{"id":323,"date":"2010-06-16T13:47:46","date_gmt":"2010-06-16T13:47:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nusum.wordpress.com\/?p=323"},"modified":"2010-06-16T13:47:46","modified_gmt":"2010-06-16T13:47:46","slug":"ottawa-drupal-in-government-session-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/strategyguy.com\/NuSum\/2010\/06\/16\/ottawa-drupal-in-government-session-notes\/","title":{"rendered":"Ottawa Drupal in Government session notes"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><a href=\"http:\/\/nusum.wordpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/drupal-logo.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-324\" title=\"drupal-logo\" src=\"http:\/\/nusum.wordpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/drupal-logo.jpg?w=261\" alt=\"\" width=\"157\" height=\"180\" srcset=\"https:\/\/strategyguy.com\/NuSum\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/drupal-logo.jpg 349w, https:\/\/strategyguy.com\/NuSum\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/drupal-logo-262x300.jpg 262w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 157px) 100vw, 157px\" \/><\/a>At Gov 2 expo I chatted with some Drupal people and last  night I attended the Drupal and Government session at the Ottawa Public  Library. Here is a slightly cleaned up version of those notes. Please  feel free to correct any errors or omissions.<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>Mike Gifford  hosted with speakers from government and private sector. I learned that  the first use of Social Media in a political campaign is generally  attributed to Howard Dean who used in an unsuccessful bid four years  before Obama. Both used Drupal.<\/p>\n<p>Many (most) entertainment and  sports sites use Drupal. Sony and other major sites in ent industry,  myplay.com, Warner Brothers uses the multisite capability of Drupal as a  shared platform for many artist sites built on common module library.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>The  Ottawa Library uses Drupal and showcased the site at the session. The  department of Agriculture used it to prototype their intranet prior to  implementation on Interwoven, apparently it is not uncommon for large  organizations to use Drupal to compliment their older enterprise content  management systems. The Department of Defense is using Drupal to build a  comprehensive social intranet that incorporates hundreds of modules as  well as a MediaWiki install. Lots of good lessons there for GCPEDIA  perhaps.<\/p>\n<p>Why Drupal?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> because of social networking  aspects, inter relationship stuff,<\/li>\n<li> modular architecture 6000+  modules available.<\/li>\n<li> A accepted solution , now in the  Whitehouse,\u00a0 in parallel with open data adn gov 2.0 movement, definitely seems to have momentum as a platform in the US gov.<\/li>\n<li>A well  developed community; in the crowd there were a number of Drupal  development shops including; open concept, liquid CMS, evolving web,  openplus dot ca, user advocate group, u7 solutions. Those are the names I  jotted down as people called out their companies, I am pretty sure some  of them are not quite right.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Deven Crawler, Ottawa  Library talked about the third law of a library guru whose name i did  not catch but I loved the law: &#8221; save the time of the reader&#8221; .<\/p>\n<p>Michael Keara, User Advocate Group, was a user systems architect who  worked on the Ottawa Library site, he talked about a user design  paradigm where his objective is to provide the most value to the user  for the least interaction cost. He also had an interesting road map that  went something like this:<br \/>\nroadmap: users &#8211; personas &#8211; roles &#8211;  tasks &#8211; info archtecture &#8211; database integration<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> users  are real people<\/li>\n<li> personas are the generalized symbols<\/li>\n<li> roles are the hats to wear, one user may have many roles<\/li>\n<li> tasks  are what each role needs to do tasks, design challenge is to present the  right tools at the right time<\/li>\n<li> information architecture is the  layout and logic of the information flow<\/li>\n<li>database is about getting the right content out of the database  to the user in the  right place at the right time<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>One issue with Drupal  that came up is that the content is embeded in the code, making it  sometimes difficult to deal with. Apparently there modules to deal with  this kind of thing though, so it does not appear to be a show stopper.<\/p>\n<p>Patrick Lajeunese from Agriculture talked about the experience of their  communications group using Drupal to create a high fidelity prototype  of a revised intranet. Interestingly it sounded like within Agriculutre  it was pretty easy to get a virtual machine with a LAMP stack.<\/p>\n<p>Drupal can handle bilingual sites, but it requires list of modules  Patrick said he would be willing to share. I loved it when he said that  they started the project by looking for templates shared on GCPEDIA.