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The news had Twitter abuzz yesterday. The official White House site has migrated from a proprietary software to open source Drupal.
"We now have a technology platform to get more and more voices on the site," White House new media director Macon Phillips told The Associated Press hours before the new site went live on Saturday. "This is state-of-the-art technology and the government is a participant in it....
"We want to improve the tools used by thousands of people who come to WhiteHouse.gov to engage with White House officials, and each other, in meaningful ways," Phillips said.
As a web developer with five years' experience working with Drupal, watching it growing up over the years, this is very exciting news.
Deborah Bryant puts in a note of caution.
Let’s be clear that this constitutes a change in plumbing – important plumbing – and not policy – but is a significant and of course highly visible sign that open source software has gone main stream.
Her skepticism is well taken. After all, what difference does a change in back-end code bring to the end-user experience of citizens? But the Post article does point to hints at policy changes.
It's also a nod to Obama's pledge to make government more open and transparent. Aides joked that it doesn't get more transparent than showing the world a code that their Web site is based on.
Maybe there's something to that. Given Drupal's strengths as software to connect people through the Internet, this is potentially exciting news for how our government works as well.
Open Source Government?
Drupal is not brochureware, it's community software that is extensible, flexible and modular. Jamie writes on Intoxination:
Given the extensibility of Drupal and existing modules that can provide anything from a full social network site to a major campaign site, including email letters, I say we can expect to see a much more user oriented whitehouse.gov.
Can we read that much into the choice of a web platform? Nancy Scola writes on TechPresident:
Let's really try to extract the last drop of possible meaning from a choice over a CMS. Squint a bit, and it's possible to see the White House's move to open-source software as a move towards the idea that collaborative programming can inspire -- or at least, support -- a more distributed politics. That idea bubbled up in 2004, when young programmers experimented with using Drupal itself to turn the Howard Dean campaign into the Howard Dean network. This idea, that a politics crafted by the people could be a powerful thing indeed, emerged in a slightly mutated way during the Obama presidential campaign, but has arguably receded below the surface during the first nine months of the Obama Administration. First the WhiteHouse.gov CMS gets more open, then the White House OS? Perhaps.
For the lay user, the White House website looks much the same as it has since inauguration day (though search should work noticeably better). 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. It's a community that the White House says it is eager to tap into. "Open source is a great form of civic participation," the White House's Phillips told me this afternoon. "We're looking forward to getting the benefit of their energy and innovation."
Tim O'Reilly recently offered a vision:
Too often, we think of government as a kind of vending machine. We put in our taxes, and get out services: roads, bridges, hospitals, fire brigades, police protection… And when the vending machine doesn’t give us what we want, we protest. Our idea of citizen engagement has somehow been reduced to shaking the vending machine. But what meetup teaches us is that engagement may mean lending our hands, not just our voices.
In this regard, there’s a CNN story from last April that I like to tell: a road into a state park in Kauai was washed out, and the state government said it didn’t have the money to fix it. The park would be closed. Understanding the impact on the local economy, a group of businesses chipped in, organized a group of volunteers, and fixed the road themselves. I called this DIY on a civic scale. Scott Heiferman corrected me: “It’s DIO: Not ‘Do it Yourself’ but ‘Do it Ourselves.’” Imagine if the state government were to reimagine itself not as a vending machine but an organizing engine for civic action. Might DIO help us tackle other
