I do my best to keep my two IT world's separated. One of those worlds of course is my obsession with content management systems which includes this blog and numerous discussions with almost anyone interested in CMS. The second world is my IT position as a federal employee for a small government field office. In order to avoid conflicts of interest, rarely do I allow those two worlds to cross one another. You'll find very little mention on this blog of my work for the federal government. At the same time, very few people in my agency are even aware of my CMS side hobby.
Earlier this week, Lullabot's Jeff Robbins posted an article about his company giving Drupal on-site training to employees within the Department of Commerce. In his post Jeff discusses the interest those employees have in Drupal as well as mentioning that the door continues to widen for Drupal in the federal government.
We had a great week of on-site training at the Department of Commerce in Washington, DC last week. They've already launched recovery.commerce.gov in Drupal and they're currently in the process of rebuilding Commerce.gov as a Drupal site. We spent the week with their team making sure that they understood not only how to build and present a Drupal site, but also the benefits of the Drupal community. They're a smart bunch and it's always fun to watch the synapses sparking as people realize all of the ways that they can snap together Drupal's pieces to create interesting web functionality.
There seems to be quite a buzz around Drupal in the government and as the Commerce team walked around the building with Drupal books under their arms, they got lots of comments from people in other bureaus, saying, "Oh! Drupal! We're thinking about using Drupal." Word is starting to get around about Drupal as a great platform for government websites.
Jeff Robbins is correct in saying that until recently, there was a lot of hesitation to using open source CMS such as Drupal for government portals and content delivery. I know earlier this decade my agency's Webmaster had considered using Drupal before deciding to build the agency's own CMS in-house. During this time period Drupal 4.5 was available but while my interest in information systems was growing, I had never really looked into Drupal (Mambo was in the open source CMS headlines back then) . However, just the possibility of my agency considering the use of Drupal during that time helped motivate me to learn more about Drupal.
Until this year, I had resigned myself to only seeing open source CMS utilized on the intranet side of the federal government. There were exceptions of course for the public seeing Drupal in the federal government, especially within smaller government agencies running niche sites such as those found in NASA. Yet, the idea of seeing Drupal as a major portal into federal government sites never seemed likely to me.
In part, I think we're seeing Drupal more in the federal government due to a positive attitude from the new administration toward open source software. I also think the shortfalls in the budget is also causing government managers to rethink how money is spent and taking another look at software licenses. In the end though, the software used by the federal government has to meet user and administrator requirements as well as be good use of tax payer dollars. Drupal evidently is meeting federal government requirements.
I have never been one to advocate the use of only proprietary software or open source for any organization yet alone for the federal government. There is importance to keeping a level playing field for all the software solutions and software licensing options being provided by vendors. However, I can't help but get some joy in knowing that Drupal can and does compete against some heavy hitters in the proprietary CMS business. The use of open source CMS possibly coming to a federal government site near you and me is one of the CMS highlights for 2009