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Norfolk's Fall Town Meeting starts on Tuesday, 9-Nov-2010.
The Norfolk ad hoc Town Meeting Technology Committee (TMTC) is pleased
to inform you that the Norfolk Warrant Discussion Forum is up and
running at
onlinetownhalls.com/map/492.
All the warrant
articles are available and can be commented on. As of Friday,
22-Oct-2010, the Advisory Committee's recommendations aren't available
yet. (We understand that they are being written and will be available
soon.) The recommendations will be added as soon as we receive them.
Norfolk's Town Meeting Warrant Discussion Forum is a web-based,
structured, discussion forum (similar to a bulletin board system, but
more highly structured) for discussing the Warrant articles and their
Recommendations prior to the Town Meeting. Since this discussion forum
is intended to help voters prepare for the Town Meeting, we envision
it being in operation through the end of the Town Meeting. The
interactive discussion forum is a place where Norfolk residents can
comment on Warrant articles or Recommendations, ask and answer
questions about them, provide background material, or advocate in
support of, or in opposition to, various articles.
Everything in the forum (comments, questions, answers, and advocacy)
is intended to be visible (read only) to anyone with internet access
and a web browser, even if they have no connection with Norfolk.
Interactive participation (i.e. posting messages) in the discussion
forum will require a "login account". Login accounts are available
only to Norfolk residents. (There will be a small number of Town
employees, state officials, or other experts who are given login
accounts even though they are not Norfolk residents.) Note: There is a
mechanism for registering for and creating a new account on the forum
web site. An account created in that way won't allow you to post to
the Norfolk Warrant Discussion Forum. Only accounts created by the
Town's own account request procedure will give you access to post in
our forum.
When you go to
onlinetownhalls.com/map/492,
you will start on
an Overview page which provides a general introduction. It also has a
link to a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page. If you go to the
Basic View (by clicking on a button labeled "Basic View", near the
upper left hand corner of the window), you can read all the articles.
If you go to the Map View (by clicking on a button labeled "Map View",
near the upper left hand corner of the window), you see two panes. The
left pane is a map of the discussion - with each article or comment on
an article or comment on a comment on an article, etc. represented by
a colored circle. The right pane shows the text of whatever is
currently selected from the map in the left pane.
We want to encourage commenters to keep their posts courteous and
relevant to the article under which they are posted. One way of
encouraging this is that all participants' comments will be identified
with the commenter's real name. (We will also have a way of removing
inappropriate comments and of disabling specific login accounts.)
We are concerned that accounts should only be created by Norfolk
residents, and only using the person's real name. In order to do this,
we have obtained an extract from Voter Registration Information System
and assigned an eight-character code (which we are calling a TMTC-ID
Code) to each registered voter. On Primary Election Day (14-Sep-2010),
we had a table at the polling place. People could show us a photo-ID
(to confirm their identity and residency) and we gave them a sheet of
paper with their eight-character TMTC-ID Code.
After obtaining their eight-character TMTC-ID Code, people are
instructed to go to
virtualnorfolk.org/warrant
and fill in
the web form there to request a login account for the Warrant
Discussion Forum. Some of the required information is your TMTC-ID
Code, your legal first and last names, a password that you choose, and
your preferred E Mail address and phone number. Other information is
required if it applies to you (for example, your middle initial(s) if
you have one or more middle names). Other information is entirely
optional. One example of the optional information is a name that you
commonly use instead of your legal first name -- such as "Skip" instead
of Otto, "Billy" instead of William, "Peg" instead of Margaret, etc.
The other optional information is alternative E Mail addresses and
phone numbers (if you'd like to give us a way of contacting you if we
can't reach you through your preferred E-Mail address and phone
number).
After filling in the web form with the TMTC-ID Code and the other
required information, we will verify that the supplied TMTC-ID Code is
associated with the supplied name. After that is verified, your login
account will be created and we will send E-Mail to the preferred
E-Mail address you supplied, giving you your login name and details
for accessing the discussion forum.
If you didn't pick up your TMTC-ID Code on primary election day, you
other opportunities are:
1) If you can get to the Town Hall during its normal business hours,
show your photo-ID to someone in the Town Administrator's office
and they will give you your TMTC-ID Code, or
2) If you want to wait on until General Election Day (2-Nov-2010 -
only one week before the Town Meeting), you can show your photo-ID
to the volunteer at the TMTC table at the polling place and they
will give your your TMTC-ID Code, or
3) Send an E-Mail to
TMAccount@VirtualNorfolk.org
to make
arrangements to show your photo-ID and get your TMTC-ID Code.
The website is intended as an experiment to see whether voters want an
additional opportunity to have a web-based, structured discussion
about Warrant articles before the start of the Town Meeting. We'd be
grateful to hear any feedback you have about any part of the process -
registration, the operation of the Warrant Discussion Forum, the user
interface, or any other part of the process on which you'd like to
comment. There are three ways you can get your feedback to us. One is
through the Warrant Discussion Forum itself.
1. Below the warrant articles there are four extra nodes. The last
node is for asking for help. Another node is for reporting any
software errors that you might encounter. And another node is for
making suggestions for improvements.
2. A second way to give feedback is by joining a Facebook group named
"Norfolk Town Meeting", which was created as a channel through
which Norfolk residents can provide feedback to the Town Meeting
Technology Committee.
3. The third way of giving feedback is sending us your comments in
E-Mail to "TMAccount@VirtualNorfolk.org".
We'd prefer that you use one of the first two methods for any comments
that you are willing to make publicly.
We encourage your participation and hope that you find it worthwhile.
We would especially appreciate your sharing your ideas about how to
make the forum more convenient and more useful.=
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