This post is more than 3 years old.

It's been a long time since I started a petition to try to change something in my world. But in recent weeks my local City Council has been threatening to do some silly things related to funding the development of bike and pedestrian paths here, and I'd heard enough people say informally that they were concerned by those threats that I decided it was time to create a central spot where they could put all their names for Council members to see.

And that's how I ended up using the petitions.moveon.org service, which has turned out to be excellent for this purpose.

A few things in particular that I like about it:

  • While clearly scaled to support national and state level petitions, the MoveOn tool did a great job of enabling a smaller petition targeted at a local legislative body that might not otherwise be in their system. I was able to enter the names and email addresses of my local Council members as "targets" of the petition, and they then were set up to receive deliveries of signatures directly.
  • Related to that, the MoveOn system allowed the targets of the petition to respond directly to the petition signers with a message, without giving them direct access to each others` private contact information.
  • The system automatically picks small signature goals to start with and then scales them up as new milestones are hit. I think this helps avoid the awkward "WE'RE GOING TO HAVE A HUNDRED MILLION SIGNATURES HERE!" declarations by petition creators that quickly yield disappointment.
  • The system offered up interesting summary stats about where signatures were coming from and what activity on the petition looked like over time.
  • When I had to contact MoveOn's petition support (one of the signers had accidentally left out a word in a comment that significantly changed the meaning, and wanted it corrected) they were fast to respond and provided a quick solution.
  • Other features in the petition tool, like handling delivery via print and email, contacting petition signers, "declaring victory," and more seemed really well designed; simple, effective, built for bringing about real action.
  • The petition application is open source and available for anyone to contribute to it.

One of the things I wanted to do as the signature numbers climbed and as I prepared to present the petition to Council was create something that visualized the signing names in one place. The signature count on the petition itself was not super prominent, and in only displaying 10 names at a time it was easy to miss out on the sense of a large part of the local population making a clear statement about what they want.

So I sniffed the XMLHttpRequests being made by the MoveOn site and found the underlying API that was being used to load the signature names. I whipped up a simple PHP script that queries that API to fetch all the names, and then does some basic cleanup of the list: leaving out anything that doesn't look like a full name, making capitalization and spacing consistent, sorting, etc.

I published the tool online at https://github.com/ChrisHardie/moveon-petition-tools in case anyone else might find it useful. (I later learned that MoveOn makes a CSV export of signatures and comments available when you go to print your petition, so that's an option too.)

Using the output of my tool, I created this simple graphic that shows all of the signed names to date:

All in all the MoveOn petition platform has been great, and I think it's made a difference just the way I wanted it to. I highly recommend it.

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