Last week, I read Dries’s announcement about the recovery.gov site running on Drupal. I also though that was pretty cool but not worth a blog post. Instead I just cataloged it as an interesting Drupal site. Last night my friend Gregor Rothfuss sent me a link that helped me realize what a big deal this is.
When I dismissed the news, I wasn’t thinking about how wasteful government is when dealing with all things technical. Several years ago, I did a project for the Department of Defense as a sub-sub-contractor. After weeks of meetings and general non-productivity, the net result was to replace a horrible looking and un-useful departmental website with a very small static HTML website (that we knew would never be updated). Of course, this was all cloaked in grandiose language of knowledge management and eGovernment. It was pretty clear throughout the project that the contractors wanted to milk this thing for all that they could. The project left me feeling pretty lousy as a tax payer. But, I figured things could be worse. Websites don’t kill people – this one didn’t anyway.
Flash forward to present day and the Obama transition team… I can just imagine the disruption of technologies like Drupal are having within the government. But the biggest change to the status quo might not just the technology is free (as in liberty and beer). This could be an opportunity to look past the old guard of consultancies (like Boeing, United Technologies, and SAIC) that are draining public coffers because they know how to play the game. Hopefully the game has changed so that new ideas and energy can help drive the infrastructure of the government towards greater efficiency.
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Recovery.gov is hardly the first major government website to be powered by an open-source CMS. Check out FBI.gov, CIA.gov and nasascience.nasa.gov — all are Plone, and have been for years.
Recovery.gov is another very welcome data point in a positive trend. But it’s only the “beginning of open-source for the Federal government” if your definition of “open-source” is “Drupal.”
As always, great point Jon. I should have mentioned other success stories like the CIA on Plone (I believe that I have in other posts). I should also point out that the Department of the Navy has been using eZ Publish. Alfresco has designed their records management product to meet the DOD 5015.2 requirements. So, as Jon rightly points out, this is not at all a new trend. I guess I just got swept up in the whole Obama transformation thing.
using drupal…
Found your topic on SitePoint ” Rasmus Lerdorf: PHP Frameworks? Think Again. to be cool! I found it on Wednesday When searching for using drupal…
Which begs the question, why did the government already have such a large Sharepoint footprint — buying software they do not need/know what it does, ask questions later? Microsoft executed well with MOSS, but the government is already behind the curve in selecting this tool. Open source alternatives from companies like Sheetster+ Alfresco provide the same benefits as Sharepoint, but without the incontrovertible vendor lockin that the government will now enjoy at the hands of MS. For an informed look at the alternatives that are out there, check out alfresco.com, sheetster.com, mindtouch.com, etc.