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 problems that bedevil us? Can we imagine a new compact between government and the public, in which government puts in place mechanisms for services that are delivered not by government, but by private citizens? In other words, can government become a platform?

Heady stuff. But impossible? Business is getting involved as well. On NextGov, Jill R. Aitoro wrote this Summer about Open Source for America,

More than 50 companies, academic institutions, communities and individuals formed Open Source for America to promote its use in the federal government. Open source generally refers to software code that is provided to the public to modify and download for free. Its supporters argue the method lowers the cost of software development and can provide better applications because an unlimited number of programmers are free to improve the underlying code.

"This is the right time, with the administration and the economy and the direction that open source is moving" all supporting greater adoption, said John Scott III, director of open-source software and open integration at federal consulting firm Mercury Federal. "If you read between the lines and look at what the White House is doing, they're leading by doing. The sole purpose of this organization is to answer the president's call for technologies that help government be more participatory, more collaborative and more transparent."

The coalition, which counts Red Hat, Google, Sun Microsystems, Novell and Oracle among its members, will form working groups to focus on specific areas, such as health care, cybersecurity and defense.

But let's back up a second from the do-ocracy vision of politics, and look at the pragmatic world where open source software adoption could yield immediate results....

Open Source Elections

One obvious pragmatic use case for open source software in government functions is tallying votes in our democratic elections. This is especially true considering the problems of the last decade with electronic voting machines. For example....

Initiatives behind the adoption of open source software in our elections seem to be gaining momentum. Last week, Kim Zetter writes in Wired:

The Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV) announced the availability of source code for its prototype election system Wednesday night at a panel discussion that included Mitch Kapor, creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; California Secretary of State Debra Bowen; Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan; and Heather Smith, director of Rock the Vote.

The OSDV, co-founded by Gregory Miller and John Sebes, launched its Trust the Vote Project in 2006 and has an eight-year roadmap to produce a comprehensive, publicly owned, open source electronic election system. The system would be available for licensing to manufacturers or election districts, and would include a voter registration component; firmware for casting ballots on voting devices (either touch-screen systems with a paper trail, optical-scan machines or ballot-marking devices); and an election management system for creating ballots, administering elections and counting votes....

Miller said the foundation wasn’t looking to put voting system companies out of business but to assume the heavy burden and costs of research and development to create a trustworthy system that will meet the needs of election officials for reliability and the needs of the voting public for accessibility, transparency, security and integrity.

“We believe we’re catalyzing a re-birth of the industry … by making the blueprint available to anyone who wants to use it,” Miller said.

The post is titled, "Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released," which is perhaps misleading, considering previous efforts that have not received so much attention over the years. The Open Voting Consortium (which apparently has just moved its website to Drupal as well) has been working this field for years now, and is already providing software for regional and party elections.

And a little Googling reveals first-page results for OpenSTV, open-source software for implementing the single transferable vote and other voting methods such as instant runoff voting, Condorcet voting, and approval voting, and PVote, prototype software for electronic voting machines.

But getting away from the who was first question, it seems that the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation and The Open Voting Consortium have very similar missions. As I write this, I don't know how much they work together or collaborate. In the open source world, collaboration on code is pretty much a given, but politics is a different animal. But it's good to see both organizations making strides in this area.

Participating in The Commons

In a blog post today, Tim O'Reilly comments on the adoption of open source — and Drupal in particular — by the federal government:

The net-net is that I suspect that simply using open source software won't slash government IT budgets, at least not right away. What it will do is increase the amount of value we get for our money and the speed with which new technology can be adopted. Features that would have cost millions of dollars and years of development to add will now be rolled into the scope of current contracts.

It's also important to realize that using open source is very different from contributing to open source. Despite the exaggerated claims in the AP story, that "the programming language is written in public view, available for public use and able for people to edit", the White House has not yet released any of the modifications they made to Drupal or its operating environment back to the open source community. The source code for Drupal (and the rest of the LAMP stack) is indeed available, but the modifications that were made to meet government security, scalability, and hosting requirements have not yet been shared. In my conversations with the new media team at the White House, it is clear that they are exploring this option.

Giving modifications back to the Drupal community is the next breakthrough announcement that I'll be looking for.

Indeed.

Update: I came across this video series just after posting this post. It'a a well produced, well put-together video, and quite interesting.

[This post is also posted on BlogHer.com.]

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