Wrong ways to collect petition signatures

Today, I got a petition signing request in an email message. The idea was simple: reply to the message and added my information to endorse. But this is such a bad way to do it:

• Unless the person in charge of the operation is a good programmer, the received messages are likely to be processed manually to glean out the endorsers. This is extremely time-consuming and clearly not scalable.
• If a person manually extracts endorser information from the email messages, then the person is not a sophisticated computer user. Consequently, the endorser data collected is unlikely to be stored in an intelligent fashion such as using a database. The result is that it is not easy to analyze the collected data, to glean information out of it and to generate reports, etc.
  

For non-sophisticated users, google petition to find many servers that

• takes seconds to set up and use
• are free
  

How to publicize KMT's crimes against humanity

曾韋禎 wrote:

馬英九上任後，無所不用其及地想讓台灣重回那個美好的威權時代。即使不是他本人下令，底下的公務員也會揣摩上意，有樣學樣。

台灣郵政改為中華郵政、崇拜蔣經國、恢復中正紀念堂、高考加考中國憲法後改設中國組、陳雲林還台時嚴重箝制人民基本權利、重新放慈湖、軍隊恢復「軍人讀訓」、陸軍官校重唱有「黨旗飛舞」的校歌、軍隊恢復晚點名重唱「我愛中華」、考試院率先恢復對「總統」使用挪抬、台北市政府查挺綠企業的帳、人事行政局考慮設立制服、新聞局要求中央社修改報導、雙十節恢復動員學生排字、教官重新進入校園甚至進入國中小、警察強闖私人集會場所、罵笨總統被禁聲一個月、軍校生罵馬被記大過、高中生嗆馬被強制拘留、考慮恢復人二室……罄竹難書。

A-gu (阿牛) translated the above list into English in his blog Laundry list of sins:

It can be hard to remember all the ways in which the KMT government under President Ma Ying-jeou has been pushing Taiwan back from the progress made during the DPP's last 8 years into darker times. So Wei-chen does us the favor of cataloging them, providing links to Chinese media as well. Here's a few of the choice ones:

• Changing the name of Taiwan Post back to Chunghwa Post
• Worshipping Chiang Ching-kuo [only a slight exaggeration of the government sponsored celebration a few weeks ago commemorating what would have been his 100th birthday]
• Changing the name of Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall back to Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall
• Having certain government officials dealing with China take a test on the Chinese constitution [as MT pointed out to me, this actually makes more sense than it sounds like]
• Seriously curtailing human rights during ARATS head Chen Yun-lin's visit to Taiwan
• Re-opening the mausoleum of Chiang Kai-shek.
  
• Reintroducing the serviceman's doctrine.
• Reintroducing a song at the Army's military academy which includes the line, "the [KMT] party flag waves"
• Reintroducing the military song "I love China"
  
• The Taipei City government specifically doing checks on the book sof pro-Green businesses
• Asking departments to check on what male civil servants wear when on duty to make sure it is appropriate (really necessary?)
• The MOI asking the CNA to alter its reporting to be more China- and Ma-friendly
• Reintroducting student formations in the Double Ten parade
• Putting military instructors in middle and elementary schools and re-expanding their roles
• The police breaking up legal private assemblies

韋禎 and A-gu (阿牛) made contribution to humanity by publicizing KMT's crimes. In both cases, the crime data is simple text. Consequently, the data does not allow easy query (such as when did this occur? What is the reference URL? etc). Neither does it allow alternative way of presentation, short of a rewrite of the article. They can do better, without much more work, by using a database to store data.

To illustrate, please take a look at http://taiwan1st.net/t1/ma/ or http://taiwan1st.net/t1/achievement/. Under the hood, each story there is stored as a record of a database table. As a result, query and search are easy, and the data can be presented differently with simple programming.

Assume we now have a project hosted at http://taiwan1st.net to collect (in a database) Ma's atrocities. Each of 韋禎's original stories, 阿牛's translation of it, and other relevant information such as source, date, etc will be in one logical record for easy use.