Update August 2019: Another petition about proroguing/suspending parliament has been taking off and got 1,000,000 signatures in a day! So I’ve updated this list with some resources related to that as well.
Note that many of the tools listed here have a 6-digit petition ID in the URL, so if you change that from 241584 to 269157 you’ll get the equivalent analysis/data for the proroguing petition. Happy petitioning!
A couple of years back I was intrigued by the seemingly-very-uniform growth of a large and fast-growing government petition. The government’s petitions site gives you the data in a quite usable form (called JSON) but it’s only an instantaneous snapshot of values. It doesn’t record the history of the petition’s growth.
So I built a little tool to collect the number of signatures every 5 minutes and store it so I could plot charts of growth.
Now…you may have noticed that a little petition has gone a bit “viral” in the last couple of days! So I kinda turn, temporarily, into petition data geek.
And it’s not just me that is tracking it. Various other people are doing interesting things with the data. So here’s a little list of Revoke Article 50 petition resources. If you want to add yours then drop me a line.
Tracking over time
- My petition tracker (will track any petition you tell it to): https://petition-track.uk/check-petition/241584
- ODI Leeds Tracker (seems to be a one-off for this petition): https://odileeds.org/projects/petitions/241584
- Theo Sanderson has made a simple tracker with a real-time counter too: https://splasho.com/petitions/index.php?petition=241584
- Matt Williams has taken my data and made much better rate-of-change (signatures-per-minute) charts from it and added some simple growth predictions: http://petitionstats.eu/
- Jonty Wareing has made a simple predictor of when the next million will be hit: https://predictition.jonty.now.sh/
- Carl Hughes has made a Twitter bot that tweets out the number of signatures every 15 mins or so: https://twitter.com/revoke50bot (there are several of these now!)
- “Ben” has a tracking spreadsheet he’s updating manually every now and then. More in-depth; less real-time.
Mapping
- ODI Leeds Hex Map: https://odileeds.org/projects/petitions/?241584
- Unboxed Consulting’s UK map: https://petitionmap.unboxedconsulting.com/?petition=241584&area=uk
- Not quite a map, but Live from Brexit have put together an excellent real-time counter with constituency breakdowns and everything. Really good: https://www.livefrombrexit.com/petitions/241584
- https://revoke.info have added postcode search and constituency data to the petition data so you can see what’s happening in your area. UPDATE: This also has the results of the “indicative votes” on 27th March.
SEE ALSO: https://prorogue.info/ for an equivalent tool for the proroguing petition.
Analysis
- “Brit or Bot” have some good analysis trying to show signatures are not by foreign bots: https://britorbot.org/2019/03/22/revoke-article-50-petition/
- Jamie Whyte has compared the Revoke A50 petition to the previous-largest EU Referendum petition from 2016: http://propolis.io/dataviz/referendum_vs_petition/tool.html
Commentary
- Pete Moorey has asked “What’s the point of petitions?”: https://medium.com/@petemoorey/whats-the-point-of-petitions-9b4602db5025
Fun things
- Remain vs Leave petition tracker: https://brexit-petitions-count.now.sh/
Code. AKA: “I think you’re confusing ‘Interesting’ with ‘Boring'”
- The open-source code for the petitions site: https://github.com/alphagov/e-petitions
- Richard Gooch has some Python analysis showing MPs for whom more constituents signed the petition than voted for them in 2017, as well as MPs for whom more constituents signed the petition than their 2017 majority. https://gitlab.com/goochyr/revoke-article-50-petition-analysis