Moncton babbles
December 13, 2010 - 9:36am
Moncton is launching an online town hall forum that will allow residents to participate in discussions about municipal issues.
Municipal town halls often draw crowds of several hundred to debate contentious public issues. However, Moncton hopes to put an electronic forum in place that will draw on the thoughts and opinions of thousands of residents.
The city has hired Corporate Research Associates to set up a panel of citizens that will be sent questionnaires about important topics.
"So in theory, we could have 65,000 panelists, which is the ideal, what we would like to have," said Paul Thomson, the city's director of communications.
Good luck - this could be the future, or a good part of it, if you can get enough people participating - and work out some plans for dealing with trolls of various sorts whose only objective is preventing any sort of real and useful democratic discussion. They're certainly becoming a problem on babble here.