00:00:00,000	Now, can you. Hear me? Can you hear me? Yep. Okay, great. Okay. Well, thank you for coming out tonight. Uh, we’re going to call this meeting together at 615. And the first thing we want to do is make a few announcements.

00:00:18,730	And, um, some of you here, uh, participated in the citizens bank boycott stand out in North Beverly with us. And I just wanted to make sure everyone was aware that that boycott, a national boycott, was very successful. In a matter of months. ICE facilities that were being built by private contractors, they lost their funding due to the pressure put on by grassroot organizations.

00:00:40,100	That just shows you the power we have when we stand up. And if you we have opportunities all around our area to do that. We have our own, uh, the League of Women Voters has their event on Saturdays in front of the Winthrop School. We have Ipswich, we have Beverly and a multitude of other areas.

00:00:59,030	So I would urge everyone to to take a stand, make a sign and stand up because it actually is working. I also want to make sure I know everybody in this room knows, but September 1st is primary election day and early voting. Um, Diane can tell us this that it starts on Saturday.

00:01:18,670	Her life is going to change for a while. Um, so I wanted to ask you all to not only tell your friends, um, about the day, but ask them what plan they have to to vote. Because when people start thinking about making a plan to vote, they’re more likely to vote.

00:01:38,570	But if you just say, oh, will you vote for my candidate if I go like, yeah, sure. But then voting day comes and goes and people miss the election.

00:01:51,670	So if all your friends and families and neighbors ask them when, what are you going to do? Are you voting early? Are you voting on Election Day and ask them what their plan is to do it? Because we have to really get everyone out. You can see from my button. I firm believer on that. Um, and also I’m asking anyone if you’re interested in getting involved in any campaigns, especially as we head into midterm elections.

00:02:11,930	You can come to Stacie and I will help you get the resources that you need to support the candidate that you’re interested in supporting. And you can also go directly to their website and sign up to volunteer for any activity that you feel comfortable doing.

00:02:27,930	If you’re somebody who likes to do canvassing, that’s great, but I know I don’t. I’m not great at canvassing, but I can get on the phone and make calls. I can be like my own little call center and help, um, you know, spread the word about our candidates. But it’s really important.

00:02:47,430	Um, I also wanted to suggest that if you would like to help, uh, Representative Kastner with her campaign, come to me. I can get you, hook you up with, uh, yard signs and all sorts of information about helping her campaign. If you guys. Don’t remember her first race, she won by one vote. One vote. Yeah. So your vote does matter.

00:03:07,430	Yeah, it really does. Um, one more thing I want to ask is, uh, we have been we’ve done hundreds of progressive turnout postcards this summer. We’re writing postcards to voters in Maine to remind them to vote in November. And, um, we still have a couple of hundred more to do.

00:03:32,070	So if you would like to take a packet of postcards with you when you go home and work on them while you drink iced tea on the back porch over these last few days, please feel free to take some there.

00:03:44,300	They’re due to be mailed, uh, towards the end of October, so we have plenty of time to do them. But, um, feel free to take a pack. So. I think that’s all I have to say right now. Do you? I just want to. I just want to add that a lot of people don’t know or don’t know. They might see the pictures Nancy posts.

00:04:05,670	Nancy and I go to the ICE facility in Burlington every Wednesday. We can manage to make it there. And it it it’s been how many weeks like 7070 plus weeks. We don’t get to. All of them. And um, that people have been going there to protest what’s going on there.

00:04:29,800	And it is excruciatingly heartbreaking to see families go in there. And then only have the family come out and and things like that. And you think, is this really doing any good? But the Citizens Bank thing, it worked.

00:04:44,200	And it was the first time, like I felt this little glimmer of hope. So it does work. And the more we can think of ways to put pressure on on the money side, I think that’s the biggest thing that sends a message. So I just wanted to put that out there because it does.

00:05:03,270	It does get a little depressing to have to like, I just gotta, you know, how Facebook pops up, like, do you remember this or do you remember that I got one, it says nine years ago today, and the sign someone was holding on Boston Common said, do you believe we’re still having to protest this shit? And I’m like, nine years ago today, I was out there and that was the

00:05:24,200	sign. And I’m like, nine more years. And that’s where we still are. But anyways, that’s just all I wanted to add. I see Trudy is here, so we’re very grateful. Um, I wanted to introduce her and her colleagues, but they’re coming on the Zoom, correct? Yes. And maybe not quite yet.

00:05:45,370	They thought he would come on around about this time. Okay, so maybe we’ll take a one minute break till they get on. Or should we do that? That’s a good idea. Okay, grab some cookies and. Water, please.

00:06:00,900	Take the cookies or I’m gonna send them home with you, because we do not want to take them back to our home. At least I don’t. You could take. No. Thank you. No. I have nobody at home to eat them. Say, Sally and Kristen, please come take this time and say all the wonderful things going on at. The state. Yeah. We’d love to hear from you both.

00:06:17,970	No, I just wanted to add on to your story, Stacy, I’m sending parents. I represent, um, precinct two, a woman in the House of Representatives. You brother? Oh, yeah. Sorry. I’m giving you ever say one and two? Yeah, I tried, which I do kind of do, like, um. Sorry. Thank you. Um. Delighted to.

00:06:46,930	Be here. Um, thank you for the correction, Dianne K. Bucco. I’m Sally Kerans. I am the state representative for the 13th Essex district. And that’s the town of Danvers. West Peabody, uh, precinct two of Middleton, precinct two of Topsfield and precinct one a of Wenham.

00:07:09,370	And, um, I’m very honored to share the representation of Wenham with Hannah Bowen, who represents primarily Beverly. But we tag team and we work very hard to be responsive to the needs of Wenham. When we love working with the folks in this town, from the clerk to. It’s just a wonderful community.

00:07:29,530	As you all know, Stacy, I just wanted to tell you, uh, friend of mine in Topsfield. Maybe you know her. Sarah Beck. The name. She’s wonderful and she’s involved with, um, some folks who go to Burlington.

00:07:52,170	And she said they went on Christmas, and she said, we just stood outside and we sang so that they would know that we were there. And I thought that was so beautiful. They just sang just there. They were a presence for these folks to know. They they were not alone. Oh, sorry. I can see others are coming. I’ll give Kristen a second to say hello.

00:08:09,200	And thank you very much for the for the chance to say hello and for your program tonight. Thanks. Hello, I’m Representative Kristin Kassner. I walked here because I live a stone’s throw away from here. Um, and I’m pleased to obviously represent Hamilton and share. Well, I don’t share, Wenham, but just.

00:08:32,630	It’s funny when Hamilton Wenham is so everything together that, you know, some people say, oh, we have three reps and I can’t ask for a better team for Hamilton, one of them than, uh, Rep Kearns and Rep Bowen. So, um, but otherwise I’m just I’m happy to be here.

