“We the Coders”: White House commits open source code on Github

One small step for humans, one giant commit for mankind. The White House has open sourced its e-petitions platform on Github, fulfilling a commitment to the Open Government Partnership that the President of the United States made last September.

“…we’re launching a new online tool – called “We the People” – to allow Americans to directly petition the White House, and we’ll share that technology so any government in the world can enable its citizens to do the same.” – President Barack Obama, September 20, 2011

Macon Phillips, the White House director of digital, explained the move at the White House blog, below. In the post, Phillips indicated that the roadmap for We the People includes creating an API for third party clients and more integration of social media.

In the larger sense, it’s notable that the White House is releasing software code developed for the people, back to the people, with the hopes that with the people that code base will be improved upon.

That’s a big deal, and while the White House has been making open source part of open government for some time now, from open sourcing Data.gov to the IT Dashboard to contributing to Drupal, moving onto Github is a notable move. Open source is now playing an important role in open government, although it’s hardly a precondition for it. Whether it’s Energy.gov or House.gov moving to Drupal, middleware for open government data or codesharing with CivicCommons, open source matters more than ever.

After reading the post embedded below, you can watch an interview on open source and open government with Chris Wanstrath, co-founder of Github. Here’s Phillips:

UPDATE: Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, blogged about the release and welcomed the White House contributing to Drupal code.

In October of 2009, WhiteHouse.gov was relaunched on Drupal. Two years later, the White House launched We the People on Drupal, a big step forward for Open Government. While governments haven’t traditionally recognized the importance of the grassroots, word of mouth organizing that thrives on the Internet, We the People encourages grassroots citizen engagement. Even more exciting is that if you are an Open Source developer, you can get involved with improving how your government actually works. Needless to say, I’m thrilled to see Open Source and Drupal changing the world in a positive, powerful way. The newly released code is packaged as a Drupal install profile. The profile is currently tailored to the White House’s website but every Github member can issue pull requests to make it more generally useful. The Petition install profile can be cloned, forked or downloaded from the White House’s Github repository.