No10 petitions system goes live
I’m very pleased to announce that the petitions system we’ve built for 10 Downing Street has gone live today.
I’m very grateful for the hard and often inspired work put into this by Chris Lightfoot and Matthew Somerville, as well as the civil servants who have helped to build a petitions system which I believe is in a real class of its own.
The most notable features are:
1. Petitions are accepted and published, regardless of the political slant of the petition. However, if they break the Ts&Cs (a petition that doesn’t actually ask for any action, for example) then they are put on a special rejected petitions page: they don’t just vanish. We think this transparency feature is probably unique.
2. The site is being launched in beta, and will change over time. This might seem too commonplace to note for many of you, but it reflects a willingness to see a public IT service evolve in response to users, not simply fulfil a contract agreed in advance. mySociety exists partly to spread good practice in the public sector, and we think this is a nice example of that in action.
3. The code, including Chris’s amazing high-load optimised engine, is all open source.
Any questions? Come into our chat channel at www.irc.mysociety.org or mail us at hello@mysociety.org.