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 Im very pleased to announce that the petitions system weve built for 10 Downing Street has gone live today. Im 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 doesnt actually ask for any action, for example) then they are put on a special rejected petitions page: they dont 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 Chriss 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@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, Im afraid this is something that we wont 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 isnt representative. You see, theyre 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 e-m: dominic.pinto@ieee.org M: +44 780 302-8268 Ph: +44 207 379-8341 In the U.S. M/Cell: +1 215 667-3001