In a huge move for the Drupal and open-source communities, the White House just recently switched their website (www.whitehouse.gov) to the open-source content management system (CMS), Drupal.

This was a collaborative effort between General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), Phase2, Terremark Federal Group, and Akamai. The use of Drupal has been growing rapidly in the U.S. Government with the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education, and the General Services Administration already utilizing the open-source CMS platform in some capacity.

According to techpresident.com:

GDIT, the Virginia-based government contractor who had executed the Bush-era White House CMS contract, was tasked by the Obama Administration with finding a more flexible alternative. The ideal new platform would be one where dynamic features like question-and-answer forums, live video streaming, and collaborative tools could work more fluidly together with the site's infrastructure. The solution, says the White House, turned out to be Drupal.

In an article about the White House switch, The Associated Press points out the following:

Having the public write code may seem like a security risk, but it's just the opposite, experts inside and outside the government argued. Because programmers collaborate to find errors or opportunities to exploit Web code, the final product is therefore more secure. For instance, instead of a dozen administration programmers trying to find errors, thousands of programmers online constantly are refining the programs and finding potential pitfalls.

More and more government websites around the world are moving to Drupal. Others include Australia and France.