What Happens Next for We the People
A half million petitions. Over 40 million signatures. Hundreds of responses. We the People has been a remarkable experiment in a new kind of democracy: transparent, accessible, and responsive. A way for anybody, from anywhere, to send a message directly to the White House — and, if they collected enough signatures, to receive a direct response. When we launched in 2011, we were excited to bring a new level of transparency and access to the Administration, but we weren’t sure what would happen.
I’m very proud of the work that was started by the Office of Digital Strategy years before I joined — and where we’ve taken We the People since.
Your petitions have inspired real change. They’ve lead to profound engagement between citizens and Administration officials at the highest levels. They’ve also served as an outlet for citizens to discuss the issues that resonant with them most deeply — we’ve seen petitions on issues ranging from the refugee crisis to gun violence to worker’s rights and more.
We’ve also seen you take petitions in exciting new directions. When we launched an API, we saw people take up our code and use it to build their own, standalone petition sites. We hosted a hack-a-thon where you created innovative tools to make using We the People even easier — like integration with Google Spreadsheets and a tool that helped people find petitions close to crossing the signature threshold. We also open-sourced the code so that others could continue to innovate on what we had created.
It was thrilling to watch We the People users push the platform in exciting new directions, but we also knew we were still only scraping the surface of what was possible.
Now, as President Obama’s time in office draws to a close, we’re taking some steps to make sure we are able to answer as many incoming petitions as possible. Here’s what that looks like:
1.) If a petition crosses the threshold of 100,000 signatures before January 5 at 11:59 p.m. ET, we will make every effort to respond. Starting on January 2nd, petitions can still launch and collect signatures, but we cannot guarantee a response from the Obama Administration.
2.) As we announced earlier this year, We the People — and all of our responses and petitions — will be available on an archived version of the site.
3.) While we’ve taken every step possible to make it easy for future administrations to carry on this tradition, it’s ultimately up to the incoming team. So, if you’re a developer currently using an API key, this may impact you.
I am extremely proud of the community we’ve helped cultivate with We the People and I am hopeful that future White Houses will further the mission we set in motion — specifically, enabling citizens to communicate directly and meaningfully with their government. This mission is exactly what President Obama strove to accomplish over the past eight years:
“Citizens should be engaged and empowered. That those in power should serve the people, not themselves.” — President Obama, video message to the Open Government Partnership Global Summit, December 12, 2016
The power to join together through platforms like We the People will continue to belong to the American people, who have always been the force behind the big changes that move our country and our world forward. There are also many exciting ways that others could build on this work — whether it’s state or local officials who develop similar platforms for their constituents or it’s empowered citizens to find other innovative ways to petition for change at every level of government.
Fueled by the spirit of the communities who work with these kinds of digital tools, the possibilities are endless.
