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Drupal: The New Gov 2.0 Site Builder?

Jeff Walpole — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:10:45 +0000

Last month I wrote about how Drupal supports five of the most effective open government sites in Five Government Sites Using Drupal Effectively for Open Government Initiatives. This month, I discuss how Drupal is close to being the perfect Gov 2.0 solution for savvy agencies – and soon, perhaps, a default solution for open government web initiatives.

Drupal excels in the very qualities we are seeking to improve with open government, namely: transparency, accountability, efficiency participation and collaboration. In that sense, it is both a practical tool and a great cultural fit. Its open source roots, transparent community and natively social approach to content management make it a very appropriate choice for open government sites. Most of these five attributes are missing from many government web efforts. Instilling government with these qualities is what the gov 2.0 movement is all about. Here is how Drupal addresses each of them.

Transparency

Imagine if a commercial software executive speaking at the company’s annual conference titled a presentation, “Why I hate our product.” Wouldn’t it be refreshing? Wouldn’t it be a growth opportunity for the platform to look honestly at what it doesn’t do well? At last year’s Drupalcon conference in DC, Drupal developer and community contributor James Walker (walkah) gave a gutsy and well-attended session entitled “Why I hate Drupal”.

That is what I love most about open source platforms. Free of corporate-speak, the community spontaneously examines its strengths and weaknesses, making course corrections in the open – in real-time. Here’s the activity sidebar today at Drupal.org:

Notice how issues and bugs are dealt with publicly and placed prominently in a place where they will receive attention. This self-correcting and open process produces better software and better implementers, who are more responsive to the unique needs of Drupal’s user base.

Accountability

Drupal is highly accountable for what it is and what it not as a technology because it is out there for all to use and there are no barriers to trying it out – you can download it today and find out if it will meet your agency’s needs. Yes, there is marketing and propaganda out there about Drupal just as there is for commercial solutions, but the community and technology itself are accountable in a very tangible way – you either decide to use it and find a way to work around (or fix) what you don’t like or you do not.

That seems fairly simple, but has not always been the case for software. Social publishing, while required to satisfy any agency’s stakeholders, is a profoundly more difficult challenge than say back office integration. That’s because you can’t hide your platform’s shortcomings from your users once you open it up. Until now, a glitch in your back office platform has been the agency’s problem, invisible to your stakeholders. But if your social publishing platform allows trolls and zealots to hijack your system in its comments and discussion forums, the repercussions can get public, partisan and nasty – overnight.

Efficiency

Efficiency can have many dimensions, but for government IT projects, the two that matter most are: cost and time. Certainly free software is cost efficient on the surface, but many have argued there are hidden costs. While no software is free to implement, Drupal certainly out benchmarks commercial alternatives and custom proprietary options. A whitepaper entitled “TCO for Open Source Social Publishing: Going Beyond Social Business Software” released earlier this year by Drupal commercial support vendor Acquia, provides a wealth of evidence of the cost advantages. In this budget-conscious era of bank bailouts and exploding federal debt, it is hard to argue for our government’s use of more expensive solutions.

The strength of Drupal’s efficiency can also be witnessed through its rapid implementations – performed in weeks or months, not years. This does require experience and expertise with the platform, but learning curve is nothing new for government. Both government staff and contractors flock to classes to learn Oracle, Sharepoint, .NET, and dozens of other commercial technologies. Why not do the same with Drupal? As the pool of implementers and consultants within the government space increases, the familiarity to develop and support will increase and the learning curve decrease. The 3-year implementations for government IT projects could soon be a thing of the past with Drupal use.

Collaboration

In the Drupal community, we’ve seen robust development of modules and industry solutions for publishing, higher education, non-profits and corporate sites. As Drupal is used increasingly in government, the platform will adapt more rapidly to the unique needs of this marketplace relative to its commercial counterparts because it draws on natural collaboration to solve problems. It also means that this dynamic community will rally around the unique obstacles the government marketplace requires. The implications for government are huge because unlike proprietary software, the Drupal community self corrects to meet a market’s needs.

