The White House has just announced its second National Day of Civic Hacking, to take place at the White House. It will take place on June 1st.
“For the National Day of Civic Hacking, participants will focus on producing full, production ready apps and visualization tools that will be featured on the We the People website and made available under an open source license.”
The first hack day took place in February, and out of it came various uses of the We The People API including “Where the People,” a visualization of zip codes where petitions are being signed, weighted for signatures by percentage of population, and “Widget the People,” which gives petition creators an embeddable gauge of how many signatures the petition needs before it reaches the response threshold.
“This API is part of an effort, not only to broaden the conversation taking place via We the People, but to make the medium of that conversation as flexible, open, and transparent as possible. By building and releasing applications that leverage the API, and by making it possible for other platforms to connect with We the People, you’ll be making it easier for others to take part in that conversation,” says Peter Welsch on the White House blog.
The White House launched the We The People online petition site back in 2011. Since then, the site has seen nearly 10 million signatures on close to 150,000 thousand individual petitions. It hasn’t been without its criticisms, and its share of ridiculous petitions – but recently, since upping the signature threshold, the White House has responded on a couple of important tech issues like CISPA and cellphone unlocking.
If you’re interested, you can apply here. The deadline for applications is 5:00 pm on Friday, April 19th.