The numbers of UK e-petition signatories and their respective postcodes, dated from October 2012 - March 2015.

It has been generated by recording daily the number of signatures garnered from each petition, and grouping them by the signatories’ postcodes. This dataset also includes some information about the e-petition, such as description of the petition purpose, total signatures gathered, creator name as well as the government response (if given).

Background

The UK Government and Parliament publishes e-petitions at their website. Daily updated data is accessible via

Search (User interface allowing search using multiple filters)
API (For developers)
Atom Feed (Updated regularly with the 20 most recent resources for e-petitions)

The UK government does not release data retrospectively (eg. it is not possible to access the numbers signatories at a timepoint in the past). In order to collated this data, scripts were written to download the data from the UK government website dail. Therefore the dataset can be summarised as daily snapshots of the accumulating number of signatories, grouped by petition and postcode.

Challenge

To predict the daily trend of a specific petition in a region, as well as the total number of signatories, given a petition. This dataset can be amalgamated with other datasets from social media mentions, demographics (eg. education, newspaper type) or general election voter turnout.
To examine how support for petitions spread over time
To correlate postcodes to key words
To build a topic model which describes which issues are important to online politically aware people in UK

Data

There is one folder per day. Each folder is organized as follows:

JSON files for every petition. These contain a unique petition id, a list of postcodes and the corresponding number of signatories from those postcodes.
One json file containing information regarding the all the petitions in the folder. These include descriptions, ids and government response.