Drupal was initially developed as a collaboration tool and as such, its architecture is developed around the concept of an individual’s profile on the site – allowing for content contribution, commenting, and linking of users. This model allowed Drupal to be a leader in the web2.0 movement rather than a follower, like many commercial CMS products struggling to backfill user engagement into their publishing platforms. Naturally, the tools promoting user engagement rarely manage the counter-forces, which have particularly impact on government sites – transparency at odds with security, participation competing with privacy, etc. This means that out of the box Drupal may not be appropriate for all government sites, but certainly the concepts are more by design and less afterthought – though it may take skill to strike the right balance in their use.

Participation

Participation as a goal of open government means many things from a technology perspective, but mainly the obstacles are about process and culture. Open source communities have a lot to teach all of us about participation. Drupal is far from the largest open source community yet at the end of 2009, the project boasted 611,000 members on drupal.org with over 250,000 downloads per month, 400,000 Drupal sites and over 4500 contributed modules. Community participation has produced 7 major versions (1 per year since 2003) more predictably and efficiently than most of the world’s largest software companies.

So when we plan to seek out ways to instill greater participation from citizens in government online, surely this is a tool and a project where such spirit exists.

Why We Need a Better Tool

I started with an assumption that we needed a better tool to develop government sites because there is nothing to show us how to do it correctly at this time. Other common tools used to build such sites are focused on making the constructs of web pages easier to develop and maintain – that is web 1.0 mentality.

We talk about the principles of open government in the context of websites because this is a major interface point for citizens to their government. Today there is a disproportionate amount of bad online examples of how not to do government online. Sites with too much text, poor collaborative and participatory features for citizens and very little functionality to make them anything more than the only sanctioned places to find a particular piece of official information. Otherwise, these sites would never be visited or used by citizens.

A platform like Drupal can actually help correct this by providing a “how to” close to already setup framework to do things correctly like:

standards based templates to help with SEO and accessibility
user profile and engagement frameworks to gather public comment and feedback
modular features to extend sites with new functionality without re-contracting
social media and network integration to encourage involvement and sharing
semantic web standards to connect to other authoritative data sources

So let’s start our new government sites with a platform that is working now, inexpensive, flexible and natively embraces the qualities and characteristics we claim to be pursuing under the open government directive.

Open source matters to open government. Really.

Gunnar Hellekson — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:55:37 +0000

“Open source and open government are not the same,” I’ve been reading recently. When discussing the role of open standards in open government transparency projects, Bob Caudill at Adobe, is concerned that open source and open standards are being conflated. He likes open standards just fine, but:

“Open standards are driving for interoperability between systems or applications, while, the goal of open source is to make high-quality software available to the market free of charge.”

As an open source advocate, I’m surprised. What, I have to wonder, is so threatening about open source? Why the effort to take open source off the table? I’ve written on the topic before, and I didn’t think this was controversial — but apparently I was wrong. Andrea DiMaio at Gartner is more pointed:

“For those who have been following some of the vintage discussions about government and open source, this will probably sound like a déjà vu. I honestly thought that people had finally given up pushing the confusion between open source and open standards or open formats, but here we are again.”

While they both agree on the importance of open standards (although transparency also seems to annoy DiMaio), they also remind us that tools, proprietary or open source, are a means to an end. An open standard is an open standard, whether implemented by an open source project or a proprietary one. What’s important, they insist, is more transparency, collaboration, and participation. Open source is immaterial at best, and a distraction at worst.

They’re right, of course, that open standards are crucial to ensuring meaningful transparency in government. It does not follow, however, that this precludes a role for open source. Open source software is an invaluable tool — one of many — to approach all three goals (transparency, collaboration, participation) of the Open Government Directive. It’s not about open source software specifically, although the software helps. It’s about the process that open source projects use to create good software. Because the open source development process requires real collaboration, tangible progress towards a goal, and the participation of a broad community of users and developers, it’s an excellent mechanism for getting citizens involved in the work of government.

DiMaio couldn’t disagree more. Referring to Nat Torkington’s idea of using the open source development model to improve transparency projects:

“…there is a fundamental flaw in this line of thought. Open source projects cluster a number of developers who collaborate on an equal footing to develop a product they are jointly responsible for, as a community.

“Government does not have the luxury of doing so. An agency publishing crime statistics or weather forecast or traffic information is ultimately accountable for what it publishes.”

