I am not just a culture and politics commentator, writer and blog publisher. Am a web developer who almost exclusively works using Drupal, the open-source and free web development platform first created by Dryes Buytaert. So it tickles me to know end that the Obama administration has embraced Drupal so whole-heartedly.

I love Drupal and all the haters who complain "it's difficult" to use or implement are probably reacting to the platform's flexibility. Not that there aren't usability issues that said flexibility bring, but as Dries himself says:

Drupal provides a great mix of traditional web content management features and social features that enable open communication and participation. This combination is what we refer to as social publishing and is why so many people use Drupal. Furthermore, I think Drupal is a great fit in terms of President Barack Obama's desire to reduce cost and to act quickly. Drupal's flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems. In other words, Drupal is a great match for the U.S. government.

I discovered this for myself after I became a casualty in the first wave of spam attacks on feminist blogs back in 2004 --my blog and hundreds of others on the same server where bogged down by hundreds of spam comments published every minute that said "I am raping you".

I needed something secure that had many levels of control on how content would appear on blog posts or comments and I also needed something that couldn't be easily hackable. I found Drupal after months and months of testing and was totally sold on it after meeting two of the guys that developed DeanSpace (which then became CivicSpace) using Drupal : Zac Rosen and Andrew Hoppin. (BTW: That same day I met Zac's uncle, Jay Rosen along with Dave Winer, David Weinberger, Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej).

Anyhow, it's amazing that the White House was finally ported over to Drupal --I had  noticed months ago a lot of those changes but hadn't heard anything officially WhiteHouse.gov Goes Drupal [Updated] | Personal Democracy Forum:

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.

Drupal proponents have long tried to make the case that open-source software could be just as safe, just as stable, and and just as reliable as pre-boxed software, even if hundreds, thousands, or even millions of volunteer developers had their fingers in the mix at some point along the way. The White House's seal of approval doesn't hurt.

Let me add something that Nancy doesn't highlight on her post: Open-source should be the way to go for all government-related technology needs, especially when it comes to educational technologies such as websites and workflow systems such as word processing and worksheet software. I'd like to see the US government not only embrace Drupal. I'd like to see them ditch MicrosoftOffice for OpenOffice, the Mozilla suite: Firefox, Sunbird and Thunderbird among others.

Why? Tim Oreilly says it succintly:

The net-net is that I suspect that simply using open source software won't slash government IT budgets, at least not right away. What it will do is increase the amount of value we get for our money and the speed with which new technology can be adopted. Features that would have cost millions of dollars and years of development to add will now be rolled into the scope of current contracts.

This is really important. I went to one of our public libraries here in NYC just the other day and was shocked to see how craptacular internet access is. They are still using MSWindows 5 (not even fucking Vista) and the standards-hating MS Internet Explorer. And this is not just at the library level. I consulted briefly with a deparment within one of the CUNY universities and was shocked to find out they are running their servers on Windows NT.

As I wrote back in 2004, many countries are taking the lead against proprietary software use at the governmental level. The minister of technology of Brasil even went as far as describing MicroSoft as the technology equivalent of a crack dealer but in this case it was the economic and technological sovereignty of whole nations that are at stake. To paraphrase myself: To be economically free, Brazil needs to be technologically free. So open source software, non-DRM technology and copyleft is part of the answer for the country's future.

With that let me just pimp my services fr a second: Am getting ready to update my resume, DRUPAL SITE ARCHITECT will be my newest hat: Am an expert not only on web site design and development using Drupal, but am expert in creating custom distributions and configurations for your web development needs based on the thousands of contributed modules available for Drupal.

The more you know

With that in mind, what's your favorite open-source tool?