Online petitions.

I would like to get into this more, so here is goes.

Online petitions are worthless? - I don't know why people say this... To a certain extent yes, but also to a certain extent no. I always thought, even before what I found in my brief search. That, online petitions are mainly for sparking debate and discussion. 173 Total Signatures, is not worthless imho.

With that said. There are many other online petitions that could be relevant to or for us. Such as, one e-petition to make Canada's NSOR (National Sex Offender Registry) just like the US's, that begin the NSOR would have a database that anyone could access via the internet. I signed AGAINST this, though I think I was one of the few but not the only one.

Now some more on if online petitions really work?

I am going to link to a article from EzineArticles that gives you an overview of online petitions and how they work, it's long well not that long but I have more to say on the matter.

From Yahoo! Canada Answers: Online pettitions have the potential to work, but only to a certain extent. At some point, the valedity of the signatures would come into question. Because the only way to verify signatures to make sure nobody is duplicating would be to trace ISP addresses which is not only time consuming to do it for everyone who signed, but inconvinent, it really isn't worth it.

I myself have participated in several of these online pettitons, and while they have a well-meaning base and intentions, most of them are not taken seriously by whoever it's fowarded to because of the tendancy the signers have to rant and rave about what they're signing the pettiton for. Many are signed repeatedly by overzelous teens and pre-teens who under normal curcumstances wouldn't sign, but are more just looking for a place to rant about "injustices".

Overall, these kind of pettitions never really work. Your best bet for a propper pettition would be to either start a mail-based one or to pass around the pettiton in your local community, and have several other "base" pettitioners across the country, and then to discuss it over the internet.

I don't necessary agree with this answer, but it was the best one. On the other hand, the creators of petition hosts, such as Randy Paynter of Care2 and thePetitionSite.com, have defended web-based petitions as being more feasible, credible and effective than e-mail petitions, and are not fairly judged as a method of activism by their critics.

FTGL