I couldn’t disagree more. Again, DiMaio and Caudill misunderstand how the open source process works and what it can contribute. The trouble, I think, is with a too-narrow understanding of what participation and collaboration might mean, and a similarly narrow view of what the open source development process has to offer.

The goal of open source is much more than just making no-cost software, as Caudill suggests. It’s about producing better software through a process of inclusion and rough consensus. The source code is free of charge largely because that is the best way to create a large community around the project, it’s not the final goal. And while some open source projects function better than others, they are not, as a rule, unaccountable. In order for the projects to succeed, they must be highly accountable to their community. Further, many open source projects have commercial ventures (like my company, Red Hat) that live or die by their success, which makes them extremely accountable. So to say that the government cannot rely on open source software or the open source process because it is unaccountable is just not true. We know this to be the case because you can find the government using open source software in the Army, the NSA, the Census, the White House, and just about everywhere else. So there’s no reason to think that open source process cannot inform and support an open data project, as DiMaio suggests.

Setting accountability to the side, the more interesting conversation is how open source can bring some unique benefits to open government, unavailable any other way.

If you look at the outstanding work of pro-transparency organizations like the Sunlight Foundation, govtrack.us, RECAP, and others, nearly all are using open source and the open source development model. It’s not, as DiMaio and Caudill suggest, because they’re naive ideologues who are confused as to the meaning of “open”. These are smart people doing serious work. They’re using open source because it’s the best way to collect a large number of contributors around a common problem. They’re using open source because the transparency of the process and software makes their work credible. They’re using open source because they believe that free access to government data means free access to the tools that make that data useful.

The alternative is closed, proprietary tools, which do little to further the transparency goals. RECAP, for example, had a difficult time understanding the US Courts’ closed PACER system, and had to do a lot of difficult reverse-engineering to work with it effectively. The job would have been significantly easier if they had access to the PACER software source code. Fortunately, because RECAP is an open source project, their hard work making PACER usable is now available to everyone. So to dismiss open source as irrelevant to the crucial work of making government data available and valuable to the private citizen, and the even more important work of encouraging a collaboration between government and its citizen, is deeply misguided.

Again, even though data transparency seems to annoy DiMaio, I think there’s good reason for the tremendous transparency effort the administration and the private sector have brought to bear. First, data transparency is a relatively simple problem to solve. It’s easy to publish data on the Internet, and there’s a tremendous amount of value to be extracted. So while it’s only a part of the challenge — indeed, is only one leg of the Open Government Directive — it’s an easy win for both government and its citizens.

But DiMaio is correct that open government is about much more than just data, so let’s generalize this further. We could understand open government as an opportunity to increase the quality of interaction between citizens and their government through collaboration. “The government is not a vending machine,” as Tim O’Reilly paraphased Frank DiGiammarino of the National Academy of Public Administration, “which we kick when it doesn’t work right.” Instead of treating government as a black box, we should treat our government as the place where we, in the public and private sector, come together, to solve problems as a group. This is why we refer to “government as a platform.” Yes, as DiMaio says, each agency is responsible for its own output. But that doesn’t mean the public has no stake. Precisely because we want to hold agencies to a higher standard, we must provide a means of collaboration and participation.

The trouble is, there’s a lot more of us than there is of them. How can one agency effectively collaborate with 300 million constituents? Likewise, how can an agency effectively communicate with that many people? One of the reasons the open government movement is so preoccupied with technology and the Internet is that they represent a solution to this problem. For the first time, the government and its citizens have the means to work effectively at this scale. There are all kinds of tools for this: social networking, blogging, data.gov, the Ideascale Open Government sites, and so on. One of those tools, the one that is most interesting to me, is the open source development process.

Note that I didn’t say open source software. Although I love the software, and could talk for days about why the government should be using more of it, it’s the process that creates this software that is most valuable to the goals of collaboration and participation.

In the last 40 years, open source software communities have learned how to effectively solve complex tasks with large, far-flung, geographically dispersed communities. Why wouldn’t we take these methods, and apply them to the task of creating a better government? As I mentioned earlier, Nat Torkington suggested using the open source process to improve data quality. The NASA CoLab project uses open source software and the open source development process alongside other collaborative tools to get researchers from the public and private sector to work together. The Defense Information Systems Agency is using the forge.mil project to encourage collaboration between the DOD and its contractors — not just for software, but for testing, certification, and project management. The Apps for Democracy, Apps for Army, and Apps for America contests are all attempts to harness the collective intelligence of citizens and government to solve common problems using the open source model — not just building tools, but building the means to collaborate on top of open tools, like Open 311 and DataMasher.

