The Support Our Schools organization of Hamilton and Wenham should be commended for encouraging Hamilton voters to attend last Saturday's town meetings.
In a recent communication they offered several suggestions on how voters might free up time "on a busy, busy Saturday morning" to attend the special meetings held at the Winthrop School. They were even offering free child care at the school for parents who had no place else to leave the kids.
The group also demonstrated a grasp of the latest in technology and a determination to advance its particular agenda, by offering to advise voters via Twitter when a vote on the proposed override for school repairs was about to take place.
We're not sure these Twitter alerts represent an advance in the conduct of town business, however.
The open town meeting, which has been employed in Hamilton and other North Shore communities since colonial times, is meant to give every citizen a voice in the full gamut of town affairs. But increasingly, it seems, people show up with a specific article in mind — a zoning issue affecting one's neighborhood, an appropriation affecting a child's school, or more money for the town department in which one is employed — and not much interest in anything else.
In the past such a voter would at least have to wait for that warrant article to come up before taking off for the rest of the day or evening. But with a Twitter alert, one can ignore what comes before, as well as what comes after, and still be at town meeting in order to vote on the article of interest.
As the SOS missive states: "You can enter Town Meeting at any time ... (and) can leave and come back if you must."
That's good for busy parents trying to juggle multiple responsibilities; and good for SOS, which was interested primarily in garnering the votes needed to pass a debt-exclusion override for repairs to the HVAC system at the Cutler School.
But we're not so sure it's good for a form of government that depends on maximum citizen participation.
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