00:08:48,800	I’m happy that you guys are putting on this presentation in terms of remote town meetings, I’ll certainly can weigh in. I as many of you know, I was the planning director for the town of Burlington for a very long time and went through Covid and, um, while I was in Burlington before I was elected to this position in 2022, but also just experienced through Covid and remote town meeting,

00:09:06,770	it was representative. They’re not open, but just really trying to figure out how are the best ways that we can be inclusive to participation in all things we do. Um, but also not overwhelm, um, the administration to do that.

00:09:23,570	So just really trying to find that balance between how do we give as much access as possible and how do we give the communities the tools they need to provide that access. So, um, thank you for putting on this on tonight and for everything you do, and certainly for all of the advocacy around human rights and the environment and everything else, that you guys

00:09:40,030	are huge champions on, and being so active and together and collaborative with other groups in town as well. So happy to be here. And thank you very much. Thanks. So there’s one more thing that we have. To take. Oh yes. Is our consent agenda.

00:10:02,800	And I’d like to entertain a motion to approve the minutes from our last four. Meetings, because. We’re. Hello. I would like, uh, thank you. Um, I’d like to entertain a motion to approve the minutes of our consent agenda. So. Hey. Second. Thank you. Okay, all those in favor say aye. Aye aye aye. Those opposed. Okay. No. Opposed. And the motion passes. Thank you. And now. It’s.

00:10:28,900	All our people. So great. Um, we are so grateful to be joined by three people. Trudy’s going to come up and take my place here at the mic. And, um, two people are on Zoom because this is what we can do now with technology.

00:10:45,930	But, um, I wanted to give just a tiny bit of background on each of them. So, you know, um, their background and their expertise in this. Um, Trudy has been a town clerk for the town of Wayland since September 2022.

00:11:05,900	Um, and has more than 30 years of experience in municipal elections and town meetings, beginning as a volunteer and a town clerk for the past 16 years. So. And she was the town clerk in Wenham in 2010. I remember that, um, throughout her career, Trudy has witnessed significant changes in the way elections and town meetings have been conducted.

00:11:25,530	Um, I’ve lived in Wenham 33 years, so I’ve seen a lot of changes to, um, she’s head of the education committee for the mass town clerk’s and is a member of the Massachusetts Town Clerks Mentoring Committee, and has lived in Wenham for 33 years, same as me.

00:11:48,000	Um, David Bernstein, who’s joining us via Zoom, is, um, a technology guru, which is what we’re going to need for something like this. Vice president and general manager of products. Um, for Rational Software Strategy, which is a company that’s now been acquired by IBM. Dave, please feel free to correct me if I get any of this wrong.

00:12:09,870	Was acquired in 2003, where he drove the evolution of Eclipse Consortium for IBM Centric Association of Independent Vendor Neutral Foundation. So he’s made a lot of this type of software or overseen it. So that’s truly helpful. And he’s very smart. As a graduate of MIT.

00:12:36,600	Um, and Miranda Jones, who is the Wayland Town moderator, and we have Wayland Town moderator here, we’re so happy. I just have to say, you have the most patience of any human being I have ever met. Um, um, Miranda is the Wayland moderator. She was elected in 2023. Um, prior to the moderator position, she served on the personnel board as well as the Wayland Town Meeting Procedures subcommittee.

00:13:03,370	So she is also a practicing attorney. So that helps her and has held several positions in the Commonwealth, including Assistant Attorney general, and has been a criminal defense attorney. Um, so I will turn it over to you, Trudy. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having us this evening. Just briefly.

00:13:27,270	What brought me here this evening? Um, so when I started out volunteering at one of the town meetings, I remember standing in the back of the room, residents coming in saying, why can’t we do this from home? Why can’t we do this for ballot voting? And I’m saying, that’s crazy talk. You’ve got to be here.

00:13:41,670	Um, how are you going to participate in town meeting? So fast forward to four years ago. Um, this man, Dave Bernstein, calls me and says, I’d like to meet with you because you’re now part of the ELVIS committee because you’re the town clerk. I’m like, what? That’s crazy. Talk to you. But he told me this.

00:13:58,930	So after Dave and I met for about an hour with his presentation, I was highly impressed. I’m like, this can be done with all the right places, with all the right things in place. I believe remote participation at town meeting can be done. And, um, I’ve been very impressed by the presentation. The bills that’s been going through our legislation.

00:14:19,730	And, um, I’m not sure I’ll see it in my career. I’d like to see it, but that light is coming very soon at the end of the tunnel for me. But I wish them the best. And I appreciate everyone being here.

00:14:35,730	And, um, so I’m going to turn it over to Dave and Miranda and let them take it over from here. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Trudy. Hi everyone. I am Miranda Jones. I am the town of Wayland moderator with Dave Bernstein, who is the chair of ELVIS Committee. ELVIS stands for Electronic Voting Implementation Subcommittee. Um, Dave is the one who who pulled it all together at the directive of prior moderator.

00:15:00,170	And, um, so thank you so much for your time tonight to give us the opportunity to share, um, our PowerPoint presentation on remote participation. I’ll do a little bit of the background, and the Dave will take over all the technology part, because I don’t understand that at all.

00:15:21,930	So, um, so we have, um, technical impediments to remote participation, what David is going to go through, we’re going to have we have legal impediments to remote participation, specifically the the state law requires people to be present for town meeting.

00:15:38,200	Although I could make the argument that really the law doesn’t say that, but no town, no Open Town Meeting town is willing to have remote participation without getting approval by the state legislature. At this point, um, and then we’ll talk about next steps. First, I’m going to give an intro as to how we got here. So, um, Wayland has about, um, 10,000 registered voters. We are an Open Town Meeting.

00:15:58,500	We initially used to do the shout out vote for years and years and years, and then 15 years ago, we were the first open town meeting to have electronic voting. That is what our handsets look like. Um, we began electronic voting in 2011.

00:16:18,130	The purpose behind it was to turn a very public voting process into a private one, to have more accuracy in the voting process. I think you can probably all agree that when you’re doing a shout out vote, that those voters who stand closest to the moderator are the ones who are heard loudest.

00:16:32,530	Um, and also to speed up the voting process and speed up how much time we spend in town meeting, uh, prior to electronic voting, Wayland traditionally had it took about three nights to hold town meeting. Um, so our objective, another objective was to make sure the vote was secured and make sure that all the messages were encrypted.

00:16:48,630	This was a truly private vote that nothing it would not be connected to the internet. Nothing could touch this vote, and the moderator could initiate a real time audit.

00:17:05,600	If we thought that there was an issue with the voting, the electronic voting, the result of which has been this, is that we, um, we have the Wayland voters have embraced electronic voting. And as we were the first open town in town to do it, we now have over 70 towns in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that utilize electronic voting. Um, we have, uh, we’ve gone to a very private vote.

00:17:28,000	And I can tell you, for example, when I was elected moderator, my first town meeting was a special town meeting was a one warrant article town meeting. And so the select board voted not to have electronic voting because it is costly. And so instead, we did a secret ballot, which fortunately, Trudy is our clerk.

