A notice to post at a Town Hall?

[David M Rosenberg]

Do you have (or can you draft) a notice to be posted at a Town Hall (so that it is visible when the Town Hall is closed), that explains the different ways that someone can access meeting notices through MyTownGovernement? That is, an explanation understandable by people with minimal computer expertise that describes accessing meeting notices via a web browser, a Google group, a calendar feed, an RSS feed, an Atom feed, or via phone. If you feel that using the RSS feed or Atom feed is too complicated for someone with minimal computer expertise, maybe it would be better to omit those options.

Thanks.

[Joshua Smith]

To keep it simple, I’d suggest you just list the URL and the phone number. People with minimal computer experience probably wouldn’t know how to use those other options, and anyway, they’d need to go the website to the URLs anyway.

So something simple:

For access to open meeting notices, please visit mytowngovernment.org/12345 or call  (978) 561-9995 or (413) 285-2709.

(change 12345 to your zip, and only list whichever phone # makes more sense for your geography)

On Jul 18, 2019, at 8:18 PM, David M Rosenberg <rose...@acm.org> wrote:

Do you have (or can you draft) a notice to be posted at a Town Hall (so that it is visible when the Town Hall is closed), that explains the different ways that someone can access meeting notices through MyTownGovernement? That is, an explanation understandable by people with minimal computer expertise that describes accessing meeting notices via a web browser, a Google group, a calendar feed, an RSS feed, an Atom feed, or via phone. If you feel that using the RSS feed or Atom feed is too complicated for someone with minimal computer expertise, maybe it would be better to omit those options.

Thanks.

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[David M Rosenberg]

Hi Joshua,

I understand that the phone option is seldom used. It might be used more if someone goes to a Town Hall because he thought that there was a meeting that evening, but he finds the Town Hall closed and he reads the notice about MyTownGovernment.org and the only phone to which he has access is not Internet capable.

I have two suggestions to improve the phone service.

1. Freeze the codes associated with each town

Right now, when you call the phone number, you get a list of towns and a two-digit code associated to each. If you don't know the code for your town, you have to listen to the list until your town (and its code) is mentioned. It would be nice if the notice posted at the Town Hall could give instructions that included the code for that town. But that is only useful if the codes don't change. (Perhaps they don't, I'm not sure.) One idea is to freeze all the already assigned codes and as new towns are added, give them codes that have never been assigned to another town. Another idea is to do the same thing you did with the URL, that is, instead of using a two-digit code, use the five-digit zip code.

2. Allow access to more meetings

Right now, after you specify a town, the system starts listing the earliest upcoming meetings in that town. It lists up to nine upcoming meetings and allows the user to enter a digit from 1 to 9 to hear the agenda for that meeting. But I don't know how to hear about meetings past the first nine. Perhaps you could list only the first eight upcoming meetings. If there are more than eight upcoming meetings, after listing the eighth meeting, say "To hear about the next eight meetings enter 9" The digits 1 through eight could be "recycled" to get the agenda for one of the meetings in the current batch of eight meetings.

[Joshua Smith]

Those are good suggestions. The voice lines are almost never used in practice. They've probably gotten a dozen calls in the past year.

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[David M Rosenberg]

Hi Joshua,

Thank you for your response.

From past correspondence with you, I understand your reluctance to invest time and effort in implementing things that won't actually be used - and I appreciate that the voice lines get very little use.

I would like the notice posted outside my Town Hall to include the MyTownGovernment voice line phone number and the code for the town. I hope that freezing the currently assigned town codes could be (with very little work) just a decision on your part not requiring any programming, or (with a bit more work) a modification to use a two-digit code stored with each town instead of a two-digit code derived from the position of that town in a list of towns.

Thanks.

[Joshua Smith]

Switching to asking for the zip is probably the simplest approach. I haven’t touched the twilio API in nearly 5 years, though, so it’ll take a bit of time for me to figure that out. Stay tuned!

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[Joshua Smith]

You can now go directly to a town by entering its zip code followed by pound. The old interface of typing a 2-digit code (that might change when a town is added) is also still supported.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mytowngovernment-users-forum/D90C853E-7ECF-4991-AC7C-02A404EB5E5C%40gmail.com.