Over the last month, everyone in the Council has received huge numbers of emails about the proposed "One Touch Make Ready" ordinance.  Many of them have had an identical "Subject" line and look to me like they were generated from automatic email bots connected to Google in some way.  I wanted to hear more from these emailers.

(I want to be clear -- sending me thousands of emails all with essentially the same content from an email bot is fine. I'm okay with that. Really, I am. But it is fair for me to then want to dig a little deeper with that group of folks.)

Different people email for different reasons.  I wanted to explore whether these constituents were being motivated by the thought that "Google asked for help, and I hate Comcast/AT&T" or motivated by having independently worked through the issues, some of both, or something else entirely.

I'll include results in a link later in this post. But hopefully, you'll stay with me long enough to hear me say that I did my best to ask the questions in a fair way.  I sent it to approximately 1,700 people whose emails made me think that a piece of software actually hit "Send" on the email -- although obviously I can't be sure if that was true for all of the senders. Within several hours, I got 442 responses.

I have been happy to see that only 5 people have written me to accuse the questions of being loaded to get a particular result. Many more have written to separately thank me for asking for their feedback.

I won't spend a lot of time here trying to analyze the results. I think they largely speak for themselves. But I will make a few quick observations. Just over two-thirds of respondents said that they were motivated to email Council members after hearing about the ordinance through the media.

There was one open-ended question that asked people to describe the ordinance. There were more lengthy (multiple paragraph) responses than I had expected.  I appreciate the time people spent in responding.

The meat of the survey had to do with two questions asking about whether respondents thought there were alternatives to a One Touch approach. I am sure Google would note that 78% of respondents thought that One Touch is the only way forward. And I am sure others would say that just under 70% of these same respondents said that other solutions could achieve the same goals. Beyond that, I'll let people reach their own conclusions.

Here is a summary of the results.

Finally, again, I do NOT mean for this post or the survey results to be advocating for anything. I wanted to hear more from these 1,700 people. I sent the survey. Now everyone has the results.