Petition Bank

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Posted in Proposals 2006

Author: Matt Hall

What NEED does this meet?

The recent Power report into parlimentary reform recommended that any petition with more than 2 million signatories should be automatically given a referendum. The power of petitions on the internet seems to be something that could have a real impact. This idea attempts to make the gathering of petition signatories easier.

This would benefit those seeking to engage with local politics and also serve to highlight national causes, bringing likeminded people together online.

What is the APPROACH?

How about a page like pledgebank where people can post petitions and sign up to them online. People could suggest petitions, with arguments for their point of view and what exactly the petition would address.

Subsequently, petitions would be viewable online and sortable by area or issue and providing email addresses when siging-up means that mailing lists for signatories could be easily compiled for updates on the progess of the petition/issue.

What are the BENEFITS to people?

This would make it easier to engage with local politics and also mean that gathering large petitions on important single issues becomes far less labourious.

What is the COMPETITION?

I’ve not heard of anything exactly like this, but it has obvious similarities to pledgebank. In this case, however, the aim of the site is slightly different. rather than “i’ll do this if x other people do it with me” it’s more of “let’s let those in charge know that x people feel strongly about this”, which would seem nicely complimentary.

What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?

Given that pledgebank is built and running, the amount of time and effort involved in constructing petitionbank would not appear to be that great.

4 Comments

  1. Francis Irving

    Scottish Parliament have something like this (http://epetitions.scottish.parliament.uk/) and Napier university who made it have talked about releasing it under and open source license (written in ASP, used also in Newcastle and somewhere in Germany I think).

    Number 10 have a petitions system, although nowhere near as good as what Matt describes above

  3. As has already been noted, there are already several good sites that do petitions. What’s the point of having one more?

  4. I think this idea has great merit. There is this system (the software for which will be open source at some point) from the Netherlands that goes some way to doing what you suggest: petities.nl

    As described by the person pointing it out to me:

    * a petitionary registers to start a new petition
    * once published the petition, it automatically takes the subdomain like
    petities.nl
    * users confirm their support of the petition, they can opt-in for
    subscription to the related mailinglist
    * after confirming support, one can invite friends, with a personalised
    message (viral marketing)
    * the petitionary can change the order of the people listed as supporters,
    which is very important as you’ll want to to put the famous supporters at the
    top of the list.