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

[Alan Jones]

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)