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Open Town Hall has two participation channels:

• The Registered Channel: Sign in before or just after you submit your response. Either way, Community Feedback will show your response on this website.
• The Unregistered Channel: Don't sign in and remain anonymous. Community Feedback will just share your response with Palo Alto staff.

Note: The first time you sign in, you'll need to register (establish an account on Open Town Hall). Registration is free.

The City of Palo Alto has contracted with Community Feedback to monitor responses shown on this website.

• To prevent any single user from dominating the forum, the City of Palo Alto restricts the number of responses any one user can post on selected topics. Registration helps Community Feedback enforce this restriction.
• Users, staff and government leaders often want to know the neighborhood from which a response is posted. Community Feedback uses registration to show the neighborhood next to each response (not the address).
• If a user posts a response that does not meet the City of Palo Alto guidelines for civility, Community Feedback uses the user's email address to invite the user to resolve the issue.

Community Feedback will get your contact information. The company is under contract with the City of Palo Alto to hold it in strict confidence per their privacy policy.

• Since you'll see your own response on Open Town Hall, you'll be able to confirm that your response was posted as you intended.
• You'll be able to change and/or delete your response as long as the topic is open.

Yes. Sign out, then set your privacy preference to be "No - just show it without my name to staff". You won't need to register.

While no authentication procedure can perfectly detect every fraudulent registration, Community Feedback is able to secure the registered channel against systematic fraud: cases where users submit enough statements with fraudulent registrations to sway the overall interpretation of the feedback.

Community Feedback is unable to secure the unregistered channel against systematic fraud, because unregistered users are anonymous.

Neither the registered nor the unregistered channel represent a certified voting system or ballot box - and that caveat is footnoted on every page of feedback. Instead, both are additional channels for feedback to government.

Users can participate on the registered channel (by signing in) or on the unregistered channel (by remaining anonymous). The City of Palo Alto offers both channels in order to broaden participation and maximize decision makers' insights.

The registered channel enables users to assure decision makers that their feedback comes from a real person in a specific neighborhood. It also enables users to participate in a public discussion on the website, as well as manage their own response after posting it.

The unregistered channel is for users who want to provide quick feedback without registering, and/or whose privacy concerns would prevent them from participating if required to register. Because many users with valuable insights will only share them anonymously, this channel gives decision makers the option to consider those insights in their deliberations.

OpenGov is a non-partisan company whose mission is to broaden civic engagement and build public trust in government. The City of Palo Alto has contracted with OpenGov to administer Open Town Hall.