Rob Klause: From Whitehouse.gov to Siteworx

By Dee-Ann LeBlanc (@deele) Jan 26, 2010

Some people are never content to sit back and enjoy what they've accomplished. Rob Klause is one of these people. He took some time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about working with the Executive Office of the President, Drupal (news, site) and Siteworx.

Meet Rob Klause, Adrenaline Junkie

Certain patterns quickly became clear as Rob Klause, now the Senior Practice Manager of Siteworx, discussed his past adventures. Since the early 1990's he's moved back and forth between the private and public sector, being on hand for the rushing about of major changes and site launches and moving on when tasks boiled down to humdrum day to day operations.

Twice, his path into the public sector has taken him into the Executive Office of the President, working primarily with Whitehouse.gov and supporting the White House Communications Office. In the private sector, he's worked with an interesting mix of companies such as Ogilvy, the Christian Science Monitor, DuPont, the CDC and Quaker Oats.

A Government in Transition

Perhaps what Klause is currently best known for is being the man behind the move of Whitehouse.gov to open source Web CMS Drupal. He returned to the public sector during the run-up to the 2008 elections, and regardless who won, there would be a new administration.

Such an event requires that the outgoing administration's final message be archived for posterity. You can see the results today in the US government archives.

Returning to Government

Along with getting all of the outgoing administration's records management checkboxes attended to, there was the issue of the incoming administration's web presence. Would they use nine years' of legacy, homegrown code?

In looking at the potential that Obama would win the election, he was strongly engaging in social media. The current platform "wasn't at all social," said Klause. This was one of the challenges that drew him back to the Executive Office of the President, giving him a front row seat for the transition between these two administrations.

So, they chose a new platform to launch the new Whitehouse.gov. However, they didn't have a full set of requirements when they did so and it turned out that their choice wasn't flexible enough. Every time they wanted to do something new, their developers had to build custom code, causing lag times in their ability to react.

An inability to react quickly is simply unacceptable in a venue such as the White House Communications Office. Rolling out a new feature needs to take 20 minutes to throw together a new content type, view and module, not 20 hours to roll something custom.

Enter Drupal

Word came down from Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra that they should consider open source, and Klause was already familiar with the issues around using open source in both the private and public sectors. He says he's a fan of the intelligence and passion of the open source community.

In particular, he points out that in tech, your ideas are rarely unique. With the open source community, he enjoys that when he needs to do something, someone else has already thought about how to do it, and probably thought it through better and come up with a better solution than he might have.

Klause isn't a 100% open source kind of person. He's a big believer in letting a project's requirements dictate the platform and solution. So, when looking at open source Web CMS options, the requirements were a big factor.