"Sponsored by The Executive Office of the President"

As of Wednesday of this week, there are four new modules on Drupal.org that all include the text "sponsored by The Executive Office of the President" in their description:

• Context HTTP Headers
• Akamai
• GovDelivery
• Node Embed

By now it is old news to most Drupalers that whitehouse.gov has been running Drupal since October 2009. Back in November of 2009, Dave Cole and Macon Phillips of the White House New Media Team addressed the DC Drupal Meetup with some details about the implementation. On Wednesday Dave Cole added to this by providing more information during his "Open Source in Government" keynote at DrupalCon SF, and announced that four of the modules built for whitehouse.gov have been released back to Drupal.org. This announcement coincided with a similar announcement on the White House blog.

I do not want to overstate the importance of these contributions, for after all, many of Drupal's contrib modules were built for a specific project or client and then contributed back to the community. However, I do think that the visibility of the White House, combined with their willingness to engage the community on its own terms (through code / module releases) makes this a significant event in improving the acceptance of the open source development model in general, and Drupal in particular. Now we can not only point to whitehouse.gov as a high-visibility Drupal site, but also to the ways in which open source development can make us all potential co-contributors, rather than simply consumers.