September 2, 2026 – ELVIS Committee – Video & Transcript
September 2, 2026 - ELVIS Committee
Maybe it doesn't do it on the Chromebook.
Okay.
Well, we're all here, I think.
So welcome.
Thank you, everybody.
I hereby declare this meeting to come to order.
First order of business is to appoint the Secretary Pro Tem.
Larry, are you willing to do this yet again?
Yes, I'm all set up to go.
Thank you so much.
Much appreciated.
Next up is public comment.
Is there anyone from the public that has a comment?
There isn't a public, but Miranda has a comment.
I do.
So my only comment is this, is that we posted, I'm not sure how long ago, on
it's for, we know we have a vacancy on the ELVIS Committee.
And so I checked in with Jalen at the town manager's office to see what,
whether or not our posting is still up, because I have not received any,
any responses from any potential candidates.
So she told me that the posting is currently not on the town's website
because it gets taken down after a certain number of days.
However, it's still on the Facebook and Instagram page, but she's reposting it on the town's website.
So hopefully, fingers crossed, we get somebody who's interested in serving.
If anybody knows somebody who might be interested.
That's usually the best way.
Please let Miranda know, because we really need to fill the slot and make sure that ELVIS continues into the future.
Dave, the last time Miranda attended as a panelist, I think, in other words, was that a public comment or?
Miranda is ex officio.
Yes, that's what I thought.
Okay, good.
So she gets to be public.
She gets to comment publicly if she wants to.
And she wanted to.
Okay.
Anything else on that?
If not, we'll move on to the next item, which is to approve the minutes of our meeting,
which Larry kindly put together and I reviewed and looked good to me.
Does anyone have any corrections or comments on the minutes?
The only correction I have, Larry, is that there's an E on the end of my first name.
Oh.
There is an E, and I did not put one. Sorry. Somewhere along the line. Yep. I answer to both, but to be official, it is with an E. Okay. Okay. Thanks. Anything else with the minutes? Is there a motion to approve the minutes as amended with the spelling of Lynn's name? So moved. Is there a second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? Let it be recorded that the minutes were unanimously approved with modification of Lynn's name. Okay. The next item I'm going to put up on screen. Let's see if I can actually share my screen here. May I interrupt? And what I want to share is... I don't think he heard you. Yeah. Dave? Yes. I think technically you're supposed to do a roll call vote when you're on Zoom. Okay. All right. Let's do a roll call vote then. Lynn? Aye. Yes. Don? Yes. John? Yes. Trudy? Yes. Larry? You got me already. Okay. How did I do that? All right. Anyway, and I vote yes. So that's all of us. Because you're down a body. Maybe. Okay. I guess I was confused. Anyway, so that was unanimous. Thank you. Thank you, Trudy. All right. So I want to put up this document, which is actually an excerpt from the annual report. Let me get rid of this, if I can. Windows doesn't make it easy.
That's the agenda. It's stuck in front of everything. What are you saying? The problem is that I can't move this window because it's stuck there. It is. Okay. Fine. All right. So this is the document I'm trying to draw your attention to. Can everybody see this? Mm-hmm. Okay. So this is a summary of performance at town meeting on April, on May the 4th and May the 5th. You can see the number of handsets ordered, the attendance, the number of articles, number of votes, and my recollection is that there were zero handset failures both nights, but I was not always in attendance at the desk, so I wanted to make sure that was accurate. Did any of you encounter any handset failures or voter problems? No. Not that I recall. Okay. Then this is accurate. Yeah. So that's the second town meeting in a row where we've had zero failures, the second year in a row, which is pretty good. So I'm very happy to hear that. That's great. Anyone want to comment on how things went at town meeting from an electronic voting point of view?
Okay. If not, then we'll move on to the next agenda item, which is the annual report. So I mail that to everybody. Did anyone find any errors or omissions in the report? The one minor thing that I picked up on, Dave, is there was one place that we refer to Miranda as the Wayland moderator, and then Wayland moderator Miranda Jones, and then other places it just refers to Miranda as moderator Miranda Jones, and perhaps we should be consistent and use Wayland. And just so that it's clear that she's- I can usually do that. Yeah. But someone reading it who may not be familiar. Okay. Other comments or improvements that are suggested.
Okay. Is there a motion to approve the annual report with the modification that Lynn just suggested? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Okay. Let's do a roll call vote. Lynn? Yes. John? Yes. John? Yes. Trudy? Yes. Larry? Yes. And I vote yes. So that's unanimous. Okay. That item is disposed of. I'm practicing to be a moderator someday. Hey, hey, hey. I can hear you. I'm just teasing. Maybe I'll pass the gauntlet on to you. No way. So the next item, I just wanted to flash this up here. It was recently announced that the FY27 annual town meeting will be held on the 10th and 11th of May. So I plugged that into the spreadsheet to get the schedule. And the schedule begins back at the end of March, Don, with starting the attendance survey. So this will be, you know, I'll pass this around when we get a little bit closer. And like always, we'll have a meeting, before town meeting. But just to give everybody a sense, we're now a week into, a week later in May than we were this last year. And so things will get ramped up at the end of March. I already passed these dates on to Mark Fite at OTI. So we're on the schedule there. So all should go well. Does anybody have any comments or concerns about the next town meeting?
Don asked me, he gave me an email today asking for this year's attendance. Don is just going to take me probably next week to get that to you. Okay, that's fine. No problem. Okay. Sounds good. All right. So that's that. Okay. So the next item on the agenda and the one that we'll spend most of our time on in this meeting is the update for remote participation. And so this is the, the thing we'll go through and I'll flash some other stuff up as well. Let me just make sure I can get a hold of this. Okay. So starting at the top, everybody see that. Okay. So the first thing is that we have updated the remote participation presentation a bit. So let me show you that.
So in particular slides, starting with slide four. So this is the introduction. You've all seen this where we talk about why we, who we are and why we do this, but we've added some additional in context for participation in open town meetings being poor. So Wayland is getting 600 out of 10,000 and we didn't even do that this year. But if you look at some of these other towns and this is data we got from the Massachusetts League of Women's Voters, you know, the, the, the, the median attendance is, you know, pretty low in a number of towns nearby. We all know this slogan, if we can shop and bank from the internet, why can't we participate? So this was just a reformulation of the reasons, but I've added another reason that we've heard from other towns is these don't have enough meeting space to accommodate everybody or they don't have enough parking. And then this next slide shows the scope of the problem. I'm not seeing your slides anymore here. Really? Oh, wait a minute. Sorry. Something may have happened locally here. David's screen. Okay. Got it. I don't know what, I must've clicked on something. Sorry. No problem. So there's a total of, I don't know, 350 municipalities in Wayland of which, in Massachusetts, of which 260 use open town meeting, 32 use representative town meetings. There's about 290 here. Then there's another 45 that use city council, 13 that are town council, one that's municipal council. And you can see the colors here as to what that distribution looks like. But the key is that only 36% of the population lives in an open town meeting town. That's 1.7 million people. So one of the reasons we're having difficulty with town council is that we're a minority of the total population. And a lot of the representatives just aren't familiar with town meeting because they come from towns with town council or municipal council or city council. So it's just part of the context.
Questions? Comments? More out of curiosity, because the issue is, you know, the town meeting participation is low. Has it always been, I mean, have there been points in history where it's been significantly higher? I mean, imagine back in the 1700s when there was very few people and people came, the men came and met at the Kirk side and, and, you know, that was a whole different gambit. But, you know, say in the last 50 years, has it been, there been a precipitous drop or is this just sort of how it is? I'm not saying that we shouldn't address the issue, but I'm just more curious. I don't, I don't have, I don't have any data going back. I mean, clearly in, you know, 300 years ago, there were only 10 people in the town who could attend. Yeah, so it's easy to get a lot more people, yeah, to round them up. But, but the impression I'm getting is that more and more towns are having trouble making quorum. We've heard this from our town council. We've heard it from some legislators, Senator Durant, I've not spoken with him directly, but I've spoken with his legislative director and they're out, you know, in the West. And one of the reasons that they, they submitted a bill, 21, 29, that we had nothing to do with is because they have towns that have trouble making quorum and they want remote participation. They're central mass, Dave. Central West. Yeah. If I can just interject just for a second, I've been asked to come to the select board on September 22nd. Carol Martin, the select board chair, just asked me two nights ago and we worked on a date to talk about whether or not to reduce our quorum. Other towns, some towns have fewer than, we have a hundred, some towns have less, some towns have zero. And it's more sort of a discussion about should, should we do that just to guarantee that we always have a quorum. I don't know what the answer is, but it's something to talk about. And we haven't, you know, I don't know if you've noticed that sometimes I rush through the end of town meeting and don't even bother using electronic voting to, to very quickly get through the last few articles that are typically non-controversial because I don't want to look to see if we're not making a quorum. So that's why I do it. Okay. Any other comments about this set of changes, basically, you know, scoping the, you know, the, the, the number of communities that are affected. There's one more thing, a change I made, and it was really made in response to comments from someone in an audience, which is I added a new optional function, which is the ability of a remote participant to click the amend button. And when they do that, they have the ability to take a picture of a short amendment, which when they click submit, gets submitted to the moderator. So this is consistent with Wayland's rules. Not all towns may allow this. You know, obviously if somebody wants to submit 10 pages, they have to do that ahead of time with the moderator's rules, but being able to use the device's camera to capture something written on paper, as long as it's a few, you know, 10 words or less, is something that's technically straightforward. So I didn't think it was a big problem to add that. Any comments about this?
