On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 01:13:14PM +0900, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
> If you receive this list with more than 500 names
> signed, please send a
> copy
> of the message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
This petition, laudable as its purpose might be, would do more harm
than good. Please do NOT pass it forward.
>From Phil Agre's essential "Designing Effective Action Alerts for the
Internet" (http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/alerts.html):
DO NOT use a chain-letter petition. A chain-letter petition is an action
alert that includes a list of names at the end; it invites people to add
their own name to the list, send in the petition if their name is the
30th or 60th etc, and in any case forward the resulting
alert-plus-signature-list to everyone they know. This idea sounds great
in the abstract, but it really doesn't work. The problem is that most
of the signatures will never reachtheir destination, since the chain
will fizzle out before reaching the next multiple of 30 in length.
What's even worse, a small proportion of the signatures will be received
in the legislator's office many times, thus annoying the staff and
persuading them that they're dealing with an incompetent movement that
can never hold them accountable.
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