🚀 go-pugleaf

> Howdy!  I'm with a local grass-roots organization and we're interested in
> the possibility of putting our petition on-line through the Web.  What we
> would like your opinion on is how this could be done,

Set up an infobot that will collect responses. Instuct folks to send a 
message like so:

I <name> support/oppose whatever
<address>
<email address>
<phone>

Have the infobot sort this stuff, discard junk entries (notifying the 
sender something went wrong, quoting their message back to them and 
informing them of the proper syntax. Should weed out duplicates.

Also, set up a HTML form on a www page to collect this info. Have the 
form reject incomplete entries (I don't know which if either of phone or 
address are needed; you'll need to check on that.)

> and the legal
> questions behind verification of names.  I've had alot of experience with

As far as I know there are no legalities involved, but I'm not a lawyer.

> the Internet, and putting a Web-form on line to be filled out by surfers
> would be no problem, but we're just wondering how the City of Austin would
> view these names without signatures--i.e. the verification problem.  This
> raises alot of issues, some of them legal, 

As before, I'm not aware of any legal issues here.  We've had zero 
trouble conducting petitions of this sort.  But we did ask for either 
address, phone, or both (I forget).

> and we'd like your opinion on
> this.  Thanks in advance for your help.  I'd like to talk to someone voice
> about this if possible, so if you could leave me some email with a voice
> number I'll give you a call.

Not sure who to refer you to.

Anyway, in general, I'd strongly recommend only doing a petition as an 
adjunct to a letter-writing, calling, emailing and faxing campaign. Even 
real petitions aren't particularly effective by themselves.

As for authentication, have people that can/will do it PGP sign their 
entries.

--
<A HREF="http://www.eff.org/~mech/">          Stanton McCandlish
</A><HR><A HREF="mailto:mech@eff.org">        mech@eff.org
</A><P><A HREF="http://www.eff.org/">         Electronic Frontier Foundation
</A><P><A HREF="http://www.eff.org/1.html">   Online Services Mgr.      </A>