Thread by @shayshinecastle

Next: Council is changing the way ppl email them. No notes in the packet, so I'm gonna try and pay attention to tweet what I hear.

TLDR is: Stop emailing [e-mail] They're doing a form instead.

Staff presentation: documents.bouldercolorado.gov/WebLink/DocVie…

This will hopefully make it so that more emails get answered, bc there are just so. many. that council can't keep up.

Also, like 60 staff members are copied on each email, so it's hard to track who answers what.

This is about more than emails, but that seems like the big one for those of you who email council.

I guess there WERE notes on this, I just didn't read them. I'm sorry! It was a busy week and I was sick.

First of all, you can now use this email form in Spanish or English, which is great.

And there's a little disclaimer that lets you know emails to council are public and subject to records requests.

You can choose a topic, which will help send the email to the right people, and decide if staff, council or both should see your email.

We get an incredibly high volume of email, engagement manager Sarah Huntley says. I called peer cities 3 yrs ago and they were "absolutely astonished" with the volume.

"Dept directors are currently seeing every single email that comes into the city," Huntley says. "This will funnel it to the dept that needs to see it."

Reminder: You can still email council members individually with their email addresses. Click on each person's name to see their contact info: bouldercolorado.gov/government/cit…

Actually covered quite a bit of this in Local Gov't 101 (which I will now have to update). boulderbeat.news/boulder-101/lo…

A lot of the emails council gets are better handled by staff: Questions/complaints about city services, etc. This should help with that.

OK, so you CAN still email [e-mail] until January. And even if you do after the new system is up, you'll get an automated email that links to the new form.

Yates: "We do get some pretty lengthy emails, which is great." Will the form have a character limit?
No, says Darren Jacoby. Write away!

Yates: What will the emails look like on our end? Similar? Or a little different?

Jacoby: A little different, bc it will be a transcript of the form. It will come in blocks, based on the pieces of the form.

Speer: I hope this will help. I could easily spend 30 hrs a week answering emails.

If folks are writing in Spanish to council or staff, will there be translation support? And for our responses?

Jacoby: Yes. The city staff translator will automatically be copied on all emails using the Spanish-language form

Huntley: That's based on the volume we expect.

"If that volume gets to be really significant, we may have to revisit how we resource that," Huntley says.

Benjamin: I hope we have enough volume that we have to reevaluate having just one staff member for that. That would be great progress in engagement.

Tara Winer: Are we going to be able to see who responded to emails? Or just that someone did?

Huntley: That's in phase 2, not when we first launch this system.

Jacoby: We'll eventually be able to see who responded, if that's what you want. But again, that's a later stage.

Wallach: "The form looks a little cold to me. It looks like you're asking for a refund."

"We're asking ppl to do more work and make choices they maybe aren't comfortable making." That seems counter to our goal of more communication.

Wallach Sigh-O-Meter: First one of the night! (That I've heard)

Can we make this friendlier? Wallach asks
Brockett: Do we have access to Clippy, that little microsoft paper clip from years ago?

We do not, staff says. Sadly.
Here's hoping we get our own instrusive, city-specific mascot.

That was the email portion of this discussion. Moving on. I might not tweet much, but I will be here. And I'll def tweet the update on the fur ban, whenever that happens.

It's about bringing back the chats with council / walks with council. It's when 2 council members get together more informally with community members.

Also office hours, which councilwoman Friend already does. Like 15-min appointments with 1-2 council members and you can talk about whatever you like.

"I think we're just trying to give community members more access to council members," Yates says, "so they can have unstructured, unfettered conversations."

Winer: How do we navigate this with COVID? How do we know if ppl are vaxxed or not?

Huntley: We've done some online meetings during COVID. Obviously we'd have to follow the county's indoor masking protocols.

(Masking or vax requirements, that is)

Speer: What I've heard is that the same folks who are engaging with us will already be engaging with us. How do we expand our outreach?

Huntley: We learned that in the first go-round. Some of our best successes, from an inclusivity perspective, were those targeted audiences.

Brockett: The events at the church were phenomenal, the Spanish-first ones. Large amounts of folks who we normally don't see.

Folkerts: For me, it's folks competing for the same amount of time. If I do more of one, that means less of the other. My participation at the moment will be fairly minimal. But partial to the walks, since they're outside.

Benjamin: I'm open to both. "My work is sunrise, sunset and middle of the night, taking pictures of the stars."

"I want to make sure we're reaching new folks." That's how I'll measure success.

Friend: Translation is available for office hours.

Council also discussing having board/commission applicants submit videos instead of attending interviews.

Yates: They will be more "thoughtful and unique."

Joseph: "I'm just not sure if I'm 100% sold on this idea. It feels slightly robotic and not as dynamic as when you talk with someone. It's going to be more scripted." Why not a virtual interview?

Wallach: "I really do think this is terrific, and I support it wholeheartedly."

Winer: "I actually don't like this idea. You're really performing, and you have all this time to think about what you're going to say. It can be non-authentic."

"I would not apply to a commission bc I'm petrified of making a video of myself," Winer says.

Also, press can watch the interviews live (accountability). How are we supposed to view 100+ videos? On our own time? Ugh.

Winer also suggests virtual interviews, so "someone can ask a question or two so we're getting an authentic view."

Brockett also not a fan of the video idea.

We could preserve it as an option if ppl couldn't attend the interviews.

Benjamin also not on board. "I'm struggling to see this pendulum swing of strictly to a technology solution, bc there's an equity issue of so many ppl not comfortable with technology."

"We want to cast as wide a net and capture as many people as we can," Benjamin says.

That's a majority who don't care for this idea, so it dies an early death.

Speer likes the idea of moving away from group interviews. But they still need something to watch for applicants. "I'm not sure how we could do that realistically with so many people."

Speer: Are there objective criteria we're scoring ppl on? That matters, too.

Folkerts also likes moving away from group interviews, "but I do like the off-the-cuff nature" of the current interviews.

Speer suggested an audio alternative, which Wallach likes.

Wallach: "I'm not concerned with the possible artificiality of this. All we're testing is the ability of an applicant to respond under pressure. That's not what we want to get from our boards and commissions."

Wants something that moves away from the "casting couch" nature of board/commission interviews.

Wallach Sigh-O-Meter: 2

"I think we're testing for the wrong qualities the way that we do it," Wallach says.

Friend: "It is sort of a robotic process already. So if we're operating within that system, it is going to be sort of an assembly line system, one way or another. We're just trying to figure out" what's efficient and comfortable.

They're still talking about this. I think a final decision will kick to a subcommittee.

Either way, I'm kinda done with this particular thread and topic.

@threadreaderapp please unroll. Thanks!