Whitehouse.gov re-launches on Drupal and engages the Drupal community at DC users meeting

That is so awesome.

Anisa.

Yeay
Great news to see government using open source and especially drupal

This is simply amazing and a BIG BIG testimonial for Drupal & Open Source. I'm working on getting organizations & institutions migrate to Drupal here in Nigeria. With this, making a case is gonna be real easy...

Getting whitehouse.gov is a huge win for Drupal. I think this will convince a lot of people who were on the fence. All those "top x sites running on Drupal" lists have a new #1 to add. :)

Great video, too.

Awesome. This will give a boost to Drupal's image among developers.

--
http://clipped.in - Latest Indian blogs

Such news is further proof that drupal users/developers are on the right track. Any idea if the top area (switching between 1 2 3 4) is a module or a custom built script?

My company works almost entirely with associations and other non-profits. This community will benefit enormously from this announcement and the engagement of the development team of Whitehouse.gov!

Not to be overly evanglic and all, but for me the loading time of that site is now about 1/10 of what it used to be, but that could be just me.

Shines a much appreciated spotlight on the open source community.

-
dave myers
portland, oregon

Hi,

First of all, congratulations! Drupal was recommended to me recently and I expect to become a new user of the system. I've been asked to justify my choice, and this makes it really easy :-) without getting into tedious feature-by-feature comparisons of a dozen CMSs.

I'd like however to make a request. The audio quality is pretty bad, there's a lot of background noise, and even though I lived for 7 years in California, I have a hard time understanding it (I'm not a native English speaker). Would it be possible to add English subtitles to the video? I think that would be very helpful in extending Drupal in non-English speaking countries.

Al

sad write-up. Don't publish such a tiny article just because the community wants it... Sorry, but for the single most appreciated milestone ever in the history of the Drop, this is just sad...

This certainly seals the future of Drupal. I am glad I made the choice two years ago. Kind of like buying into a stock with a great potential, and seeing it blossom in the end. :)

As a new user of Drupal, I was initially thrilled to hear of this decision for many of the reasons noted above. As I began to use the tool developed for us by a DC Drupal firm, it become increasingly more difficult to understand how decisions were made by the multiple developers involved in its creation-themes were off if done at all, layout of edit nodes were different from node to node, various functionalities or fixes overrode each other unpredictably. Shortly thereafter, I came across this critique of the White House's decision to go with Drupal in Slate.

http://www.slate.com/id/2233719/

Understanding this is of course the Drupal.org community, I'd be interested in a sincere feedback on this take, particularly the last bullet point, which characterized well those at the firm we employed. Also, does anymore have more information on the decision by Recovery.gov to bring in a private contractor to rework their site, yet the White House deciding to proceed with a Drupal platform nonetheless?

I found another critique though that seems to be more thoughtful than the one at Slate:

http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20091025/whitehouse-drupal-and-the-open-source-...

"how is a locked down highly customized variant of Drupal different than a proprietary solution?" He says that whitehouse.gov is certainly not using the Drupal you and I can download at drupal.org :) I guess those who work on it know better, maybe they will comment.

Although I assume many of the security improvements, if there were any on the code itself, will eventually be committed to Drupal as well since it is open source, so again, that is all the better for Drupal.

hi.. nice site..
anybody have step by step how to develop it

TIA

Sorry that I missed this meeting. The fact that the whitehouse.gov team accomplished this is nothing short of a miracle. That's because the White House and the Office of Managment & Budget usually try to minimize risks. I am sure that many people they had to work with created or tried to create doubt in their minds.

Lets keep in mind that the white house staff were really talking to a friendly audience. But what about the website teams of the approximately 24,000 other Federal Government websites? They are charged with a similar mission see http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/documents/Federal_Web_Managers_WhitePaper.pdf.

Those web site managers can probably grasp the beauty of an Open Source CMS and Drupal quite easily or perhaps have heard some horror stories. (It only takes one!). Even if they get it, the real issue for them is how to overcome the mindsets of people in charge at their agency who may be "risk adverse" to an open source CMS let alone Drupal. They would also want to know more about the practical side of the CMS and how it can address issues that they will face.

