Currently when viewing the list of council agenda items it isn't possible to know if an item has any comments associated with it until you click 'share your opinion':
Before clicking:
After clicking:
@ianmesa and Niel suggested that residents looking for items of interest may look to comments as an indication that an item is interesting or relevant. They suggested visually distinguishing items with comments from those without. They said the city as well would find utility in having items with comments highlighted.
Implementation notes:
The simplest solution is probably to just mark items that have comments.
The second simplest thing would be to include the number of comments.
You might also want to see which items have relatively high numbers of comments (to fulfill an underlying desire to know what "the community" considers a hot topic). This could be related to #99. A challenge I see with using number of comments as an indicator of an item's interestingness or importance is that a) the users of the site may not be a representative sample of the population of the district or the city ("the community"), and b) it may be that "popularity breeds popularity": visually distinguishing items with comments, and making it easier to discover those items (via sorting or other means) may lead people to comment on them for no reason other than that someone else already did.
Currently when viewing the list of council agenda items it isn't possible to know if an item has any comments associated with it until you click 'share your opinion':
Before clicking:
After clicking:
@ianmesa and Niel suggested that residents looking for items of interest may look to comments as an indication that an item is interesting or relevant. They suggested visually distinguishing items with comments from those without. They said the city as well would find utility in having items with comments highlighted.
Implementation notes: