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http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2013/pro-cispa-backers-spend-over-100-times-more-lobbying-opponents/

  Interests supporting a controversial bill aimed at improving cyber security, set for a House vote Thursday, spent 140 times as much lobbying Congress as those on the other side of the debate and have dozens of former Capitol Hill insiders working on their behalf, an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation's Reporting Group shows.

Sunlight's review of lobbying disclosures from the last session of Congress in Influence Explorer shows that backers of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act had $605 million in lobbying expenditures from 2011 through the third quarter of last year compared to $4.3 million spent by opponents of the bill. While it's impossible to say how many of those dollars were devoted to trying to influence votes on the CISPA bill (many of those entities have multiple interests before Congress), it provides some measure of the lopsidedness of the resources available to each side.

Here are the lobbying totals for supporters: https://data.sunlightlabs.com/dataset/Lobbying-totals-by-CISPA-proponents/5brg-ruk9

and opponents: https://data.sunlightlabs.com/dataset/Lobbying-totals-by-CISPA-opponents/jhe8-cki6

http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2013/pro-cispa-backers-spend-over-100-times-more-lobbying-opponents/

  Interests supporting a controversial bill aimed at improving cyber security, set for a House vote Thursday, spent 140 times as much lobbying Congress as those on the other side of the debate and have dozens of former Capitol Hill insiders working on their behalf, an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation's Reporting Group shows.

Sunlight's review of lobbying disclosures from the last session of Congress in Influence Explorer shows that backers of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act had $605 million in lobbying expenditures from 2011 through the third quarter of last year compared to $4.3 million spent by opponents of the bill. While it's impossible to say how many of those dollars were devoted to trying to influence votes on the CISPA bill (many of those entities have multiple interests before Congress), it provides some measure of the lopsidedness of the resources available to each side.

Here are the lobbying totals for supporters: https://data.sunlightlabs.com/dataset/Lobbying-totals-by-CISPA-proponents/5brg-ruk9

and opponents: https://data.sunlightlabs.com/dataset/Lobbying-totals-by-CISPA-opponents/jhe8-cki6

(Obligatory disclosure: My business is providing technical services for advocacy organizations in DC. My practice isn't Drupal-oriented, but obviously I have a financial interest in trends in that sector, so you may wish to discount my opinions accordingly.)

The answer is that it has critical mass in the advocacy/e-government sector. It isn't so much anything about Drupal per se that makes it the default choice; it's that in this line of business it's what everybody else uses. So you get lots of projects that start with the assumption that they're going to be using Drupal, without ever really evaluating how appropriate Drupal is versus competing alternatives. It's just What You Use. Partly this comes from having lots of tech people around who are familiar with it, so they reach for it first, and partly it comes from managers whose knowledge of Drupal begins and ends with having heard the name attached to other projects they're familiar with.

The result, of course, is that lots of projects end up trying to wrestle Drupal into strange configurations it was never meant to be in. You can kind of see that in this blog post from the Sunlight Foundation, an open-government think tank. It's called "Content Management Systems just don't work," but the title is a bit misleading, because what it's really about is content management systems (a.k.a. Drupal) not working when pressed into service for tasks other than content management. Drupal's a fine CMS; the problem comes in when people try to make it act like a framework, or a database platform, or a RAD tool, which it isn't.

The more interesting question isn't why people choose Drupal, it's how Drupal achieved critical mass in the DC technosphere in the first place. It's a long story, but the short version is that it goes back to the Howard Dean campaign in 2004. Dean was the first candidate to really raise serious money online, and his tech team had built lots of their tools on top of Drupal. (Here's an early example of Dean Drupal buzz.) When the 2004 campaign was over, every political candidate wanted a bit of that Howard Dean Internet fundraising magic for himself, so there was a brisk demand for ex-Dean staffers to write articles and speak at conferences, explaining how they did what they had done. These staffers were naturally asked what tools they had used, they said "Drupal," and the result was hordes of magazine-readers and conference-goers coming away with the impression that Drupal was Internet Success In A Box. Which completely missed the point of the Deaniacs' message, but it led to more Drupal usage in advocacy & e-politics projects, which led to more visibility for Drupal, which led to more usage, which led to more visibility, and so forth.

Correct, just look at what goes through Congress near holidays and weekends.

Sunlight labs is sponsoring a hack-a-thon for Haiti in DC on Saturday.

I was recently looking for an API with this kind of data and found that votesmart.org has a pretty good one that offers information on federal, state, and local government representives, legislation, votes, and more. http://votesmart.org/services_api.php

Also, the Sunlight Foundation has an API with congressional data, and they are currently holding a contest for creation of any kind of application that would help improve accountability, transparency, and interaction in government. The app has to be released under the MIT, New BSD, or GPL family of licenses. First place prize is $15,000. Submissions are due by March 31st. You can read more here: http://www.sunlightlabs.com/appsforamerica/

I am not associated with VoteSmart or the Sunlight Foundation.