Okay. Well, that's it. Yeah. The only thing I, I mean, we're probably not at the specking stage, but you might, when we get to that, probably want to indicate that it's 10 words or less. Well, actually it would be subject to that community's moderator's rules. Remember every, every, every, every, every town that does this gets to say how it gets used. Yeah. And one of the things Dave has been pointing out is we've taken our show on the road again and been talking to different communities about remote participation. We are very clear that every town gets to decide just how to, they want to tweak their remote participation if they were inclined to utilize remote participation. And I would suggest to you that not everybody uses moderator's rules either. Our, our town does, we have historically have used moderator's rules, but not every town even has them. Sometimes they just rely on Robert's rules of order, different things, their town bylaws. So that's why every single, what is it, 260 open town community, open town meeting communities in this state, every town does it just a little bit differently from each other. Okay. All right. So next item on the remote participation update is that we have gotten all of our web content onto the town's web page, the town's town meeting web page. And I'm taking a brief snapshot of it here. Um, so where did I put it? It is six chart. Here it is right there.
Okay. So this is just the main page, but you can see that it's got the major topics, remote participation, why ease of use, security, legislation, take action. And each one of those takes you to additional information. Um, we got, this is the, the, the top page here with also access to the same stuff. Um, so this is, um, very helpful in terms of people who want to learn more about it. And we have vectored people here. Um, so any comments about this?
Now, is, is that the full URL there? Get, get remote TM. Yeah. It's got a full URL when you actually go to the page, but get, get remote TM is, is dot org is sufficient. I was thinking about hiring an airplane during the, uh, soccer finals to carry that around on a, on a big banner. Yeah. A lot of those people weren't from our country, let alone from our state. Yeah. But they could still, they could still call their legislators. Well, not if they're, yeah. Not if they're coming from outside the, the, uh, new England or the country. Right. Um, yeah. Okay. So, um, the next item here is legislative status in the current legislative session, which is the one 94th, which ends, uh, at the end of this year. So three of the bills that we've been following, two of which we submitted were referred to study. So H 2272 is our home rule petition, and that was referred to study, um, 2274, uh, representative Gentiles statewide authorization of, um, for town meetings was sent to study both by the same committee. Um, and the excuse in both cases was we want to focus on making remote participation in representative town meetings permanent. Um, and that's more important right now. So we don't have time to worry about these things. Um, I'm not sure that's a very honest response, but that was a response we got. Um, there was a statewide bill 3342 from representative Gregoire, who's actually a member of house leadership. And that was also sent to study. Um, so, um, there are still some bills that are alive. Um, Congress home rule petition is still alive. Um, Senator Barrett's statewide authorization is alive. And there's a pair of bills, um, book in the Senate before the Senate ways and means committees. They've gone quite far from Senator Oliveira and Senator Durant. 2197 is identical to 3342. This was a house Senate pair. So the house bill was sent to study, but the Senate bill is still alive. Um, I have suggested to Senator Eldridge, our Senator, that he worked with Senator Oliveira and Senator Durant to craft a compromise, which would be a five town pilot program. Um, and basically it said the first five towns that approved doing it are allowed to do it. Um, I have spoken to legislative assistants in both of the, for both of these senators and both have been agreeable. Um, but I have not been able to get any feedback from Senator Eldridge or his staff on where that stands. So as far as I can tell, they're still alive, but nothing has happened either. And people who know what they're doing say that at this stage, it's unlikely that anything is going to happen there. Senator Barrett is the assistant majority leader in the Senate. That's a very significant position. His bill is also still alive. The Concord home rule petition is before the committee on third readings. Now you would think, wow, that's not that the last place that has to go before it gets a floor vote. Well, on the very first year that Waylon submitted a home rule petition, we got to the committee on third readings. Um, but then nothing happened. So I think that's just a tease myself. I think the first time you submit a home rule petition, they let you go all the way to the committee on third readings before they send you to study just to tease you. Um, that, that's my conclusion anyway. Um, we did make two budget amendments, uh, both for the five town, uh, pilot program. Neither one of them was admitted, was accepted. So we made an amendment, a last minute kind of thing for the house budget, last minute kind of thing for the Senate budget. These were suggested by our representative Gentile and by Senator Eldridge. Neither was accepted. So my perspective is we're not completely dead yet, but it's unlikely that we're going to see any of this legislation succeed in the current legislative session. So we're assuming that what we need to do is plan what to do in the next legislative session. So our thinking now is that in the next legislative session, I'm going to just move this a little bit. At least try to kind of move this. Yes. Make it bigger. Yes. Okay. That in the next legislative session, our principal focus will be on submitting a five town remote participation pilot program. Now we have to specify, or maybe a governing agency, the amendments we did didn't, didn't say anything at all about a governing agency. It just said first five towns that approve it, do it. But the feedback we've gotten is that it would be better if we nominated the attorney general's office or the secretary of state's office to kind of monitor the five town pilot program and verify that it's working correctly and maybe help write a report at the end. So we have to decide, do we want a governing agency? Do we have to recruit them? Do they have to agree? We're thinking that we want identical House and Senate bills, but we have to decide which legislators should do the submission. I think on the Senate side, Senator Barrett would be very attractive. He's the assistant majority leader. And we want to maximize the number of co-sponsors. We want to get as many legislators to sponsor these bills as we can. And to that end, we've assembled sort of a whip sheet of all the legislators that have either gotten involved with remote participation or we've spoken with or have co-sponsored something or have sent positive email or done something. So out of the 40 senators, 21 senators have indicated that they think positively towards remote participation. However, out of the 161 or 160 representatives, we only have about 30. But we're focusing on all of these. We know for each one what their role is, if they have a role in leadership, when we last engaged with them, what their actual action has been. Some have co-sponsored bills for us. Some have spoken in favor. Some have attended our seminars. We know which open town meeting towns they represent. So a guy like this, this is Senator Mark. He's got 54 open town meeting towns. So he's a very strong candidate to get involved. And he was a co-sponsor of 2197, which would have authorized remote participation. This is Senator Oliveira's bill statewide. So we're really trying to prioritize who are the people that would likely support us. And we want to get all of the wood behind our legislation, as much as we can. Any comments about this? That's a lot of data, I know. And if anybody's interested in this, send me an email. I'll be happy to send you the spreadsheet. My only comment is that if it weren't for Dave keeping track of all of this stuff, he is relentless, which is fabulous. And if we get remote participation one day, it'll be 98% due to his efforts. I appreciate everybody's work on this, but creating these kind of spreadsheets, this is so impressive. And it's so hard to keep this all straight, especially because those names in that column, in column B, those change. I was just going to say, given the fact that we're in an election cycle now. Yeah, unfortunately, Carmen Gentile is retiring, and Ravi Simon has won, and he has no opponent. And he's a big supporter of ours, so we're lucky. But he's new, and so he won't have the oomph that other state reps will have. We should dwell on that just a little bit. Ravi was Representative Gentile's legislative assistant. And he has been extraordinarily helpful between him and Nancy, the lady from League of Women's Voters. They have just really helped us enormously, Nancy Brumbach. And now Ravi is making a transition from legislative assistant to legislator. So, as Miranda said, he's not going to have the power that Carmen did, but he has, he's a really energetic person. And he's very articulate, and so I'm looking forward to continuing working with him. Really good guy. Yeah, we're very fortunate. He's very young. He's in his early 30s, and this is what he wants to do with his life. So, it's great. He's running unopposed. He has no Republican opposition. Any other comment or discussion about this stuff? Is there any hope of all the towns that are interested coming together before the legislation and just submitting one thing for all of them instead of all these things? So, maybe it has more force by itself, or does that just never happen? I'm not sure what you mean. Well, you know, I mean, our person submits one for us, and somebody else submits one for somebody else, or the wording is slightly different, and they all have to go to some committee, and they all have to get reconciled or whatever. If basically all the towns that were interested got together and behind the scenes came up with exactly the wording they wanted to submit, and submitted only one bill, you know, so all the energy could go into one thing. Would that in any way help, or is that possible? Well, I think that's what we're doing here, John. But, I mean, towns can certainly, first of all, legislation comes from legislators, not towns. There can be a home rule petition for a town submitted by that town's legislator. Yeah. And we do want to, as part of the strategy, we want to encourage as many towns as we can to submit home rule petitions. And we're happy to give them the text of our home rule petition, so they can just copy it and do a change Wayland to whatever. But what we think is the most likely to succeed is a pilot program, because we sense that there's some concern about doing a statewide bill all at once and saying everybody across the state can just do this. So, by starting with a five-town pilot and proving that it works before we ask for statewide authorization, that's a good first step. So, what we want here is as many legislators across the state to endorse this, to co-sponsor it as we can. Okay. Yeah, and to that point as well, so we have Concord is on board. Weston seems like they're going to be there. They're putting it on their ballot probably this fall, right, at a special town meeting. Yeah. And so, we still need to get a couple more towns, and we would prefer to have some towns that are from different parts of the state so we can get different. Number one, it looks like affluent towns are the ones that want to push for more participation because we can afford it. So, Dave and I are also on a slightly different marketing spree trying to say that this is affordable. Alexa, pause. Secondly, in order to get more state legislators interested, we need to get towns from different areas. So, for example, Dave and I spoke to the Democratic Town Committee in Hamilton-Wenham, thanks to Trudy, a couple weeks ago. We spoke to the one in Medway. So, those are all different legislators. I happened to be in an event last week with Senator, excuse me, Representative Margaret Scarsdale, who's like pep roll in towns, out Groton, towns like that, which she said is a very purple community. But she was completely fascinated by this and said, has this been, do you see any partisanship here? And I said, not at all. In fact, we have Senator Durant, who's a Republican, who sponsored a bill. So, if we could get some towns in central mass involved, too, we could kind of spread the word amongst the legislators. And maybe that would give us a little bit more oomph that we need, like get more people to pay attention to it. And I