We The People seems to have embraced a release early and often approach to web development. I think this is actually a great approach, but it needs to be done so openly, to help set expectations and to manage feedback about problems or needed features. This is particularly true since the President has already pledged to make this platform open source for others to use. A public bug tracker is part of the backbone of an open source project and it should be for this service as well.

I shouldn't conflate the idea of a support forum and a software bug tracker though. I think there should be a public ticketing system that is specific to this implementation of the software and separately there should be a public bug tracker for development of the main software codebase.

A significant portion of petitions that received enough signatures violated the terms of use and were not eligible for a response. This includes peititons that cover legal matters that the Executive Office of the President is legally prevented from commenting on. There are also many petitions that seem to be redundant with other petitions including ones that have already been answered.

The submission processes should do as much as it can to inform authors of new petitions of these issues to ensure that they don't feel misled by the opportunity presented by this platform.

A good example of a platform that does this is Quora, though Uservoice and Get Satisfaction does some of this as well. These platforms analyze the text of new entries before they're submitted to see if similar entries already exist. Some, like Quora, also do additional analysis to look for key words and correct question and grammar structure to help ensure that submissions are worded in a way that meets the intent and quality standards of the platform. If they're not, it helps guide the user through better wording.

A similar process could be used to look for entries that don't meet the Terms of Service for We The People, but I think the larger strategy of helping to phrase petitions correctly is also very important.

Let's agree that a communication requiring .gov to respond has inherent value e.g. https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions. The bad news is that unless this site catches on it will disappear in 1 to 5 years along with its value as the Internet voice of the 99% and 1% alike.

Minimally, 2 things are needed to enlarge user base and develop site loyalty so users become advocates for preserving this value.

1) People are at their best when they interact and collaborate. So, take a cue from social nets and encourage people to collaborate on every aspect of developing petition... from initial vague idea to submitting petition. This will help improve petition quality and focus. Also each interaction is an object lesson in civil discourse (something most of us could benefit from)

2) Government should not own or manage .gov/petitions sites. Rather, it should define operational and civil discourse standards in a way that stimulates .coms and .orgs to innovate their own .../petitions sites. Government agrees to "listen" to sites that comply with standards.

.gov/petitions is a tremendous gift to the American people and one we need to protect.

Think Facebook of political discourse.

The White House petitions capability has the opportunity to open up new conversations between Federal officials and all of the rest of us, conversations that bring new issues and new perspectives on those issues to the attention of the government and that educate people on how an issue is viewed not just by government but also by their fellow Americans.

As JH Snider put it:
"The democratic purpose of the We The People website ...should be to help put new issues on the public agenda that aren't already there by making it easier for politically underrepresented groups to mobilize themselves."

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jh-snider/what-is-the-democratic-fu_b_1018865.html]

Unforunately, Federal action on petitions, and White House action in particular, does not "scale". If ten, then one hundred, then one thousand petitions cross the "response required" threshold, the Executive staff to develop those responses neither expands nor becomes orders of magnitude more efficient in developing those responses.

However, the building of communities and conversations around those issues can be made to scale.

Currently, WeThePeople provides no support for discussion around the petitions nor for the building of communities that care about these issues. Providing a discussion and resource facilities for each petition that reaches the public threshold would build conversation and community while each petition is private. Providing tools to allow later petitions to draw on the communities formed for earlier petitions would build the issue conversation and community across petitions.

**Facilities to support each petition**

1. Create a discussion board for each petition, modelled on sites such as Hacker News and Stackexchange Adapt the upvoting and reputation systems from these sites, but weight the reputation so that the preponderance (75%, say), is based on the discussion for this particular petition, 20% is based on discussions in this issue area (e.g. Telecommunications or Civil Liberties), at 5% is based on participation in any Petitions discussion. The goal is to create an incentive for people to participate in a useful way across the site, but also to give newcomers a way into the conversation without being drowned out by the old hands with high reputations.

To see what could be accomplished in terms of discussion breadth and quality, see, for example, this Hacker News discussion about Japan's current nuclear problems[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2318980] and this Stackexchange discussion [http://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/9581/what-are-the-most-important-things-to-check-do-after-buying-a-home] about what to consider and test before buying a home.

