Hi Jabou,

Thanks for volunteering to coordinate the signature collection for the planned
petition.  As I imagine it, this is what would be involved:  you call for and select
a group of people (I suggest 5 of them) who will be the first line of signature
collectors (calle them Level 1).  The people you select will be people who you know
or can prove their identity to you.  And you'll be able to trust that they'd do a
good and honest job.  They'll then collect signatures, and submit them to you.

The Level 1 volunteers can either collect signatures themselves, and/or recruit Level
2 volunteers to help them collect signatures.  Similar to your selection process
above, Level 1 volunteers recruit Level 2 people *they* (Level 1 people) know and/or
trust, to help them collect signatures.  The system is pretty much like a multi-level
marketing one, except that in this case we'll be collecting signatures, rather than
selling products.

I suggest that we stop at only 2 levels, to make things more manageable.  If we have
5 Level 1 volunteers, and each of them has 3 Level 2 volunteers, we'll have 15
signature collectors.  That's probably more than enough, but you get the idea.  I'll
leave it to you to decide how many people you want at each level, and hence the
maximum number of signature collectors you want to work with.

Once we have the list of signature collectors, we can then publish it on Gambia-L, so
that people would know who to write to to sign-up for the petition.  Each signature
collector is responsible for making sure that all the signatures collected are
authentic.  For this reason, signature collectors will have to know people who
sign-up for the petition, or these petitioners will have to prove that their e-mailed
petitions are genuine.  There are a number of means of doing this.  For example, we
can have signature collectors in different countries and parts of the world so they
can call people back, or have people call them to validate their requests to sign on
to the petition.  I suggest we leave it to individual collectors to determine exactly
how to go about validating signatures they receive.

With regards the signatures, I suggest that people provide their full names,
addresses, and e-mail addresses (if they have them).  The petition we deliver will
only have names, cities, (states/provinces - if applicable) and countries, but for
our records, I suggest you keep the detailed information submitted by each signatory.
Finally, any incomplete information will be rejected.

That's about it for now.  Please let us know of any suggestions you (or anyone out
there) has for making the signature collection excercise go smoothly.

Again, thanks for volunteering for to coordinate the drive.  Have a great evening,
and best wishes.

Katim

----- Original Message -----
From: Jabou Joh <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 1:55 PM
Subject: Re: Petition to US Ambassador designate, Baba Jobe, and Tombong Saidy


> Katim,
>
> i agree that we should wait until Mr Macdonald's nomination is confirmed by
> the Senate before sending him the petition. Once that is done, we can send it
> right away.
> I volunteer to collect the signatures if George Sarr or someone else more
> knowledgeable about the process will give me a few pointers.
>

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