Andrew Hoppin on Drupal in Government with OpenPublic

Andrew Hoppin has been involved with the Drupal Community since 2004 when he got involved in CivicSpace, which was the first Drupal "distribution" that was focused on bringing Drupal to government campaigns and non-profits. CivicSpace was technically a fork of Drupal, and they put a lot of work into making the install profile system work a lot better with Drupal. Ultimately the vision of spreading Drupal to governments was never fully actualized with CivicSpace, but it did plant a seed with the install profile systems and the concept of a Drupal distribution that has come full circle with the OpenPublic distribution just put out by Phase2 Technology.

Hoppin was a keynote speaker last year at DrupalCon when he was still the CIO of the New York State Senate. He talks about his accomplishments with bringing open source to government, but his larger vision of spreading Drupal throughout all other different types of state legislatures and local governments was not actualized due to a lack of ease of replicability of the work that the New York State Senate released last year at DrupalCon, which is described here by Sheldon Rampton.

Hoppin has since left the New York State Senate with the recent change of administrations there, and now he is working as an evangelist for spreading open source technologies to governments all over the country. He is starting to build out some sites using OpenPublic, and is advising an organization called CIvic Commons, which is a non-profit that is tasked with helping to bring Open Source technologies to government (including Drupal, but not limited to just content management systems).

Hoppin sees a lot of hope that OpenPublic can deliver on the promise of bringing replicable open source websites to governments all through the United States, and he praises Phase2 for having the vision to be able to create it and be willing to let go of the control of deciding what should be included and developed for it. Hoppin mentions the possibility of having Civic Commons more directly involved with helping shape the future of OpenPublic, and how it's important that governments don't have only one vendor to choose from when deciding on a platform. So the ideal scenario would be to have an entire ecosystem of development shops and vendors available that could be helping to develop and maintain Drupal sites at all levels of government.

Hoppin sees that Phase2's concept of an App store that's implemented within the OpenPublic framework has a lot of really exciting possibilities for delivering standardized functionality across many different instances of OpenPublic distributions. It's certainly an exciting time to see how Drupal is virally spreading to all different branches of government, and Hoppin talks about how surreal it is to see his long-time dreams of bring Drupal to governments finally coming to fruition.