Whitehouse.gov Goes Open Source

It was a red-letter day for open-source software when the White House announced its transition from ASP.NET to Drupal on Oct. 24. Several insightful pieces have already been written in the blogosphere (Nancy Scola and Tim O'Reilly), so I'll not rehash that here. Instead I'll do the usual and take a look at some numbers.

Some obvious choices for searching stats turn out to create problems. Uncle Sam's Google Search returns things like the National Vulnerabilities Database listing for a given CMS. Perhaps given that its 3:30 a.m., a first whack at how many .gov sites are out there using OS is to simply look at self-reporting for some representative CMS's.

CMS	Sites Reported	Source URL
DotNetNuke	--	(No obvious collection available. If anyone knows of one, please comment.)
Drupal	46	http://groups.drupal.org/node/19885 and http://groups.drupal.org/node/24119
Joomla	30	http://community.joomla.org/showcase/sites/government-and-nonprofit/government.html
Plone	234	http://plone.net/sites/sites_listing?industries%3Alist=Government
WordPress	17	http://wordpress.org/showcase/tag/government/

Although its been heralded as a watershed moment for open source, FOSS has been steadily penetrating the .gov domain for years. The high-profile nature of whitehouse.gov, however, gives open source a great boost. But places like Albuquerque, Newport News, Brazil, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, and many others have been using open source for years. I recommend reading the e-Government article in Wikipedia with an eye towards FOSS mentions, which are numerous.

As always, the message is to match requirements with capabilities. If you're a PHP shop with lots of talent in that area, you might be inclined to go in that direction. Similarly, with ASP.NET staff, DNN is a player. If security is one of your top concerns, Plone should be on your short list.

Meanwhile, here's another plug for FosterMilo's presentation at World Plone 2009 on Day 2 -- "Helping the Government Go Plone." They were instrumental in getting Plone up and running for the Cities of Albuquerque and Raton here in New Mexico. If past presentations are any indication (here's one of my favs), this will be a good one.

Plone at TED

Peter Donnelly described a statistician as a person who likes numbers and figures but lacks the personality skills to be an accountant. So tonight I'll skip the numbers and do a strictly anecdotal analysis.

I was trolling the net last night and early this morning and came across a TED video on cooperation. The presenter, Howard Rheingold (author of Smart Mobs) discusses among other things, the role of open-source software in the new economy of collaboration. Definitely worth a look.

Also in the TED collection is Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks) talking about open-source economics. Good stuff.

And if you're wondering why Plone Metrics is interested in all this besides a general enthusiasm for international cooperation, then watch Richard Baraniuk's presentation on open-source education. Baraniuk is the champion of Connexions, the educational collaboration program. Connexions in turn is a Plone site. Although Plone is not specifically cited (the only technical plug is for XML in general), I'll wager it was the only CMS that formed the critical backbone of one of the TED presentations.

It may just be anecdotal and there may be another CMS-driven TED topic hidden out there, but knowing that Connexions enabled by Plone made the TED cut should be a source of pride for the Plone community and a point of reference for anyone else evaluating CMS.

(BTW, the TED website appears to be built on top of the Dojo framework, which is manifestly not a CMS but the site looks great.)