told Representative Scarsdale, I said, I don't see this as a bipartisan issue at all. It's just people want it. It's just using modern technology to preserve a very, a 400-year-old process. So, we'll see. But I think the five-town pilot program that Representative Kate Hogan was the first person to suggest it, that's probably our best bet. Would there also be included in that mix, the Representative Town Meeting? So, you have like towns that do a Representative Meeting as well? So, we, you know, so when you meet with the legislators, they, a lot of them have both open and Representative Town Meeting. There's not that many Representative Town Meeting towns to begin with. Yeah. And like, for example, the town of Belmont, the town I grew up in, just filed a petition to get, to be allowed to do remote participation. So, and we know that Plymouth has it. And Dave, what other towns have it for Representative Town Meeting? Lexington has it. Lexington has it. They created their own software program. So, really, what Dave is trying to get is trying to get the software, the OTIs of the world to say, you know, we could, you could make this software program so that both Representative and Open Town Meeting Towns used it to make it even, you know, more marketable. But more towns have to be interested in doing it. But, you know, with your state legislators, you never know which town, you know, they all, especially the representatives. You ever seen the way the districts are divvied up? They make no sense at all. So, I mean, some, like Senator Durant, I think, Dave, we said he has like 20 towns in his district, right? They're all small, central mass towns, a lot of open town meeting towns. So, we'll see. Okay. So, we're saying a five-town pilot program. We have to work out the details. We still want to submit a home rule petition. And we want to encourage as many other towns as possible to submit home rule petitions. I'm hearing an echo. So, I wanted to just briefly flash this up. This is basically the number of presentations, the presentations we've done since the last Elvis meeting in February. So, we met with the Nantucket Select Board. That was interesting. This, we tried to wangle invitations both to the Republican and Democratic state conventions. So, we could meet with delegates and attendees there. The Republicans weren't interested. But we actually got a table at the state Democratic convention. Miranda, David Allen from Concord, and I spent a couple days there. And during the course of that, we basically engaged with about 300 different people. Most of whom knew something about open town meeting, but didn't know anything at all about remote participation. And as a result of that, we got invitations, not just to the Wayland Democratic Committee, but to some other Democratic committees, Medway, Wenham, where, again, we've been spreading the word. And in this case, two representatives actually showed up. Trudy basically set this one up. So, you need to make a correction to that, because it was the Hamilton and Wenham Democratic Committee. Okay. We are two towns. Okay. And if somebody from Hamilton saw this, they'd probably lose it. I will fix that. Be a little offended. How about that for real-time corrections? Great. Thank you. And then their state rep was also there, that Kristen Kasner. Yes. Yeah, she's listed. So, basically, the reason I wanted to bring this up is that you never know exactly how you're going to get leads. You just have to, it's like, you have to fire as many torpedoes as you can and hope you're going to hit a few ships. And that's what we've been doing. This one also bears some discussion. The Mass Municipal Association is highly regarded by the legislature. They're very influential. We did succeed in getting their legislative director to speak, that was bad, at one of our seminars last year. But we really need a significant written endorsement. But even more importantly, they can introduce us to select boards. They're engaged with every select board. They can help us acquaint select boards with the fact that remote participation is not just secure and easy to use, but as Miranda points out, affordable. So, I was able to get a meeting with this guy a couple of weeks ago, and he agreed with our approach, and he agreed to help us do that. Now, he hasn't responded in my most recent email, but we're trying to basically, that's another front, another way to get to select boards. This is really interesting. Joe Patek is a member of the Lexington Select Board. Lexington is an open town meeting town. No, they're not. Representative town meeting town. They originally used OTI for remote participation. OTI provides a product called VVoter, Virtual Voter. And in combination with Zoom, you can use that combination to basically do remote participation. Plymouth uses the same combination. It's very difficult for representatives to flip between applications. They find it very challenging. To the point where Joe, who it turns out has a background in the MIT AI lab and HP research, took it upon himself to replace the VVoter piece of that to make a more integrated solution. But he didn't do that because he's looking to cast his fame and fortune in being the author of a remote participation system. He views it as just something to carry them over until there's a viable commercial solution. So, when he and I went through what we're proposing, he was thrilled because that's what he wants. And when we met with the moderator of Plymouth, Steve Trofetti, he had the same reaction. In fact, he wrote us a one-paragraph endorsement that's on our town webpage. So, everybody who's using remote participation in representative town meetings is actually a potential customer for the software that we have specified. Because for the same reason we want it to be easy to use, they want it to be easy to use. Comments? Dave, when the MMA does their conference in, I believe it's February, is that something you guys could do a table at? We'll talk about the MMA momentarily. You mean mass municipal, not mass moderators, right, Trudy? Correct. Okay. Yeah, we'll get to that shortly. So, any other comments about encouraging other towns? Okay, let's move to endorsements. We have a very strong endorsement for the Mass League of Women Voters. Nancy Brumbach, who is their legislative director, has been incredibly helpful. She's done seminars, not just, they've hosted seminars for legislators, for officials. She's done seminars for their own chapters, so they all know what we're doing and why. Been great. So, just mentioned the Mass Municipal Association, Adam Chapta Lane, we're working on that. Mass moderators has been really problematic, and I'll let Miranda handle this one. Yeah, okay. So, they don't want to come out and endorse anything. So, we have an executive board meeting, which I just remembered that I'm actually on for mass moderators. You know, I've been a moderator very long, and they put me on an executive board. We have a meeting at the end of September, and we are going to just, they are going to discuss at this executive board meeting sort of what kind of public statement they want to release, and it's not an endorsement. It's a really wishy-washy, lukewarm statement. But I think they feel, for whatever reason, they feel a little bit pressured to do something about it, because obviously, this town and Concord has been getting the word out. That being said, I have offered, Dave and I have offered to give the remote participation presentation to the moderators one Thursday night, later this, in a few weeks, before I have the executive board meeting. So, I'm hoping to bring more moderators on board. Similarly, the moderator for the town of Weston, he and I are going to talk, he's on the executive board, too, and Weston seems to be almost on the cusp of voting to pursue remote participation. He and I are going to discuss beforehand and strategize how to deal with the executive board. He's a more, he's been on the moderator longer than me, so he's got a little more experience with the executive board. I mean, I hate to sort of be elected moderator and come into the mass moderators association and kind of shake things up. But you know what, that's what the town wants me to do. So, here we, I answered a wail and not to the mass moderators association. So, we're hoping, you know, maybe between Rip and me, that we can persuade them to give a slightly stronger endorsement, because a lot of people do ask, how do the moderators feel about this? And our moderators aren't necessarily on board for a variety of reasons. A lot of them, I think, are scared of it, of remote participation, of learning, learning this, a system, learning the process. Some people just have a philosophical problem with it. They don't like the thought of, of modernizing it, not everybody being in the same room at the same time. That's what, how town meetings started back in, I think it was the Norse people who started town meeting. And so, so some, some people are philosophically opposed to it. Some people are software engineers and worry about the threat, you know, that it comes with, you know, doing this through the internet. So, there's a lot of reasons why moderators, and I think a lot of it is that some, some just don't want to learn. They don't want to learn how to do, how to moderate town meeting in a different way. And so, so they're not pushing it. So anyway, so that's this month. So we'll, you know, I'll report back to Dave what happens at the Mass Moderators Association, the executive board meeting to see if we can get them to put out a stronger statement, and we'll see how we do. We just keep plugging away. Just before the last Elvis meeting in January, I met with Representative Alvis Peish, who's the assistant majority leader in the House, very influential. And she supports what we're doing, but she made the comment that the silence from the Mass Moderators was deafening. So the fact that they aren't saying anything is, has an impact on some legislators. So if we, even if we can get a lukewarm, yeah, it's okay for them to try it kind of statement, that would be something. The fact that they're saying nothing has been noticed. Yeah, it's just anything, just supporting towns that are interested in adopting remote participation. Nobody's saying you have to utilize it, just allowing towns to try it. Because again, every open town meeting town does town meeting just a little bit differently. Disability Law Center, I have briefed the executive chair of this for technical reasons. She did not want to weigh in on our side. I need to get her to revisit that. This has to do with whether or not hybrid meetings of public bodies are optional or mandatory. The Disability Law Center would like all meetings to be hybrid guaranteed. And that's opposed by the Mass Municipal Association because small towns would find it financially challenging. And the fact that our remote participation is optional in town meetings, that was, that was difficult for the Disability Law Center to endorse at the time. So we'll take another shot at that. When we were at the Democratic Convention, I ambushed the chair of the Democratic, Mass Democratic Party while he was buying some food. Steve Kerrigan. Steve Kerrigan. I basically pitched him on what we're doing. And he knew about town meeting. He knew about open town meeting. And he was receptive. So I have been trying to get some kind of endorsement from the party. I hope this is an OK idea. We probably should discuss it at some point because we don't want to piss off any Republicans. This isn't a partisan issue. But we're trying to get as much mind share, as much knowledge as possible. So we're not trying to convert it into a partisan issue. We're just trying to get as many people to understand that we can make it secure, we can make it easy to use, and it will be affordable. So I don't know. Does anybody have any comments about this? Should we keep pushing on this? Well, if you're going to ask the Democratic Party, why don't you ask the Republican? Well, I tried that once and they weren't even interested in having us show up at their convention. But we could try again. Yeah. Especially if maybe through Senator Durant, if you'll ever. You know, the problem with these legislators, if we're not their constituent, they're not taking emails, they're not answering. They've got so many other people to answer to. For example, I sent an email to Representative Scarsdale after having spoken with her for a while in person. I sent her an email and I got just an automatic response because she's got so many emails from her constituents. So it's hard to get through. But yeah, I mean, we could give it another shot with Republican. We do, besides Senator Durant, there's a, I think he's a Senator O'Connell, who's also very supportive. So maybe between the two, we can do that. I'll take a note there. Yeah, I think it's O'Connor, right? Yeah. McConnell. Okay. I think so.