2. Supplement the discussion for each petition with a pre-structured wiki, modeled on Wikipedia and Stackexchange, that can be elaborated by anyone - as regulated by their reputation.

Offices throughout the Federal Government should be encouraged to post resources relevant ot the issue, including feeds and mailing lists.

**Facilitaties to support conversation and community-building across petitions**

1. Notifications. Allow people who sign Petition X to "opt in" to notifications regarding that petition.

2. Community overlap rewarded with opt-in to opt-out transition. When more than, say 30 signers of petition X also sign petition Y, notify everyone who signed petition X and who opted in to general notifications of Petition Y and its discussion group. Of course, the X signers can still opt out of notifications regarding Petition Y. If, say, more than 30% of the X signers then opt out of "Y notification", turn off the automatic notification feature driving notifications from Y to X.

3. Interest area subscriptions. Allow WeThePeople members to subscribe to a feed or email list providing the newly published petitions in a particular issue area, filtered additionally and optionally by keyword. And of course allow people -- whether they have signed a particular petition or not -- to subscribe to notifications about that petition.

4. Provide RSS feeds of each petition's wiki and discussion that allow third-party sites to incorporate this content easily, to provide more ways for communities already active on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and elsewhere to follow conversations of interest to them.

[This draws on the discussion for Lucas's suggestion "Empower citizens to deliberate on each petition" - http://wethepeople.uservoice.com/forums/134454-improving-we-the-people/suggestions/2269580-empower-citizens-to-deliberate-on-each-petition]

The democratic value of creating, promoting, and signing a petition is not merely reaching the 25,000 signature threshold and getting the White House to provide an official reaction. Much of the value is educating the public that a critical mass of Americans believe an issue is important enough to sign a petition. This value is lost if the White House removes petitions from its public website after 30 days. The White House should not only publicly archive petitions after the 30 day deadline but clearly state in its terms of participation what its petition records retention and accessibility policy is.

--J.H. Snider, iSolon.org

The "We the People" site supports the popular conception of the White House as the Emerald City, with an all powerful wizard at the center. But the reality is that the Executive is constrained - as it should be - by laws and regulations, and that power is shared with a variety of Departments and agencies, Congress and the Courts, and state and local governments.

Respond to petitions by identifying the various relevant constraints and pressure points for change. For instance, in addressing "Restore democracy by ending corporate personhood" <http://wh.gov/g5Y>, identify the role of the Supreme Court in passing Citizens United, the relevant Congressional committees where legislation might begin,
and any significant measures that could be taken at the state level.

In the long term, consider co-hosting petitions relevant to particular agencies on "We the People" sites specific to those agencies. E.g. allow a "We the People" branch at FCC to co-host sign-ups for the Internet competition petition <http://wh.gov/gJd>.

To get a sense of which reforms to We The People are highly desired by users of We The People and should be included in a final set of recommendations, create a petition on We The People to improve We The People. An example, which is available at http://wh.­gov/2VA, reads as follows:

We petition the Obama Administra­tion to increase to 180 days the days allowed to get enough signatures (currently 25,000) for an official White House response.

The explanatio­n accompanyi­ng the petition reads as follows:

Currently, We The People only allows 30 days for gathering enough signatures to reach the 25,000 threshold to receive an official response. This was hard enough to do when the White House set the threshold at 5,000 signatures­. Now it is much harder. No good democratic rationale exists for such a rush: the quality of petitions does not increase as the time period allowed to sign them is decreased from 180 to 30 days. Instead, the shorter time period primarily disenfranc­hises a large part of the population that may need time to mobilize support. The democratic rationale for We The People should be simple: use new technology to allow politicall­y underrepre­sented groups to mobilize support. The short time period to gather signatures is incompatib­le with that purpose.

While adding the ability to discuss petitions on the site, as already suggested, is a good idea, the reality is that - especially on the topics that attract a lot of signatures - most of the discussion is going to happen elsewhere on the web. There needs to be a way to tie this discussion to the petition. On a blog, you can display trackbacks - links to other pages that linked to that blog post. On each petition, there should be a list of blogs, newspaper articles and anything else that has linked to that petition. This will allow people reading the petition to read around the issue and be better informed before voting.