[Town Meeting] Fw: Re: Town Meeting Members email address (fwd)

[Diane Mahon]

Alan,

Good points.  Also, submitting any email address is voluntarily and
definitely not required.  This came from several requests that along with
the name and mail address of TMMs, that if email addresses could be
provided, as well.

The Clerk and Webmaster have been working on this for 3 or so weeks, and
this is their draft plan.

I'll make sure we stress the point that this is not a requirement of any
TMM.  Also, someone else suggested the point you made about *precinct-only*
requests and I'll be sure to pass it along.  Right now, any resident and/or
Arlington business owner can get all the home mail addresses for all TMMs on
labels.

Your fellow TMM Precinct 14,
Diane


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alan Jones" <jones at carr-jones.com>
To: <townmeeting at arlingtonlist.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 04, 2009 11:43 AM
Subject: Re: [Town Meeting] Fw: Re: Town Meeting Members email address (fwd)


 In my opinion, this is not a good implementation. Among other problems, it
will create unnecessary work for the Clerk and Webmaster maintaining the
address base, and it will expose private emails to spammers who harvest from
web sites. If we do this, I recommend that each TMM create a new disposable
address just for this use.

>

> The purpose of publishing TMMs' addresses is to provide constituents with

easy email access to their representatives, which is a good thing. I propose
an alternative in which 21 mailing lists would be set up, one per precinct,
with an address something like Precinct14 at tmm.arlington.ma.us. Then request
all TMMs to sign up and maintain their own private addresses on these lists.
When constituents want to offer their opinion on an issue to their
representatives, they would simply send to their precinct's list address and
it will CC to their precinct's TMMs. Individual TMMs can initiate a private
conversation in response as they choose, thereby avoiding group deliberation
by email. Presumably the list manager would provide a high degree of spam
filtering for the lists.

>

> -- Alan (Precinct 14)

>

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