make your own Drupal @ Drupal Gardens!
Kieran Lal of Acquia led a great talk (adventure) on the use of government Social Publishing and Drupal. Kieran is the Drupal community adventure guide for Acquia, which provides commercial subscriptions for Drupal. He is a board member of the Drupal assocation, coordinates testing.drupal.org, and the Drupal security team. Recently he’s been involved in scaling Drupal.org, organized 900 attendee Drupalcon, and is driving the Drupal.org redesign.
Kieran was aided by a few government folks; Dennis Sutch and Tim Wood of the Department of Commerce who have stood up 3 sites so far with Drupal, Jason Hoekstra of the Department of Education, and Kirsten Burgard, Department of Veteran’s Affairs, who recently did URL shortening for federal government.
Dennis and Tim have been moving from Microsoft Word as their content publishing tool. They saw the transparency mandate as a turning point to change the way they published content. When looking around the network, they found Drupal, enjoyed it’s open API and the fact that it is based on PHP. The DoC team first worked the opengov.gov website in less than 8 weeks. They have also worked on Commerce.Gov redesign (check it out here). They did their re-design in less than 8 weeks, and the website is great. Drupal has provided flexibility to development teams, including quick posting and embedding capabilities (which they did not have with Microsoft Word). They are able to download the stack to individual users, enabling a high degree of interoperability learning. Drupal has a large amount of plug-ins that you can use, which DoC office of the CIO has used as a force multiplier – allowing their little shop to do more than previously possible.
Jason, Technology Solutions Advisor, had been looking for a new web-platform. Looking to open internally and allow program offices to contribute content. Currently in migration right now (80K pages!). Ed.gov is currently running Drupal. Jason is finding Drupal to be a swiss army knife – add-on modules are easy to find, without the need for custom development. Drupal was used to post the National Education plan, and return comments quickly. They are finding Drupal a great way to interact with the public, allowing them to see what’s going on and contribute. data.ed.gov, about to launch June 1st, is going to open up the grant-making process and the data surrounding the grants.
Kirsten first created Go.Usa.Gov, a url shortener for the US Gov. With the VA, Kirsten is beta-testing open-atrium. Sharing information is a cultural shift for the VA, which is one of her biggest struggles. The VA needed something that would be useful for multiple CIOs to collaborate online. Created a Google Group of Government Drupalers. They have been able to share leading practices amongst each other. Kirsten foresees a government Drupal camp, culminating in a coding sprint in the near future.
I was already very interested in Drupal both because of its open source roots, and the capabilities that it enables on websites. After this talk, I am sold on Drupal. With my beta code, I plan to get into playing with drupalgardens (here). Drupal is an easy to manage website designer, complete with B2C capabilities, blogs, social networking, forums and more. Drupal has a great community @ www.drupal.org, and is being used by multiple government agencies, (see here). As Open Government Initiatives continue, I think Drupal will become a big player in the federal web design market.
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