Regardless of any political differences you may have with the current administration (and believe me, as a small business owner I have a few), you have to admit that what the Obama Administration has done and is doing online is quite impressive. It’s pretty obvious that they have taken the same team that built the fundraising and group organization phenomenon that was BarackObama.com during the election and have now challenged them with some of the biggest digital communications issues the bureaucracy has to offer.
Recovery.gov is the administration’s online location for citizens and stakeholders to track how the money earmarked in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is being distributed, broken down by category, agency, and state. In the past it would have taken some sort of investigative piece in Time Magazine or The New York Times to really dig into and lay out how the stimulus money is being spent. However, with Recovery.gov taxpayers can go visit the site anytime and have access to this information. And with it being a Drupal-based site, content managers are keeping it very up to date.
Data.gov is another impressive move at using an open source content management system (yes our friend Drupal) to create a platform where many government agencies can share the wealth of data that they all possess, and that we tax payers OWN. We have a right to be able to access it. However, until now, that data has been an effort to go get. Not anymore. You want years worth of storm prediction data? How about a weekly listing of patents granted, in XML format? All this and more is at your fingertips.
Not only are these two sites doing good things for the government and for the consumers of the data (US citizens and taxpayers), but seeing as they are built on a free open source platform – I have to believe they are saving us a lot of money too. These comments raise some sad but not too surprising points. Can you imagine a CMS built by Boeing? :)
Update 07/07/09: Found another example of Government Drupal - USASpending.gov
Comments
Heck yeah they're making use of Drupal. It's the hottest CMS out at the moment. It's funny, with all the amazing free CMSs out there, like Drupal and Wordpress, I wonder how much longer proprietary systems, that usually aren't as good, will last. FOSS for the win!
Best,
Jaime's Web Design Firm Service
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