So when DiMaio bemoans the lack of government employee engagement and the lack of community data, it may be because he doesn’t realize that this work is happening, and it’s happening using open source and (more generally) collaborative innovation models.

Both DiMaio and Caudill make the mistake of believing that open source is about making cheap bits. Instead, it’s a blueprint for effective collaboration on a massive scale. Advocates for open source in government, like me and my friends at Open Source for America, aren’t just talking about open source tools, although those are also useful. We believe that the open source development model has a concrete contribution to make to the open government movement — and those who dismiss open source as irrelevant don’t realize just how open a government can be.

You go gURL: GSA turns on URL shortener Go.USA.gov

Luke Fretwell — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:00:26 +0000

GSA announced it has officially opened up its URL shortener Go.USA.gov to anyone with a .mil, .gov, .fed.us or .si.edu email address. The site lets users create trustworthy short .gov URLs on Twitter and other online services with character restrictions and was developed by the team behind USA.gov along with members of the Drupal community.

For Drupal geeks:

Go.USA.gov is open source, and was developed in Drupal using the theme base Blueprint, Drupal Core, Shorten, Short URL, and TLD restriction modules.

User activity will be monitored to better understand citizen interests and needs. According to GSA, more than 700 public servants across all levels of government have registered to use the service, and more than 3,000 URLs that have been clicked over 450,000 times.

Government 2.0: An Empire State of Mind

Luke Fretwell — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:29:41 +0000

Video of New York State Senate Director of Technology Innovation Noel Hidaldo’s (@noneck) IgniteNYC presentation, ‘Government 2.0: An Empire State of Mind.’

Technology should be viewed as a vehicle rather than a destination

Rob Pinkerton — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:58:10 +0000

I was recently interviewed on Federal News Radio on their In-Depth with Francis Rose program, where I had the opportunity to discuss open government. We discussed the idea that technology should be viewed as a “vehicle” rather than a “destination” and that the real role of technology in open government is that of an enabler of mission success.

I’m finding more and more that these conversations are evolving beyond discussions about government data publication to a focus on how technology, information and behavior can open up government and make it more effective for people who are at risk or in need.

Listen:

Video:

FreshWrap: This week’s posts

Luke Fretwell — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:54:17 +0000

A wrap-up of this week’s posts:

Microsoft exec talks cloud computing and government

Luke Fretwell — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:00:43 +0000

Microsoft Senior VP & General Counsel Brad Smith discusses the future of cloud computing in government on C-SPAN’s The Communicators. Smith addresses citizen privacy rights, cost-savings, service provider challenges, consumer awareness, data portability and other cloud computing related issues.

SF launches PolicySF to help governments share ideas

Luke Fretwell — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:30:17 +0000

The City of San Francisco has launched PolicySF, a Website to ‘help communities share good ideas with one another.’ The site provides ‘policy toolkits’ with FAQs, processes, sample policy documents and ordinances on SF-specific initiatives. Other governments can also share their ideas.

Initial toolkits includes Healthy SF, Plastic Bag, SF Promise, JobsNowSF! and Open Data.

SF Mayor Gavin Newsom video announcement:

New on GovFresh: ‘Fresh from: Sunlight’

Luke Fretwell — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:18:50 +0000

Fresh from: Sunlight is a new GovFresh feature that highlights the latest transparency and open government news directly from Sunlight Foundation and Sunlight Labs. Contributors will include Sunlight’s best and brightest, including transparency hunk Jake Brewer.

Follow the freshest from Sunlight at sunlight.govfresh.com.

Introducing the Cycle of Transparency

Jake Brewer — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:47:06 +0000

Government transparency is that rarest of political phenomena — a great idea with support across the political spectrum and popularity among the public. Yet, here we are in the 21st century with every tool we would need to make government more transparent and accountable, and still we are operating with a government that often behaves as it did in the 19th century.

So, transparent government is a good thing, but we do not yet have one. Now what?

