Government releases We the People API

From IT World:

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for the digital team at the White House. Last week they expanded their already large social media footprint by joining Tumblr. Then, yesterday, they announced the release of an API for their open source petition platform, We the People.

Since being launched in September, 2011, We the People has been used to create more than 200,000 petitions and gather more than 13 million signatures. The new API currently allows read-only access to data on petitions with at least 150 signatures. It allows you to query petitions based on date created, title/body text, signature count and status. You can also query signatures for a given petition and filter the results based on signee location and date. The API currently limits queries to 10 requests per second, though there are plans for a bulk data download and a write API in the near future.