Last Saturday marked 100 days since the new e-petitions service was launched by GDS and the Office of the Leader of the House of Commons. The service continues to be incredibly popular -on average 18 people have signed an e-petition every minute since the service started.
e-petitions also maintains a very high social and mainstream media profile, with significant television and press coverage, especially when a petition nears or reaches the 100,000 signatures threshold required to trigger a debate in Parliament.
There isn’t much of a pattern in terms of traffic to e-petitions on a day to day or week to week basis, with the range of daily visitor numbers to the site fluctuating between 2,000 and 350,000. It’s also interesting to note that approximately half of all submitted e-petitions are rejected for failing to meet the service’s terms and conditions - including duplication, defamation and relating to things the government can’t act on.
As I write there have been six e-petitions that have achieved the target of 100,000 signatures (one of which has now closed) and are now eligible for debate in the House of Commons.
Of the six e-petitions which have passed the 100,000 threshold, two have been debated (the London riots and Hillsborough petitions), two are scheduled to be debated (Fuel Duty and Babar Ahmad – as part of a wider extradition debate) and one has been accepted for debate but will not be scheduled until the new year (Immigration). The only other outstanding petition, financial education in schools, is waiting for an MP to approach the Backbench Business Committee (who schedule e-petition debates), which should happen this month.
Despite some initial concerns voiced in social media (and ironically the subject of a number of e-petitions) that 100,000 signatures was too high, it is interesting to note that most of the petitions that have reached this target, have done so within one week - despite a 12 month allowance. Sitting and watching the Twitter stream when popular e-petitions receive media coverage or other high profile promotion, it’s easy to see how.
Commenting on these statistics, the Leader of the House of Commons, Sir George Young MP, said
“I welcome the positive public response to the e-petitions site, which is an important way of building a bridge between people and Parliament.”
The special relationship
Not long after we launched e-petitions, the White House announced they are were also about to launch an online petitions service - ‘We the people’. In doing so, they acknowledged having kept a keen eye on our work with e-petitions. Although there are enough differences in the way the systems operate to make direct comparisons a bit misleading (the US target for a response is 25,000 signatures, just increased from 5,000; you get a formal response in the US rather than a formal debate in the UK; and the US, of course, has about five times the population of the UK) a quick look at the numbers can still be instructive.
‘We the People’ received 12,000 petitions and collected 1.2 million signatures in just over a month, at around 31,000 per day. Some quick number crunching shows a similar volume and rate of petitions and signatures between the two services in the early days.
What does this tell us? Well, what it does make clear is that there is a real appetite for online petitioning and that the widespread use of social media can make them a powerful tool for engaging with governments.
Iteration, iteration, iteration
Since we launched e-petitions, we’ve made a number of improvements to the service, including updates to the FAQ list, the addition of a feedback mechanism, increasing capacity to meet the higher than expected demand and fixing the issues we faced on launch. As a result of this feedback, we are engaging across government and planning a release to add some of the more commonly requested features from users, ensuring that e-petitions continues to meet their needs. At that point, we’ll share the open source code. Here’s to the next 100 days….
Peter Herlihy is the Product Manager for e-petitions and Delivery Manager for the @GovUK corporate platform.
17 comments
Comment by Michelle posted on
Please can you clarify at what age a person can sign an e-petition?
Comment by Pete Herlihy posted on
There's currently no minimum age for signing petitions. As long as you have your own email address, and are a UK citizen or resident you're able to support petitions.
Comment by Michelle posted on
Thank you
Comment by Dorothy Allcock posted on
Sorry can't make much sense of this page. Was looking for petitions but couldn't find them. None of my friends know anything about e petitions. Wonder why not! They are generally knowledgeable, well educated people.
Comment by Carrie Barclay posted on
Hi Dorothy
Thank you for your comment. This blog post was written in November 2011, so the information may now be out of date. The House of Commons and the government are working together on some important changes to e-petitions. We expect the petitions service to be back in early July 2015.
Comment by Happy birthday e-petitions – a year in numbers | Government Digital Service posted on
[...] the very first product delivered by GDS and last week it celebrated its first birthday. Pete Herlihy, product owner for e-petitions [...]