00:17:44,670	And because she had experience with it, unlike the town of Wayland, who had no prior experience with secret ballot voting, um, Trudy was able to pull it off. And so that will tell you how much the town has switched from a very open vote to a very, very private vote. Just for one more article. They didn’t want to do it publicly.

00:18:01,370	They did not want to vote publicly. So, um, but we have found that voters feel that they can make decisions on the merits. They’re not concerned about what their neighbors, their family, anybody thinks about how they vote. Town meeting is now much more relaxed, more deliberate, more methodical. And we have shortened our annual town meetings by three hours.

00:18:20,130	It’s a lot of time to get back. Um, and, and also something to point out to is that we typically get about 600 voters at our annual town meeting of about 10,000 of 10,000 registered voters. But a town elections will get 2100 people to actually come and vote in person for for real elections.

00:18:40,600	And so there’s a big discrepancy there. And that’s what we kind of focused in on this participation gap. And so similar to what Trudy said about people saying, why can’t we vote in person? Um, excuse me, why can’t we vote electronically if we can do everything else electronically?

00:18:56,700	Wayland has for the last five years had a warrant article, a town meeting in which we voted on whether or not to pursue remote participation. And for five years in a row. And I want to point out to something out, these are the people who actually show up at town meeting.

00:19:11,270	They are voting to have remote participation. So, um, they have asked us to pursue it. And so the ELVIS Committee has, after they implemented electronic voting, now they’re their latest, um, task is to do remote participation.

00:19:30,300	How can we bring it to town meeting? So, um, so as you can see the stats here in Open Town Meeting, we have 600 participants, which is only 6% of our registered voters who participate. Um, we looked at the average participation rate in our in neighboring towns, although not one of these actually is touches on the town of Wayland.

00:19:47,070	And you can see that the participation rate is fairly low. Um, and so we’ve now said to ourselves, how can we bring this to more people? How can we make this more inclusive? And so here are the people that we’re talking about. We’re talking about voters with disabilities. We’re talking about voters who who do not like to drive or cannot drive at night.

00:20:06,130	Um, we’re talking about voters who can’t, who can’t leave their homes. We’re talking about voters who have problems with hearing. So even if they can’t get themselves to town meeting, they would have a problem with hearing it.

00:20:22,230	Um, we have a lot of parents who are registered voters who have issues with child care. Um, we have a lot of people in our town who may be caregivers to either their spouses or to their own parents. We have people like me who travel for work, although I actually show up for town meeting, and we also have people who work at night.

00:20:37,570	We have, you know, we have the nursing population. We’ve added some police offICErs to people who may be on night shift, who wouldn’t be able to participate in town meetings.

00:20:59,230	So we’re we’re hoping that by, um, by making town meeting more accessible, by using modern technology, which we all learn because of Covid, if there’s one positive thing out of Covid is that we realize we don’t all have to attend meetings in person, we’re hoping that we can use modern technology to preserve a 400 year old institution.

00:21:16,000	Town meeting is only done in New England, and while the the city of Dorchester, when it was then a town, is recognized as the first place to hold town meetings in 1633, it actually occurred sooner or earlier than that, most likely in Plymouth. Um, and so here we have, um, Davis has put up a map for us, and this shows you the scope of how the problem is significant.

00:21:34,130	And this shows you all the 351 municipalities in the Commonwealth. And it shows you that we have a total population of registered voters of four point almost 4.8 million people. But amongst our 260 Open Town Meeting time, town’s only 1.7 million of those. Um, of those towns have registered, they have 1.

00:22:00,800	7 million registered voters in those towns. So while we have so many communities that have open town meeting, it’s it’s less way less than half the population of registered voters in the state.

00:22:15,600	And the reason why we bring this to your attention is that we think that one of the problems that we’re having with the state legislature is that it isn’t a real big deal to them. Wayland is brought home rule petitions. So have some other towns. The town of Concord is also with us trying to get remote participation, and I think we’ve had three, three, um, formal petitions and not have been forwarded on. And we can’t explain why.

00:22:32,870	So now what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to push a five town pilot program. And what we would love to do is get towns from different areas within the Commonwealth on board to pursue this five-town pilot program, so that maybe we can get the interest of more than just our local, our state reps who have

00:22:50,500	been fabulous to they’ve worked with us so well, but we’re hoping that other reps will get involved. Now, there are state legislators who in fact have filed bills for, um, remote participation.

00:23:08,670	But, um, typically they have some, some parts to it that may or may not be all that appealing, but we’re just we just think that it isn’t a it’s just doesn’t seem to be an issue for the state legislature yet. And we’re trying to make it one. So talking about electronic voting and how we get to the technical aspects of it, which brings us to remote participation.

00:23:24,730	This is how we do electronic voting in the town of Wayland. We bring in a voting system. We use the company O.T. they’re out in Florida. They bring the system to us, they give us the handsets. Nothing goes through the internet. Everybody’s in the same room at the in the high school gym at the same time.

00:23:39,600	That’s how electronic voting works. Now we switch it over to remote participation and it works differently. What we would have instead is the moderator. The system would be brought in, the internet would be used.

00:23:54,770	And I know you’re all going to say, oh my God, what about if we get hacked? What if we lose internet service? What if a town doesn’t have internet service? Dave is going to explain the answers to all of those questions.

00:24:11,930	So we anticipate most likely that rather than handsets, people, everyone, including those people who are at home or away on a business trip will be using a like an iPad type thing that we would provide to them instead of a handset. And, um, and so through the internet, people who are participating remotely, wherever they are, can participate. And it would be full participation. They aren’t just voting. We’re not talking about just voting. We mean people who can. They can they can participate in debate.

00:24:29,800	They can bring motions. They can move the question. They can they can do anything that they otherwise would have done if they had been present, and it would be full blown participation and so on that note, I think I turn it over to Dave, and he’s going to explain all the technical issues that

00:24:45,970	we need to overcome in order to implement this. Thanks, Miranda. So, um, the committee I chair, ELVIS, um, was trying to go to the implementation subcommittee, which was originally formed to figure out how to do electronic voting and then was later charged with how to figure out how to do remote participation.

00:25:10,870	Um is responsible for the technical content you’re about to see. So I’m the chair of the committee, but I’m graced with an excellent committee. Um, there are seven folks. One of them is Trudy, our town clerk, and we’ve been working together as a team.

00:25:27,070	It took us several years to identify these four problems that you see before you. How do we make it simple? So simple that no training is required to use it. How do we detect, as Miranda said, an internet outage? This could be, you know, as simple as a tree coming down in a storm and knocking out power or cell phone service to one part of

00:25:45,230	the town. On the other hand, it could be an adversary trying to disrupt town meeting with a denial of service attack. The thing that everybody worries about how do we securely route votes over the internet? Um, how do we make sure that we aren’t being hacked? And yes, it’s turned into no’s on one

00:26:02,930	particular article, and a problem that’s also very interesting and challenging is impersonation. How do we detect it? One person says they’re one registered voter, but they’re really somebody else. How do we detect that? How do we prevent that? How do we deter that.

