Southborough technology committee highlights website problems, plans meeting‑room AV upgrades and cloud phone migration

The Town of Southborough Municipal Technology Committee reviewed analysis of four years of resident satisfaction surveys and discussed near‑term technology work including a meeting‑room audio‑visual upgrade and a planned migration to a cloud phone system.

Chair Matt told members the survey dataset spans 2021, 2022, 2024 and 2025 and totals 1,529 responses with 149 open comments. "The main headline is to strengthen official digital channels residents can find, trust and subscribe to without depending on unofficial intermediaries," he said, framing the committee’s priority to improve the town’s website, subscription options and civic input channels.

Survey findings presented to the committee emphasized that email remains the preferred communication channel (about 81% preference), younger residents show more appetite for social and text, and residents repeatedly flagged website usability problems (difficulty finding meeting Zoom links and committee pages), clunky online forms and challenges with online payments. Members discussed an approaching website refresh window and debated whether to change vendors or improve the existing CivicPlus implementation.

The committee also reviewed technology department updates prepared by the absent town IT manager, Jay. Matt said the McCall hearing room is being upgraded with automated multi‑pane camera framing and a ceiling microphone array so the room can operate as a self‑service meeting room and feed audio/video to Southborough Access Media; equipment installation was reported underway and expected to be completed by the end of the month. The committee noted that the town meeting had approved the regular IT budget and the new cloud phone system; staff said the migration will be performed by the current vendor and that diverse connectivity and redundancy are necessary to maintain phone availability during outages.

Library director Ryan explained limits on integrating some systems: the library’s patron and notification systems are provided through the Evergreen/CW MARS consortium and are closed systems that limit integration with town platforms for patron data and SMS holds notifications. Members discussed a roadmap of 3‑month, 1‑year and 2‑year priorities including a website redesign, improved email subscription lists, SMS reminders and back‑end workflows for knowledge base and payment improvements.

The committee did not take binding procurement action on a website vendor during the meeting. Members asked staff to follow up with the vendor maintainer (Jay) about the town’s social feed (X/Twitter) and how feeds might populate the site, and to return with more detailed cost and operating models for any platform consolidation. The committee tentatively set May 11 as its next meeting with May 19 as a backup and adjourned by unanimous voice vote among members recorded present.