Acquia Launches New ‘Social Publishing for Open Government’ Program

Yesterday, Acquia, the enterprise guide to social publishing and almost all things Drupal, announced their new ‘Social Publishing for Open Government’ program. This program is designed to provide agencies a seamless platform to successfully meet the requirements of the new Open Government Directive (OGD). The directive, sent by President Obama to the head of every US federal government department and agency, encourages and instructs agencies to open their operations to the public, based around the three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration. Acquia’s new program is aimed to help the agencies implement Drupal to meet these objectives. This is big time for Acquia, and Drupal.

The United States Government is not the only organization to discover the benefits of Drupal, as the British Government, the Dutch Government, the Australian Government, and the Belgium Government, are all realizing what Drupal can do for their websites and online communities. We all know that in the U.S., www.whitehouse.gov is operating Drupal; but the New York State Senate, US Courts, NASA, and the Department of Commerce are just a few of the hundreds of government agencies utilizing Drupal for their websites.

Here is a video that Acquia has available on their site that walks you through the preliminary phase of their program, an on-ramp Government Jump-Start program.

In addition to the Jump-Start program, Acquia will also offer a seminar series that features speakers from federal and state agencies who will share their experiences of how open source content management with Drupal is quickly being adopted across U.S. federal, state and local governments to meet a rapidly changing society.

Acquia will also provide government agencies access to its library of resources, including a whitepaper “Social Publishing for Government” which includes user case studies, to help departments "better understand Social Publishing and why it’s relevant to government agencies worldwide."