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White House Releases Video From ‘We The People’ API Hackathon

We the People, is essentially a practical manifestation of the First Amendment in today’s digital world. Its website is routinely used by Americans all around the nation to file petitions directly with the White House. Recently, a ‘We The People’ API hackathon was brought together and now, White House has dished out a video of the event.

We the people

Normally, hackathons are fairly popular events and hundreds of hackers flock to such events to take a part in them. However, the We The People API hackathon was fairly small, comprising of only 22 participants.

During the course of the event, the participants came up with creative tools which would enable users to easily access and effectively utilize the White House petition system. The end goal was to increase the users’ accessibility towards the petition system and to empower them to file and monitor their petitions effectively enough and then ask others to sign them.

Writing about the many projects that were shown off by the participants, a post on White House’s official blog reads, “Among them was Mick Thompson, who created Where the People, a time-lapse visualization of zip codes where petitions are being signed, weighted for signatures by percentage of population. Douglas Back built Widget the People, a tool that lets you create an embeddable thermometer showing how many signatures your petition needs before it reaches the response threshold. Catherine D’Ignazio developed an embeddable map that shows where signatures came from, right down to the zip code level. Yoni Ben-Meshulam’s R We the People is a package for the R statistics environment that allows users to generate word clouds and visualize the issues that petitions are created about over time.”

You can watch the video posted below to see brief snippets of each participant describing his/her project and citing how it would help the ‘We The People’ system.

Source: White House

Courtesy: Venture Beat

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