Long ago, we were told that the reason that remote participation was made legal for representative town meetings, but not open town meetings, was concerned by Senator Galvin. We've also been told that nobody listens to him. We've tried for years to get in front of him and show him what we're doing. We haven't been successful. I think we have to make another shot at that. I don't know whether he's interfering. No one has said he is. But from my point of view, anybody who's expressed a negative point of view needs to see our presentation because so far, we've had 100% conversion ratio. There have been lots of people who've been skeptical going in, but after learning about the audit, learning about the recheck-in, they come out feeling quite comfortable that what we're doing would be secure. And we need to have the same conversation with Secretary of State Galvin and his directors. Okay, the next one is pretty interesting. So it turns out that two towns in Massachusetts with open town meetings are allowing disabled voters to remotely participate. One is North Andover and the other is Carlisle. The moderator of North Andover is Mark DeSalvo, who is the president of the Mass Moderators Association. And not only that, the attorney general has weighed in and said, that's okay. Because of the Americans with Disabilities Act, remote participation in town meeting, an open town meeting, is a reasonable accommodation.
So that means we could offer remote participation to disabled registered voters within Wayland's borders. Furthermore, if we had a remote participation solution, we could offer it to people holding representative town meetings. So about a month ago, I had dinner with Mark Fite, who's the CEO of OTI. And I basically pitched him on not waiting for a blanket legislative authorization, but rather to say, hey, Mark, there's at least the representative town meeting towns, one of which has already kicked you out because it was too hard for the representatives to use vVoter. And disabled folks, that may be enough of a market to get started. So he and I are meeting tomorrow afternoon. He spent last month, supposedly, discussing it with his development team. So tomorrow, I'll learn where they came out on whether there's interest in getting started with just this sub-market.
Well, and that seems like that would be a good opportunity for a pilot. Yeah. It's another way to do a pilot. So how does North Andover do that? We don't know. And Miranda and I have an action item to meet with Mark DeSalvo and find out exactly what they're doing. My suspicion is, based on some comment he made, that they're using Zoom. Zoom has a polling mechanism built into it. Yeah. I don't, I don't, I also am not sure if he appoints an assistant moderator to be with the person too. I'm not sure if he has to do it that way because it's in a different, separate location. I have to ask him, I mean, North Andover often gets 2,000 people at their annual town meeting. Sometimes they've gone up to three. It's a very popular town for, so they must have assistant moderators because I can't imagine they have a place to accommodate all these people all the time that they have to have it in separate rooms. So he must assign assistant moderators anyway. So, and he had spoken to me last year about, about trying to pursue it through the Americans with Disabilities Act. And so now we're thinking, okay, we should. So then I reached out to our ADA coordinator in Wayland to see how we go about finding if there's been any, any of our registered voters who have asked about providing a reasonable accommodation for those with disabilities. Unfortunately, our ADA coordinator separated from employment with the town. And so, and so I don't know if there's been a replacement. So I never heard back from this person. And then I don't know if there's, I assume there's been a replacement. Trudy may know better than I, because she works in the town building. I don't, but it was Kelsey who was, was the appointed. So I don't know if Kelsey has a replacement yet. No, there's not been a replacement for that position. I don't know about if somebody's taking over the ADA responsibilities until the position itself has been filled. Right. When I was in North Andover, I don't remember them pushing remote for the disabled. It could be something new because when the two town meetings that I did there, they were both outside because it was still COVID. If I need to get any information from the town clerk, please let me know. Sure. Thanks. And I can get it. I can, I mean, Mark just emailed, DeSalvo just emailed with me too. And I could ask him, I can ask him more directly. Yeah. I mean, he's pretty easy to communicate with, but. Super easy. Yeah. Because I'd also, he's very great. He's, he, he thinks he's indebted to me because I talked to his son, future son-in-law about his law practice. But that being said, I, Mark is, to me, is not in favor of remote participation with regard to the way we're trying to do it, making it available to just all registered voters. But he is obviously very interested. I mean, he's a supporter of doing it for those with disabilities. So I get, get some more information from him. It's just one of the many things to go on my to-do list. So any other comments about this initiative, basically trying to convince OTI to get started with this combination of market. So I have one more thing to add here. And that is that one of the things that I did here was talking to the Westin Town Meeting Improvement Committee, which was put together in preparation for Westin getting to a home rule petition, hopefully at their fall town meeting. So I briefed them back in July, but there was one gentleman who was not present. His name was Ron Mahool, and he has an IT background. He's retired. And he, in the last couple of weeks, sent me a couple of presentations, and then he and I met over the weekend. This is a gentleman with a lot of cybersecurity experience. So, and he reviewed, even though he wasn't present when I did the presentation, he reviewed the recording. So his perspective is that in terms of our approach, he's pretty comfortable with it. The fact that we're not assuming that we can stop hacking, but rather that we can detect it and report to the moderator before a vote that's tainted is declared final. He's comfortable with that approach, but where he has a lot of value to add is that he points out two things. One, the availability of AI makes hacking a lot more accessible to a lot more hackers. Yeah, that's number one. And the AIs are pretty good at impersonation. That's number two. But the thing that he's most concerned with is that whoever develops the software, that they are secure and that they are following all the right practices for securely developing software. So just to state a worst case, imagine if some hacker somehow was able to get access to the developer's development environment and inserted into our town meeting software, a backdoor that allowed them to exfiltrate the table that relates secret voter codes to voter names and voter IDs. Well, then they could, in effect, figure out who voted which way for every vote and then go extort people to not make that public. So where his name is Ron Mahul, where he will be very, very helpful is as we make the transition, hopefully sooner rather than later, to actually commissioning someone to build this stuff, to put in place the right procedures and processes so that we can be confident that the software that gets built will be itself secure and resilient to hackers and other adversaries. Comments? We don't usually discuss cybersecurity details here and we won't start now. I suspect that at the next Elvis meeting that we do in preparation for the next town meeting that I'm going to want to schedule an executive session where we do discuss cybersecurity and more detail and that part would not be public, would not be open to the public. Because the last thing we want to do is identify weaknesses to potential adversaries looking at recordings of this meeting. So the one I just mentioned, hacking into somebody's development environment, every hacker on the planet knows about that. But going any more granular would be, not serve our purposes. And isn't AI also good at finding vulnerabilities in the software? It is. So, you know, it's sort of a, they can be looking for holes, but AI can all be looking for things to fix. It's, it's a tool we can use for penetration testing of the, of our software. Right. So yes, it's a double-edged sword. It can help us build a more robust product, but it can also- It's like an arms race. I used to tell my clients it's an arms race. Yeah, exactly. Okay.
Okay.
One last detail. We do not need a RFP to work with a supplier to develop software if we're not paying them anything. Recall that OTI built our original electronic voting mechanism at no charge to Wayland. We basically contributed our expertise, our domain knowledge, our testing, and they got access to a market. Um, I'm thinking we'll use the same model here, except there's now 50 or 60 companies offering online voting. And by the way, I called one of them and asked, what would it cost to host a remote town meeting with a hundred votes over the course of two evenings for, and I quoted 2,000 people and the answer came back less than $2,000. Whoa. Cheaper than electronic voting. So that was just one vendor, but my suspicion is that's representative. And my guess is the end point for all of this is going to be that even on-premises voters will use, uh, smartphones and tablets and the remote participation system. They'll just be physically present because it'll be cheaper. So in other words, you would still offer some of the devices for those less than 5% of people, probably even less than that, who don't have a device or whose devices. We have to do that even for remote participation. There may be some disabled people who don't have a tablet or a smartphone. So we'll have to loan them one. I don't think it'll be a large number. The last time I checked, it was like 92% of all Americans have a smartphone. So, right. And maybe more of a, you could see folks in less affluent towns maybe having challenges. And frankly, most people have some sort of phone. I mean, it's not, may not be the latest iPhone, but you know, they've got something that they bought them. Yep. In many towns, libraries and schools have repositories of tablets and, uh, that could be used for this purpose. Mm-hmm. Okay. So that's it for what's listed here. Are there any other comments or discussion about remote participation that we should go through? I have a couple. Fire away, Trudy. What do you say to the smaller towns who say, well, we don't have the IT to help us with this at town meetings? What I say is you don't need IT. Basically, uh, basically the, um, the software is hosted. It's not running on a local server. Um, and, um, it's run by the moderator and an assistant moderator. So you don't need IT. That was one of the comments that one of the clerks in this, on the North Shore had made in the, in a newspaper article that, you know, it's great for the communities who have the ITs to help with this. I've made the point, and I made it to Mark Fite, that for towns that want to do hybrid access to select board meetings and school board meetings and finance committee meetings, but can't afford IT, that this software would solve that problem. Because the chair of whatever committee it is can run the meeting without IT support. And every remote participant just uses their smartphone or tablet. Now it's, you know, the, it would be a slightly different software in the sense of how things get sequenced, but the basic mechanism is the same.
And my other comment is that I know that several town clerks are concerned what their involvement would be at town meeting. And I know you and I've discussed this before, that there should be no involvement of the town clerk as far as monitoring anything or whatever. So I know that some of them are concerned about the extra responsibilities they may have during town meeting. So the, the biggest impact on town clerks will be the registration process. And that's what I've said to them. Anybody who wants to remotely participate has to go see the town clerk before the meeting and get issued a set of credentials. Now, I don't think that's a big deal. I don't think so either. But, but, but it's not something people do now. And, you know, if, if we end up with 5,000 people in a town wanting to attend town meeting, then there's probably going to need to be some kind of registration, reservation system where you can reserve a 10 minute slot with the town clerk. So that we don't end up with lines around the block. But other than that, I don't, I don't see an impact, Trudy. I didn't think so either, but I know that that's some of the comments I'm hearing. Yep. Any other comments, Trudy? Nope. Any comments from anybody else?
