open government

Recently, I was able to do a temporary detail to GSA from my agency (Veterans Affairs). My detail involved the creation of a url shortener (it's in a Beta test now, but you can see it at http://go.usa.gov).

I had amazing help from friends in the Drupal community, especially my friend SeanR.

However, there was also a lot of discussion about the usual sorts of things:

· Drupal isn’t secure,

· it’s gonna crash our system,

· can’t be done,

· it’s not safe for government,

· too vulnerable to cross site scripting,

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.