00:26:20,970	So I’m going to go through these one at a time with you. If you have a question just shout it out. Stop me on the spot. So our thinking to start is that every remote participant will use their own smartphone or tablet. The statistics are that 92% of all Americans own a smartphone, so this isn’t a big stretch.

00:26:41,270	And as Miranda pointed out, for the few people who don’t have a smartphone or tablet, we can simply loan them one, because most towns have, uh, tablets being used in their schools or in their libraries or the voting system provider could loan those tablets to the number of people who need them.

00:26:57,670	I mean, all of the handsets used for electronic voting are alone for the duration of town meeting, or at least for that night. So this isn’t a new concept.

00:27:12,370	Now, you might say, well, why can’t we use our desktop computers? Well you could, there’s nothing that’s going to technically stop you from doing that. But unlike phones and tablets, desktop computers aren’t appliances. They don’t have built in microphones and cameras. You can add them, but each one is different and they’re a little bit persnickety. Whereas with your phone, the camera always works, the speakers always work, the microphone always works. It’s just it’s an appliance.

00:27:33,400	Um, also, we want everybody to have their own device. We don’t want to have time pressure when voting. If a husband and a wife are sharing the same personal computer, you know, one gets in there and then the other one has to get up and let the other one vote. It’s just easier if everybody has their own device.

00:27:48,400	Um, so, um, how is this going to work? Well, if you want to participate remotely, the way it works is you would go see the town clerk before the first session of town meeting. Um, and you would basically check in just like you would on premises. You would state your name, you would state your address.

00:28:07,530	I’m Dave Bernstein, I live on 25 Gleason Lane. The town clerk or her staff would enter that information into a into an application that would be provided. And that application would print out on a piece of paper, a voter code, a password, and an audit code, along with the URL for town meeting.

00:28:26,500	And that would be given to the person applying to participate remotely. So step one, you can only do this if you’re a registered voter. If you’re on the rolls and you’re checked in the same way, you would be checked on premises.

00:28:40,270	Um, the voter code and password are like a username and password. I’ll explain the audit code in a few slides, but this information gets handed to the town clerk. Now excuse me. Hand it to the voter who is registering. Now, if this works the way we hope, we’re going to have a lot of people wanting to do this.

00:28:58,000	So it may well be necessary to use an online reservation system so people can reserve out 15 second or 32nd slot with the town clerk to come in there and do this little dance to get the registration information.

00:29:18,070	So the first important point of simplification is that to remotely participate, you don’t have to download or install any software. You just use your web browser. That piece of paper you get from the town clerk has on it the URL for town meeting.

00:29:35,670	It’s the same URL for everybody, so you just give that URL to your web browser and poof! Um, you’re now in town meeting and you can do everything you want to do by clicking one button. There’s one button to check in, one button of request to speak, one button to vote, one button to initiate an audit of your vote, one button to help, and one button to indicate that you’re going to leave. So what might this look like? So here we are.

00:29:50,670	I’ve just typed in that URL or looked at, uh, a QR code on the piece of paper I got in the town clerk, and I’m being prompted to enter the voter code and password that’s on that piece of paper. So I do so.

00:30:04,000	And when I do that, I’m immediately in a two way audio video conversation with a member of the town staff, probably the town clerk staff. So again, we repeat the check in process, just like we would do on premises at town meeting.

00:30:21,070	I state my name and address the staff member verifies that I, um, I’m on the rolls and now I’m allowed to enter town meeting remotely. One little difference is that we capture a still image of the remote participant’s face, and the system retains that for the duration of just that session, after which it’s expunged.

00:30:39,100	So there’s no way that’s going to get out and get on to the internet or anything like that. That’s just something that we capture for this one session of town meeting. So here I am. I’ve checked in and my smartphone is telling me that we are on article 11 main motion.

00:30:53,700	And you can see there’s an array of buttons down at the bottom, which are the things that I can do. I can request to speak, I can send in an amendment. I can look at the queue of people who want to speak, initiate an audit, I can leave or I can ask for help.

00:31:09,270	Well, right now a gentleman named Robert Smith is addressing town meeting and we see both his identification, who he is and that he’s remote, not on premises. And we also see his speech transcribed in real time. Now, this is actually an option. Some towns might prefer to have town meeting video shown on the screen.

00:31:28,430	We can hear Robert Smith. We can hear him in the speaker of our device, and we can see his words here. Or alternatively, the white want to have video of Mr. Smith speaking. That’s a town by town decision. Wayland, for example, has a cable network that already broadcasts town meeting video.

00:31:44,470	So we would probably opt for real time transcription, because that’s very helpful for people who have hearing impairments. But each town can decide which way they want to go. So Mr. Smith is speaking and we see what he has to say.

00:32:05,200	Um, we have decided the remote participant whose shoulder we’re looking over has decided that she wants to submit an amendment. This is another option. Not all towns have to want may want to do this, but some towns may want to allow remote participants to submit a an amendment in writing remotely. So to do that you click the amend button.

00:32:22,270	You’re prompted to center the text of your amendment and your device’s camera. So here you can see my little amendment. And then you click the submit button and poof, you’ve submitted your amendment to the moderator. And that goes into a queue that the moderator can see. As I say, that’s a town by town option.

00:32:37,670	But Wayland certainly permits people to do short amendments. And this is how you would allow remote folks to do the same thing as as Miranda said, our goal here is to completely duplicate all the capabilities of on premises town meeting for remote participants, not just voting.

00:32:55,030	So now the person whose shoulder we’re looking over decides that she wants to speak. So she clicks the speak button. When she does that, she’s prompted with an array of buttons for the possible reasons why she might choose to speak. She might choose to speak in favor of the current motion. She might speak to oppose the current motion.

00:33:11,500	Maybe she has a question about the motion. She may want to submit an amendment to the current motion. She may want to terminate debate or raise a point of order. Or she could change her mind and withdraw her request. Well, in this case, she wants to submit an amendment.

00:33:27,330	She’s already submitted the paper. Uh, in writing, and now she wants to actually address it. So she clicks the amend button. And when she does that, she’s informed that your request to amend awaits. Moderator recognition. So now it’s up to the moderator to decide when to recognize this particular speaker.

00:33:49,070	The moderator has her own console that we’re looking at right now. And one of the things the moderator can do besides look at all the articles and initiate a vote and ask for help herself. The moderator has a list of all of the people who have asked to speak, and whether they’re local or remote, and why they want to speak.

00:34:07,630	They want to speak in favor, oppose. Whatever. Uh, as Miranda pointed out a couple times, the order of this list is town specific. Some moderators might want to see it in chronological order. You know who did it first.

00:34:26,270	Some moderators might want to say, well, a question is more important than a con or a pro, so put the questions at the top. That’s again a town oriented option as to how their moderator wants to see this list of, um, of speaker requests, sort of. But in this case, we have this speaker, Angela merkel, who is remote, who wants to amend. And so we’re going to recognize Angela by clicking the amend button.

