Even official government policy for the United States of America.

GitHub’s Ben Balter announced today that the White House drafted and released the official Open Data Policy of the United States on the service.

“Today’s news marks the first time a government entity has published law as a living, collaborative document,” Balter said. “We’re excited to see how the Open Data Policy evolves with the input of the community, and we hope this is just the first of many.”

Project Open Data is a policy that instructs government agencies to “manage their data, and information more generally, as an asset from the start.” And not just to manage it for monetary or political gain but to manage it for the public good — the document says that government data should, wherever possible, be released “to the public in a way that makes it open, discoverable, and usable.”

That’s impressive, and that’s exciting for advocates of open and collaborative government.

“This is the geekiest thing the feds have ever done,” VentureBeat’s own Dylan Tweney said.

The White House is using GitHub Pages, which GitHub hosts for free. Pages can be managed from the GitHub site, a Mac app, or the command line, and it includes features such as theme options — often responsive or optimized for mobile — as well as custom URLs.

“By choosing GitHub Pages, government employees as well as citizens are empowered to continuously propose and discuss potential improvements,” Balter says.

And, he adds, the “revolution is only just beginning.”

But the White House is definitely not doing business — or government, rather — as usual. The U.S. government has released a repository of open source code that allows citizens to create and vote on petitions, the same functionality that drives WhiteHouse.gov.

In September 2011, President Barack Obama made this commitment:

Among our commitments, we’re launching a new online tool — called “We the People” — to allow Americans to directly petition the White House, and we’ll share that technology so any government in the world can enable its citizens to do the same.

Today the White House fulfilled that commitment, as a repository of source code was made public on Github. The web application allows users to create accounts, log in, set up petitions, and vote. Petitions only go public when they cross a designated number of voters, and future development plans include streamlining, API development, a mobile version, and social media integration.

Interestingly, the developers and, presumably, the government chose the GNU General Public License, which Richard Stallman, long a proponent of completely free software, would approve. The GPL grants anyone the rights to use, study, modify, and redistribute software, which is one of the reasons Microsoft argued it was anti-American.

The application, titled Petition, is built on the Drupal content management system, and requires MySQL, MongoDB, and, naturally, PHP. Petition is in alpha, which is a very early stage of software development, but is currently in use already at whitehouse.gov.

Open source: You’ve come a long way, baby.

Image credit: White House/ShutterStock

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