Image via Wikipedia

Last month the White House, under the direct instructions of President Obama, scrapped the old, expensive system the White House’s website ran on and moved towards the freely available open source platform Drupal, which also powers this site. In a Drupal meet up in D.C. last night, the White House tech team broke their silence on the move:

The biggest news from the night was a few announcements about the White House’s plans for engaging with open source development communities. Dave Cole, the White House Deputy Director for Technology, said that the White House New Media team has been working with the White House legal council to figure out how to participate and contribute code back into the Drupal community. They can’t promise a timeline for when that’ll happen since it’s pretty unprecedented for the Executive Branch to be participating in an open source project and to be directly engaging the Drupal community.

They also want to start holding “Development Challenges” for the international Drupal community in order to help figure out some ways to take the best ideas that are already out there, and see how they can be used for the public good.

This is very welcoming news. Open source software is the future of computing, and now that the United States government is so openly embracing it and willing to contribute back, it will only get better.

When I first posted the news about the White House’s move to my favorite content management system I also said that it will provide a great tool to allow more user interactivity, and that appears to be exactly what the White House has in mind:

They have about a list of at least 60 feature requests for the project, but the number one issue is user account management and figuring out a user authentication system. This issue happens to have a lot of privacy implications, and it’s not just matter of the technological implementation of user account management, but they’re also considering the social media best practices of single sign-on and OpenID. They have to thinking about dealing with the range of users from skeptical to technologically immersive users.

Another feature is a way to save a search, and then send out e-mail alerts whenever new information appears containing that keyword search.

Imagine that. If you are interested in executive orders then you will be able to create an email alert about “executive orders” and get an email anytime one is added to the website. This is like Google Alerts, only on the White House. It will provide an extremely valuable tool for the media and blogosphere, as well as normal citizens.