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Tara Whiting

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May 22, 2014, 11:12:00 AM5/22/14
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Good morning Joshua,

 

Hope this finds you well.  I have a question with regards to the my town govt site.  We do not use it as our legal posting site, it is a wonderful backup and resource.  Postings do not always make it there with in the 48 hr notice, depending on when they are handed to me, is my computer still on etc.  I thought I had asked this, and perhaps I just misunderstood, but the red notice that comes up when a meeting is posted late, I thought that was just ‘internal’ and the public did not see that.  Turns out they can.  Is there any way to not have that visible to the public?  For our purposes, it is just confusing and misleading. 

 

Thanks so much for your help.

 

Regards,

 

Tara J. Whiting
Town Clerk
Town of West Tisbury
PO Box 278
West Tisbury, MA  02575

 

Joshua Smith

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May 22, 2014, 11:33:24 AM5/22/14
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The message is:

NOTE: This meeting was added to this system after the posting deadline or after it occurred.  For information on when this meeting was posted, please contact the Town Clerk.

The reason to have that message, obviously, is because the system cannot attest whether it was legally posted. And despite the fact that you are not considering it your legal posting site, it seems quite likely that people looking at the site would assume it is a legal posting site.

I think it’s pretty important that users not be misled. What it says is that they need to contact you to find out whether that meeting was posted on time. That sound exactly correct to me.

If you are not using the site as a legal posting place, and you don’t want people to think that, then maybe a message like that should appear on every meeting page.

Also, for what it’s worth, you might want to consider actually using the site as your legal posting place. There are over a dozen towns which have boards post their own meetings to the site, which means considerably less work for the town clerks in those towns. Most of them subscribe to this list, if you want to ask them about that...

-Joshua
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Tara Whiting

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May 22, 2014, 11:53:00 AM5/22/14
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Joshua,

 

If I craft some language, is that something I send along to you to add?  I can just cut and paste what we have on the town web site.  The message about where the legal postings are is on the town web site at the same location as  the address for my town govt, so one would hope people are noticing that and reading when they then click over to my town govt.  It seems it makes it more confusing then that the site tells them it was not legally posted. 

 

Much like facebook and other things, we decided not to use this as our legal posting.  The vast majority of people still come to town hall to check meetings, and I still have a number of smaller boards/committees that need to be monitored closely to with regards to legal posting time.  I am very happy for those other towns it works so well for.  West Tisbury is doing what works well for us! Every town is different. 

 

But any help you can provide to have a notice on the my town govt site as well would be appreciated. 

 

Tara

Joshua Smith

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May 22, 2014, 12:50:16 PM5/22/14
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Yup. That’ll work. I snagged that language from your site, and your town now shows that at the top of each meeting page, and doesn’t tell the user when your postings to the site were late.

Have a look, and let me know if you need any changes.

-Joshua

Tara Whiting

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May 22, 2014, 12:59:00 PM5/22/14
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That looks wonderful! Having it in both places will be very helpful!

 

Thanks so much.

 

Have a great holiday weekend!

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