Comment by innannna posted on
Reblogged this on My Blog and commented:
This is some idea !
Comment by How Latvia turns online petitions into policy « RODRIGO DAVIES posted on
[...] The UK government, for its part, says it will consider petitions that receive more than 100,000 signatures for debate in parliament, and any British citizen can sign, regardless of age – that means you need the support of 0.16% of the population to be considered by MPs. Actually getting the issue debated is another matter, but there’s been sufficient press and public interest for some high profile petitions to reach parliament. [...]
Comment by Project Ideas by iancremona - Pearltrees posted on
[...] e-petitions: the first 100 days | Government Digital Service Iteration, iteration, iteration Since we launched e-petitions, we’ve made a number of improvements to the service, including updates to the FAQ list , the addition of a feedback mechanism , increasing capacity to meet the higher than expected demand and fixing the issues we faced on launch . [...]
Comment by What happened at the 2nd AgileTea camp? | Government Digital Service posted on
[...] they only had 10 working days to deliver the service to deadline. Since it went live there have been over 6.5 million visitors and 30 million page views - producing 21,500 e-petitions and collecting 2.6 million [...]
Comment by Don’t mention the EU. Don’t mention the EU! DON’T MENTION THE EU!! « Kevin Townsend posted on
[...] The report goes on to talk about the success of the system: Of the six e-petitions which have passed the 100,000 threshold, two have been debated (the London riots and Hillsborough petitions), two are scheduled to be debated (Fuel Duty and Babar Ahmad – as part of a wider extradition debate) and one has been accepted for debate but will not be scheduled until the new year (Immigration). The only other outstanding petition, financial education in schools, is waiting for an MP to approach the Backbench Business Committee (who schedule e-petition debates), which should happen this month. e-petitions: the first 100 days [...]
Comment by Andrew Brigthwell posted on
Hi Peter, Is there any way of getting hold of the data? It'd be lovely to have a good look at the numbers.
Comment by Peter Herlihy posted on
Andrew, good question. Some of it, yes. Some of it (personal detail), no.
We haven't yet developed the detailed reporting that will allow us to produce and share the data we collect (of course, we have the raw data). This is high on the list of things we are likely to do in the next release, currently being scheduled, but ought to be in the next couple of months.
Comment by UK Government e-petitions site gets 18 signatures a minute | Digital Politico posted on
[...] Government’s e-petition site is 100 days old, and in a blogpost reporting back on the milestone Product Manager Peter Herlihy reported that “on average 18 people have signed an e-petition [...]
Comment by Gov justifies e-petitions as MPs mull upping debate threshold :: WES Computing posted on
[...] a post on the government digital service blog, Peter Herlihy – delivery manager for the GovUK corporate platform [warning: this project [...]
Comment by Fraser posted on
Thanks for your update (and stas!). Conversely, a recent study from Brunel on the effectiveness of local (e)Petition facilities has revealed that the number of local petitions has increased very slowly. In my opinion there should be more flow and syndication between local and central systems. For example, how many petitions have been rejected or need to be re-directed? How will this work with the digital dimension of the European Citizens Initiative?
Likewise, why wasn't the formal ePetition interoperability standard adopted?
..but what I really want to know is - what was the equality of users like? Is this a tool for the elite?
Comment by Peter Herlihy posted on
Hi Fraser,
Thanks for taking the time to comment. I agree with you that we should do more to improve the flow between local and central petitioning. As you note, there are a number of e-petitions coming in that are not in the gift of central government to act on, a number of which are local government issues as as such are being rejected from e-petitions. If a petition is rejected on these grounds, it would be great to 'refer' these to a more appropriate place. A capability we haven't yet delivered in the service.
It is an evolving product, we continue to iterate and we have learned a lot already. We are also working with, and feeding our thoughts into, the development of the ECI, who are interested in the lessons that we have learned.
Regards e-petition being a tool for the elite and questioning the equality of users: I think the incredibly broad range of topics that e-petitions have been created about, tell us that there is a diverse range of users. We may take an opportunity to introduce some snap survey at some point to validate that, as your point is a very important one, this tool should be for everyone.