Nope. All right. Is there a motion to adjourn the meeting? No. Is there a second? Second. Okay. Roll call time. Lynn? Aye. Don? Yes. John? Yes. Trudy? Yes. Larry? Yes. And I vote yes. So it's unanimous to say it again. Thank you, everybody, for making time for this meeting. Appreciate the feedback. I will make the modifications to the documents that we passed, and I will submit them. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, Dave, for all your heart. Have a good night. You too. Thank you. Good night, everybody. Good night. Good night. Good night.
There is an E, and I did not put one. Sorry. Somewhere along the line. Yep. I answer to both, but to be official, it is with an E. Okay. Okay. Thanks. Anything else with the minutes? Is there a motion to approve the minutes as amended with the spelling of Lynn's name? So moved. Is there a second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. Anybody opposed? Let it be recorded that the minutes were unanimously approved with modification of Lynn's name. Okay. The next item I'm going to put up on screen. Let's see if I can actually share my screen here. May I interrupt? And what I want to share is... I don't think he heard you. Yeah. Dave? Yes. I think technically you're supposed to do a roll call vote when you're on Zoom. Okay. All right. Let's do a roll call vote then. Lynn? Aye. Yes. Don? Yes. John? Yes. Trudy? Yes. Larry? You got me already. Okay. How did I do that? All right. Anyway, and I vote yes. So that's all of us. Because you're down a body. Maybe. Okay. I guess I was confused. Anyway, so that was unanimous. Thank you. Thank you, Trudy. All right. So I want to put up this document, which is actually an excerpt from the annual report. Let me get rid of this, if I can. Windows doesn't make it easy.
That's the agenda. It's stuck in front of everything. What are you saying? The problem is that I can't move this window because it's stuck there. It is. Okay. Fine. All right. So this is the document I'm trying to draw your attention to. Can everybody see this? Mm-hmm. Okay. So this is a summary of performance at town meeting on April, on May the 4th and May the 5th. You can see the number of handsets ordered, the attendance, the number of articles, number of votes, and my recollection is that there were zero handset failures both nights, but I was not always in attendance at the desk, so I wanted to make sure that was accurate. Did any of you encounter any handset failures or voter problems? No. Not that I recall. Okay. Then this is accurate. Yeah. So that's the second town meeting in a row where we've had zero failures, the second year in a row, which is pretty good. So I'm very happy to hear that. That's great. Anyone want to comment on how things went at town meeting from an electronic voting point of view?
Okay. If not, then we'll move on to the next agenda item, which is the annual report. So I mail that to everybody. Did anyone find any errors or omissions in the report? The one minor thing that I picked up on, Dave, is there was one place that we refer to Miranda as the Wayland moderator, and then Wayland moderator Miranda Jones, and then other places it just refers to Miranda as moderator Miranda Jones, and perhaps we should be consistent and use Wayland. And just so that it's clear that she's- I can usually do that. Yeah. But someone reading it who may not be familiar. Okay. Other comments or improvements that are suggested.
Okay. Is there a motion to approve the annual report with the modification that Lynn just suggested? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Okay. Let's do a roll call vote. Lynn? Yes. John? Yes. John? Yes. Trudy? Yes. Larry? Yes. And I vote yes. So that's unanimous. Okay. That item is disposed of. I'm practicing to be a moderator someday. Hey, hey, hey. I can hear you. I'm just teasing. Maybe I'll pass the gauntlet on to you. No way. So the next item, I just wanted to flash this up here. It was recently announced that the FY27 annual town meeting will be held on the 10th and 11th of May. So I plugged that into the spreadsheet to get the schedule. And the schedule begins back at the end of March, Don, with starting the attendance survey. So this will be, you know, I'll pass this around when we get a little bit closer. And like always, we'll have a meeting, before town meeting. But just to give everybody a sense, we're now a week into, a week later in May than we were this last year. And so things will get ramped up at the end of March. I already passed these dates on to Mark Fite at OTI. So we're on the schedule there. So all should go well. Does anybody have any comments or concerns about the next town meeting?
Don asked me, he gave me an email today asking for this year's attendance. Don is just going to take me probably next week to get that to you. Okay, that's fine. No problem. Okay. Sounds good. All right. So that's that. Okay. So the next item on the agenda and the one that we'll spend most of our time on in this meeting is the update for remote participation. And so this is the, the thing we'll go through and I'll flash some other stuff up as well. Let me just make sure I can get a hold of this. Okay. So starting at the top, everybody see that. Okay. So the first thing is that we have updated the remote participation presentation a bit. So let me show you that.
So in particular slides, starting with slide four. So this is the introduction. You've all seen this where we talk about why we, who we are and why we do this, but we've added some additional in context for participation in open town meetings being poor. So Wayland is getting 600 out of 10,000 and we didn't even do that this year. But if you look at some of these other towns and this is data we got from the Massachusetts League of Women's Voters, you know, the, the, the, the median attendance is, you know, pretty low in a number of towns nearby. We all know this slogan, if we can shop and bank from the internet, why can't we participate? So this was just a reformulation of the reasons, but I've added another reason that we've heard from other towns is these don't have enough meeting space to accommodate everybody or they don't have enough parking. And then this next slide shows the scope of the problem. I'm not seeing your slides anymore here. Really? Oh, wait a minute. Sorry. Something may have happened locally here. David's screen. Okay. Got it. I don't know what, I must've clicked on something. Sorry. No problem. So there's a total of, I don't know, 350 municipalities in Wayland of which, in Massachusetts, of which 260 use open town meeting, 32 use representative town meetings. There's about 290 here. Then there's another 45 that use city council, 13 that are town council, one that's municipal council. And you can see the colors here as to what that distribution looks like. But the key is that only 36% of the population lives in an open town meeting town. That's 1.7 million people. So one of the reasons we're having difficulty with town council is that we're a minority of the total population. And a lot of the representatives just aren't familiar with town meeting because they come from towns with town council or municipal council or city council. So it's just part of the context.
Questions? Comments? More out of curiosity, because the issue is, you know, the town meeting participation is low. Has it always been, I mean, have there been points in history where it's been significantly higher? I mean, imagine back in the 1700s when there was very few people and people came, the men came and met at the Kirk side and, and, you know, that was a whole different gambit. But, you know, say in the last 50 years, has it been, there been a precipitous drop or is this just sort of how it is? I'm not saying that we shouldn't address the issue, but I'm just more curious. I don't, I don't have, I don't have any data going back. I mean, clearly in, you know, 300 years ago, there were only 10 people in the town who could attend. Yeah, so it's easy to get a lot more people, yeah, to round them up. But, but the impression I'm getting is that more and more towns are having trouble making quorum. We've heard this from our town council. We've heard it from some legislators, Senator Durant, I've not spoken with him directly, but I've spoken with his legislative director and they're out, you know, in the West. And one of the reasons that they, they submitted a bill, 21, 29, that we had nothing to do with is because they have towns that have trouble making quorum and they want remote participation. They're central mass, Dave. Central West. Yeah. If I can just interject just for a second, I've been asked to come to the select board on September 22nd. Carol Martin, the select board chair, just asked me two nights ago and we worked on a date to talk about whether or not to reduce our quorum. Other towns, some towns have fewer than, we have a hundred, some towns have less, some towns have zero. And it's more sort of a discussion about should, should we do that just to guarantee that we always have a quorum. I don't know what the answer is, but it's something to talk about. And we haven't, you know, I don't know if you've noticed that sometimes I rush through the end of town meeting and don't even bother using electronic voting to, to very quickly get through the last few articles that are typically non-controversial because I don't want to look to see if we're not making a quorum. So that's why I do it. Okay. Any other comments about this set of changes, basically, you know, scoping the, you know, the, the, the number of communities that are affected. There's one more thing, a change I made, and it was really made in response to comments from someone in an audience, which is I added a new optional function, which is the ability of a remote participant to click the amend button. And when they do that, they have the ability to take a picture of a short amendment, which when they click submit, gets submitted to the moderator. So this is consistent with Wayland's rules. Not all towns may allow this. You know, obviously if somebody wants to submit 10 pages, they have to do that ahead of time with the moderator's rules, but being able to use the device's camera to capture something written on paper, as long as it's a few, you know, 10 words or less, is something that's technically straightforward. So I didn't think it was a big problem to add that. Any comments about this?
Okay. Well, that's it. Yeah. The only thing I, I mean, we're probably not at the specking stage, but you might, when we get to that, probably want to indicate that it's 10 words or less. Well, actually it would be subject to that community's moderator's rules. Remember every, every, every, every, every town that does this gets to say how it gets used. Yeah. And one of the things Dave has been pointing out is we've taken our show on the road again and been talking to different communities about remote participation. We are very clear that every town gets to decide just how to, they want to tweak their remote participation if they were inclined to utilize remote participation. And I would suggest to you that not everybody uses moderator's rules either. Our, our town does, we have historically have used moderator's rules, but not every town even has them. Sometimes they just rely on Robert's rules of order, different things, their town bylaws. So that's why every single, what is it, 260 open town community, open town meeting communities in this state, every town does it just a little bit differently from each other. Okay. All right. So next item on the remote participation update is that we have gotten all of our web content onto the town's web page, the town's town meeting web page. And I'm taking a brief snapshot of it here. Um, so where did I put it? It is six chart. Here it is right there.