00:34:46,930	And as soon as the moderator does, that, Angela’s console her, her speakerphone, her smartphone, excuse me, her smartphone prompts her now to offer her amendment by speaking into her device’s microphone, and it gives her a countdown clock. Again, a town specific number.

00:35:09,270	In this case, it’s 75 seconds, but each town decides what it wants, and that clock begins counting down while this person speaks to town meeting and everybody hears it. Everybody, all the remote participants hear it. And all of the on premises participants hear it. And if you want the video from her device’s camera can be displayed to all remote participants and on to, um, screens, on premises.

00:35:33,400	So that’s how you would address all of town meeting. And this is an example that we don’t just mean voting. This is full participation remotely in town meeting. So every remote participant can ask to see the speaker queue.

00:35:50,000	And you can display the speaker queue on premises, on screens if you wish. So here’s the speaker queue. Uh, I used some abbreviations L for local and R for remote, but you can see here that all the people who want to speak are listed in whatever order the moderator has chosen to list such things and why they want to speak.

00:36:05,400	Now, this is important for a couple of reasons. The most important one is that even though there may be a lot of people, a lot more people attending town meeting, the the number of people doesn’t mean that there’s a lot more points of view.

00:36:21,430	So you look at this list of people who are speaking and you might say, well, I don’t really need to ask to speak because I know that Scott Morrison is going to make the point I want to make. So I don’t need to ask to speak because I’m confident that he will do that.

00:36:37,400	So being able to see who’s lined up to speak both locally and remotely makes it so that we use town meeting time more wisely, we don’t duplicate by saying things that have already been said. Okay, so we’re back to the moderators console, and the moderator is seeing here that what our 11 main motion is all about, what the quantum of vote is, who proposed it, what it means.

00:36:56,670	All the text will be here. And now. The moderator has decided that it’s time to initiate a vote. So she pushes the vote button. And when that happens, every remote participant sees this on their screen. Article 11 main motion 30s remaining that time is a town chosen option. And your vote yes.

00:37:17,470	Vote yes, vote no or you can abstain if you choose. If you accidentally push yes or no and you decide you really want to not vote, you can click abstain and clear your vote. So as you everybody sees this and all the local um participants, the on premises participants, they see a similar thing on their hand.

00:37:34,230	So that’s they can push one or push two to vote yes or no. So everybody votes when you click the yes button. Uh, 16 seconds in you voted yes. So you get confirmation.

00:37:52,730	This is a message means that your vote was transmitted to the voting system, and you got a message confirming back that you voted yes. So this is a round trip. Confirmation of your vote. So that’s all I have to say about making it simple. Any questions about that? I have. I have one quick question. Is that is that are those screenshots of a software you’re already using or one you propose to make? If this legislation.

00:38:16,700	Passes? Good question. So no one from a professional organization is going to build software that’s not legal to use. It’s just too expensive. Um, so what we’ve been trying to do is through home rule petitions or maybe a five-town pilot, at least get enough towns authorized to use this capability that we can convince a company to build it.

00:38:42,400	That’s how we started with electronic voting back in 2011. Nobody had handsets back then, at least for town meeting. We had to convince a company to do the development, and then the benefit was they got to be the first participant in what turned out to be a pretty big market.

00:38:59,470	That’s the same situation we have here, which is we’re trying to convince the legislature to make enough of a market by authorizing remote participation in at least a few towns so that we can get the software built. I am a software engineer.

00:39:18,770	I have prototype this, and there actually is on our website, um, a six minute video showing what you’ve seen here running on my smartphone. Now, it’s not the real software. It’s a it’s a mockup. But you get a better idea for what it looks like than me flipping a bunch of slides. What do you think.

00:39:33,700	The build out time is? If they if they knew there were a market and they said, let’s go, how long do you think it would take? So I cover this in a couple slides, but I’m going to answer your question now if, if the, if we if the gun went off tomorrow, my best guess is we’re looking at three years to

00:39:50,230	develop the software to test it with senior citizens and high school students in mock town meetings to refine it through that process, to eventually get to the point where the moderator says, oh, I think we can have a couple of remote participants in our real town meeting and then gradually

00:40:07,270	increase that number until we say we can have as many remote participants as one over ten from start to finish. That’s about three years, okay. Which is why we want to get started. We are chomping at the bit to get started. Great. Thank you. And that’s why we need your help.

00:40:26,400	Because frankly, the legislators listen to you a lot more than they do to us, okay? Listen to me. I write to him a lot, and I don’t always hear back. Well, at least you’re a constituent. Okay, just to be clear, our legislators do listen to us. But we only have two out of what? Um, several hundred. So.

00:40:47,830	Well, three. Two reps, two reps and one stays on. Right. Okay. Fabulous for us. So on to the on to the second technical challenge, which is how do we detect a widespread internet outage, which as I said before, could be caused by a power failure or a problem with an internet service provider or, you know, it’s

00:41:06,000	extremely low probability, but we have to be able to handle it. A denial of service attack by an adversary. So the way to solve this is that every remote participants, um, web browser will check in with the the town meeting system once a minute and say, I’m still here.

00:41:27,330	And that will continue until the remote participant clicks the leave button. So basically every remote participant is constantly sending an I’m still here message to the town meeting system. And if all of a sudden a a significant number disappear without having clicked leave, then the moderator will immediately be notified.

00:41:50,330	Now the moderator has to have decided ahead of time what is going to be the action that will be taken if that happens, and that continuation policy has to be well publicized, it could be as simple as, okay, we’re going to suspend town meeting for 30 minutes so that those people who can can jump in their cars and come down to the field

00:42:05,730	house and will continue the meeting, or it could be we’re going to delay town meeting for 24 hours and try again the next day. That has to be decided ahead of time. But the point is, we can detect one of these outages and recover from it. And that’s the key point.

00:42:21,570	I mean, we can certainly have a power failure in a town meeting on premises. So we have to think about that contingency in the same way. And this is just an extension of that. Any questions about this? This is probably the easiest one to overcome. The next one is how do we secure votes cast via the internet.

00:42:41,700	So naturally we’re going to encrypt all messages. That’s table stakes. But that’s not enough. We’re going to exploit something that’s very unique about town meeting. What’s unique about town Meeting is that every vote is resolved in real time. We can. The moderator conducts a vote when the vote is is outward.

00:43:04,530	The moderator announces the results, and then the moderator declares the result to be final. At that point, it’s done. You cannot overturn the vote. There’s no changing the vote. However, in a system where you have remote participation, if you can provide a way for each voter to audit their vote and confirm that their vote was correctly received, and if not, file a discrepancy report before the

00:43:28,600	moderator declares the vote to be final, then you have a way to detect discrepancies. To detect tampering over the internet and prevent that tampering from causing the wrong vote to be declared final.

00:43:50,100	Now, in a representative town meeting where you have 200 representatives and their votes are public, this is very easy because you can just have a table like the one you’re looking at where instead of an audit code, you’ve got every representative’s name and their vote and their votes public. And the representative can verify that their vote was received correctly, because they can look at it in the table and see it. So that’s easy for remote participants in a Representative Town Meeting.

