Vote for a Drupal Site to Win Apps for Democracy Contest!

We thought the Apps for Democracy contest was a great way to show the DC government that Drupal is the leading open source platform for government project and a great chance to get them familiar with the platform. So we built a Drupal site and entered it in the contest. You can vote for it here. You don't need to log in so it only takes three seconds to vote, but voting closes tonight at midnight, so vote soon!

The site we built is called DC Bikes and you can check it out here. It's a guide to biking in DC and puts mostly city data on a map so people find detailed bike routes in DC, monitor bike theft in real time, and buy bike equipment on Craigslist. This site is built on Drupal and is the only submission that is 100% open source - we used open source Mapnik for our maps rather than Google Maps. Specifically we used <a href="http://drupal.org/project/feedapi>FeedAPI and Feed Element Mapper for the site's aggregation, and the spaces module allowed us to build it pretty quickly.

We hope that this site will make biking safer in DC and get more people to bike overall, which in turn would make us a greener and healthier city. Here's a screenshot of the site:

Apps for Democracy is a pretty neat contest being run by the DC government. The city opened up a bunch of the data it collects (crime incidents, traffic reports, etc.) and is sponsoring a competition for people to build cool websites that take the data and show it on a website. We hope that this is only the beginning of the data the DC government makes available (and there are rumors that if this competition is well received, the government will open up an additional 200 data sets.) More freely available information is almost always a good thing, and it will lead to more websites that take open data and make it useful to all of us.

Voting closes at midnight, so keep an ear out for news about the winners tomorrow!