Author: Peter Welsch

On the first weekend in June, civic activists, technology experts, and entrepreneurs around the country will gather together for the National Day of Civic Hacking. By combining their expertise with new technologies and publicly released data, participants hope to build tools that help others in their own neighborhoods and across the United States.

It's a great cause and we're excited to take part. On June 1, we'll welcome developers and tech experts to the White House for our second hackathon. 

The last time we did this, it was a huge success. We hosted 21 participants who built apps and visualizations based on the new API for We the People — the White House petition system. The White House development team drew on feedback from the hackthaon to improve the API and is adding code from its projects to a software development kit (SDK). 

For the National Day of Civic Hacking, participants will focus on producing full, production ready apps and visualization tools that will be featured on the We the People website and made available under an open source license.

Apply for the National Day of Civic Hacking at the White House.

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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. 

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Since we launched We the People, our team of developers has been hard at work on the code that makes the whole thing tick. Good thing, too! More than 2 million users joined We the People in the last two months of 2012 alone and some 6 million of you have logged in to the system and left more than 10 million signatures. That's a lot of citizen engagement for one application to handle, but it's done well, and we continue to release updates to the source code on GitHub and Drupal.org

Today, though, we're starting the next stage of We the People's development. I'm pleased to announce that Petitions 1.0, the code that We the People runs on, is complete. We're now working towards Petitions 2.0. 

In software development, when you go from one version number to another it means that something big is going on. We're taking a new approach to how the application works, one that starts with the assumption that it should be as open, transparent, and flexible as possible. 

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