Okay. So this is just the main page, but you can see that it's got the major topics, remote participation, why ease of use, security, legislation, take action. And each one of those takes you to additional information. Um, we got, this is the, the, the top page here with also access to the same stuff. Um, so this is, um, very helpful in terms of people who want to learn more about it. And we have vectored people here. Um, so any comments about this?
Now, is, is that the full URL there? Get, get remote TM. Yeah. It's got a full URL when you actually go to the page, but get, get remote TM is, is dot org is sufficient. I was thinking about hiring an airplane during the, uh, soccer finals to carry that around on a, on a big banner. Yeah. A lot of those people weren't from our country, let alone from our state. Yeah. But they could still, they could still call their legislators. Well, not if they're, yeah. Not if they're coming from outside the, the, uh, new England or the country. Right. Um, yeah. Okay. So, um, the next item here is legislative status in the current legislative session, which is the one 94th, which ends, uh, at the end of this year. So three of the bills that we've been following, two of which we submitted were referred to study. So H 2272 is our home rule petition, and that was referred to study, um, 2274, uh, representative Gentiles statewide authorization of, um, for town meetings was sent to study both by the same committee. Um, and the excuse in both cases was we want to focus on making remote participation in representative town meetings permanent. Um, and that's more important right now. So we don't have time to worry about these things. Um, I'm not sure that's a very honest response, but that was a response we got. Um, there was a statewide bill 3342 from representative Gregoire, who's actually a member of house leadership. And that was also sent to study. Um, so, um, there are still some bills that are alive. Um, Congress home rule petition is still alive. Um, Senator Barrett's statewide authorization is alive. And there's a pair of bills, um, book in the Senate before the Senate ways and means committees. They've gone quite far from Senator Oliveira and Senator Durant. 2197 is identical to 3342. This was a house Senate pair. So the house bill was sent to study, but the Senate bill is still alive. Um, I have suggested to Senator Eldridge, our Senator, that he worked with Senator Oliveira and Senator Durant to craft a compromise, which would be a five town pilot program. Um, and basically it said the first five towns that approved doing it are allowed to do it. Um, I have spoken to legislative assistants in both of the, for both of these senators and both have been agreeable. Um, but I have not been able to get any feedback from Senator Eldridge or his staff on where that stands. So as far as I can tell, they're still alive, but nothing has happened either. And people who know what they're doing say that at this stage, it's unlikely that anything is going to happen there. Senator Barrett is the assistant majority leader in the Senate. That's a very significant position. His bill is also still alive. The Concord home rule petition is before the committee on third readings. Now you would think, wow, that's not that the last place that has to go before it gets a floor vote. Well, on the very first year that Waylon submitted a home rule petition, we got to the committee on third readings. Um, but then nothing happened. So I think that's just a tease myself. I think the first time you submit a home rule petition, they let you go all the way to the committee on third readings before they send you to study just to tease you. Um, that, that's my conclusion anyway. Um, we did make two budget amendments, uh, both for the five town, uh, pilot program. Neither one of them was admitted, was accepted. So we made an amendment, a last minute kind of thing for the house budget, last minute kind of thing for the Senate budget. These were suggested by our representative Gentile and by Senator Eldridge. Neither was accepted. So my perspective is we're not completely dead yet, but it's unlikely that we're going to see any of this legislation succeed in the current legislative session. So we're assuming that what we need to do is plan what to do in the next legislative session. So our thinking now is that in the next legislative session, I'm going to just move this a little bit. At least try to kind of move this. Yes. Make it bigger. Yes. Okay. That in the next legislative session, our principal focus will be on submitting a five town remote participation pilot program. Now we have to specify, or maybe a governing agency, the amendments we did didn't, didn't say anything at all about a governing agency. It just said first five towns that approve it, do it. But the feedback we've gotten is that it would be better if we nominated the attorney general's office or the secretary of state's office to kind of monitor the five town pilot program and verify that it's working correctly and maybe help write a report at the end. So we have to decide, do we want a governing agency? Do we have to recruit them? Do they have to agree? We're thinking that we want identical House and Senate bills, but we have to decide which legislators should do the submission. I think on the Senate side, Senator Barrett would be very attractive. He's the assistant majority leader. And we want to maximize the number of co-sponsors. We want to get as many legislators to sponsor these bills as we can. And to that end, we've assembled sort of a whip sheet of all the legislators that have either gotten involved with remote participation or we've spoken with or have co-sponsored something or have sent positive email or done something. So out of the 40 senators, 21 senators have indicated that they think positively towards remote participation. However, out of the 161 or 160 representatives, we only have about 30. But we're focusing on all of these. We know for each one what their role is, if they have a role in leadership, when we last engaged with them, what their actual action has been. Some have co-sponsored bills for us. Some have spoken in favor. Some have attended our seminars. We know which open town meeting towns they represent. So a guy like this, this is Senator Mark. He's got 54 open town meeting towns. So he's a very strong candidate to get involved. And he was a co-sponsor of 2197, which would have authorized remote participation. This is Senator Oliveira's bill statewide. So we're really trying to prioritize who are the people that would likely support us. And we want to get all of the wood behind our legislation, as much as we can. Any comments about this? That's a lot of data, I know. And if anybody's interested in this, send me an email. I'll be happy to send you the spreadsheet. My only comment is that if it weren't for Dave keeping track of all of this stuff, he is relentless, which is fabulous. And if we get remote participation one day, it'll be 98% due to his efforts. I appreciate everybody's work on this, but creating these kind of spreadsheets, this is so impressive. And it's so hard to keep this all straight, especially because those names in that column, in column B, those change. I was just going to say, given the fact that we're in an election cycle now. Yeah, unfortunately, Carmen Gentile is retiring, and Ravi Simon has won, and he has no opponent. And he's a big supporter of ours, so we're lucky. But he's new, and so he won't have the oomph that other state reps will have. We should dwell on that just a little bit. Ravi was Representative Gentile's legislative assistant. And he has been extraordinarily helpful between him and Nancy, the lady from League of Women's Voters. They have just really helped us enormously, Nancy Brumbach. And now Ravi is making a transition from legislative assistant to legislator. So, as Miranda said, he's not going to have the power that Carmen did, but he has, he's a really energetic person. And he's very articulate, and so I'm looking forward to continuing working with him. Really good guy. Yeah, we're very fortunate. He's very young. He's in his early 30s, and this is what he wants to do with his life. So, it's great. He's running unopposed. He has no Republican opposition. Any other comment or discussion about this stuff? Is there any hope of all the towns that are interested coming together before the legislation and just submitting one thing for all of them instead of all these things? So, maybe it has more force by itself, or does that just never happen? I'm not sure what you mean. Well, you know, I mean, our person submits one for us, and somebody else submits one for somebody else, or the wording is slightly different, and they all have to go to some committee, and they all have to get reconciled or whatever. If basically all the towns that were interested got together and behind the scenes came up with exactly the wording they wanted to submit, and submitted only one bill, you know, so all the energy could go into one thing. Would that in any way help, or is that possible? Well, I think that's what we're doing here, John. But, I mean, towns can certainly, first of all, legislation comes from legislators, not towns. There can be a home rule petition for a town submitted by that town's legislator. Yeah. And we do want to, as part of the strategy, we want to encourage as many towns as we can to submit home rule petitions. And we're happy to give them the text of our home rule petition, so they can just copy it and do a change Wayland to whatever. But what we think is the most likely to succeed is a pilot program, because we sense that there's some concern about doing a statewide bill all at once and saying everybody across the state can just do this. So, by starting with a five-town pilot and proving that it works before we ask for statewide authorization, that's a good first step. So, what we want here is as many legislators across the state to endorse this, to co-sponsor it as we can. Okay. Yeah, and to that point as well, so we have Concord is on board. Weston seems like they're going to be there. They're putting it on their ballot probably this fall, right, at a special town meeting. Yeah. And so, we still need to get a couple more towns, and we would prefer to have some towns that are from different parts of the state so we can get different. Number one, it looks like affluent towns are the ones that want to push for more participation because we can afford it. So, Dave and I are also on a slightly different marketing spree trying to say that this is affordable. Alexa, pause. Secondly, in order to get more state legislators interested, we need to get towns from different areas. So, for example, Dave and I spoke to the Democratic Town Committee in Hamilton-Wenham, thanks to Trudy, a couple weeks ago. We spoke to the one in Medway. So, those are all different legislators. I happened to be in an event last week with Senator, excuse me, Representative Margaret Scarsdale, who's like pep roll in towns, out Groton, towns like that, which she said is a very purple community. But she was completely fascinated by this and said, has this been, do you see any partisanship here? And I said, not at all. In fact, we have Senator Durant, who's a Republican, who sponsored a bill. So, if we could get some towns in central mass involved, too, we could kind of spread the word amongst the legislators. And maybe that would give us a little bit more oomph that we need, like get more people to pay attention to it. And I told Representative Scarsdale, I said, I don't see this as a bipartisan issue at all. It's just people want it. It's just using modern technology to preserve a very, a 400-year-old process. So, we'll see. But I think the five-town pilot program that Representative Kate Hogan was the first person to suggest it, that's probably our best bet. Would there also be included in that mix, the Representative Town Meeting? So, you have like towns that do a Representative Meeting as well? So, we, you know, so when you meet with the legislators, they, a lot of them have both open and Representative Town Meeting. There's not that many Representative Town Meeting towns to begin with. Yeah. And like, for example, the town of Belmont, the town I grew up in, just filed a petition to get, to be allowed to do remote participation. So, and we know that Plymouth has it. And Dave, what other towns have it for Representative Town Meeting? Lexington has it. Lexington has it. They created their own software program. So, really, what Dave is trying to get is trying to get the software, the OTIs of the world to say, you know, we could, you could make this software program so that both Representative and Open Town Meeting Towns used it to make it even, you know, more marketable. But more towns have to be interested in doing it. But, you know, with your state legislators, you never know which town, you know, they all, especially