&quot;We The People&quot; open sourced by the White House (as in the Drupal We The People petitions application)

Friday, August 24, 2012

"We The People" open sourced by the White House (as in the Drupal We The People petitions application)

.net magazine - White House open sources petitions app

"Drupal 7 code base for tool for voters to create petitions made available on GitHub

The US government is increasingly a fan of open data and development

The White House has open-sourced the We The People petitions application. The application enables people to petition the Obama administration to take action on a range of issues. The project's readme.md file states: "Releasing the source code for this application is meant to empower other governments and organizations to use this platform to engage their own citizens and constituencies. In addition, public review and contribution to the application's code base will help strengthen and improve the platform."

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WhiteHouse / petition

We The People petitions application

Drupal 7 code base used to build an application that lets users create and sign petitions.

This application is under active development and will continue to be modified and improved over time. The current release is an "alpha" pending changes that will remove its dependency on MongoDB (see “Roadmap” section below).

Goals

President Obama is committed to creating the most open and participatory government in our nation’s history, and this petitioning platform is a key part of that initiative. In September, 2011, the White House launched We the People, a powerful and simple way to petition the Obama Administration to take action on a range of issues. If a petition gathers a minimum number of signatures in a defined amount of time, policy officials review it and publish an official response.

Among our commitments, we’re launching a new online tool -- called “We the People” -- to allow Americans to directly petition the White House, and we’ll share that technology so any government in the world can enable its citizens to do the same.

-- President Barack Obama, September 20, 2011

Releasing the source code for this application is meant to empower other governments and organizations to use this platform to engage their own citizens and constituencies. In addition, public review and contribution to the application’s code base will help strengthen and improve the platform.

Requirements

Drupal 7.x

MySQL 5.x

MongoDB 1.8

PHP 5.2 or 5.3

Recommended:

RAM +512 M

Dedicated MongoDB server (this dependency will be removed soon, see “Roadmap”)

Usage

Site visitors can create a user account, log in, and create petitions. Petition creators can share the URL for their petition to generate signatures. When the petition crosses a certain threshold, the petition becomes "public" and is listed as an open petition on the site's "open petitions" page.

Visitor can sign petitions. Petitions that receive a designated number of signatures (at the White House the number is 25,000 in one month) get a response.

For installation instructions, see INSTALL.md.

NOTE: Setting up the application and configuring it for use in your organization’s context requires Drupal development experience. The application ships with a similar design (theme) to what is used on petitions.whitehouse.gov and needs to be customized for use by others using standard Drupal 7 themeing conventions. The application also ships with various user interface elements, user account settings, and other configurations that users should expect to customize using standard Drupal 7 techniques and conventions.

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