When Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Patrick Kennedy announced his intention to challenge Jack Evans for the Ward 2 D.C. Council seat, people reached out to his campaign to ask how they could donate, says campaign treasurer Marina Streznewski.

“We were like, ‘Can you wait a little while?'” Streznewski says.

That’s because Kennedy’s campaign is the first in D.C. history to use a new public financing program that is being implemented by the D.C. Office of Campaign Finance, and it’s clear that the agency is still working out a few kinks.

For Kennedy (or any candidate for a ward-level race) to be eligible for the program, his campaign needs to raise $5,000 from 150 donors who live in the District. Then, he’ll get a base grant of $40,000 and receive public funds at a 5 to 1 match. In other words, he’d get $5 in public funds for every $1 from a D.C. resident. (Other local political races, like mayor, have higher donation requirements and earn larger base grants.) Supporters of public financing in elections say that the measure empowers residents and dulls the power of big-money donors.

But as Streznewski explains and Washington City Paper reported, OCF provided them with conflicting information about how they were supposed to gather donor information.

“We’ve been having problems figuring out how to take donations online, which is how everybody does everything,” says Streznewski. “The hitch was OCF wanted a written signature and we had worked out kind of a kludgy mechanism for doing that.”

She says that, while early donors were Kennedy’s friends and family, and likely willing to go the extra mile of filling out an extra form, scanning it, and emailing it back, “it’s not a solution for the long term.” Streznewski feared donors might not go through that laborious process, and therefore not be counted towards that 150 necessary to secure the funding. “It would have made online fundraising very, very difficult.”

Now, though, there’s a solution to that issue. According to both Streznewski and Wesley Williams, a spokesperson for OCF, the Kennedy campaign and the agency met on Wednesday and figured out a compromise: the online form includes a space for donors to type their names, and that electronic signature will be sufficient.

“We saw the platform that they were going to use for online contributions, and it will work,” says Williams. “With each contribution, [campaigns] are required to provide signature cards—either physical or digital signatures—and a receipt is created. We’ll have to upload that into our system.”

Williams says the online system that OCF currently has in place has various warnings that show whether candidates are going over the contribution limit, whether an address is verified, “just to guide the filer and to assist us when we’re reviewing the report.” To accomodate public financing, “right now we’re tweaking the system.” The agency has posted regulations regarding public financing on the D.C. Register, where they still have a week of public comment left.

The next finance report is due to OCF on July 31, which is when campaigns can start getting certified for the public financing program.

Streznewski says that, after this first hiccup, “We were annoyed, but everybody is keeping in mind the fact that Patrick is the very first candidate to run under the Fair Elections Act. We knew we were going to be guinea pigs, we knew there were going to be problems … Everybody has agreed to be nice to everybody else, and we’re all in this together. We’re all going to be talking to each other a lot.”