Dries Buytaert

British Council using Drupal

English Online is an initiative created by the British Council to encourage the learning of English in China.

In good Drupal style, the site boasts a number of social networking features such as personal profiles, blogs and forums to connect a community of over 60,000 users. Users can customize content in Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional and English. Other features include video, newsletters, an events calendar, as well as a mobile version of the site at http://m.englishonline.org.cn.

The site, developed by Brightlemon, was also referenced in Gordon Brown’s recent visit to China.

United Nations using Drupal

117 million people participated in the United Nations' Anti-Poverty event, and it was organized on a Drupal site: http://www.standagainstpoverty.org/.

Nearly 117 million people – close to 2 per cent of the world’s population – took part in events all around the world to stand up and take action against poverty and for the Millennium Development Goals. According to a United Nations' press release they broke the Guinness World Record for the largest social mobilization ever on a single issue. Furthermore, the United Nations unveiled that they secured around $16 billion in new commitments to meet the Millennium Development Goals.

The Stand Up Against Poverty site was developed by the great folks at Development Seed; and as you can tell from their blog post, they pushed the Drupal envelope once again.

It is great to help make a product that many people like, but it is even better when that product helps improve the world a little bit!

New Zealand government using Drupal

The New Zealand government is using Drupal at http://beehive.govt.nz. The site features information about all their ministers, their speeches, press releases, ministerial briefings, major government initiatives and more. (Hat tip: Bevan Rudge)

Joëlle Milquet using Drupal

After Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme, Deputy Prime Minister Joëlle Milquet also started using Drupal. Check it out at http://milquet.belgium.be. More information in this IT Professionals article (Dutch).

Belgian Prime Minister using Drupal

Today, a new Belgian government has been sworn in, ending a political deadlock of nine months. With our new government comes a new Prime Minister, and with our new Prime Minister comes a new website. It's not quite the same as the constitutional reform that was promised many months ago, but at least the Prime Minister's official website is using Drupal: http://premier.be. Snickers.

Belgian government using Drupal

The Belgium government is using Drupal at http://invest.belgium.be.

It is the website of "Only in Belgium", a campaign to promote companies to invest in the Belgian industry. The campaign, and the accompanying website, are being promoted in the media and on national television.

The design of the "Only in Belgium" website was done by Prophet and the implementation was done by dotProjects -- two Belgian companies.

I'm told that the "Only in Belgium" website will be translated to seven languages, and that the Belgian government has additional Drupal sites in the pipeline. Good stuff!

It's great to see Drupal gain some traction in governments. If you think about it, Drupal is also the ideal tool for local government websites: it is powerful technology that is cheap and independent and that lends itself to collaboration. Local governments could team up with other towns and local web development shops to work on a common technology platform. What is often missing are local Drupal experts that want to coordinate such initiatives.

Mike Bloomberg using Drupal

Mike Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, is using Drupal for his website at http://www.mikebloomberg.com/.