About Repetition.me

Why?

One of the top FAQs on the government's e-petitions website (at least, on the original version - it seems to have disappeared now!) is "Why can't I vote against a petition?". The answer to that question gives a very good explanation of why that's not appropriate for a petition website (after all, you can't vote against a paper petition either). But it does indicate that there is a demand for a place where people can express their opinion on a petition without having to sign it. This website exists to fill that gap.

In the process, I've also taken the opportunity to present the petition data slightly differently to the official site. Repetition.me automatically extracts common tags, and allows you to search or browse using those as keywords.

Petition data is updated approximately hourly, so it runs slightly behind the official site which updates in near real-time.

This is the second version of Repetition.me. The original was built around the original e-petition system introduced in 2011, then modified to use data from later versions, and then eventually disappeared when the server hosting it failed. Because the current government e-petition system has itself been sigificantly rebuilt since the early days, this version of Repetition.me has been rebuilt from the ground up using all (or almost all!) new code and a new front-end framework.

The name

The name, "Repetition.me", is something of a multidimensional pun. The word "repetition" means the act or process or an instance of repeating or being repeated", and this site repeats petitions that exist on the official site. But it can also be read as "re-petition", meaning to petition again, or "re: petition", meaning about a petition. So you can read it how you like. And it's a .me domain partly because the equivalent .uk and .com domains were already taken, and partly because it just sounds nicer!

Mentally, I pronounce the name of the site as "re-petition dot me". But you can pronounce it how you want to.

Copyright

See the Photo Credits page for individual photo credits.