Score one more for open source — and by extension, open governance. WhiteHouse.gov has ditched its previous Bush-era proprietary content management system, and now runs on the open-source Drupal.

The great Drupal switch came about after the Obama new media team, with a few months of executive branch service (and tweaking of WhiteHouse.gov) under their belts, decided they needed a more malleable development environment for the White House web presence. They wanted to be able to more quickly, easily, and gracefully build out their vision of interactive government. General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), the Virginia-based government contractor who had executed the Bush-era White House CMS contract, was tasked by the Obama Administration with finding a more flexible alternative. The ideal new platform would be one where dynamic features like question-and-answer forums, live video streaming, and collaborative tools could work more fluidly together with the site’s infrastructure. The solution, says the White House, turned out to be Drupal. That’s something of a victory for the Drupal (not to mention open-source) community.

Thanks to developer communities, open-source content management systems often feature more plugins, many of which are tuned towards reader participation. Such plugins should further empower the Obama administration’s push for participative governance through technology.

Originally posted on October 26, 2009 @ 11:12 am