Ten days ago I wrote here about the petition I made to the UK Parliament for them to debate introducing legislation for all shops to have to keep their doors closed (that is, not propped open) during opening hours. The idea is that they all want it but no one wants to make the first move.
The Impetus For The Petition
Again – for years my wife, Tamara, has been speaking to managers in shops and supermarkets talking to them about the heat they let escape through the doors they leave open wide. By keeping at it, she has seen the attitude of shop managers change over the years from ‘who is this person coming to make my life difficult?’ to be more positive and understanding.
And who wouldn’t change their attitude once they see the bigger picture about the risks to Earth’s environment. But no shopkeeper (with a few exceptions) wants to make the first move to close their doors for fear of losing out if customers think their shops are closed.
Getting Signatures
It is hard work getting signatures, even for a clear-cut idea. Maybe I need more cat pictures.
My oldest daughter is in PR and she suggested I make a ‘home’ for the petition so that there is a focus and identity behind the petition. Now I have done that, she is working on a press release.
She and I joke about what her job involves, because it is decidedly not about press releases. If I understand it at all, it is about her establishing relationships with journalists who will write about what she would like them to write about. That involves knowing what is newsworthy or worthy of being written about.
To do my part, I bought the domain name lostheat.org.uk.
I figured that lost heat gets to the heart of what the campaign is about – the loss of heat from open shop doors.
The choice of ‘org‘ is to show that it is not a commercial enterprise.
And ‘uk‘ to show that it is directed to the United Kingdom.
Making The Site
I set up some web hosting and made the site last night.
The home page is a statement of ‘what and why’, with a link to the petition.
And to round out the picture of me as a person, I copied in two articles I had written previously.
One article is on the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan that was knocked out by an earthquake followed by a tsunami, where poor design decisions made a bad situation worse.
The other article is about FSO Safer, the rusting hulk that is still sitting there in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, in danger of spilling more oil into the sea than in any disaster ever.
And the United Nations is crowdfunding (yes, crowdfunding) to raise the money to offload the oil to make FSO Safer safe.
So that’s what I did, and unsurprisingly, I built the website with WordPress. I would love to say I built it from scratch with my coding skills, but GeneratePress gives access to a site library with elements to assemble. It’s like Meccano or Lego.
Take a look – and it you think of anything I could or maybe should do to grab people’s imagination in this worthy campaign, please tell me.
Photograph Works 