Drupal in Government Meetup
Governments around the world are pressing to be more innovative in their use of technology, to be more open to the public, and to do even more with reduced budgets. And as more and more information is being delivered through the Internet, there are increasing calls to have that information be secure, accessible, and readily available.
There is a lot of information to maintain on a Government site. Whether it is internal (intranet) or external (internet), the policies, standards and content can be very difficult to maintain.
In Europe, the United States, New Zealand and Canada government departments and agencies are running high profile sites on Drupal, an open source content management system that offers a highly modular framework for building web applications. Because the source code is freely available and supported by a huge global development community, Drupal is allowing governments to slash development times by eliminating the lengthy RFP process and by rapidly assembling web applications from a vast collection of available modules.
Drupal is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) that can:
- maintain English *and* French content, with workflow;
- fulfill CLF 2.0 compliance with available templates;
- manage workflow, upgrades and extensions;
- be totally administered on the back-end through an advanced admin panel;
- be customised through templates, modules and PHP code;
- provide full statistics and analytics integration.
The presentation on August19th will be an opportunity to learn more about this popular, flexible and scalable CMS; to learn about the accessibility initiatives for Drupal 7; and to see the new Common Look and Feel 2 (CLF 2) theme for Drupal that’s now available for federal departments.
You are invited to join colleagues in the Federal Government who are also using Drupal and see their implementations, discuss opportunities for collaboration.
Event Details:
Where? The Code Factory, 246 Queen Street (2nd Floor)
When? August 19th at 4:30pm
For more information contact Mike Gifford – mike@openconcept.ca
Twitter: @mgifford
Thanks to Mike and all the presenters for this useful and informative session. Now to the complaint: this is useful and I think necessary for government to hear. But doing this in the middle of August is bad as this town is a dead zone because of holidays. And announcing a session that you want attended by government employees to Facebook (and having an FB RSVP) when almost no gc.ca departments have Facebook access… well you see the problem?
I have an idea for Drupal developers in the city:
Get together and develop a basic, CLF 2.0, bilingual compliant Drupal installation on a disk. Make this simple and clearly tied to typical use scenarios.
I might suggest that there are two baseline implementations, the first is a standard CLF 2.0 implementation, the second is a smart departmental intranet implementation option. Note that I *do not* think it wise to apply CLF 2.0 to the intranet option. And more interestingly, the intranet is where more interesting Web 2.0 things might be internally applied whereas putting these on the public face is typically more problematic from a policy (not technical) perspective.
Maybe a discussion can be had about how to do this? It would go a LONG way to making the business case for Drupal in government and be a compelling demonstration of the power and ease of implementation of the platform.
Good work all you!