White House contributes to Drupal

Very exciting news from the White House today.

Last night, President Obama fulfilled his promise to release the code behind "We the People", a Drupal-based application that enables the American people to petition the President of the United States directly about the issues they care most about. The release follows a commitment the President made to the United Nations to share the technology behind this platform "so any government in the world can enable its citizens to do the same."

White House Director of Digital Strategy Macon Phillips explains the move in a White House blog post featured today on the front page of whitehouse.gov.

In October 2009, WhiteHouse.gov was relaunched on Drupal. Two years later, the White House launched We the People on Drupal, a big step forward for Open Government.

While governments haven't traditionally recognized the importance of the grassroots, word-of-mouth organizing that thrives on the Internet, We the People encourages grassroots citizen engagement.

Even more exciting is that Open Source developers can get involved in improving how their government actually works. Needless to say, I'm thrilled to see Open Source and Drupal changing the world in a positive, powerful way.

The newly released code is packaged as a Drupal install profile. The profile is currently tailored to the White House's website, but every GitHub member can submit pull requests to make it more generally useful. The Petition install profile can be cloned, forked, or downloaded from the White House's GitHub repository.