00:44:09,670	Remember that when a remote participant checks in with the town clerk before town meeting, one of the things written on the piece of paper she gets from the town clerk is there secret audit code? So what we put in the audit table is not your name. We put your secret audit code there.

00:44:29,030	So if my secret audit code is Lennart Decorah, I type in Lyn. First few letters and scrolls to this line, and I can see that my vote is yes, which is exactly what I voted. So I’m able to confirm that my vote was correctly received without it being revealed. How I voted.

00:44:49,670	That’s the core of how we do this now. We took one further step and we said, okay, the moderator is going to immediately announce the remote vote. She won’t immediately announce the totals all up, but she’ll announce the remote vote.

00:45:07,270	And as you can see here, the table keeps a running count of yeses and no’s, and they all have to basically all line up to this set of numbers. These should match with the moderator analysis. So what that does is it prevents somebody from hacking the arithmetic.

00:45:23,970	You can see that every yes is correctly counted, every no’s correctly counted, and the numbers here are exactly what the moderator announces. So each individual can verify that their vote was correctly counted, and that the vote, all of the remote votes were correctly added up. Excuse me, Dave. Hi. Uh, Tim, moderator here in Wenham. Thank you for all the information.

00:45:45,100	So does the moderator have to make two declarations of vote? Is that reading? I didn’t quite catch the question. Does the moderator have to make two different declarations of vote? You said that the model. Well. The first, declare the remote. Vote when the voting window closes. The moderator says the remote vote was three yeses and four no’s. And then when there are no no one files any discrepancies.

00:46:06,030	And I’ll finish that in a minute. Then she declares the vote to be final, and she announces the total vote, which is the sum of the remote vote in the on premises vote. So the purpose of announcing the remote vote only is to verify that the remote arithmetic is correct. That makes sense. Yes. Thank you.

00:46:27,830	Okay, so to take this one step further, uh, some people would say, wait a second. You know, if you got 1000 voters here, what are the odds that 1 or 2 people get confused about what their audit code are? So we have this notion of designated auditors recruited by the moderator, and they agree to

00:46:45,830	audit every one of their votes, and they report their discrepancies via a text message to the moderator smartphone. So the point here is these are people that the moderator has chosen, like tellers in days of old. Um, who the moderator trusts to reliably report whether or not there’s a discrepancy.

00:47:07,570	So if you have 2000 remote participants and you get one report of a discrepancy, and, you know, even if it was true that it wouldn’t affect the outcome, but no designated auditors reported a discrepancy, you would say that’s probably voter error. On the other hand, one designated auditor reporting a discrepancy. You would assume that you are under attack.

00:47:27,670	So we have two mechanisms here independently checking to make sure that votes are correctly conveyed. Any questions about that. So here we are back to looking over somebody’s shoulder. We see you voted yes. This voter is going to ask to see the audit table.

00:47:51,130	She clicks the audit button and she sees exactly that table we were just looking at. She scrolls down to her secret voter code that nobody else knows, sees that it was correctly showed that she voted yes. And she if therefore she does not click the report discrepancy button.

00:48:08,970	If she does, click the report discrepancy button, then a screenshot of this screen will be sent to the moderator. So you can’t cheat. You can’t say, well, you know, I don’t like the way that vote came out. So I’m going to pretend that there is a discrepancy when there really wasn’t. Because if you report the discrepancy, it’s going to show that you really did vote yes. Okay.

00:48:27,470	The last one detected deter proxy voting. So here are the problem is impersonation. Now we had this problem with on premises electronic voting. The concern was suppose that a husband and wife attend town meeting in person. They each are issued a hand set.

00:48:47,400	Halfway through the meeting, the husband takes his handset, puts it into his wife’s coat pocket and leaves. So his wife then for the rest of the meeting votes two handsets. Everybody hated that idea. I mean, you could have one person with 15 handsets that way.

00:49:04,870	So the way we solve that problem was that when you come to Wayland Town meeting, you’re either issued a handset or a dated visitor card. When you go to leave town meeting, you have to surrender one or the other. So you can’t leave town meeting. Having being issued a handset without surrendering it. And that eliminated the problem on premises.

00:49:22,530	It’s a more difficult problem remotely, because how do you know? Just to pick out a worst case, that someone who wants badly wants some article to be passed, goes and finds 100 people who don’t care, gets their smartphones, and then has their staff vote all the smartphones at the meeting.

00:49:44,870	Well, remember that when you check in to town meeting, a picture is taken of you, so you can’t. After that, give your handset to somebody else. Because all throughout town meeting the system will randomly initiate remote recheck ins. So the system will pick someone and connect a member of town staff to a remote participant.

00:50:08,430	Another two way audio video conversation where the remote participant has to again state their name and address. It’s a recheck in and the member of town staff has the picture that was taken at initial check in, So there’s no way that having checked in, you can then give your handset to somebody else and have them voted.

00:50:26,530	Now, I’m told that the penalty for impersonation at town meeting, that’s voter fraud. And that includes time in prison. So that level of deterrence is more than sufficient, we to prevent anybody from giving this a try. It takes about 15 or 20s to remotely reject somebody in.

00:50:47,400	That means 3 or 4 members of town staff over the course of a four hour session can recheck in more than a thousand people randomly. So that’s a lot of checking. Dave. Can I ask you another question? Sorry to interrupt. What happened? Someone covers up their camera. Once they’ve checked in, initially.

00:51:05,000	If they cover up their camera, then they’re going to fail to recheck in. And they’re not going to be. They’ll be discontinued from voting. So essentially be like the as if the town clerk has turned them away at the check in. If they were in person. Or something like that.

00:51:21,530	I mean, if, if, if, if there’s a recheck in and the person either there’s a different image in the screen or there’s no image in the screen, then maybe what you do is again, we’re talking town by town policy. Another option might be re attempt to recheck the in again in two minutes. And if it’s still no image there then decide that they’re gone and check them out.

00:51:39,100	You just said it’s a town by town policy. So is the idea that the legislation is going to require each town to create a bylaw to control this? No, no, this is when I say this to each town. Each town’s policy. I’m thinking moderator rules in that town. Okay.

00:51:58,330	Thank you. The moderator, the moderator would decide how that should be handled. The idea is that the software would provide options for how it would work, and the moderator would basically specify in my town, if somebody fails to check in, I want them immediately disconnected and they can

00:52:16,300	attempt to recheck in if they want to another town. The moderator might say if a recheck in fails, then don’t allow them to vote, but automatically recheck them again in five minutes and see what happens. Yeah, they could have. They could have been in the bathroom, right? For example.

00:52:43,470	Any other questions about that? When I talk about town options, this is one of the things where we’re not going to know everything we need to. We actually try this. I mean, some of the stuff I talk about is our issues that various people have brought up during the last several years while viewing this presentation.

