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. > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html You may also send subscription requests to [log in to unmask] if you have problems accessing the web interface and remember to write your full name and e-mail address. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------