Drupal is a open source content management system known around the world by web developers, designers, enthusiasts and many others. Today, Drupal is being used hundreds of thousands to create websites and solutions for individuals, companies, government agencies and administrations.
What started as a hobby in a dorm room at a University, has now become a leader in the open source community. Today, Drupal has approximately 5800 contributed third party plugins known as contrib modules, approximately 830,000 registered users which 2000 of them are registered with developer accounts on drupal.org. With conference events happening every couple of months around the world today for the Drupal community, plus the hundreds of small developer and enthusiast group meetings once every couple of weeks, Drupal is growing rapidly and many are participating in it’s growth and evolution through its usage and open dialogs.
Did you know that large Government websites like whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk run on Drupal? Well they do!
I believe that Governments and their agencies can learn from Drupal and its community. Drupal and its community have demonstrated what a constant evolving and participatory platform looks like over the past few years. I believe that there are for main reasons why Drupal and it’s community can teach Governments the power of open (Open Government) and a platform (Government as a Platform). They are: Drupal is ‘Open‘, Drupal’s success is because of participation, Drupal assists in building businesses (and the economy), and Drupal is developed for the people by the people.
Drupal is Open
Drupal is a free software package which is distributed under the GPL (GNU General Public License). With Drupal being an ‘open’ project, thousands of users and developers are now able to build new features for Drupal as contrib modules, maintain it’s source code, submit bugs, patch bugs and additional problems or quirks along with much more.
Today, governments of all sizes are starting to adopt an Open Government philosophy, whether it is just a piece of the philosophy like sharing its collected data (Open Data) or fully adopting it into a policy. By doing so, citizens, who are essentially the users, are now able to submit queries in an open form, receive data which has been collected and paid for by the taxpayers or simply fix (at least attempt to by raising awareness) problems that exist.
There are already powerful stories which Governments and their agencies have not identified problems but citizens have – through the release of government data. One which comes to mind is that of a Canadian who identified multiple Charities within the Greater Toronto Area that were being used for fraud. David Eaves blogged about this exact story, talked about it last years Gov 2.0 Expo as well as I at London’s first Ignite Event.
Participation results in its success
The community and individuals behind Drupal’s success are those who participate and are actively involved. I would personally like to believe, that without the community it has today, Drupal would neither exist or have come as far as it has.
Unlike today’s Governments, Drupal has only been around for almost ten years. However, I believe that within it’s existence so far, Drupal has gained a larger amount of participation by its users and supporters then which the average Municipality and even at times, Provincial Governments, have (and can) on a variety of issues that will assist in the evolution of a policy, law, etc. Drupal has successfully gained more and more traction over time and has continuously grew it’s supporting and participatory community then our Governments today, which serve millions of citizens.
Drupal has done this by keeping the technology and community open and participatory. Virtually anyone can shape the way that Drupal evolves, whether it is a custom distribution to the actual core platform.
Businesses are founded because of Drupal
Many businesses today are built upon Drupal and providing services for it and it’s platform. Whether it is customized web hosting solutions to custom themes and module development, Drupal has made a dent into today’s technology industry as a platform which businesses are founded upon.
Dries Buytaret (http://twitter.com/dries) is the founder of Drupal, core source committer and an inspiring entrepreneur. Dries founded Acquia as a commercial open source company focusing on providing products, services and technical support for Drupal.
Today, Acquia helps accelerate Drupal through their contributions of core technology along with providing an Acquia specific version of Drupal (which has over 2,000,000 downloads).
Government as a Platform concept can offer new opportunities and assist inspiring entrepreneurs to start new businesses who can directly interact with the Government and Citizens, similar to how Acquia does with Drupal and it’s community. With the current Open Government movement in the USA today, companies and organizations like the Govistics, Sunlight Foundation and Code For America are founded which aim to help improve the Government along with Citizen’s interaction and knowledge of government data.
Developed for the people by the people
As a result of Drupal being a free and an open sourced application, virtually anyone can download and use it. However, like many open source applications that are very successful, Drupal’s continuous development, tweaking, bug fixing, etc. is done by those who are using Drupal. I believe that Drupal and its community is one which is governed by the people, developed by the people and for the people.
A similar phrase was used when Abraham Lincoln spoke of government and democracy. This statement is well known to this day. Lincoln is known to have written and said the following in his Gettysburg Address,
…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Drupal does this similarly. Drupal’s community is a growing one because it is made up of people who use Drupal, it is governed by the itself (the people), and acts in the best interest of it’s people and Drupal – whether it is spreading the word, defending its awesomeness or developing the platform itself.
In closing, I believe that Governments should take a step back and realize that we already have a history of doing Open. This can be shown by looking closely at successful open source technology communities like Drupal because they demonstrate and prove that ‘open’ works, participatory platforms engage and attract users, assist in developing the economy through start-ups like Acquia, and their successes are caused by those which are governments were founded upon – of the people, by the people, for the people.
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