Have you ever needed to collect signatures to support a white paper, a mission concept or a proposal? Or have you ever organized some kind a petition that needed community support?
If so, you probably realized that there are no good solutions. Many people use forms or shared spreadsheets, but these can not easily account for anonymous signatures, it is difficult to remove or modify your signature, it is often not possible to verify that the person who signed is really who they say they are, and the signature list is not always updated automatically. Even if you are happy with the solutions provided by big tech companies, you might not be happy with their privacy policies, or the fact that they probably support racist autocratic leaders.
It is for these reasons that we have created a new open source software project called Signatories. Signatories is a simple web-based application that allows a person to sign an online petition, a declaration, a statement, or any form of communication that requires community support. Designed for academics, signing is accomplished by authenticating with an Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID).
Singing a campaign can be done with only a few clicks. Signatories to a campaign may choose to add their professional affiliation, and they can modify their preferences or remove their signature after signing. When the signatory’s name is visible, any public visitor may click on it to inspect their ORCID profile. By using ORCID to authenticate, an account may sign at most once, and anonymous participants to a campaign are assured to have an ORCID account.
Creating a campaign is simple and only requires filling out an online form with a title, a subtitle, and the main text. The campaign owner can choose to allow for anonymous signatures or not, and once the campaign is created, it is immediately accessible online with a unique web address. Owners of a campaign can modify the campaign parameters if necessary, they can close the campaign to further signatures, and they can delete the campaign altogether. For privacy reasons, owners of a campaign can not see the identities of anonymous signers.
Our signatories instance is hosted by the Planetary Research Cooperative and we will accept any campaign that is of relevance to the planetary science community. If you would like to be given editor privileges to create campaigns, it is only necessary to contact us and provide your ORCID. And if you would like to use this project outside of planetary science, please feel free to run your own instance! The project is open source, and the initial configuration requires editing only a few lines in a single environment file.
Live instance:
