Wow.
Planning for the new We the People platform, we were confident the system would ultimately get a lot of use, but we expected it would take a little longer to get out into the ether and pick up speed.
Let's just say our estimates were … ahem … a wee bit on the low side! In one week, more than 7,800 petitions have been created, more than 600,000 signatures have been logged and more than 375,000 people have created an account to participate in this platform. It's by far the biggest online engagement event ever for the White House – and we're just getting started.
That's what you call a good problem to have. Here's one thing we're doing to address it:
The massive participation on We the People means that in the first week over 30 petitions reached 5,000 signatures, the initial threshold to generate an official response from the White House. At our first internal review meeting Friday, two things were clear: (a) everyone is thrilled about this new challenge and excited to process the first batch, but (b) this many petitions challenges our ability to offer timely and meaningful responses to petitions in the long term.
So starting now, the threshold a petition has to reach in order to generate an official response is 25,000 signatures in 30 days. This change only affects petitions created from this point forward, and will not be applied to petitions of any signature count already in the system.
This may not be the last time we change the thresholds, both in terms of signatures and amount of time. And we're also evaluating a number of other ways to improve the system, many based on ideas we've received from you. Since we launched We the People we’ve been reading your feedback submitted via the feedback form on the We the People platform and through the Twitter hashtag #WHWeb.
Here are a few answers to questions and issues we’ve seen over the last few days:
Fonte: White House