Researchers

The database of Petities.nl with 10 years of citizens actions is available for research.

The 2005-2015 dataset consists of:

• over 6 million signatures (timestamp, locality plus petition id)
• over 6000 petitions (timestamp open/close, status, text, number of signatures, 4 links to other sites)

The signatures are stripped from privacy sensitive information, making it difficult to find correlations. If you are interested in the correlations we have to program something. Contact us.

The petition consists of several text fields: introduction, sender (self description of signatories), observation and demand. The petition is consistently coded by us with one of these tags upon moderation, publication. The date of publication has a timestamp, but also the date the petition closed. A petition can have different statuses. For example, a closed petition can be withdrawn or concluded. Each petition can link to maximum 4 websites and the lead petitioner can publish news items about the petition and send 3 e-mailings to the signatories who opted in for this.

To understand the database model see the source code of the website over at Github.

In a list with interviews about Petities.nl there are a few in English.

Note: UTC time for signatures is incorrect between 2015-12-28 and 2017-07-15. Input was in UTC (not actual time), server side converted this again to UTC. Thus, during daylight savings time the date is one hour off, otherwise two hours.