Very soon, a lot of government agencies will start building applications to share their data with the public, and we need to have tools ready to access this information.  A lot of companies, organizations and civic groups are already building applications to get access to this information, and many people are starting to ask what tools are best for the job.

It is amazing to see how strong Drupal’s tool set is for helping the open data movement gain speed.  It is not alone – several other open source frameworks and CMS’s are in key positions to facilitate amazing government transparency wins for this country. We have an opportunity for open source projects to help the United States government to finally embrace open source on its merits, and this has already begun to happen with the White House launching Recovery.org on Drupal last week.

Here is why I am confident that the Drupal community has built such an amazing system for doing this. The tools below are just a few of the projects that I am intimately familiar with since Development Seed has had it’s hands dirty with them, and they’re not close to comprehensive of all the great open data work being done in the Drupal community. We should talk more about Drupal as a platform at TransparencyCamp, which starts tomorrow.

Drupal-powered Open Data Applications for Apps for Democracy

• Stumble Safely Launched on Drupal for a Fun, Late Apps for Democracy Entry
• OutsideinDC: A Guide to Biking in Washington, DC
• Spaces: A Paradigm for Reusable Drupal Features (Can you imagine what could be done with installer profiles for each branch of the government to create sites that will help them better stay on the same page?)

Good Examples of Integrating with Off-site Data

• Mapping and Referencing External Data via RDF in Drupal
• Extendr for Flickr and Views (Using Drupal’s native tools to reference external data sources with ease.)

Powerful Geographic Mapping

• Decentralized Data Collection and Real Time Mapping with Drupal
• Geotagging With the Provincial Drilldown Widget
• Pandemic Preparedness: When Data Visualization and Workflow Matter
• Hey, That’s a Nice Map! New Custom Mapping Module for Drupal

Powerful Aggregation

• Managing News (This is application is built on Drupal.)
• Comment Aggregation: Tightly Integrating Third Party Social Networks with Your Site

Cross-platform Notifications & Messaging

• Demo of Two Way SMS Gateway on a USB Stick with Drupal Integration
• Setting Up a Two-Way SMS Gateway with Gnokii and Drupal
• Jabber integration/ The Next Level in Team Communications: Jabber Integration with Drupal

As you can see, Drupal has a lot of features already in place that give application designers a solid starting place already, and members on the community continue to push more and more in the direction of having a tighter & lighter core with a host of plug-able and powerful API’s. As that happens, Drupal will just become an even stronger platform for building open data applications.