I connected the dots this week between a headline and article in my hometown newspaper in Massachusetts and a letter to the editor in the DJ. The connection is a continuation of a link I've mentioned before about how public meetings (i.e. city council, school board, planning, etc) are changed by the "Zoom ethos". I've seen some council comments that might not have happened if there were 20 or 30 people in chambers staring at the council members. The hometown headline read The writing's on the screen: Municipal meetings via Zoom might be here to stay. In some contexts that sentence construction is ominous and this might be one of them. Here are a couple of snippets:
Jane Doe likes to be able to “pop in” to a town government meeting remotely on her computer. She’ll typically view discussion about the agenda item she finds of interest, possibly add a comment and then pop out of the meeting and get on with her evening. “It’s like a whole new paradigm — a whole new world,” she said. “And a lot of it has been absolutely fabulous. I think there is a democratizing element in some ways. More people can access the meetings, and they don’t have to rearrange their whole lives to go there in person.”
Bearing in mind that this is a place with less tech savvy than the Peninsula where the video of the meetings isn't typically on cable TV or Granicus for review later. But now the downsides
“Maintaining a civil discourse can be a bit more challenging,” the town manager e said. “I think, in the remote setting, there is a reduction in social inhibitions that leads people to speak more freely. We have a lot more people participating, but in some cases, the meeting format is new to them. And you lose a lot of the personal connection — there are people we’ve been engaging with who none of us have ever met in person. In a way, we’ve lost the sense that we all live in the same town together."
Cue the letter from a San Mateo resident
I read the 4/1 article, “San Mateo Begins Housing Discussion” with interest and amazement. It described a “discussion” I would have liked to attend. Wait a minute! I did participate in Let’s Talk Housing’s online meeting. My experience was not even close to what the article described. Everyone lost 20 minutes due to technical problems. Many who registered were unable to log in. We also lost an essential poll of attendees. Residents? Workers here? Property owners? It might have supported my observation that many attendees did not live here. It became clear that this was like a written “open mike.” People began posting random ideas, suggestions, beliefs, on the “chat” feature, even as the presentations were going on. At two points, some of those ideas (often out of context) were pulled into “word clouds” of what people cared about — with zero sense of the writers’ intent.
One of the moderators finally pulled down the chat because the 180 degree back and forth was getting so out of hand. The city should view this meeting’s results to be as questionable as residents who attended know them to be. If this is supposed to be what a productive workshop and discussion of housing looks like, we might as well stop right now.
I spent more than a decade of my professional career refining the way to have video-conferenced meetings with in-person and remote attendees, some well-known, others like clients that were identified but perhaps not well-known to other attendees and all tech savvy. Cisco WebEx pre-dates Zoom by years and still renders a good viewing experience. It is not easy even when the bulk of the people mostly share a similar community, time zone and language. Don't get me started on the global version of this challenge. It's clear the cities, the county, the school boards and various agencies and commissions will need some ground rules. I think you will eventually see "chat" disabled in favor of typed questions and comments to the admin, pre-registration with a verified identity and even town of residence required (hear that Delta, Coke and the MLB?) and a return to in-person meetings with preference given to those that appear live when time runs short. Can't happen soon enough.
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