00:53:00,070	So a fair amount of content in this presentation came from moderators and town clerk saying, well, what are you going to do if this happens? And us saying, oh, well, we can solve that by doing this.

00:53:16,870	So I think we’ve gotten maybe 60 or 70% of those, but there’s another 30 or 40% that we’re going to find when we start doing mock town meetings with high school students and senior citizens. And then when we try having small numbers of remote participants, um, basically in a real town meeting, um, my experience in building software like this is you don’t know how it works until you use it.

00:53:34,470	So you better plan to refine it over multiple trials, because the first time you build it, it will not be what you want. Okay? So hopefully I’ve convinced you that we can support remote participants with a friction free user experience, something that will not require anybody to take a course to learn how to use.

00:53:54,770	It’s if you understand town meeting well enough to participate in town meeting, then you know you can request to speak and speak in favor and all that good stuff. We’ve identified how we would detect that a disruptive adversary as basically interrupted town meeting by making some or even all remote participants disconnect.

00:54:18,700	We’ve shown how to outwit a vote tampering adversary by detecting any tampering, by enabling every voter to audit their vote in real time and report a discrepancy before that vote is declared to be final. If there’s one. And finally, we have a way to deter proxy voting.

00:54:38,970	So, um, I just want to say that the likelihood of these things happening, particularly if it’s well known what we’re doing is very, very low. We have to anticipate these as contingencies so that they do happen. We’ll do the right thing. But I’m not bringing these up because I think that it’s likely that some hacker is going to try and disrupt a town meeting.

00:54:55,500	There’s no gain in that or that people are going to try and flip votes over the internet. Again, there’s no gain in that. But we have a way to detect it if it happens and we can recover from it. And that’s what we have to do. All right.

00:55:13,100	So as Miranda said, there are legal impediments to remote participation back during the pandemic, the the legislature made it legal for representative town meetings to have remote participation, but not Open Town Meeting. So we’ve been working to legalise that.

00:55:35,100	Um, as Miranda said, over the last 4 or 5 years, we have submitted remote participation, uh, articles at every one of our town meetings because it’s important we have people who are disenfranchised by the fact that they can’t physically attend town meeting for 4 hours or 5 hours on two successive weeknights. And in other towns, it’s even longer.

00:55:54,330	So, um, all of this stuff that we’ve been talking about, the random recheck in the real time auditing, this is aimed at enabling people who want to participate, to fully participate. And so given that, um, we’re at least trying to encourage the legislature to authorize town meeting, remote participation in at least a couple of towns, either with, uh, home rule petitions.

00:56:16,230	Uh, we have done that, Concord has done that, or with a five-town pilot. So here’s the history of all of the articles that we submitted at Wayland town meetings. Um, so far, all the way that we’re in the currently in the 194th session, the sessions are two years long, were most of the way through the 194th.

00:56:36,900	We started submitting uh, article legislation in the 192nd. Nothing in the 192nd came to a vote. Nothing in the 193rd came to a vote. And it’s looking like we’re not going to get a vote in the 194th. But we haven’t given up yet. We’ve talked to a lot of towns.

00:56:52,370	Um, and we will add you to this list after this presentation. Um, you know, lots of people who are monitoring our progress. Um, just a few days ago, we talked to folks in Westborough and Medway. Um, these are the bills that have been submitted to the current legislative session. 2272 is Whelan’s Home Rule petition.

00:57:13,270	2274 is a statewide authorization. Uh, came from our representative, SB 3114 is a statewide town meeting authorization from Senator Barrett. 4552 is Concord’s home rule petition. And there are three statewide petitions here that went to the Senate Ways and Means Committee. So far, three of these bills have been referred for study.

00:57:38,300	That’s polite legalese for their dead, uh, at least for the current session. So we still have Concord’s home rule petition and three statewide bills that are still alive. Unlikely. At this point. We’re still pushing as hard as we can.

00:58:01,830	In particular, um, we have been trying to authorize a £5 pilot proposal. Wayland, Concord. In the next three towns that approve it. Um, so we’ve been trying to get that done in front of the Ways and Means Committee, where we have where three of those bills are currently setting. There’s also budget amendments that we have submitted. Unfortunately, um, neither of these has been accepted.

00:58:23,100	Um, so we’re still pushing, but it ain’t great. I mentioned that we have a web page. Um, this is part of Wayland Town meeting web page, and it’s basically remote participation. It’s got five sections.

00:58:45,230	I won’t read them to you, but I mentioned that there’s a, um, a six minute video of the mock up that I built, uh, of what you just saw running on my smartphone. And that’s in the ease of use section. But if you go through, you’ll see all the arguments I just made. Why we need this, how to make it easy to use, addressing security and integrity.

00:59:01,800	Summarizing all the legislation and how you can take action. Maybe the most important section to engage with your legislators to help persuade them to move this forward. Because that’s what really what we need.

00:59:20,830	Okay, so the question was asked, how long would it take to build this? And so here’s the the here’s basically the steps we would go through once we got authorized. We would identify companies that can build the software. Now back when we did electronic voting, nobody was even building software for on premises town meeting.

00:59:43,230	We picked one company uh Options Technology in Florida convinced them to take their handset technology, which was being used for quizzes and schools and for entertainment on cruise ships, and basically customize it for use in town meetings. So they were the first. They did it for nothing. They built the software at no cost, but we helped them understand the requirements and understand how to test it and tested it.

01:00:00,570	And as a result, there are several companies now offering that technology to the 70 different towns that are currently using it. As a result of the pandemic, there’s been an explosion of companies that support online voting on the web. And you can see all the lists here.

01:00:17,970	So we’ve got lots of folks we can talk to as well as these guys about how to move forward. If we can get the legislature to at least approve a pilot so we can get started. So Option Technologies, which is our current supplier, has reviewed the technical requirements that you’ve seen here. Um, we have a requirements document. They’ve been formally reviewed.

01:00:38,900	It um, they’re just waiting for a go ahead, uh, to be able to say, okay, if you do it, we’ll actually be able to allow it to use it legally. But until we have that, nobody’s moving forward. So if we get to go ahead, then we have to build it. And critically, we have to test it.

01:00:57,100	So as I said, mock town meetings on premises voters with remote participants that are high school students and senior citizens, um, then we start using mock remote participants in real time meetings. And then then and only then do we start having small numbers of real remote participants, and then we start increasing that until we demonstrate that it works very reliably.

01:01:16,730	Everybody’s happy with it, and we don’t need any limits at all. So that’s using remote participation in actual town meetings. So that’s everything I wanted to cover. Uh, are there more questions? Yes. No parting shots. Hello? Nope. Thank you very much for this presentation. My name is Nancy Stehfest. With the Hamilton DTC. Um, has there been any cost analysis.

01:01:43,870	For towns? Uh, Most towns in the Commonwealth are struggling with their finances right now. And has. That been addressed? So it’s difficult to project the cost of something that doesn’t exist.

