Another big win for Drupal. The point here is that Drupal is an extensible platform and fit for the future. While they may not be using the full power of Drupal yet, they will. And the good news about Drupal is, the Whitehouse can try something "new" in social media without wasting hundred of thousands of your tax dollars on systems integration consultants for proprietary content management system tweaks.

Jordan
http://www.sumolabs.com

To endorse OpenSouce is really a welcoming move...

-Abhishek from http://indiblogger.net

I wish that the White House web site would conform with the open standards that are recognized for web documents. It is not enough to include the doctype declaration in the HTML that claims that the page is XHTML + RDFa, but there must be follow through to actually realized the goal. Any tools that are used, whether free or not, should be good enough to put out good code. I've personally used Plone which is also costs nothing and has open code that can be examined and changed. But Plone, understanding it is not perfect, at least by default produces code that conforms with the open standards it claims to.

As I went through and used the W3C validator Tool on pages (for example: http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehouse.... ), I found invalid XHTML + RDFa. It would also then more easily reach the accessibility guidelines (WAI and Section 508). Also the data contained in the web pages could be machine processable as well as being human readable (the more truthful the doctype declaration, the easier for the data to be consumed by standards compliant software).

I applaud the White House trying to make positive steps forward in terms of transparency. I just hope that they can also put in steps to ensure that the data and documents published conform with the standards they claim to want to abide by.

For more information:
http://www.w3.org/TR/gov-data/
http://validator.w3.org/
http://www.validsites.org/

Daniel Bennett

Daniel Bennett
http://advocatehope.org
daniel@citizencontact.com

"the idea that collaborative programming can inspire -- or at least, support -- a more distributed politics"

Bingo! It's not really about "software flexibility" or "features" or "freeness" but using tools that have collectivist ideologies baked into them. Thanks for spelling that out again, it's helpful.

It's also helpful that we have transparency from you on the names of all the contractors in the Digital Beltway. Now what would also be useful is a news ticker showing the cost of their consulting fees put up on whitehouse.gov and updated daily. Then the American taxpayer will likely see what some really chagrined and angry managers in the private sector have seen, which is the huge sink of money that "free opensource Drupal" costs them and what a mess that can make of their CMS.

Drupal also has non-user-friendly features and then there's the other big piece of this you aren't telling us, Nancy, which we have to get from O'Reilly, which is that the mods that the whitehouse.gov goverati geeks are putting on to this particular Drupal project will be hidden and unavailable to the public. We're told "that's ok" under the concept of the licensing associated with this, because they are not reselling or reissuing the software commercially.

But...why *is* it ok for these soi-disant opensource projects, that sell themselves with the almighty shill of being open and "for the people" and with millions of eyes available to crush bugs blah blah able to create these cul-de-sacs where the mods aren't revealed? And frankly, this isn't just some script kiddie's garage, this is *the White House*. It would be one thing if this were *really* about security -- issues that the IT sector has been embarrassed before (remember when Iran got the blueprints to the president's helicopter off that contractor's laptop?).

But it's another thing if what it really does is cover up the collectivized actions by self-appointed people running the government outside the system of democratic institutions, without public oversight.

Remember, the whole Howard Dean thing isn't about "the people" because "the people" didn't elect Howard Dean -- there weren't enough of "the people" who wanted him -- and you can't chalk that up to chad problems. It's about "some people" who want to get into power by going around the system, and thinking that the whole Facebook Twitter wired thing is their express lane to that power.

Opensource, even of this sort you are giddily boosting with the leftism baked into it (Drupal devs solemnly tell you about that ideology they hope they have welded into their tool) cannot, in and of itself, guarantee civic *anything*.

You can't speak of "participation," for example, on Beth Noveck's Office of Science and Technology site when she and her cadres get to set up all the issues, and run the debates on their terms, and close the comments when and as they feel like it. Open government=closed comments.

"But by being open source, the White House is opening itself up to all the bright ideas, powerful plug-ins, and innovative tools that the considerable community of Drupal aficionados come up with."

Of course, there are bright ideas in proprietary software, too, Nancy, by people who show up for work on time, aren't anonymous, and have contractual obligations and one-time licensing fees and maintenance contracts that don't turn into the balloon payments of opensource contracting.

But...just what are these powerful bright ideas? Do they involve things like flag@whitehouse.gov, informing on your neighbour's bad and dangerous ideas about health care? Or welding into iphone apps various flash-mobs on various lefty issues like net neutrality?

And where are the innovative tools? Drupal always looks about as exciting as watching the paint dry.

I'm sorry to hear you find it hard to accomplish basic functions in Drupal. I have found Drupal to be extremely flexible and extensible. If you are interested in getting involved in the Drupal community I would encourage you to check out the online documentation at http://drupal.org/handbooks and http://api.drupal.org (the hook system allows you to programmatically modify most anything) or check out one of the dozens of Drupal books (I'm a fan of Pro Drupal Development from Apress).

Working with open source CMS is a great way to save clients money as you do not need to spend time reinventing the wheel developing something like a comment system, friend requests, email notification frameworks, etc. What open source CMS are you currently working with?

Would you mind sharing what you moved on to?

Also, anyone have any idea which CMS the WhiteHouse.gov site was using before the move to Drupal?

Thanks

I was the White House Internet director from 2005-2007. There was an internal Perl based CMS that was bulit homegrown by a handful of brilliant career government employees. The "Tool" was used all eight years during President Bush's two terms. However, months before the election, and in preparation for the new administration (either Obama or McCain), a brand new CMS was put in place (GDIT) at 12:01 PM on Inauguration Day.

I'm not sure if you were replying to me, but the other commenter here put it well, "the headache of modifying, patching, and bending code in Drupal for just basic functions, is too much."

People experiencing this are both programmers and users. And merely mouthing the propaganda again with a sense of superiority, and making it seem as if somebody hasn't read enough documentation or Bible passages to believe, and if one hasn't read enough of the books with the inspirational messages, then it's their fault.

You don't save clients money with open source. Because...they have to constantly pay *your consulting fee* to make that lovely free but buggy and balky stuff work. And, there are varieties of options, and the White House will end up falling very flat with this, so one can only hope that the failure will be fast and public so they and we can learn from it, and that they don't lie about it and cover it up out of ideological zealotry about opensource, which is merely a cover for baking leftwing ideology into social media tools.