Liveblog: Dries' Keynote at Drupal Gov Days

Drupal powers the websites of royalty, from the King of Belgium to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. It powers the websites of governments, the US President, Prime Ministers and cities. Drupal is used by many of the world’s most powerful websites.

Key to this success is the fact that it is open source. This gives some key freedoms - not just in terms of cost. The most important freedoms are those that allow anyone to see the source code, modify it and distribute it.

Open source is not just a license, it’s a development strategy. It allows people to innovate much more freely, and speeds the pace of development.

The beginnings of Drupal’s role in the public sector was when Howard Dean used it in his push for the US presidency - powering the Deanspace website. The success of this was the cover story in an issue of Time magazine, and established the seed of Drupal as a platform for the public sector.

Dries gives a few examples of some recent projects in which open innovation has been going on in the public space - including sites that use data mashups to provide an information service. Dries says that governments should provide more open data. They don’t need to process it, other people can do that.

Government 2.0 is about both technology and attitude.

This must come from the decision makers. The progress on this in the US really accelerated when President Obama was elected, and drove an agenda of open data on open source bringing more transparency, reducing cost and giving more flexibility.

But, of course, security is critical. If Dries were a 12 year old script kiddie, he says, he would try hacking the White House website. It must be the website with the most hack attempts in the world. The success of this site is testament to the security of Drupal.

The US government has 34,000 websites, and many governments and organisations have large numbers of sites. At the moment they are built on a very diverse technology stack. Dries believes that Drupal will gradually become the standard. It is a platform that can be developed to provide many types of sites.

He also believes that many government systems will move to the cloud. He believes that traditional hosting will decrease, and people will move to Platform as a Service, or Software as a Service. Drupal is ideally placed to operate in this way, and Dries’ company Acquia is pursuing these opportunities.