Why the White House's Embrace of Drupal Matters

drupal.jpg (JPEG Image, 349x400 pixels)Drupal developers are abuzz with the realization that the White House's new Recovery.gov site was built using the free and open-source content management platform Drupal. Pre-Recovery.gov, the perhaps highest-profile use of Drupal had been the Onion website. But that's not the only reason that Drupal fans are excited. I asked two CMS expert friends to help me understand the situation, and here are a few of the reasons they gave for why the White House's embrace of Drupal is momentous:

First off is the very fact that with the move the White House is offering an alternative to DC's long love-fest with proprietary technology. Drupal is free, and hey, the economy being what it is, there are tax-payer dollars to be saved on going open source.

Second, it shows that the White House isn't putting much stock in the argument that collaboratively-built software isn't stable or secure enough for government use. (Though one could make the argument that Recovery.gov isn't exactly mission critical.)

Third, Drupal is, arguably, progressive. It has relatively deep roots in Democratic politics, first getting attention in the political space as the foundation under Dean Space. Whatever state Drupal is in today is a result of the community of developers who cared enough to nurture it -- the underlying message, of which, of course, echoes Obama's political narrative. ([UPDATE] David Cohn's written a history of Drupal's political past.)

And lastly, using Drupal for Recovery.gov is a sign that the White House is engaged in an open relationship with Blue State Digital, the firm that's been the home of both the campaign Internet director and the White House Internet director. BSD uses their own proprietary CMS.

As a community-built system, Drupal depends on developers helping to grow the code by folding what they build back into it. So, at least in theory, the White House could build some awesome widgets and nodes and give them back to the Drupal world. To that end, DrupalCon is taking place in Washington DC March 4th through 7th.

(A big thanks to the two unnamed developers for educating me here.)

Comments

The political ethos of Drupal

Nancy Thanks for linking to the research I did on Drupal's narrative. I became fascinated with it while working towards my masters at Columbia's J-school. While one could never say that software is purely political - the Drupal communities roots in the US stems from the progressive left.

www.digidave.org

awesome, have been looking

awesome, have been looking for such a post. its amazing to think the WH will be a leader in pushing open source.

Drupal != BSD

Nancy, How does Drupal's use indicate a relationship with Blue State Digital?

Dean space maybe?

When I saw that I thought she was talking about the OS on the servers. Maybe she is refering to the fact that one of the biggest projects that grew out of Drupal (CIVICMS) started as Howard Dean's 2k4 campaign site. BTW: Since I'm a Ron Paulie and a software developer, what color is my finite state machine?

High profile drupal sites

It have have been true, during the Dean campaign, that the Onion is the most high profile site built with Drupal it's hardly the case anymore. Take a look at the sites highlighted at http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites You'll find everything from International Aid programs, governments, corporations, software projects, musical artists, schools, etc. I'm a fan of the Onion, but I'm not sure it's any more high profile than Harvard or Britney Spears. Drupal is an amazingly powerful tool. It's great to see our government embrace it.

It indicates the opposite

I wrote that Drupal on Recovery.gov is a sign that the White House is "engaged in an open relationship with Blue State Digital, the firm that's been the home of both the campaign Internet director and the White House Internet director. BSD uses their own proprietary CMS." Maybe I could have been clearer, but the point is that this is something other than the BSD route.

Comments aren't threading right

The above was in response to cjoh.

Community orientation

I'm interested that the administration is using community-built software, but more intrigued that they're using community-oriented software: Drupal isn't just a CMS for one-way posting of information. I'm hoping they'll use some of those features, as they did for the campaign and for Change.gov, though the privacy policy so far is not encouraging. More at http://www.advocacyavenue.com/ .

This is great news!

Thanks for posting this. The argument that open source isn't secure enough for government use kinda went out the window ages ago when the CIA started using Plone. That and the recent creation of the military's own Sourceforge for open source development - http://disa.mil/forge/ It is nice to see how the Obama administration is using Drupal. Hopefully there will be some representatives there at the DrupalCon in March. -- http://openconcept.ca - open source software for social change

Finally!

I was beginning to think Blue State was going to be Obama's Rasputin. I'm glad to see the administration branching out and embracing true open source. But why not go one better and start their own open design and open source development projects for various citizen-oriented web utilities? I've already proposed a couple of my own on Transparency Labs. I'd be happy if they'd take them over. After all, this is our government. Why shouldn't they be rounding up citizen volunteers to help them design and build something the citizens actually want? Why be so secretive in their IT plans? -- The People's Agenda

Progressive Software

The idea that you save money, or get away from evil proprietary companies by using opensource is one of the big shills of the opensource extremists. You don't. Opensource is always given away for free -- but then you have to buy the consulting to run the stuff on top of that because the OS is so buggy and hard to use. And it ends up being more expensive than buying the proprietary software license that comes with courteous and efficient customer service personnel taught to put the customer first rather than insolent geeks who might or might not bestir themselves from the IRC channel or Twitter to help.

