Good start, now need to grow

Dear friends, thanks again from West Africa for your help in starting our petition. We now have 80 signatures and more coming in daily. First good news today is that we have found the person who can grant our request: It is Jan Koum, the founder and CEO of WhatsApp who is still making the technical decisions, not least about the user interface. He is somebody we respect, so sending our letter to him, once we got enough signatures, will be nice. We hope for 20.000 signatures. Second big news is that the petition got very small: We have had the help of many direct and personal friends to launch the petition. Now we need to get thousands more signatures from all the Africans concerned. I have received (and heeded) advice re the amount of my text. To make it more accessible to our young people in all the villages, I have dropped all the explanations and all the arguments from the main petition and just state what we need. Should fit much better on a smartphone screen. So I never changed anything, just removed parts. Below the petition you can see that the actual letter which will go to Jan Koum is still complete, i.e. carrying all the explanations and arguments and technical links. Thanks for your help and for your signature. Please help again by sharing the link. If you are concerned about your or your friends' data or privacy: We do not receive your e-mail address, just your name, town and country and the date and time you signed. And if you do not write a comment, your name will not even show up online. So please sign away and share away. Thanks, Martin