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Free Software for Politics
kevin lyda writes "The Howard Dean campaign is releasing software for web-based communities under the GNU GPL. The project apparently is based on drupal. See here for more info, and here for the software. Regardless if you're for Dean, against Dean, or you're not an American, it's great to see an American politician on the national level using and promoting free software. I wonder if RMS thought he'd see a U.S. presidential candidate releasing stuff under the GPL when he founded GNU 20 years ago!"
There was a call for this before... Slashdot and Dean staff, are you listening?
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
The great thing about this software is that it could ultimately cut down on the cost of campaigns, lessening the need for big political donors and their influence on politics.
A former employer of mine was involved in developing Web communities for conservative clients, and the bill for his services is huge even by 1999 standards.
If you go to the Drupal website, you'll see that Brad posted some brief comments from his interaction with the Dean campaign (9/10/2003).
(Taken from Drupal.org)
I met with a Presidential campaign yesterday. They asked me to advise in general on their web site, but when we got into our discussion, I learned they were doing the static html thing. So, I demoed three CMS' to them - Drupal, Typo3, and a fork of Backend my company developed. They were blown away by all of them,. But I steered them to Drupal for speed of setup, flexibility and features. As a matter of fact, if you compare the features to what Howard Dean has on his site, you are basically setup with everything he has.
Having managed campaigns for a living in a previous life, I realized that if a Presidential campaign is this far behind technologically, then there are likely hundreds of candidates running now and next year that will not have a system in place. Additionally, most do not have the budget of this campaign and are unable to hire developers, designers, and writers, but know it is necessary.
Regardless, it is quite impressive to see an open project get this kind of press (Presidential campaigns?), and the modifications given back to the community?! Ye gods! w00t!