[Air-l] Petition Tony Blair, online that is

[Dominic Pinto]

I've taken the liberty of asking via mysociety.org for
their reactions/responses to some of the comments,
remakrs, observations etc on this list.

Clipped from mysociety, where there is discussion
'space' :-) (I've also observed that it's 'nice' to
see - http://www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page49.asp -
that ‘my’ or ‘our’ petition becomes ‘theirs’ 


.
which we cannot do anything with (other than print or
file) without permission or license):

No10 petitions system goes live — 14th November 2006
Posted by Tom Steinberg

I’m very pleased to announce that the petitions system
we’ve built for 10 Downing Street has gone live today.

I’m very grateful for the hard and often inspired work
put into this by Chris Lightfoot and Matthew
Somerville, as well as the civil servants who have
helped to build a petitions system which I believe is
in a real class of its own.

The most notable features are:

1. Petitions are accepted and published, regardless of
the political slant of the petition. However, if they
break the Ts&Cs (a petition that doesn’t actually ask
for any action, for example) then they are put on a
special rejected petitions page: they don’t just
vanish. We think this transparency feature is probably
unique.

2. The site is being launched in beta, and will change
over time. This might seem too commonplace to note for
many of you, but it reflects a willingness to see a
public IT service evolve in response to users, not
simply fulfil a contract agreed in advance. mySociety
exists partly to spread good practice in the public
sector, and we think this is a nice example of that in
action.

3. The code, including Chris’s amazing high-load
optimised engine, is all open source.

Any questions? Come into our chat channel at
www.irc.mysociety.org or mail us at
team at mysociety.org. 

5 responses to “No10 petitions system goes live”
Andy says: 


Any chance of setting up a “no” column?

e.g “We the undersigned want a flat tax”
name 1
name 2

 etc

We the undersigned oppose this petition
name 1
name 2 

written on November 16th, 2006 

Tom Steinberg says: 


Hi Andy,

I’m afraid this is something that we won’t be doing.
You see, petitions are valid because they count the
total number of people willing to put their name to
something. But the moment you have a contrary
position, you get something that looks like a poll, or
a vote, but which isn’t representative. You see,
they’re different beasts, and we would be doing little
but increasing the amount of confusion on the internet
if we added this feature.

However, you can create a petition contrary to another
petition - nothing wrong with that, as two separate
counts. 

written on November 16th, 2006

<snip>


Dominic Pinto BA MIEEE MCMI MRi FRSA
http://www.ecademy.com/user/dominicpinto

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