Drupal is clunky and annoying, and one of the really annoying things it does to the user is constantly make him add up equations to make a comment. Make too many mistakes, and get locked out. The equations are simple and you would think it wouldn't matter, but due to glitches, sometimes the system goes into overdrive and starts telling you that you've solved the equation incorrectly merely for clicking on a page with a comment form. Drupal enables webmasters to prevent people from even reading the Drupal pages -- not just IP block them from commenting.

Nancy, you don't seem to be *reporting* this story so much as looking for like-minded cheer-leaders to hype it to you so you can cheer better. Do me a favour -- go and *report* this story. Find out *how much* the government is spending *on the consulting that goes with this soi-disant free software package*. How many gigs have how many new digital Beltay bandits gotten out of this caper? Then push it further: how well does this site *work*? How are the users accessing it?

In other words, the only reason you seem to be celebrating it are reasons of anti-corporate anti-capitalist hate -- let's all hate on evil proprietary technology from evil big corporations. But...the opensourceniks are merely the free labour and free R&D for those big companies like IBM and Microsoft who simply move in and scoop up all the free results and often eventually buy these start-ups anyway.

And here, we get to the truly stellar example of "magical thinking," and an inadvertent confirmation of the point I've made for years, that opensource software engineers are welding their worldview into the tools, skewing them toward political outcomes, so that the fairy-tale that they are "all about civic engagement" is a ruse, as they really aren't open, but closed:

"Drupal is, arguably, progressive. It has relatively deep roots in Democratic politics, first getting attention in the political space as the foundation under Dean Space. Whatever state Drupal is in today is a result of the community of developers who cared enough to nurture it -- the underlying message, of which, of course, echoes Obama's political narrative."

Thanks. I couldn't have ever dreamed of getting such a frank admission. So software isn't just code, isn't just a tool, it's tool-as-politics-welded-in, it is "community" -- which means the group of geeks around it who develop it *their way*.

And now, I have to wonder what transparency in government is *for* if you are going to write a sentence like this, "using Drupal for Recovery.gov is a sign that the White House is engaged in an open relationship with Blue State Digital, the firm that's been the home of both the campaign Internet director and the White House Internet director" -- without reporting the consulting fees that these firms may have garnered.

"So, at least in theory, the White House could build some awesome widgets and nodes and give them back to the Drupal world." Um, please follow up on that in 6 months. The extremists in the opensource movement often gripe that high-profile users of their wares don't give back. I don't know what the licenses are there, but I wonder if there is any dual licensing scheme here whereby proprietary use can be made of the OS software which means that all those "commmuuuunity" people are going to be ripped off.

DrupalCon. Perhaps aptly named.

Well?

Er, which citizens?

What kind of fee would Transparency Labs get when you "give away" your software...or you don't charge...until they call and say they can't get it to work? THEN you charge?

Control

Drupal offers extraordinary capacity to filter, ban, block people in a community as they attempt to post on blogs, yes. Drupal is good for managing groups of writers who want to broadcast oneway, and get love-pats from all their fans in the comments.

"the community" just means people of one ideological perspective and worldview. It's not "all citizens" or any wider sense of community of *users* who would have to struggle with these wonky and non-user-friendly applications.

Software Never Neutral

You would hope that software would NOT be "purely political". Indeed, the technology-driven view of geeks often claims that software is "neutral" and is never at fault for anything in the emergent behaviour and outcomes it drives.

And yet, there is no question that Drupal, like Open ID or anything related to Linux, or OpenSim, are all products of a way of thinking, a culture, a mindset, and that definitely welds into the tools.

I think there are many instances of when you can show that software is not neutral and its outcomes certainly aren't.

This is one of the most

This is one of the most ridiculous comments I've ever seen. Your logical fallacies are truly awe-inspiring.

>You don't. Opensource is always given away for free -- but then you have to buy the consulting to run the stuff on top of that because the OS is so buggy and hard to use

a) Drupal is extremely easy to use and is not 'buggy' -- Get a grip.

b) Wow, instead of investing 500k into proprietary software, another 100k into customizing said software, you can actually invest 600k into making Drupal what you want!

Invest in people, not software.

>Drupal is clunky and annoying

So is a car if you don't know how to drive.

I won't even bother touching the rest of your malformed and obviously presumptuous post.

p.s. You posted a comment on a Drupal-driven web site. Was it clunky and annoying? Or is that just you?

I was beginning to think Blue

I was beginning to think Blue State was going to be Obama's Rasputin. I'm glad to see the administration branching out and embracing true open source. But why not go one better and start their own open design and open source development projects for various citizen-oriented web utilities? I've already proposed a couple of my own on Transparency Labs. I'd be happy if they'd take them over. After all, this is our government. Why shouldn't they be rounding up citizen volunteers to help them design and build something the citizens actually want? infant car seat - infant formula - infant shoes

Hi

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