Steve Grunwell

Open-source contributor, speaker, and electronics tinkerer

Tag: API

Looking out from the Smithsonian Natural Science museum on a foggy day

Petition The People

Built for the second annual National Day of Civic Hacking, Petition The People leverages the We The People Write API to collect signatures on WTP petitions. Petition The People makes it easy to collect signatures while canvassing or at events, and is built responsively so it looks as great on a phone or tablet as it does the desktop.

The app is targeted at advocacy groups and organizations who might want to draw attention to more than one issue at a time, so organizations are able to create what I named “Campaigns,” consisting of one or more petition. Each campaign has its own unique URL, and users are presented with the body of each petition. After selecting at least one of the campaign’s petitions to sign, a single signature form is presented. This enables a user to sign multiple petitions at once, rather than manually entering their information across several petitions.

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We The People WordPress Plugin

In early 2013 the White House released an API for their We The People petition site. In the spring they announced the National Day of Civic Hacking, set for June 1, 2013, and to celebrate were accepting applications to attend a hackathon on the grounds of the White House. I submitted a proposal for a WordPress plugin to embed petitions via shortcodes and widgets. To my surprise my plugin was approved and I was invited to attend the hackathon in Washington D.C.

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National Day of Civic Hacking at the White House

This past weekend I was invited to attend the second-ever hackathon at the White House as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. The goal of the hackathon was to build cool applications and visualizations around the recently-released We The People API. As a result I built and released the We The People WordPress plugin, which enables WordPress users to easily embed petitions from We The People using shortcodes and widgets.

You can read all about my day at the White House on the Buckeye Interactive blog. The plugin source and my presentation from the hackathon are both available on Github.

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