01:02:05,770	But I did call up a couple of these companies and say, if we wanted to have 2000 remote participants for two four hour sessions back to back, what would that cost? Using your online voting service? And the answer was less than $2,000. That’s a factor of ten lower than what we’re currently paying to do remote participation to do on premises voting in Wayland.

01:02:26,130	So my guess is that this is going to be a lot less expensive because we’re using people’s smartphones and tablets mostly, um, and because there’s a lot more competition than there is for these. Other questions. We do have. As we speak, it seems to. Me like there were. A number of, um. Places where there. Was somebody discretion, like you mentioned in, would start.

01:02:57,870	It with a small number of, of, uh, voters. And I’m. just wondering about how that element and a couple of other things that were, you know, kind of up to each town. Well, my view, my view of that is the moderator does that.

01:03:17,600	So, you know, to start, you build a first iteration of the system, you have the requirements, you build the software, you get a bunch of people together to help test it. You don’t need the moderator to do that. You’re just trying to see if votes work. And if people can speak and request to speak.

01:03:30,700	So you get the basic functionality working. Now you convene a mock town meeting. You get, I don’t know, for high school students and for senior citizens.

01:03:44,700	And then you get the moderator and you ask her to conduct a mock town meeting with those eight people, and you run it as if it were a real town meeting, and you see how it works. And if you run into problems, then you identify them and you correct them. You run into rough edges, you sand them off and smooth them.

01:03:56,370	When you get to the point where it works fine with eight mock participants, then you go to 16, uh, and then you go to 32 and then to 64, and eventually you get to a lot. You get to half the high school doing it.

01:04:12,200	Only then will the moderator say, I think this is ready to try in a real town meeting, but let’s limit it to five remote participants the first time and see how that goes. And then if that goes well, then maybe ten the next time and then 20. So, you know, town meetings aren’t frequent things in Wayland. We have them once a year.

01:04:28,570	So one of the reasons why it’s going to take a while to, to do this is that the last step is going to take a couple of town meetings to get to the point where the moderator is willing to say, um, this is good. I’m willing to have no limits.

01:04:42,770	Now, that’s the very first town meeting that does this, and maybe the second and maybe the third in different towns. But after 5 or 10 towns are doing this and moderators are coming to watch and see how it works, those moderators might say, I think we can start with 50 remote participants, because I work at Wayland with 300, and it was no

01:05:02,030	problem. So eventually it just gets to the point where nobody, except everybody just uses it. It becomes an appliance. But the startup takes some time because you do not want to risk getting it wrong.

01:05:20,100	The thing about this kind of technology is that if early on you make a bad mistake, everyone will lose confidence and you’ll set the whole process back by a decade. You just can’t do that. So the startup has to be slow and methodical, where step by step you verify and test before you put safety critical load on the system.

01:05:39,430	I liken it to building an air traffic control system, where if you get it wrong, people will die. So you want to test it out very, very well. With mock airplanes before you’re allowing live people to be subject to any faults in your system. And I have worked with companies that have built air traffic control systems.

01:05:58,530	Is this is this happening in any other state, or is this very a very much a mass or New England thing, like has any other state adopted this and is using it or. No it’s not. Yeah. So town meeting only occurs in the six New England states.

01:06:16,870	So we limit town meeting to begin with just in New England. And I don’t believe it’s going on in any of this state right now. I will tell you that there are a couple of communities, Carlisle in particular, North Andover, where there is some form of remote participation going on for people with disabilities.

01:06:37,500	And that is one way to bring some people who are disenfranchised into town meeting. But but in those examples, I believe, um, pursuant to current state law, there is an assistant moderator that is identified as with the person. So it’s um, it’s on a very, very limited basis. And I don’t know that it’s full participation.

01:06:58,530	I can’t say that it may simply be remote voting as opposed to remote participation. Thank you. Sure. Uh, have you spoken with any of the representative town meetings that do, uh, remote town meeting and to get input from them on how they’ve done it? I know some have just done Zoom or things like that, but I’m wondering if you’ve

01:07:18,630	canvassed, uh, uh, canvass that group. Yes, we have. So we have spoken with Steve, who is the moderator of the Plymouth Town meeting, which is representative, and you will find a testimonial from Steve, uh, in the I think it’s in the ease of use section here, but what Steve said is that remote participation works really

01:07:42,100	well. Um, in representative town meeting, however, it if he could have the integrated support that he that you saw in this presentation where it’s one system that makes it really easy to use. He would benefit from that.

01:08:02,070	His representative town meeting would benefit from that, because what they have right now is they use Zoom for remote speaking and remote listening, and they use a voting application for voting. So the remote representatives have to switch back and forth between two different applications. So they have to install those applications or at least install one of them. Um, and they have to flip back and forth.

01:08:21,630	And that’s been problematic. So representative town meetings will benefit from having this software be developed because they’ll be able to use it. Um, I that was actually my question, but I also wanted to follow. Up with, um, how many communities have permitted, um, that have representatives town meeting.

01:08:49,100	Um, do we know how many have remote participation, um, as part of their town meetings at this point? And the votes have to be. So you just mentioned the question about, um, that they use a voting system.

01:09:08,900	Um, but yeah, anyway, just how many communities that have representative that, that have, um, been permitted so far or have allowed themselves to be remote? If you can answer that question, thanks. I don’t have the statistics for that. I know that Plymouth does it. I know that, um, Lexington does it. Um, but I don’t know how many others are using, um, remote technology.

01:09:27,300	Uh, just to follow up for those communities that have allowed remote participation since it’s been permitted, you know, post-Covid. Um, do we do they have any indication that representative or representative? So I guess you would know that more people showed up, but more consistent attendance with remote. Thank you. I would assume so, but I don’t know that for a fact. Belmont. Sorry, Belmont just filed legislation today.

01:09:50,470	They just filed their own home rule petition for it. Their Representative Town Meeting as well. Sorry. They’ve. No no problem. Other questions. In the room. Was that a question? I didn’t hear it. No, no, I was just asking the room if there were any more questions.

01:10:16,430	So, um, they I think we are out of questions, but we thank you very much for all this information. It was super helpful. And, um, thanks for zooming in. Sure. Thank you for your time. We really appreciate it. And also just want on a quick note to what we’re looking for is just the ability to do it. We’re not asking the state for for money for this.

01:10:36,870	We just need permission to do it. Nor are we saying that all towns need all Open Town Meeting towns need to do this. This is a town by town decision. We just are looking for permission. Yep. Great.

01:10:53,370	So, um, I believe that our email is available on this web page, or you may already have it. If you have questions you want to follow up, you want to have, you know, talk about more issues. We’re happy to do that. Also, if, if if you don’t have any problem with sharing the slides, we’ll share them with the whole group. If you don’t have a problem sharing slides.

01:11:11,400	I don’t. Did I send you a copy already? Um, you might have Nancy. You haven’t. If not, we’ll follow up after to make. Him happy. Happy, happy to send you the slides. Perfect. Great. Thanks so much. Everybody. Okay. Great. Thank you. For your time. Thank you.