\u00a0  HTML, CSS and some php were the core skills they needed for working with  Drupal.<\/p>\n<p>Jason Peltzer talked about a secure closed intranet  using Drupal for a fairly comprehensive social intranet including some  integration with, MediaWiki, RDIMS, and Remedy. The Remedy ticketing  system is being used to generate translation requests that include a  link to the original content inside Drupal. Sounds like a much more  efficient system than the one I have experienced.<\/p>\n<p>Generallyspeaking  they practice a no code philosophy, using more than 200 modules,  Documents are stored in rdims. uses drf&#8217;s as the only way to upload doc.  The GC desperately needs something like this to keep GCPEDIA from  becoming a shared drive. Jason talked about thier content model has  having three main groups<\/p>\n<table id=\"o096\" style=\"height:115px;\" border=\"1\" cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"3\" width=\"648\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"33.333333333333336%\">Primary content  types<\/td>\n<td width=\"33.333333333333336%\">Secondary content types<\/td>\n<td width=\"33.333333333333336%\">User generated content types<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td width=\"33.333333333333336%\">users<br \/>\ngroups<br \/>\nprojects<br \/>\nservice<\/td>\n<td width=\"33.333333333333336%\">ads<br \/>\nannounwnts<br \/>\ncourse<br \/>\nevent<br \/>\nFAQ<br \/>\nphoto etc<\/td>\n<td width=\"33.333333333333336%\">blog<br \/>\ntweet<br \/>\nforum<br \/>\netc<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>He talked  about a one day training program they have for content publishers that  was half IM training and half learning how to use the system. I like the  emphasis on the Information Management part.\u00a0 Another useful feature he  talked about was the email notification of expired content with  automatic removal of old content.<\/p>\n<p>Why social networking?<br \/>\nPurpose is to create and strengthen connections bases on shared career  and hobby interests. \u00a0 CIO buys into this. User content type includes  skills and hobbies, Drupal uses taxonomy to generate communities on the  fly.<\/p>\n<p>Jason also had an interesting road map that went like this:<br \/>\nquality &#8211; personalization &#8211; social networking \u00a0&#8211; collaboration,  the basic idea being that when quality of content improves we want to  personalize it, once we personalize it we want to share it, and once we  are sharing content we start to collaborate.<\/p>\n<p>David Pewer and  (Kent intern Law student at McGill) from the Technology Law Clinic at  Ottawa U talked about the important topic of returning development  efforts to the open source community. The legal haze in this area as it  relates to crown copyright makes it seem risky for Government  departments to contribute to open source communities, the procurement  group in PWGSC is responsible for managing licenses for the Government  but dont have a lot of experience with open source.\u00a0 the Technology Law  Clinic have prepared an opinion (available on GCPEDIA I think) and are  writing a white paper regarding GC contributions to open source. They  presented their analysis of the situation, this is my incomplete  summary:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>Copyright act does not put restrictions on  how crown copyright material is licensed.<\/li>\n<li>Communications policy  says ok if license is non exclusive, IP remains with crown and royalty  is levied. this is subject to interpretation but changes to  communications policy is desired for clarity.<\/li>\n<li>The hereditary  feature of the GPL does not intact restrict use.<\/li>\n<li>Risk of patent  infringement remains very small.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My take is that there not  much stopping sharing for non commercial use but its a bit problematic  for commercial use because communications policy seems to inadvertently  get in the way.<\/p>\n<p>Big props to the folks at Government of Canada,  CIOB who have released a large number of <a id=\"yd:v\" title=\"Accessible web templates\" href=\"http:\/\/tbs-sct.ircan.gc.ca\/projects\/gcwwwtemplates\/wiki\/Government_of_Canada_Web_Template_-_Terms_and_Conditions_of_Use\">Accessible Web Templates<\/a> under crown copyright, using a MIT open license. This\u00a0 might be a good  example for others in the GC to follow. Also check out their twitter  channel @<a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/GCWebStandards\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">GCWebStandards<\/a> . The hope is that an international community will form around  developing accessible modern web templates for widespread use.<\/p>\n<p>Like  I said, lots of good stuff. #drupalgov<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Gov 2 expo I chatted with some Drupal people and last night I attended the Drupal and Government session at the Ottawa Public Library. Here is a slightly cleaned up version of those notes. 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