This interesting look at the history for Drupal and lefty politics was published in December, but is starting to get more attention now that the Obama administration is using Drupal for their Recovery.gov site. It brought back lots of good memories, and it's exciting to see the new administration embracing the legacy of lefty tech work over the past decade or so.

Nancy Scola has also written a bit about Drupal and Recovery.gov, and it's interesting to see just how far things have come since I helped build sites with DeanSpace back in 2003.

Of course, Draft Obama was built on Drupal and the CiviCRM tools that grew out of DeanSpace. And my new top secret project is built on the same, with some pieces thrown in from Sunlight Labs and others working on opening government up from a technical point of view.

I wonder how much off-the-shelf Drupal they're using, and how much will be custom developed modules. If they are developing modules or hiring Drupal contractors to develop them, I wonder if they will be released publicly. My hope is that for modules (and Drupal core changes) that could have broad use, they'll contribute them back to community. In fact, since it's undoubtedly tax dollars being spent on the site, perhaps all their development should be released to the public domain.

This is an exciting time for someone interested in the intersection of technology and governance, and I think that we have an administration that's not only willing to consider these ideas, but will help drive the technology by leaps and bounds.