When the White House made its big switch over to Drupal, some asked whether this was simply a move over to a new content management system or if it was instead meant to be a lifestyle choice; in other words, would the White House engage with the collaborative, share-and-share-alike Drupal community? Tonight might be one sign that the White House intends for it to be the latter. White House new media director Macon Phillips and White House developer Dave Cole will be discussing the Obama Administration's Drupal switch at the Drupal Meetup tonight at DC bar Stetson's. It's a shared billing. WhiteHouse.gov will be discussed alongside its fellow Drupal implementations OpenPublish and Managing News.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in conjunction with the office of special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, is about five days into an experiment mobile phones to build civil society in Pakistan. Working with three local cell phone companies and a U.S.-based mobile vendor, the State Department has set up in Pakistan what it is calling Humari Awaz. That's "Our Voice" in what seems to be Urdu. Here, in brief, is how it works: Pakistanis text in keywords to the network via the short code 7111, and those phrases are used to spontaneously create texting-based social lists -- around the day's price for cotton, the latest cricket scores, a community radio station's fan base, or perhaps the desire for less extremist political leadership.

The State Department is covering the cost of the first 24 million texts to Humari Awaz. How long that reserve will last remains to be seen. Less than a week in, and more than half a million SMS messages have been sent over the State-sponsored mobile network thus far. Visit ProPakistani for a taste of some of the suspicions and concerns the plan is raising in that country.

The Humari Awaz project is part of the Clinton State Department's push toward what it calls "21st century statecraft." In related news, Secretary Clinton recently announced while in Morocco that State was launching a "Civil Society 2.0" initiative, centered around providing education and training on the building blocks of digital literacy -- building a website, working with text messages, blogging, using a social network to create social change, and more. Clinton also announced $5 million in CS2.0 monies to be dedicated to "bolster[ing] the new media and networking capabilities of civil society organizations and promot[ing] online learning" in the Middle East and North Africa.

Even smaller than the fraternity of people who have served as President of the United States is the fraternity of those who have served as the Internet Director to the President of the United States. David Almacy is a member of the latter club, having served under President George W. Bush's tenure, and as we chew over the White House's recent embrace of the Drupal open-source content management system, Almacy has an invaluable post up walking us back through the history of the online White House, back to the days when there was no content management system to speak of.

(Yes, those days did exist. Perhaps today is a good day for those more, ehem, experienced among us to take some time to share with our younger colleagues what it was like back when publishing something online generally required hand coding HTML, and there was one, maybe two people in an organization that could thus do much of anything on the web. Uphill, both ways.)

Back in those days before Drupal, Almacy tells us...

We linked yesterday to a piece from Slate's Chris Wilson in which he made the case that White House's switch to the open-source content management system Drupal for its WhiteHouse.gov site and related projects was a horrible, miserable mistake. Now Conor McNamara, developer with the web firm DPCI, offers a point-by-point refutation of Wilson's main arguments, rooted in Drupal's admittedly unique way of doing things. Where Wilson says "Drupal knows best," for example, McNamara counters with, "No, Drupal is cautious about which users can do what, and with good reason." McNamara also more eloquently explores something we rambled on about yesterday: that whatever Drupal's challenges and quirks on the back end might be, what matters is the end users' experience with WhiteHouse.gov. Worth a read.

(A source challenges the wisdom of taking Wilson's advice on these matters at face value by sending along a link to a studiously contrarian piece from May 2008 in which Wilson advocated that Barack Obama drop out of the Democratic primary. The premise? Hillary Clinton would go down in defeat against John McCain, and a chastened Democratic party would anoint Obama its leader going into 2012.)

(Photo credit: Andre Molnar, via Volacci)

News of the White House's switch to Drupal absolutely has absolutely rocketed around the web this weekend and week. We are among the lucky beneficiaries. Our traffic numbers, frankly, look like a one-hump camel. We jumped on the story early, fleshing out an almost comically bungled Associated Press story that read, in part, "The White House says it's overhauled the technical aspects of the site and now there's computer code written in public view, available for public use and able for the public to edit." That's one way -- the wrong way, sure -- to make sense of the news, and the approach makes some sense. There's more or less two ways to think about software these days: either out-of-the-box software like, say, Adobe Acrobat, or something like Wikipedia, something that is almost completely created by its users, on the fly, and with only the most minimal barriers to entry.

Of course, a few minutes spent pondering a story like that has to make you doubt the prospect that the White House of the United States of America has turned itself completely read-write. Then what? Are there more useful ways to help us understand the great Drupal switch?...

Publisher, conference convener, and lover of animal pen drawings Tim O'Reilly gives us his insight into how the White House just switched from a proprietary content management system whipped up by a federal contractor to one based on Drupal, the free and open source software made by the Internet. Or, more specifically, by people who spend a lot of time on the Internet and like to make and give away software.

There are three things about O'Reilly's analysis that pop out in particular. Consider this fair warning: the first is really, really technical, at least for 98% of the population. O'Reilly gives word that the White House will be using an implementation of Drupal that makes use of what is called the LAMP stack in softwarese. The "L" is for Linux, the open-source operating system. (It'll be of the Red Hat variety, says Tim.) The "A" is for the Apache web server software package, itself open source. Because you're getting the hang of this and realizing we're dealing with an acronym here, we'll just say that rounding things out are MySQL for database stuff and either Perl, Python, or PHP for a programming language. (The trouble with acronyms, perhaps.) The search engine on the site -- on of the very few things that actually might look different to mere mortals post-switch -- is based on Apache Solr. That's a chunk of code that the CNET Network thunked up and then passed back to the Drupal community. That practice of share and share alike is one of the things that makes the open source software movement so special.

Which is, coincidentally, just about the perfect set up for the second thing that jumps out of O'Reilly's post. (Don't worry, this one is understandable for even layfolk.) When the White House's switch to Drupal will really get jazzy and exciting, says O'Reilly, is when...

Some of the most popular state, local, and general-interest blogs in the progressive blogosphere were brought low this morning, when the lone developer behind the hosted community-blogging service SoapBlox threw in the towel. Well-regarded sites like Pam's House Blend, Blue Jersey, Michigan Liberal, Swing State Project, and MN Progressive Project found earlier today that they couldn't access either the public-facing front ends of the site or their sites' content-management backend. As of this afternoon, the sites are (mostly) back up, but that hasn't eased fears that a core part of the left's online infrastructure isn't all that sustainable.