Starting today, people can sign We the People petitions even when they’re not on WhiteHouse.gov. Now, users can also use third-party platforms, including other petitions services, or even their own websites or blogs. All of those signatures, once validated, will count towards a petition’s objective of meeting the 100,000-signature threshold needed for an official White House response.

We the People started with a simple goal: to give more Americans a way to reach their government. To date, the platform has been more successful than we could have imagined, with more than 16 million users creating and signing more than 360,000 petitions.

We launched our Write API beta test last year, and since then we’ve been hard at work, both internally and in collaboration with our beta test participants. Last spring, as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking, we hosted a hackathon right here at the White House, where our engineers spent a day sitting side-by-side with our beta testers to help get our code and theirs ready for the big day.

That big day has finally come.

Click here if you want to get started right away, or read on to learn more about the Petitions Write API.

What can you do with the API?

The Write API enables people who want to sign White House petitions and engage in the conversation on We the People without visiting WhiteHouse.gov. Instead, users can use or build an interface that’s more suited to their own needs and issues.

This is where it gets exciting: In addition to expanding the audience and making it easier than ever to sign We the People petitions, the Write API opens up a host of new possibilities, such as new mobile apps and ways to sign petitions via social networking, or new possibilities we’ve yet to imagine.

We’ll be hosting additional hackathons in the future to highlight the opportunities on the platform, and to give the community the ability to collaborate around building new applications. 

Why is this important?

The Petitions Write API takes a strong step toward making it easier than ever for people to petition their government. At the same time, we also hope it serves as a model for a new way of delivering government services online. 

With that in mind, the Petitions API would not exist without the hard work of key federal agencies working on improving how people can use technology to engage with their government. Specifically, the Petitions API is built on infrastructure created and supported by the 18F Team at GSA, and pioneering work done by Presidential Innovation Fellows.

As a developer, how do I use the API?

The process is simple: You request a Write API key* here and agree to our Terms of Use; we review your application and issue you a key along with some introductory instructions, as well as how to test your code without affecting live petitions.

There are some rules you’ll need to follow when building or hosting applications that use the API.

Documentation for the API, as well as a gallery of previous API projects, is available at petitions.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/developers.

*Keys are not needed for the read-only functionality.

We couldn’t be more excited about what this means for We the People, and citizens’ ability to petition their government. Request a key and get started today.

We can’t wait to take part, which is why we're inviting developers and tech experts to the White House for an all-day (civic) hackathon on May 29.

Last year we hosted 30 participants who built apps and visualizations based on the new Petitions API for We the People -- the White House petitions system (check out some of those projects here). Feedback from the participants helped improve the API, and we’re adding code from their projects to a software development kit (SDK) to help others who want to start using the API too.

The focus of this year’s National Day of Civic Hacking event? Our Petitions Write API, which is currently in beta testing, and will help even more Americans make their voices heard -- allowing them to use the platform of their choice to reach the White House.

Participants will focus on building out new ways of signing petitions, shaking loose any bugs, and collaborating on ways to improve the API and We the People in general.

If you have the skills necessary to work with APIs and especially if you’ve developed on petitions platforms before, we want to hear from you.

Submit your application today.

The deadline for applications is 5:00 pm ET on Friday, May 9. Capacity is limited. Those selected to attend the hackathon in person will be notified by email and invited to join us at the White House on May 29.

Follow @WHWeb on Twitter for updates and details.

What a year it’s been!  Since that first exciting day, we’ve opened up seven more code repositories on GitHub (usually called “repos”), as well as several projects on Drupal.org too. In addition to the software for We The People, we’ve open sourced the White House’s official mobile apps, several Drupal modules, and even our API standards documentation. 

Of course one of the great things about open-source software is that anyone who wants to build something similar, or improve an existing application, can make a copy for themselves (known as “forking”) and even send us their improvements (called a “pull request”). And we really hope you’ll take advantage of that.

Get started at our developers page, where you can get information on how you can take part in all of our open source and open data initiatives.

And you won’t be alone. Over the past year, our repos have been forked more than 500 times, and we’ve taken nearly a dozen pull requests as we continuously work on improving the quality and re-usability of these applications as publicly and transparently as we can. In fact we’ve even hosted a couple of hackathons right here at The White House (hint: Follow @WHWeb on twitter to find out about future events like these).

But releasing the software was just the beginning. Back in May we announced the release of a read API for We The People, allowing you access to data on all of the publicly available petitions to build things like maps that show a petition’s geographic support, or widgets for promoting a petition on your blog, and a whole range of interesting data analysis.  If that weren’t enough, we’re now hard at work on the write version of the API.  Once that’s done it will allow you to submit signatures directly to We The People petitions from your own platforms.

We’re developing these APIs and soliciting valuable input from the developer community because we want to continue improving the experience of using The White House’s petitions platform and broadening the dialog that We The People represents. So we encourage you to take part by forking our code and sending us pull requests, by building apps and widgets with the API, and of course, by creating and signing petitions.  We’re excited to see what the next year brings!

To learn more about open data and open source projects at the White House, visit WhiteHouse.gov/Developers. Also, please feel free to contact us via the WhiteHouse.gov developers feedback form or to follow our tech team on Twitter @WHWeb.

And there's a lot we can learn from a set of data that rich and complex, but we shouldn't be the only people drawing from its lessons.

So starting today, we're making it easier for anyone to do their own analysis or build their own apps on top of the We the People platform. We're introducing the first version of our API, and we're inviting you to use it.

Get started here: petitions.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/developers

This API provides read-only access to data on all petitions that passed the 150 signature threshold required to become publicly-available on the We the People site. For those who don't need real-time data, we plan to add the option of a bulk data download in the near future. Until that's ready, an incomplete sample data set is available for download here.

A couple months ago, we invited a group of developers and tech experts to the White House for a hackathon to kick the tires on an early version of the API, and we've also published a gallery of some of those projects -- including links to live examples and GitHub repositories. You'll see maps that show the geographic support for a range of petitions, a time-lapse visualization of zip codes where petitions are being signed, an embeddable thermometer that shows progress toward crossing the signature threshold for any given petition, and a range of data analysis.

Coming up on June 1, as part of the National Civic Day of Hacking, we'll host another hackathon here at the White House. Today we're also making the GitHub repo open to the public -- where participants will be collaborating with each other and the White House development team.

This first version of the API is just the start, by the way. Now, we're turning our efforts to a Write API that will allow individuals to collect and submit signatures from their own platforms without directly sending users to We the People. After that, we'll work to decouple the presentation and data layers of the application and begin building a new, streamlined signature process. We hope you'll follow the process and continue offering your thoughts and feedback.

At its most basic, We the People is a conversation. Individuals ask questions of the White House, and the Obama administration responds. What this API allows us to do is broaden the discussion -- make it as flexible, open, and transparent as possible. And if you take the time to build a tool that leverages the API, you'll be making it easier for others to take part in this national dialogue.

So we hope you'll check it out.

To learn more about open data and open source projects at the White House, visit WhiteHouse.gov/Developers. Also, please feel free to contact us via the WhiteHouse.gov developers feedback form or to follow our tech team on Twitter @WHWeb.

Update: Go here to download the full We the People bulk dataset. 

Leigh Heyman is the Director of New Media Technologies for the Executive Office of the President.