Hong Kong’s First Online Petitions Platform
Full disclosure: I worked on the design for this project.
Online petition platforms have taken off in the English speaking world, but what about a Chinese petition platform? In the US and UK, the government both run official petition platforms (remember the Death Star petition to the White House?) and there are a whole host of free-for-all services like change.org, Causes and Avaaz. But in the Chinese-speaking world, they’re still in their infancy. The Mainland Chinese government’s own petition platform crashed during its debut, and even now requires real name registration before you can even access its contents.
In Hong Kong, multinational organizations like WWF have their own online solutions, while smaller local players have to choose between a Google Form embed or one of the free-for-all English-language platforms. SupportHK is (to my knowledge) the first, homegrown open petition platform in Hong Kong, but there is a catch. It’s only available for environment-related petitions; this editorial decision is either a lost opportunity (if you’re gunning for large-scale political change) or a clever tactic (if you realize that environmental issues are being buried by other, more contentious issues).
The bet with SupportHK is that a local community of engaged citizens will emerge around the platform. For starters, that would be useful for government-related petitions, for which only signatures from local residents or citizens count. (Hong Kong petitions on international platforms are often filled with support from foreigners, which do not always make the best case when petitioning a very Hong Kong-centric entity.) And signing petitions is also an interesting activity for Hong Kong itself, as it finds its feet as a democratic city-state that just happens to be a part of China.