the representatives. You ever seen the way the districts are divvied up? They make no sense at all. So, I mean, some, like Senator Durant, I think, Dave, we said he has like 20 towns in his district, right? They're all small, central mass towns, a lot of open town meeting towns. So, we'll see. Okay. So, we're saying a five-town pilot program. We have to work out the details. We still want to submit a home rule petition. And we want to encourage as many other towns as possible to submit home rule petitions. I'm hearing an echo. So, I wanted to just briefly flash this up. This is basically the number of presentations, the presentations we've done since the last Elvis meeting in February. So, we met with the Nantucket Select Board. That was interesting. This, we tried to wangle invitations both to the Republican and Democratic state conventions. So, we could meet with delegates and attendees there. The Republicans weren't interested. But we actually got a table at the state Democratic convention. Miranda, David Allen from Concord, and I spent a couple days there. And during the course of that, we basically engaged with about 300 different people. Most of whom knew something about open town meeting, but didn't know anything at all about remote participation. And as a result of that, we got invitations, not just to the Wayland Democratic Committee, but to some other Democratic committees, Medway, Wenham, where, again, we've been spreading the word. And in this case, two representatives actually showed up. Trudy basically set this one up. So, you need to make a correction to that, because it was the Hamilton and Wenham Democratic Committee. Okay. We are two towns. Okay. And if somebody from Hamilton saw this, they'd probably lose it. I will fix that. Be a little offended. How about that for real-time corrections? Great. Thank you. And then their state rep was also there, that Kristen Kasner. Yes. Yeah, she's listed. So, basically, the reason I wanted to bring this up is that you never know exactly how you're going to get leads. You just have to, it's like, you have to fire as many torpedoes as you can and hope you're going to hit a few ships. And that's what we've been doing. This one also bears some discussion. The Mass Municipal Association is highly regarded by the legislature. They're very influential. We did succeed in getting their legislative director to speak, that was bad, at one of our seminars last year. But we really need a significant written endorsement. But even more importantly, they can introduce us to select boards. They're engaged with every select board. They can help us acquaint select boards with the fact that remote participation is not just secure and easy to use, but as Miranda points out, affordable. So, I was able to get a meeting with this guy a couple of weeks ago, and he agreed with our approach, and he agreed to help us do that. Now, he hasn't responded in my most recent email, but we're trying to basically, that's another front, another way to get to select boards. This is really interesting. Joe Patek is a member of the Lexington Select Board. Lexington is an open town meeting town. No, they're not. Representative town meeting town. They originally used OTI for remote participation. OTI provides a product called VVoter, Virtual Voter. And in combination with Zoom, you can use that combination to basically do remote participation. Plymouth uses the same combination. It's very difficult for representatives to flip between applications. They find it very challenging. To the point where Joe, who it turns out has a background in the MIT AI lab and HP research, took it upon himself to replace the VVoter piece of that to make a more integrated solution. But he didn't do that because he's looking to cast his fame and fortune in being the author of a remote participation system. He views it as just something to carry them over until there's a viable commercial solution. So, when he and I went through what we're proposing, he was thrilled because that's what he wants. And when we met with the moderator of Plymouth, Steve Trofetti, he had the same reaction. In fact, he wrote us a one-paragraph endorsement that's on our town webpage. So, everybody who's using remote participation in representative town meetings is actually a potential customer for the software that we have specified. Because for the same reason we want it to be easy to use, they want it to be easy to use. Comments? Dave, when the MMA does their conference in, I believe it's February, is that something you guys could do a table at? We'll talk about the MMA momentarily. You mean mass municipal, not mass moderators, right, Trudy? Correct. Okay. Yeah, we'll get to that shortly. So, any other comments about encouraging other towns? Okay, let's move to endorsements. We have a very strong endorsement for the Mass League of Women Voters. Nancy Brumbach, who is their legislative director, has been incredibly helpful. She's done seminars, not just, they've hosted seminars for legislators, for officials. She's done seminars for their own chapters, so they all know what we're doing and why. Been great. So, just mentioned the Mass Municipal Association, Adam Chapta Lane, we're working on that. Mass moderators has been really problematic, and I'll let Miranda handle this one. Yeah, okay. So, they don't want to come out and endorse anything. So, we have an executive board meeting, which I just remembered that I'm actually on for mass moderators. You know, I've been a moderator very long, and they put me on an executive board. We have a meeting at the end of September, and we are going to just, they are going to discuss at this executive board meeting sort of what kind of public statement they want to release, and it's not an endorsement. It's a really wishy-washy, lukewarm statement. But I think they feel, for whatever reason, they feel a little bit pressured to do something about it, because obviously, this town and Concord has been getting the word out. That being said, I have offered, Dave and I have offered to give the remote participation presentation to the moderators one Thursday night, later this, in a few weeks, before I have the executive board meeting. So, I'm hoping to bring more moderators on board. Similarly, the moderator for the town of Weston, he and I are going to talk, he's on the executive board, too, and Weston seems to be almost on the cusp of voting to pursue remote participation. He and I are going to discuss beforehand and strategize how to deal with the executive board. He's a more, he's been on the moderator longer than me, so he's got a little more experience with the executive board. I mean, I hate to sort of be elected moderator and come into the mass moderators association and kind of shake things up. But you know what, that's what the town wants me to do. So, here we, I answered a wail and not to the mass moderators association. So, we're hoping, you know, maybe between Rip and me, that we can persuade them to give a slightly stronger endorsement, because a lot of people do ask, how do the moderators feel about this? And our moderators aren't necessarily on board for a variety of reasons. A lot of them, I think, are scared of it, of remote participation, of learning, learning this, a system, learning the process. Some people just have a philosophical problem with it. They don't like the thought of, of modernizing it, not everybody being in the same room at the same time. That's what, how town meetings started back in, I think it was the Norse people who started town meeting. And so, so some, some people are philosophically opposed to it. Some people are software engineers and worry about the threat, you know, that it comes with, you know, doing this through the internet. So, there's a lot of reasons why moderators, and I think a lot of it is that some, some just don't want to learn. They don't want to learn how to do, how to moderate town meeting in a different way. And so, so they're not pushing it. So anyway, so that's this month. So we'll, you know, I'll report back to Dave what happens at the Mass Moderators Association, the executive board meeting to see if we can get them to put out a stronger statement, and we'll see how we do. We just keep plugging away. Just before the last Elvis meeting in January, I met with Representative Alvis Peish, who's the assistant majority leader in the House, very influential. And she supports what we're doing, but she made the comment that the silence from the Mass Moderators was deafening. So the fact that they aren't saying anything is, has an impact on some legislators. So if we, even if we can get a lukewarm, yeah, it's okay for them to try it kind of statement, that would be something. The fact that they're saying nothing has been noticed. Yeah, it's just anything, just supporting towns that are interested in adopting remote participation. Nobody's saying you have to utilize it, just allowing towns to try it. Because again, every open town meeting town does town meeting just a little bit differently. Disability Law Center, I have briefed the executive chair of this for technical reasons. She did not want to weigh in on our side. I need to get her to revisit that. This has to do with whether or not hybrid meetings of public bodies are optional or mandatory. The Disability Law Center would like all meetings to be hybrid guaranteed. And that's opposed by the Mass Municipal Association because small towns would find it financially challenging. And the fact that our remote participation is optional in town meetings, that was, that was difficult for the Disability Law Center to endorse at the time. So we'll take another shot at that. When we were at the Democratic Convention, I ambushed the chair of the Democratic, Mass Democratic Party while he was buying some food. Steve Kerrigan. Steve Kerrigan. I basically pitched him on what we're doing. And he knew about town meeting. He knew about open town meeting. And he was receptive. So I have been trying to get some kind of endorsement from the party. I hope this is an OK idea. We probably should discuss it at some point because we don't want to piss off any Republicans. This isn't a partisan issue. But we're trying to get as much mind share, as much knowledge as possible. So we're not trying to convert it into a partisan issue. We're just trying to get as many people to understand that we can make it secure, we can make it easy to use, and it will be affordable. So I don't know. Does anybody have any comments about this? Should we keep pushing on this? Well, if you're going to ask the Democratic Party, why don't you ask the Republican? Well, I tried that once and they weren't even interested in having us show up at their convention. But we could try again. Yeah. Especially if maybe through Senator Durant, if you'll ever. You know, the problem with these legislators, if we're not their constituent, they're not taking emails, they're not answering. They've got so many other people to answer to. For example, I sent an email to Representative Scarsdale after having spoken with her for a while in person. I sent her an email and I got just an automatic response because she's got so many emails from her constituents. So it's hard to get through. But yeah, I mean, we could give it another shot with Republican. We do, besides Senator Durant, there's a, I think he's a Senator O'Connell, who's also very supportive. So maybe between the two, we can do that. I'll take a note there. Yeah, I think it's O'Connor, right? Yeah. McConnell. Okay. I think so.
Long ago, we were told that the reason that remote participation was made legal for representative town meetings, but not open town meetings, was concerned by Senator Galvin. We've also been told that nobody listens to him. We've tried for years to get in front of him and show him what we're doing. We haven't been successful. I think we have to make another shot at that. I don't know whether he's interfering. No one has said he is. But from my point of view, anybody who's expressed a negative point of view needs to see our presentation because so far, we've had 100% conversion ratio. There have been lots of people who've been skeptical going in, but after learning about the audit, learning about the recheck-in, they come out feeling quite comfortable that what we're doing would be secure. And we need to have the same conversation with Secretary of State Galvin and his directors. Okay, the next one is pretty interesting. So it turns out that two towns in Massachusetts with open town meetings are allowing disabled voters to remotely participate. One is North Andover and the other is Carlisle. The moderator of North Andover is Mark DeSalvo, who is the president of the Mass Moderators Association. And not only that, the attorney general has weighed in and said, that's okay. Because of the Americans with Disabilities Act, remote participation in town meeting, an open town meeting, is a reasonable accommodation.
