Meanwhile in town of unity business, the Town Office Committee had an public meeting where we discussed all the options we were exploring; that was followed by a town meeting where they passed the article to give us 120 more days to work on it with informational meeting every 30 days. We're not proposing any spending yet, so of course they gave us more time. The 60 or so people who showed up at the town meeting were mostly friendly. The weirdest thing was that one of the selectmen nominated an unknown guy from Burnham whose name was a secret until the meeting to be moderator. Someone in the audience nominated Don Newell and the vote went to Don who runs a great meeting. I don't like weird secret shit and I complained about it.
In my townie stuff I am trying to be all about communication and community process, trying to press for those things where they are lacking, trying to use the website and mailing lists to get us something more than 1970's models for getting the word out. Mailings are expensive. I think I will try a Dave Cash suggestion and see if I can subtract the list of those with email and mail only to those without.
For example, just the use of a standard agenda/minutes form in the meeting makes it easy to use those minutes as a record. Hell, just having an agenda and following it will be a big improvement.
