Rockville Central Candidate Forum Saturday, Oct. 24, 9:30 am

Dear Readers:

We are delighted to announce the first-ever Rockville Central candidate forum. It will be held on Saturday, October 24, at 9:30 am. The location is our very own Thomas Farm Community Center near Fallsgrove.

We have been thinking about this event for some time and we are delighted to be able to announce it.

We want this to be a “different kind of candidate forum.” Many organizations and local associations hold candidate forums each election, and they do a great job of making sure candidates are accountable to their hoped-for constituencies. We always attend as many as possible. We scheduled this event so that it would not interfere with any of the other candidate forums announced so far.

With this candidate forum, we hope to build on the work of other organizations. It won’t look like a typical forum, and we may not run it like a typical forum. We are going to try to create an environment in which candidates interact with each other as much as possible — after all, one of the chief concerns on the minds of citizens right now is how candidates will work together.

We will also make sure that the full video of this forum is available online and we are also exploring the feasibility of live streaming the forum so people throughout Rockville can tune in.

One big complaint we have heard is that forums can go on a long time, especially when there are lots of candidates like this year. So, we are intentionally limiting the forum to two hours. We feel certain we can be fair in that period of time and also respect the desires of the audience who have other things to do in their lives.

Leading up to the forum, we will be reaching out to the Rockville Central readers’ community to solicit good ideas. We want you to weigh in on:

• What kinds of questions should the candidates answer?
• What format would give you the best sense of who the candidates are?
• What kinds of things would you like to avoid in a candidate event like this?
• What kind of event would make you proud of these candidates?
• And more.

Please consider adding a comment if you have some initial responses. We are probably also going to create a survey for more formal input.

We also will need help pulling this off — so if you are willing to pitch in at the forum, please let us know!

Watch Rockville Central for more announcements as we make this thing happen!

Thank you for your ongoing support.

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