Sound the alarm - if local government websites in Vermont are considering shutting down rather than raise the reliability of their public meeting notification systems online, we have a serious problem in local democracy.
If a smart state like Vermont can't figure out how to build a state-wide public meeting notification system like Rhode Island - http://sos.ri.gov/publicinfo/openmeetings/ - what hope do we have across America? You'd hope there would at least be an option provide a shared option, and small countries like Estonia can figure out shared open source systems to support democracy - https://www.volis.ee/gvolis/?lang=en - including remote voting by representatives in public meetings when they can't be there physically, On my radar are some community calendaring tools - http://bit.ly/networkedcalendars - and the possibility to solve this problem - globally - via Poplus - http://bit.ly/poplusmeetit - since as far as I can tell the meetings have similar attributes around the world - who (the host org/gov), what (the agenda/agenda link), when, where, why (links to reports/handouts), etc. If you want to land in a place with others specifically jazzed about making public meetings digitally more accessible - join this online working group: http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/publicmeetings Thanks, Steve From: Bradley Holt <[email protected]> Date: Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 5:52 PM Subject: [cfabrigade] Towns Consider Shutting Down Websites To Avoid New Open Meeting Law To: Brigade <[email protected]> > Substantial changes to Vermont’s open meeting law go into effect next week. > Among the changes: for the first time towns with websites will have to meet > specific posting requirements. > > But some towns are considering taking down their websites rather than run the > risk of not meeting the mandates. Full article: http://digital.vpr.net/post/towns-consider-shutting-down-websites-avoid-new-open-meeting-law Has anyone else encountered similar examples of unintended consequences of open meeting laws? -- Bradley Holt Code for America Brigade Captain [email protected] (802) 383-4737 ext. 11 Code for BTV, a Code for America Brigade Burlington, Vermont http://codeforbtv.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Code for America Brigade" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/a/codeforamerica.org/group/brigade/. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/codeforamerica.org/d/msgid/brigade/CALqXAW6bMH2yVUHcWdCh%2B-Tj3DuXbik9Sxvqu6L3hce1iO95MA%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/a/codeforamerica.org/d/optout. ᐧ ----------------------------------------- Group home for Newswire - Steven Clift's Democracies Online Newswire: http://groups.dowire.org/groups/newswire Replies go to members of Newswire - Steven Clift's Democracies Online Newswire with all posts on this topic here: http://groups.dowire.org/r/topic/3063myAonjElGmwcIvlo0v For digest version or to leave Newswire - Steven Clift's Democracies Online Newswire, email [email protected] with "digest on" or "unsubscribe" in the *subject*. Newswire - Steven Clift's Democracies Online Newswire is hosted by Democracies Online - http://dowire.org.
