Suddenly, I became interested in politics again.
Government ≠ Politics
Huh?
The White House just open sourced their first Github repo
81–90 of 127 posts
Re: The White House just open sourced their first Github repo
#82Who cares? This is boring code. Save all the "it portends an open government!" handwaving for once the Obama admin does something _actually_ meaningful (in a positive way - starting a new war doesn't count). Seriously. Much ado about a Drupal module that is used for people to petition the government to be patronized and ignored.
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Re: The White House just open sourced their first Github repo
#83> "President Obama is committed to creating the most open and participatory government in our nation’s history" I'll believe that when his administration stops being one of the most secretive and most aggressive prosecutors of whistleblowers in recent history. Sources: http://www.salon.com/2012/02/09/obamas_unprecedented_war_on_... http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/06/obamas-whistlebl... http://tpmmuckraker.ta…
I reckon this was simply a first-pass readme -- hands-up, who likes writing those?
I submitted a pull request that tones down the hyperbole somewhat: https://github.com/WhiteHouse/petition/pull/5
I sense it's essential for them to keep the project focused on the software. Partly what makes this interesting is managing the partisan nature of discourse. That's a unique non-functional requirement here.
It's a good test for Github as a collaboration platform.
Re: The White House just open sourced their first Github repo
#84Finally I can sass the whitehouse using github issues! https://github.com/WhiteHouse/petition/issues/2
Opening issue #2 was not a wise or helpful act. This initiative should be encouraged; presumably the government will be more enthusiastic about continuing the experiment if they do not receive the impression that the community of open source developers are childish and counter-productive.
Re: The White House just open sourced their first Github repo
#85Moving from MongoDB to MySQL. I never understood why people felt they need MongoDB/NoSQL for their projects. Does anyone have an example where it was really necessary/advantageous?
Session data. NoSQL isn't meant to be a catch-all solution, and it's certainly not meant to be the only database you use in a complex project. It's meant for data that you really wouldn't mind losing that you have to access a lot. Normally, that's temporary data in an app that might require it on every page view— recently viewed items, sessions, shopping carts that aren't saved for later, etc.
Re: The White House just open sourced their first Github repo
#86Ignoring all the snarky comments about how the current administration has ignored every online petition so far, this is really cool. Everyone now has a chance to have their name attached to an official government project!
Re: The White House just open sourced their first Github repo
#87Just want to point out that this is not the first code contributed to open source from the WhiteHouse.gov project. Several of the Drupal modules developed for the site were made available to the community on Drupal.org not long after the new site launched. Some examples (may not be all of them): http://drupal.org/project/govdelivery http://drupal.org/project/akamai http://drupal.org/project/context_http_headers http:…
And specifically it includes a drupal-org.make file which is a manifest for the Drupal.org packaging system which bundles up this profile, all of it's dependencies, and Drupal core into a single download. Perhaps they are planning to put it there, or just decided to mirror it on Github for now. Also FWIW, the petition namespace on d.o is already occupied, perhaps that is blocking the release on d.o?
A drupal-org.make file, like any .make file that the Drupal tool Drush uses, is independent of the Drupal.org packaging system.
There's a lot of pressure from within the Drupal community to host all Drupal contrib modules, themes, and distributions on drupal.org but I don't see anything wrong with a distribution being hosted on GitHub. It certainly brings more visibility to the project from developers outside of the "Drupal Island".
Re: The White House just open sourced their first Github repo
#88Re: The White House just open sourced their first Github repo
#89And, in the spirit of the project, they'll reject all pull requests with a patronizing response about the way things are.[1][2] 1. https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/legalize-and-regul... 2. https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/abolish-tsa-and-us...
This snark doesn't apply to the Github release of the code, it is just politics. I guess one cannot publicly speak the phrase 'White House' without a hundred knees jerking into action.
Anyway, rejecting pull requests with patronizing responses is hardly uncommon on Github.
Re: The White House just open sourced their first Github repo
#90> "President Obama is committed to creating the most open and participatory government in our nation’s history" I'll believe that when his administration stops being one of the most secretive and most aggressive prosecutors of whistleblowers in recent history. Sources: http://www.salon.com/2012/02/09/obamas_unprecedented_war_on_... http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/06/obamas-whistlebl... http://tpmmuckraker.ta…
I reckon this was simply a first-pass readme -- hands-up, who likes writing those? I submitted a pull request that tones down the hyperbole somewhat: https://github.com/WhiteHouse/petition/pull/5 I sense it's essential for them to keep the project focused on the software. Partly what makes this interesting is managing the partisan nature of discourse. That's a unique non-functional requirement here. It's a good test…
If it is possible to manage the partisan nature of discourse, it is also possible to exacerbate it and to frame it in a desired way. Since this project has no special protection and seems to be uniformly hated by citizens, we can expect it to be abolished in the next Presidency and possibly replaced with something more blatantly partisan.