The whitehouse.gov team could really help the federal website owners by addressing the following issues and questions that they successfully faced. Wouldn't it be great to see a short paper or at least short presentation on this.

1) The real costs of using Drupal. Sure the software is free, but what about the investment in people to design, implement and finally maintain a Drupal website. Is there a cost saving with Drupal or at least a better benefit to cost ratio in terms of advancing e-govement and reaching out to citizens?

2) How to migrate content into Drupal. Remember, government agencies turnout alot of content- reports, news releases, policies, decisions, etc.

3) The security concerns- how they are handled and can Drupal effectively deal with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and other requirements. As a website owner I am routinelly upgrading modules and versions due to the great work of Drupal's Security Team. Glad they are on top of things.

4) Personally Identifiable Infomation (PII)- how did the white house team handle this.

5) Procurement- most federal website managers have to work with large IT contractors. While the CIOs of the federal agencies will have to be convinced about open source, the large IT vendors who provide IT support and services will also have to be on board or at least not plant roadside bombs. Some vendors like IBM and Sun M understand CMS and specifically Drupal. Others will fight it or create a climate of doubt.

6) Legal implications- everything in government has a legal side. i am sure that the white house team had to educate the lawyers and provide some assuances on who currently uses Drupal in the private and non-profit sectors.

that's an awesome drupal site, it would be great if there is a complete case study about it so we can all learn creating a such powerful website :D

Maybe now I can get that job at the White House I have always dreamed of.

As soon as people start fearmongering about security that should IMMEDIATELY raise a red flag. Security is a very popular scapegoat when someone want to trash something or promote their own products/services. 99% of the people reading don't know enough about it to confirm or deny so it's an easy way to try manipulate peoples opinions.

You can claim just about ANYTHING connected to the internet is not secure and it would be very hard to disprove in ways most people could understand. The reality is the only way you can get absolute security is to cut the network cable. Far far too much paranoia about security out there and far too many people with an agenda willing to exploit that.

Does anyone know how they did the principal menu?

nice web site

My name is Jacob Luetkemeyer and I am the Secretary for the Missouri Republican Liberty Caucus. I was turned on to Drupal a couple months ago for the same reason. I am running for state representative in my district and I want to increase the communication between the people and their elected officials. I am working on a drupal based site to do this for the Missouri RLC organization. I have programming experience but not much on web developement so the site is still plain but Drupal has really helped me create a site without having to do a lot of programming myself. It would be nice to have a theme developed for these specific types of sites.

Thanks Drupal!

Jacob Luetkemeyer
Candidate for Missouri District 117 Representative
http://www.rlcmo.org

Wow, this is big news for OS/drupal community.

Just remember, all this enthusiasm is good, but simply because the government USES open source, it does not mean it IS open source. And probably it is a good thing that entities such as the Supreme Court, Congress, and the Senate are NOT wiki pages or user-created revisions. There is a reason we elect qualified, knowledgeable representatives to advocate our interests. The new Whitehouse.gov, however, is a testimony to the current administration's commitment to open source. Now if they started switching to open source servers and desktops everywhere, installed open source office applications, and stored data in open source database management systems, they would save taxpayers even huger amounts of money. Whitehouse.gov is an excellent step in the right direction. A government cannot afford to lock itself into proprietary solutions and accompanying restrictive contracts. Since then-Senator Barack Obama started running for office, Americans have started to care about our nation and government at unprecedented levels. Today's youth is more interested in making our country better for all of us, and the amount of talent out there willing to volunteer is amazing. With expanding implementation of open source, the government opens the doors for more Americans to contribute based on their specialty fields. Legions of volunteers motivated by sense of civic duty will improve government information management infrastructure better than any corporation interested only in the bottom line.

¿Donde puedo encontrar el lin para ver ell codigo abierto?

Cool to find out you've been active on the Drupal community. Noticed the nigeriadotcom site was Drupal & I was impressed & looking forward to meeting you. You can reach me on codeweavernaija@gmail.com. There are a couple of issues we can collaborate on i guess.