Open Source Whitehouse.gov

Masters of Social Media

Jon Lebkowsky and Dave Evans have been working with web technology and strategy since the web first appeared. Both are acknowledged thought leaders at the forefront of development of what we now call social media.

Jon Lebkowsky has two decades' experience with Internet-based communications, and was cofounder of the first company built as an Internet community. He was also involved in conversations and strategic thinking around the inception and evolution of blogs and other social media and the evolving "web 2.0" concept in the 2000s. He was cofounder of the successful web consultancy, Polycot Consulting, and was coeditor of Extreme Democracy, a book about political uses of social technology. Learn more at Wikipedia.

Jon Lebkowsky's personal blog

Dave Evans is the author of Social Media Marketing an Hour a Day. Dave has extensive marketing and advertising experience through his work with GSD&M, Progressive Insurance, and his own web consultancy, Digital Voodoo, founded in 1994.

Dave Evans' personal blog

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Ride the Cluetrain

Jon Lebkowsky was a signer of the Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999, and has continued to advocate its principles.

"...learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about 'listening to customers.' They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf....employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets."

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By jonl | October 26, 2009

The Obama Administration is moving Whitehouse.gov to the Open Source Drupal platform, based on a set of requirements for a platform “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 Personal Democracy Forum explores the social relevance of the decision to adopt Drupal, which is known for its interactive community features:

Let’s really try to extract the last drop of possible meaning from a choice over a CMS. Squint a bit, and it’s possible to see the White House’s move to open-source software as a move towards the idea that collaborative programming can inspire — or at least, support — a more distributed politics. That idea bubbled up in 2004, when young programmers experimented with using Drupal itself to turn the Howard Dean campaign into the Howard Dean network. [Jon Lebkowsky of Social Web Strategies was part of that effort.] This idea, that a politics crafted by the people could be a powerful thing indeed, emerged in a slightly mutated way during the Obama presidential campaign, but has arguably receded below the surface during the first nine months of the Obama Administration. First the WhiteHouse.gov CMS gets more open, then the White House OS? Perhaps.