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.

No one tagged me, but here it is. You can see your own results by running this command in the terminal

history|awk '{print $2}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head

  77 ssh
36 karp
20 ls
20 home
19 man
18 exit
16 abs
13 sudo
12 scp
12 cd

karp is an alias to ssh to a server at work. home is an alias to ssh to my G5 desktop. abs is another alias to ssh to a server at work.

I've spent the last few days installing and configuring a new site, DraftObama.org, to serve as a grassroots gathering spot for the body politic to rally around a 2008 presidential run by Illinois Senator Barack Obama. I announced the rough draft of the site in a diary on MyDD, hopeful that others more talented and eloquent than I will join with me and help build something larger and more exciting than what you'll find now.

Attention Citizens of Earth,

The word labtop is not a word. Your portable computer is a laPtop. As in, used on top of your lap. Do you use it on top of a lab? No. Why would you even think that? Why are you so dumb? Stop it.

Again, there is no such thing as a labtop. Stop saying it. STOP IT!

Sincerely,
Ben

In my IRC log, I noticed this from Sunday morning:

[NOTICES ] [06:12am] - cbarrett We're going to be rehubbing, total affected users... aw, who the fuck cares? Nobody reads these. Have a shitty day, you ungrateful fucks!

I think Mr. Barrett may have been having a bad day.