On February 22nd, we welcomed twenty one programmers and tech experts to the White House and invited them to spend the day working alongside seven members of our own development team. Their goal was simple: to build tools using the new API for We the People, the White House petitions system, and contribute example code to a software development kit (SDK). For nine hours, these two groups clustered around each other's laptops, solving problems, sharing ideas, sharing code, and asking questions.
This was the first White House Open Data Day Hackathon.