open source in government - The Web Experience Toolkit

The Government of Canada has its Web Experience Toolkit on GitHub

https://github.com/wet-boew

By making the WxT open source, it has been possible for organisations outside of the government to use it for their websites and to improve it.  Both the University of Ottawa and the City of Ottawa are now using WxT.

There was a writeup in Wired about the WxT: Canadian [Coders] Solve Mystery of Open Source Government.

the Treasury Board of Canada hosted a CodeFest to invite hackers — mostly government staffers — to hack its Web Experience Toolkit, or WET — a set of open-source tools that the Treasury Board uses for building websites. One hundred and fifty people came. Many of them were young developers, excitedly swapping code and sharing ideas across tables.

There are some minor issues: It's Treasury Board Secretariat, not Treasury Board, and TBS is the government's central policy agency not an "obscure Canadian tax-collecting agency".  (Admittedly it is difficult to decode that from the TBS website, but if you read far down enough you get to "policies, directives, regulations, and program expenditure proposals with respect to the management of the government's resources".)

You can follow Web Experience Toolkit info on Twitter using the hashtag #wxt and the account @WebExpToolkit

Author of the article is Robert McMillan @bobmcmillan

Featured or indirectly mentioned are:

• Paul Jackson @pjackson28
• Mary Beth Baker @bethmaru
• Lucia Harper @Lucialand
• Laura Booker (of OpenPlus) @bookerlaura
• @OpenPlusSoft
• Mike Gifford (of OpenConcept) @mgifford
• Luke Charde @lukecharde

UPDATE: There is a Drupal working group, the next meeting is January 25, 2013 at Ottawa City Hall.