It’s clear that there is a breakdown between conceptual support for the idea of government transparency and enacting the changes necessary to make it so. There is fear and resistance to change inside government that requires cultural, political, and attitude adjustments. And there’s a large gap between the good intentions of citizens and watchdog groups and think tanks and reporters, and translating those good intentions into effective results. Many people want to act, but they rarely know how or where to begin.

For many, the concept of transparency still simply feels too vague to get behind in a meaningful way. People strongly support transparency in theory, but don’t know what they would need to do, or how they would need to think, to create the “open, transparent government” we talk about.

We’ve grappled with these challenges at Sunlight since our founding four years ago, and have been thinking about it with increased urgency over the last year in particular. How do we connect all the necessary parties and resources, and how do we put them together and act on them in the right way to actually make government more open and transparent?

Perhaps even more challenging: how do we explain it to people in a way that helps them know where they fit?

Now, the pieces are falling into place.

We know that at the heart of the open, transparent government we seek is ‘open’ government data that is available online and in real-time.

Government information should be as accessible to us as information about the weather, sports scores or knowing what’s going on in the stock market — and we need it to be this way so we can both hold government accountable and create new enterprise with what is made available to us.

In order to reach our vision of an open government – or an online, real-time government – we also know there are a number of “things” that must occur – and not just occur once, but continue to happen over time and continuously reinforce each other along the way.

This “Cycle of Transparency” demonstrates, in one image, the specific actions and the variety of actors that need to work together to create the open, transparent government we seek. We hope this graphic can be a useful tool in thinking about how to make city, state, federal, and even international governments more transparent.

Each type of actor and action complements the others in the Cycle to make every other element easier, or even possible at all. Of great importance is that just about anyone – from hardcore Internet developers to academics to government staff to reporters to activists – has a place in it.

One of the first places we often start in talking about transparency is in the crafting of policies that require the release of data from government. While no one piece of this Cycle is “first” or more important than others, the legislative component is a useful starting point. (Mostly because it’s the first one we wrote down.)

Lawmakers, lobbyists and think tanks (as well as citizens) all play a role in articulating new transparency policies and pushing them through the twists and turns of government processes. Those policies must adhere to core principles of openness, such as making sure government data is “raw,” that it is complete, or that it is searchable (in total, there are nine of these openness principles that government data should adhere to).

These principles aren’t things that government is accustomed to just yet, so the advocacy process is pretty difficult, and the subsequent “gap” between writing new legislation and actually getting legislation passed is more like a “chasm.”

One of the beautiful aspects of open government, however, is that while laws are written (and should be passed) to require the release of government data, Congress, federal agencies, states and cities can – in most cases – become more open and transparent without new laws.

Sidenote: A great example of “enacting without law” is that no law has been passed requiring all federal legislation to be available online for 72 hours before it is debated by Congress. Yet in 2009, Congress showed again and again that it could post bills online for three days before debate without the law requiring that action. Similarly, the “Open Government Directive,” released in a memo by the White House, has made all kinds of new government data available without laws to require it. (Though, it would be ideal if Congress codified the Directive into law to give it a lasting impact.)

Once data is released, government agencies (such as the Department of Energy or Transportation) and web developers anywhere can build the necessary technology to organize the data and make it usable. Federal repositories like Data.gov or Sunlight’s National Data Catalog are great examples of this type of public/private foundation building.

In the way of analogy, one way to think about this entire process is that it turns government into a type of public data wholesaler through which the public can build retail outlets.

With data being made easily accessible, journalists and bloggers can begin to dig into it, mix it up, identify relevant information and give the data context. As that critical context is provided, citizens absorb it and spread the information to others – both online and face-to-face – and make the data actionable.

Ultimately, informed citizen action creates greater public awareness; citizens become more effective, responsible advocates; holding government accountable becomes informed by data rather than inside-the-Beltway pundits, and better decisions can be made for our democracy.

As each element of the Cycle of Transparency moves forward concurrently, bringing about the changes we need to create a more transparent government, we also identify new needs.

At the end of the day, the process that the Cycle of Transparency describes is about creating a government more deserving of our trust, and ultimately, a government that allows its citizens to fully participate and hold government accountable as our Founders intended.