I’ve been helping out with this and I can say that the organizers are working as quickly as possible to verify and publish new signatures. New signatures have been published since the launch, and additional signatures will continue to be published as they are verified. There is a team of people working on it right now and has been since launch.
The main obstacles to extremely swift publication are:
First, determining who meets our bar for name publication. We think the letter will have greater authority (and coordination value) if all names are above a certain bar, and so some effort needs to be put into determining whether signatories meet that bar.
Second, as you mention verification. Prior to launch, CAIS built an email verification system that ensures that signatories must verify their work emails in order for their signature to be valid. However, this has required some tweaks, such as making the emails more attention grabbing and adding some language on the form itself that makes clear that people should expect an email (before these tweaks, some people weren’t verifying their emails).
Lastly, even with verification, some submissions are still possibly fake (from email addresses that we aren’t sure are the real person) and need to be further assessed.
These are all obstacles that simply require time to address, and the team is working around the clock. In fact, I’m writing this comment on their behalf so that they can focus on the work they’re doing. We will publish all noteworthy signatures as quickly as we can, which should be within a matter of days (as I said above, some have already been published and this is ongoing). We do take your feedback that perhaps we should have hired more people so that verification could be swifter.
In response to your feedback, we have just added language in the form and email that makes clear signatures won’t show up immediately so that we can verify them. This might seem very obvious, but when you are running something with so many moving parts as this entire process has been, it is easy to miss things.
Thanks for the reply. Also for the work—it’s great signatures are added—before I’ve checked bottom of the list and it seemed it’s either same or with very few additions.
I do understand verification of signatures requires some amount of work. In my view having more people (could be volunteers) to process the initial expected surge of signatures fast would have been better; attention spent on this will drop fast.
Hi Jan, I appreciate your feedback.
I’ve been helping out with this and I can say that the organizers are working as quickly as possible to verify and publish new signatures. New signatures have been published since the launch, and additional signatures will continue to be published as they are verified. There is a team of people working on it right now and has been since launch.
The main obstacles to extremely swift publication are:
First, determining who meets our bar for name publication. We think the letter will have greater authority (and coordination value) if all names are above a certain bar, and so some effort needs to be put into determining whether signatories meet that bar.
Second, as you mention verification. Prior to launch, CAIS built an email verification system that ensures that signatories must verify their work emails in order for their signature to be valid. However, this has required some tweaks, such as making the emails more attention grabbing and adding some language on the form itself that makes clear that people should expect an email (before these tweaks, some people weren’t verifying their emails).
Lastly, even with verification, some submissions are still possibly fake (from email addresses that we aren’t sure are the real person) and need to be further assessed.
These are all obstacles that simply require time to address, and the team is working around the clock. In fact, I’m writing this comment on their behalf so that they can focus on the work they’re doing. We will publish all noteworthy signatures as quickly as we can, which should be within a matter of days (as I said above, some have already been published and this is ongoing). We do take your feedback that perhaps we should have hired more people so that verification could be swifter.
In response to your feedback, we have just added language in the form and email that makes clear signatures won’t show up immediately so that we can verify them. This might seem very obvious, but when you are running something with so many moving parts as this entire process has been, it is easy to miss things.
Thank you again for your feedback.
Thanks for the reply. Also for the work—it’s great signatures are added—before I’ve checked bottom of the list and it seemed it’s either same or with very few additions.
I do understand verification of signatures requires some amount of work. In my view having more people (could be volunteers) to process the initial expected surge of signatures fast would have been better; attention spent on this will drop fast.