OPEN TOWN HALL
HOW OPEN TOWN HALL FORUMS ARE:
Legal
Governments need to comply with laws that aren’t applicable to companies and individuals – that’s why mass-market social media doesn’t meet government public comment requirements.
Open Town Hall is solely focused on governments, so our services comply with free speech rights, requirements for public records retention and requests, and sunshine ordinances.
FREE SPEECH
Our disruptive statement handling protocol reconciles statements containing personal attacks, profanity or irrelevant content without infringing on the free speech rights of the author.
RETENTION
All public comments can be downloaded in PDF files, and stored in your own facilities. In addition, we retain them using Amazon S3's storage designed to provide 99.999999999% durability.
PUBLIC RECORDS
Anyone can obtain a copy of any public data for any forum - both open and archived - from any browser. No staff time is required to respond to a public record request.
SUNSHINE
Every part of every forum - both open and archived - is accessible from any browser, including the staff introduction, public comments and staff close-out statements.