So that means we could offer remote participation to disabled registered voters within Wayland's borders. Furthermore, if we had a remote participation solution, we could offer it to people holding representative town meetings. So about a month ago, I had dinner with Mark Fite, who's the CEO of OTI. And I basically pitched him on not waiting for a blanket legislative authorization, but rather to say, hey, Mark, there's at least the representative town meeting towns, one of which has already kicked you out because it was too hard for the representatives to use vVoter. And disabled folks, that may be enough of a market to get started. So he and I are meeting tomorrow afternoon. He spent last month, supposedly, discussing it with his development team. So tomorrow, I'll learn where they came out on whether there's interest in getting started with just this sub-market.
Well, and that seems like that would be a good opportunity for a pilot. Yeah. It's another way to do a pilot. So how does North Andover do that? We don't know. And Miranda and I have an action item to meet with Mark DeSalvo and find out exactly what they're doing. My suspicion is, based on some comment he made, that they're using Zoom. Zoom has a polling mechanism built into it. Yeah. I don't, I don't, I also am not sure if he appoints an assistant moderator to be with the person too. I'm not sure if he has to do it that way because it's in a different, separate location. I have to ask him, I mean, North Andover often gets 2,000 people at their annual town meeting. Sometimes they've gone up to three. It's a very popular town for, so they must have assistant moderators because I can't imagine they have a place to accommodate all these people all the time that they have to have it in separate rooms. So he must assign assistant moderators anyway. So, and he had spoken to me last year about, about trying to pursue it through the Americans with Disabilities Act. And so now we're thinking, okay, we should. So then I reached out to our ADA coordinator in Wayland to see how we go about finding if there's been any, any of our registered voters who have asked about providing a reasonable accommodation for those with disabilities. Unfortunately, our ADA coordinator separated from employment with the town. And so, and so I don't know if there's been a replacement. So I never heard back from this person. And then I don't know if there's, I assume there's been a replacement. Trudy may know better than I, because she works in the town building. I don't, but it was Kelsey who was, was the appointed. So I don't know if Kelsey has a replacement yet. No, there's not been a replacement for that position. I don't know about if somebody's taking over the ADA responsibilities until the position itself has been filled. Right. When I was in North Andover, I don't remember them pushing remote for the disabled. It could be something new because when the two town meetings that I did there, they were both outside because it was still COVID. If I need to get any information from the town clerk, please let me know. Sure. Thanks. And I can get it. I can, I mean, Mark just emailed, DeSalvo just emailed with me too. And I could ask him, I can ask him more directly. Yeah. I mean, he's pretty easy to communicate with, but. Super easy. Yeah. Because I'd also, he's very great. He's, he, he thinks he's indebted to me because I talked to his son, future son-in-law about his law practice. But that being said, I, Mark is, to me, is not in favor of remote participation with regard to the way we're trying to do it, making it available to just all registered voters. But he is obviously very interested. I mean, he's a supporter of doing it for those with disabilities. So I get, get some more information from him. It's just one of the many things to go on my to-do list. So any other comments about this initiative, basically trying to convince OTI to get started with this combination of market. So I have one more thing to add here. And that is that one of the things that I did here was talking to the Westin Town Meeting Improvement Committee, which was put together in preparation for Westin getting to a home rule petition, hopefully at their fall town meeting. So I briefed them back in July, but there was one gentleman who was not present. His name was Ron Mahool, and he has an IT background. He's retired. And he, in the last couple of weeks, sent me a couple of presentations, and then he and I met over the weekend. This is a gentleman with a lot of cybersecurity experience. So, and he reviewed, even though he wasn't present when I did the presentation, he reviewed the recording. So his perspective is that in terms of our approach, he's pretty comfortable with it. The fact that we're not assuming that we can stop hacking, but rather that we can detect it and report to the moderator before a vote that's tainted is declared final. He's comfortable with that approach, but where he has a lot of value to add is that he points out two things. One, the availability of AI makes hacking a lot more accessible to a lot more hackers. Yeah, that's number one. And the AIs are pretty good at impersonation. That's number two. But the thing that he's most concerned with is that whoever develops the software, that they are secure and that they are following all the right practices for securely developing software. So just to state a worst case, imagine if some hacker somehow was able to get access to the developer's development environment and inserted into our town meeting software, a backdoor that allowed them to exfiltrate the table that relates secret voter codes to voter names and voter IDs. Well, then they could, in effect, figure out who voted which way for every vote and then go extort people to not make that public. So where his name is Ron Mahul, where he will be very, very helpful is as we make the transition, hopefully sooner rather than later, to actually commissioning someone to build this stuff, to put in place the right procedures and processes so that we can be confident that the software that gets built will be itself secure and resilient to hackers and other adversaries. Comments? We don't usually discuss cybersecurity details here and we won't start now. I suspect that at the next Elvis meeting that we do in preparation for the next town meeting that I'm going to want to schedule an executive session where we do discuss cybersecurity and more detail and that part would not be public, would not be open to the public. Because the last thing we want to do is identify weaknesses to potential adversaries looking at recordings of this meeting. So the one I just mentioned, hacking into somebody's development environment, every hacker on the planet knows about that. But going any more granular would be, not serve our purposes. And isn't AI also good at finding vulnerabilities in the software? It is. So, you know, it's sort of a, they can be looking for holes, but AI can all be looking for things to fix. It's, it's a tool we can use for penetration testing of the, of our software. Right. So yes, it's a double-edged sword. It can help us build a more robust product, but it can also- It's like an arms race. I used to tell my clients it's an arms race. Yeah, exactly. Okay.
Okay.
One last detail. We do not need a RFP to work with a supplier to develop software if we're not paying them anything. Recall that OTI built our original electronic voting mechanism at no charge to Wayland. We basically contributed our expertise, our domain knowledge, our testing, and they got access to a market. Um, I'm thinking we'll use the same model here, except there's now 50 or 60 companies offering online voting. And by the way, I called one of them and asked, what would it cost to host a remote town meeting with a hundred votes over the course of two evenings for, and I quoted 2,000 people and the answer came back less than $2,000. Whoa. Cheaper than electronic voting. So that was just one vendor, but my suspicion is that's representative. And my guess is the end point for all of this is going to be that even on-premises voters will use, uh, smartphones and tablets and the remote participation system. They'll just be physically present because it'll be cheaper. So in other words, you would still offer some of the devices for those less than 5% of people, probably even less than that, who don't have a device or whose devices. We have to do that even for remote participation. There may be some disabled people who don't have a tablet or a smartphone. So we'll have to loan them one. I don't think it'll be a large number. The last time I checked, it was like 92% of all Americans have a smartphone. So, right. And maybe more of a, you could see folks in less affluent towns maybe having challenges. And frankly, most people have some sort of phone. I mean, it's not, may not be the latest iPhone, but you know, they've got something that they bought them. Yep. In many towns, libraries and schools have repositories of tablets and, uh, that could be used for this purpose. Mm-hmm. Okay. So that's it for what's listed here. Are there any other comments or discussion about remote participation that we should go through? I have a couple. Fire away, Trudy. What do you say to the smaller towns who say, well, we don't have the IT to help us with this at town meetings? What I say is you don't need IT. Basically, uh, basically the, um, the software is hosted. It's not running on a local server. Um, and, um, it's run by the moderator and an assistant moderator. So you don't need IT. That was one of the comments that one of the clerks in this, on the North Shore had made in the, in a newspaper article that, you know, it's great for the communities who have the ITs to help with this. I've made the point, and I made it to Mark Fite, that for towns that want to do hybrid access to select board meetings and school board meetings and finance committee meetings, but can't afford IT, that this software would solve that problem. Because the chair of whatever committee it is can run the meeting without IT support. And every remote participant just uses their smartphone or tablet. Now it's, you know, the, it would be a slightly different software in the sense of how things get sequenced, but the basic mechanism is the same.
And my other comment is that I know that several town clerks are concerned what their involvement would be at town meeting. And I know you and I've discussed this before, that there should be no involvement of the town clerk as far as monitoring anything or whatever. So I know that some of them are concerned about the extra responsibilities they may have during town meeting. So the, the biggest impact on town clerks will be the registration process. And that's what I've said to them. Anybody who wants to remotely participate has to go see the town clerk before the meeting and get issued a set of credentials. Now, I don't think that's a big deal. I don't think so either. But, but, but it's not something people do now. And, you know, if, if we end up with 5,000 people in a town wanting to attend town meeting, then there's probably going to need to be some kind of registration, reservation system where you can reserve a 10 minute slot with the town clerk. So that we don't end up with lines around the block. But other than that, I don't, I don't see an impact, Trudy. I didn't think so either, but I know that that's some of the comments I'm hearing. Yep. Any other comments, Trudy? Nope. Any comments from anybody else?
Nope. All right. Is there a motion to adjourn the meeting? No. Is there a second? Second. Okay. Roll call time. Lynn? Aye. Don? Yes. John? Yes. Trudy? Yes. Larry? Yes. And I vote yes. So it's unanimous to say it again. Thank you, everybody, for making time for this meeting. Appreciate the feedback. I will make the modifications to the documents that we passed, and I will submit them. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, Dave, for all your heart. Have a good night. You too. Thank you. Good night, everybody. Good night. Good night. Good night.