Hi. The city is having a hearing Tuesday night as part of their council meeting, on ordinance 8318 authorizing five City departments to spend our time and money working on what they call electronic petitions, which will probably turn out to be a contract for a service called eSign, which is vastly inferior to true online petitions. And you may remember that the national nonprofit Maplight.org has pledged a FREE open-source online petition system for Boulder.
Everyone who testified to City Council in August and who I've explained the difference to wants real online petitions. So this is a waste of taxpayer money on something we don't want. It doesn't preclude future online petitions, but it will chew up a year and plenty of money, given what I know about City operations after being part of their campaign finance and elections working group.
The nice folks from Boulder Democratic Socialists of America, who are planning on two ballot initiatives for the Boulder ballot for 2020, told me there's no way they would use the iPad eSign system, if they have to pay for it, which seems very likely since it's a commercial which requires an iPad for each petition passer: 303software.com/eSign
Please email City Council at Council@bouldercolorado.gov. at least to say something like: Please don't spend our time and money on obsolete and inferior electronic petitions when we have a FREE offer of what we really want, true online petitions, from a reputable non-profit.
It would be good to have your company if not your 3 minutes of testimony to council Tuesday night, starting sometime after 8:30. It's Hearing 5 C & D, which you can see on their agenda at https://boulder.novusagenda.com/agendapublic/MeetingView.aspx?MeetingID=495&MinutesMeetingID=618&doctype=Agendahttps://boulder.novusagenda.com/agendapublic/MeetingView.aspx?MeetingID=495&MinutesMeetingID=618&doctype=Agenda
1777 Broadway at Canyon, upstairs. You could monitor the meeting online so you come at the right time here:
https://bouldercolorado.gov/boulder8
Thanks for your help! Please feel free to share this. It never hurts to get people to keep signing our change.org petition...
You can always email me: eravitz@gmail.com
Evan Ravitz