A common complaint about the U.S. government is that lawmakers, cooped up in their offices in Washington, D.C., are ignorant of many of the most pressing issues facing the American people. They spend hours debating bills that don’t address fundamental problems, and there is no way for citizens to collectively inform them that they are off track.
As more and more people began to draw attention to the potential of the Internet to connect citizens and lawmakers and rectify this problem, the federal government decided to take action. The White House created a system called We the People that allows citizens to submit petitions that they want lawmakers to acknowledge and act upon. If a petition receives enough signatures (100,000 now, formerly 25,000 and 5,000), the White House promises to at the very least write a response to it, and where possible take further action.
We the People certainly has some good qualities. It has a nice user interface that surfaces petitions that have recently cleared 150 signatures – the minimum required for them to be publicly visible – enabling such new petitions to gain further traction; allows users to search over the text of petitions or filter them by popularity or issue; facilitates easy creation of new petitions; and supports easy sharing of petitions on Twitter or Facebook. In fact, the source code of the website is on GitHub and users can submit suggested changes to the code. From the perspective of Benkler’s “Networked Public Sphere,” the system successfully takes advantage of the Web to unite people from across the country behind common issues. My only criticism on this front is that it doesn’t have facilities for users to comment on and discuss the texts of petitions so that they can be improved, which would make the interactions among participants richer than they are now, since interactions now mostly involve agreement by signing.
The main criticisms of We the People revolve around the responsiveness of the government to petitions that have cleared the signature threshold. In most cases the White House provides a few words affirming its general commitment to the principles outlined in the petition, without any concrete details or plans of action. For example, one petition requested that during his visit to India President Obama ask Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi why the Indian constitution does not recognize Sikhs. It received a response that praised Obama for “underscoring that India’s success depended on the nation not being splintered along the lines of religious faith” and made no mention of Sikhs. It seems to me that these frequent non-responses have only led to more and more extreme petitions (e.g. “begin a Justice Department investigation of Congressman Boehner for illegal activities under the Logan Act”), creating an growing divide between the requests in the petitions and what the government is willing to do.
One other criticism of the system is that since Web literacy is not yet universal in America, the petitions reflect the needs and interests of a subset of the American people. In particular, niche issues that are relevant to those in the tech community are far more likely to clear the signature threshold than, say, issues relevant to poor youth. For example, one petition requested the government to fire Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. District Attorney who prosecuted hacktivist Aaron Swartz for his downloading of large volumes of copyrighted content on MIT’s network and who some say caused his subsequent suicide. It received over 60,000 signatures and got a response from the government, even though Aaron Swartz was known primarily among those in the tech community. The only major success story stemming from a We the People petition – the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act, which legalized cell phone unlocking – is also fittingly in the realm of technology.
On the whole, I have mixed opinions about We the People but think it is at least a step in the right direction in terms of greater government engagement with the American people through the Web.