Government
New York State Senate using Drupal
More proof that Drupal and open government is a great match: the New York State Senate just relaunched its website on Drupal and there is a lot to like. Check out their new site at http://www.nysenate.gov.
It is absolutely worth checking out; not only does it look great, it also illustrates how social publishing can help provide greater government transparency. Each State Senator can have a blog, Twitter integration and more. This enables citizens and lawmakers to directly and genuinely interact. In addition to that, the site enables people to view and comment on all pieces of legislation currently under consideration. All things combined, the site is a model for how governments can share and correspond with their stakeholders in an open and transparent way. Quite frankly, sites like this put many other governmental websites to shame.
The site was built by our friends at Advomatic, EchoDitto and an in-house team at the New York State Senate lead by Senate Chief Technology Officer Andrew Hoppin. If you want to learn more about the site, check out the great write-up on drupal.org.
Where Open Source, Open Data and government meet
The Obama administration recently excited the world of open source software by choosing to launch recovery.gov on Drupal. Their choice of a free, open source platform over any proprietary system is as hopeful and promising as the purpose of the website they built, which is to lend transparency to the spending of the $800 billion dollar economic stimulus money. We should be happy both that the U.S. government is embracing Open Source software, and that it is promoting Open Data.
I recently blogged about how hundreds of thousands of Drupal sites contain vast amounts of structured data, but that structure has been hidden deep in Drupal databases and never surfaced to the HTML level. To counter this, I'd like the upcoming version of Drupal to emit structured information through the addition of RDFa metadata for both common and custom content types. This could help the Obama administration with their goals around Open Data.
Instead of needing to do all of the data analysis themselves, governments should work on making data available in machine readable formats. This would have the effect of enabling citizens and organizations to query and combine that data, to answer interesting questions not asked before, and to build new services that help other citizens. Just look at Apps for Democracy.
According to Georges Thomas from recovery.gov, the Obama administration wants to do exactly that. Thomas presented some additional details on how they envisioned making all of that data available. Furthermore, they recently solicited proposals for what to technologies to use. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, submitted a proposal for Linked Open Data. Various people, including myself, wrote in to express our support for Tim Berners-Lee's proposal.
To achieve these goals, and help governments transition into an era of open, linked data, Drupal has some growing to do. As mentioned earlier, we are organizing code sprints that aim to make Drupal 7 a more powerful tool for managing RDF data.
Given that recovery.gov already runs Drupal, and given that I would like to see more Semantic Web technologies in core, I couldn't be more excited. With the right encouragement and technological tools, government sites can expose vast amounts of data covering an enormous range of concepts and topics. This data will be exposed in an open, reusable form that can be searched or leveraged by organizations and individuals as they require. We, the Drupal community, have a unique opportunity to help reshape how politics is done.
Step one is to make the data available -- and that is exactly what we try to accomplish with Drupal 7 and beyond. Many of the technologies -- such as RDF, RDFa, SIOC, FOAF, Oauth, and OpenID -- are available. It's a simple matter of programming to start putting these together, and it takes projects like Drupal to help bootstrap them. Time to get our hands dirty!
Obama using Drupal
This afternoon, in Denver, Colorado, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known in US political circles as the "stimulus bill".
The bill provides new spending, tax cuts and aid to state and local governments all totaling almost $800 billion US dollars, making it the largest spending bill in that nation's history. Designed to create jobs and provide a boost to a sagging economy, the bill focuses on green, renewable energy and investments in health care technology.
Of immediate interest to us, however, is the accompanying website, recovery.gov, which -- you guessed it -- is using Drupal!
Drupal is no stranger to the political arena, and has been used for many campaign and government sites before. Recovery.gov, though, is a definite coup for Drupal -- there are not many Drupal sites that have their own post on Whitehouse.gov. Or on the Huffington Post. Or is featured on CNN all day long. Or has its own YouTube promo by the US President. Unbelievable!
World Food Programme using Drupal
The United Nations is using Drupal (and Mollom) for the World Food Programme. The World Food Programme is the world's largest humanitarian organization. With almost 12,000 people working for the World Food Programme, their food assistance reaches an average of 100 million people in 80 countries every year.
It is a stunning Drupal 6 website built by Phase2 Technology and Development Seed. Awesome!
French Ministry for Health, Youth and Sport using Drupal
The French Ministry for Health, Youth and Sport launched a Drupal-based information portal for French youth: http://www.jeunes.gouv.fr. Building on the rapid adoption of Drupal by non-profit and advocacy groups, Drupal's use by governments just keeps increasing!
ASI using Drupal
Drupal goes to space! ASI is in Italy what NASA is in the USA. In other words, ASI is the Italian national agency for space activities, and works primarily with ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). Among their many projects include recent work on construction of the International Space Station. Turns out their site uses Drupal. Check it out at http://www.asi.it.
Belgium.be using Drupal
Belgium.be, the official website of Belgium, is using Drupal at http://forum2010.belgium.be. This forum site has been put together in preparation for our Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the second half of 2010.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect is the fact that the site was built in less than 10 days. The Chancellorship of the Prime Minister picked Connexion to build this site with the help of Internet Architects.
The site is available in 4 languages so all Belgian citizens can express their opinions and engage in interactive discussions about European issues.
