Hi Andria.
If you would like to contact me about content on the E-Cigarette Politics site, please use the Contact form linked to near the top right on the home page of the ECP site. That site is a personal leisure pursuit of mine and has no connection with this website at all (I have, or assist others on, a multitude of sites and none are connected with ECF).
That page is an old one, perhaps the first article I wrote for the new site and it probably needs a re-vamp...
Regarding petitions: my personal opinion (though many would disagree) is that petitions come about 2 on a scale of 1 to 100 of things that people can do to help protect vaping. The reasons for that are many and complex, but start with:
1. If we claim there are millions of vapers (as we do), and a major petition gets 20,000 signatures (about 1/30th of the size a petition to build a death star gets - exactly what image does this present regarding our real strength?
2. If the petition is poorly worded, poorly targeted, obviously written by someone who has no real idea of the current legislatory situation, and was obviously written by someone who has limited education - what image does that present?
3. If there are dozens of such petitions every year, almost all of which are more a less a waste of time - what good does that do us?
4. If people sign a petition, they think they are helping but have in fact done nothing, and this may prevent them doing something that actually helps.
I'm not saying petitions are bad. I'm saying (a) there are 98 better things to do if you actually want to help, and (b) the major organisations are the best people to organise them.
Things that *do* help are:
1. 10,000 people going to their Representatives' office and camping out there till they get a hearing, and taking plenty of appropriate documentation with them.
2. 10,000 people writing physical letters mailed to their Rep, with your personal story plus appropriate docs and links to genuine web resources - and repeating and repeating until the secretary asks the Rep to do something about it.
3. 10,000 people phoning their Rep again and again until something is done.
4. 10,000 people faxing their rep again and again and again until something is done.
5. People with specialist talents or positions, en masse, exerting pressure that their position or talent allow them to. For example journalists, web specialists, lawyers, doctors, and nurses. If I had to pick two groups with the most power, it's journalists and nurses (they have more power than is generally recognised).
Those things work. Petitions are OK after all that is done, and done again, and done again. In other words: not much.
Setting up a website: if that's your game, go for it. Choose Wordpress (simple) or Joomla CMS (more capable) if you can work with those platforms; otherwise something else. Make sure to get a good domain name, and buy up anything similar to it. Don't blog on a hosted site if you think your site has any chance of longevity: most of the value (in all respects) goes to the domain owner (ex: Blogger.com etc.).
Aim to specialise in some aspect of the campaign: host resources, or write commentary, or blog on news, or examine a particular aspect of the issues. And so on. Choose something you can do in your sleep or it'll get too hard.
Or, for the young: bite off more than you can chew, and find out what you're made of
Hope some of that helps, somehow.
