We the People, launched by the Obama administration on September 22, 2011, is a defunct section of the whitehouse.gov website used for petitioning the administration's policy experts. Petitions that reached a certain threshold of signatures were reviewed by Administration officials who in most instances would subsequently provide an official response. Legal proceedings in the United States were not subject to petitions, rather, the site served as a public relations mechanism for the presidential administration to provide a venue for citizens to express themselves. On August 23, 2012, the White House Director of Digital Strategy Macon Phillips released the source code for the platform. The source code is available on GitHub, and lists both public domain status as a work of the United States federal government and licensing under the GPL v2.

In the United States, the right to petition is enumerated in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which specifically prohibits Congress from abridging "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances".