Shomei TV

» see shomei.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Shomei TV opened in March 2008 to do one job: let a person in Japan start a petition on the web and collect signatures for it without knowing anybody. You registered an account, which was free, described what you wanted changed, and the site gave you a page and a counter. There was also tooling for what happens after a campaign closes, which is the part almost every petition site forgets, because the interesting engineering is in the counter and the interesting problem is in the follow-up.

Its real technical problem was the oldest one in online signature collection, which is telling one person from the same person twice. The web version required an email address before it would record a signature. The mobile version, built for the Japanese feature phones that were still most people's internet in 2008, identified you by the handset ID the carrier sent, so it did not need an address at all. Neither of those is a strong identity check and both were defensible then.

The company behind it was United People, a small Tokyo operation founded by Kenji Sekine, whose other product was a click-to-donate site called eee-kokoro. Around 2009 Sekine began moving the company into film, importing and distributing documentaries about the subjects his websites had been collecting signatures over. That shift matters to the ending, because the petition site was being run by a business that was turning into something else while it ran.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the price of a petition ~

At the start, launching a project cost nothing. Later the site changed that to a payment somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 yen per campaign. Every reason for the change is a good reason. Moderation takes staff time, a free launch button on a petition site fills up with noise, and somebody has to pay for the servers. The effect is still a price on the act of asking people to agree with you, and the people most likely to balk at it are the ones without an organization behind them, which was the entire original constituency.

Petitions are one category where I have no Turkish version to compare against from those years. Before Change.org showed up in Turkish, an online petition where I was looking was a forum thread with people typing their names into replies, and it carried exactly the weight that implies. Japan at least had a site that took the format seriously enough to charge for it.

~ what arrived instead ~

Change.org launched its Japanese edition in the summer of 2012, run out of Tokyo by Emmy Suzuki Harris, and passed a hundred thousand Japanese users by May 2013. It was free to start a campaign, it had the delivery machinery of a platform operating in dozens of countries, and it had the press attention that comes with a name people already recognized. A domestic site charging 5,000 yen a campaign had no answer to any of that.

Shomei TV ended all of its services on 28 February 2014, announced on the company's Facebook page rather than anywhere more permanent. The mobile site survives in the Internet Archive because somebody thought to file the link. United People is still trading today as a documentary film distributor, which means the operator outlived the petition site by more than a decade and is not remotely in the same business.

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