Online Petitioning Software Made Public

Mar 31, 2010

Anika Kehrer

British organization Public-i has made its ePetitions software publicly available under European Public License (EUPL) on the Forge page of the Open Source Observatory and Repository Europe (OSOR) information service.

With the ePetitions software, based on PHP and MySQL, website managers can set up an online portal for users to submit, support and comment on petitions. According to Public-i, the software was created using Code Igniter, an open source development environment for PHP apps. The software has now found a home as a project on the OSOR website, where downloads of the source code already exist.

The release of the ePetitions program, according to Public-i's technical lead on the OSOR projects page, was "timed to coincide with the passing of the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act of which ePetitions are a central element." The 2009 act is currently in effect in the cities of Bristol and Birmingham, and case studies of ePetitions deployment from these and other cities are available on the Pulic-i website.

The ePetitions project is also a model project for the EU. Partly funded by the EU, it is part of the EuroPetition "eParticipation through Petitioning in Europe" project.

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