  The Internet has become a fundamental resource for activism as it facilitates
political mobilization at a global scale. Petition platforms are a clear
example of how thousands of people around the world can contribute to social
change. Avaaz.org, with a presence in over 200 countries, is one of the most
popular of this type. However, little research has focused on this platform,
probably due to a lack of available data.
  In this work we retrieved more than 350K petitions, standardized their field
values, and added new information using language detection and named-entity
recognition. To motivate future research with this unique repository of global
protest, we present a first exploration of the dataset. In particular, we
examine how social media campaigning is related to the success of petitions, as
well as some geographic and linguistic findings about the worldwide community
of Avaaz.org. We conclude with example research questions that could be
addressed with our dataset.
