The New We the People Write API, and What It Means for You

White House Blog by Leigh Heyman: “The White House petitions platform, We the People, just became more accessible and open than ever before. We are very excited to announce the launch of the “write” version of the Petitions Application Programming Interface, or “API.”
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….”