White House 'We the People' Site, Explained

The White House’s We the People website encourages visitors to submit and support petitions on policy issues they’re interested in -- and once a petition reaches a certain threshold of digital signatures, Administration officials get involved and issue a response. To discuss the website in more detail, White House Digital Strategy Director Macon Phillips participated in a Yahoo News chat on Wednesday, March 13, with Yahoo Columnist Chris Wilson.

Similar in format to a TweetChat, participants sent in questions, which were moderated by Wilson and answered by Phillips. Several questions were asked regarding the magic number a petition must reach before it prompts a response or action from the White House. While the number 100,000 was bandied about, Phillips pointed out that some issues still get attention, short of that number. "We are really excited to dig below the threshold and look for themes and individual petitions that have new ideas -- petitions shouldn't have to cross the threshold to have an impact necessarily,” he said. Phillips added that when issuing a response to a petition, staffers look for similar petitions so they can pass on the response to their creators too. According to Phillips, when people create a petition using the We the People system, they will be notified if a similar petition already exists so that duplicate efforts can be avoided.