We the People (petitioning system)
Website logo (2011)
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Screenshot
Screenshot of website homepage (2017)
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Type of site
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Government site |
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| Available in | English |
| Owner | U.S. Government |
| Created by | Obama Administration |
| Slogan(s) | Your Voice in the White House (2017) |
| Website | petitions.whitehouse.gov |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Required |
| Launched | September 22, 2011 |
| Current status | Active |
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Content license
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Public domain |
| Written in | Drupal 7 |
| IP address | 23.206.248.110 |
We the People, launched September 22, 2011, is a section of the whitehouse.gov website for petitioning the administration's policy experts. Petitions that met a certain threshold of signatures were typically reviewed by Administration officials who prepared and issued official responses, however, this was not always the case (see Criticism). Criminal justice proceedings in the United States and other processes of the federal government are not subject to White House website petitions. We the People, rather, served as a public relations device for the Obama administration to provide a venue for citizens to express themselves. On August 23, 2012, the White House Director of Digital Strategy Macon Phillips released the source code for the platform. The source code is available on GitHub, and lists both public domain status as a work of the U.S. federal government and licensing under the GPL v2.
Users who wish to create a petition are required to register a free whitehouse.gov account. To sign a petition, users only need to provide their name and their email address, and they will receive an email with a link that they must click to confirm their signature. It is not necessary to have a whitehouse.gov account to sign a petition.
Under the Obama administration's rules, a petition had to reach 150 signatures within 30 days to be searchable on whitehouse.gov and had to reach 100,000 signatures within 30 days to receive an official response. The original threshold was set at 5,000 signatures on September 1, 2011, was raised to 25,000 on October 3, 2011, and raised again to 100,000 as of January 15, 2013. The White House typically would not comment when a petition concerned an ongoing investigation.
"It’s unclear whether Trump’s advisors will make a tradition of publicly responding to petitions from the American people," Dell Cameron wrote for the Daily Dot on the day that Trump was inaugurated, noting that the Trump administration that same day "archived" (that is, deactivated) all petitions in progress on the 'We the People' site. New petitions were created, but only two petitions—both created on Inauguration Day—soared above the 100,000-signature threshold within the Trump administration's first week, while other petitions created subsequently seemed not to count signatures at all.
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