I'd like to propose creating a "starter" Municipal Website that could be used to replace 95+ percent of the existing sites that are now used by local communities.
The idea is that any community wanting to upgrade their current Website to a "2.0" capability could just install and theme it, and start populating the site with content. Developers could use it as starting point for more complex projects. A basic set of documentation could simplify implementation.
Three vendors that I'm familiar with account for the bulk of these sites and include Virtual Town Hall, CivicPlus and GovOffice. All share a pretty common structure and core features.
I'm not sure what the protocol is on these things but I would be happy to host a prototype and help populate it. I also may be able to convince my Town (Wayland) to participate by putting some of the departments and committees on it if that would help - I'd sure rather see our town build our new Website on Drupal rather than any of the above.
Thoughts?
Comments
Red tape
Your biggest problem is red tape. Generally the deck is stacked in favor of incumbents and established companies. All RFPs I've seen require a handful of existing successful projects in the gov space, and a few references from government agencies or cities.
But I agree with you, any new municipal website is far better off on Drupal than on the mentioned commercial systems. It's a matter of getting the shoe in the door. A prototype or starter site is a great idea to gain traction, we've been toying with the same idea until a new day job diverted attention...
We have a basic module to populate department-based user roles, document types, permissions and workflow to facilitate distributed content authoring, in case you are interested.
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Christoph Weber | http://dialogconsulting.biz
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Christoph Weber
I agree on the red tape. As
I agree on the red tape. As a member of our town's website review committee, the overwhelming urge by the non-technical people on our committee was to do what everyone else was doing - a "best in breed" mentality.
The problem is the 'breed' is getting pretty "long of tooth" to overwork the metaphor. In our search for Web 2.0 models for the site we completely drew a blank. There were some initiatives by larger cities but these were clearly expensive and in any event didn't really stand out.
A strategy or creating a "remarkable" town website that redefines how municipal government and their residents use the Internet to interact should be able to clearly differentiate itself from the current pack of vendors. Then the challenge is finding the Towns that are early adopters. If a Drupal municipal website can truly be remarkable (as Seth Godin puts it), then getting mainstream adoption will become easier and easier.
The module does sound interesting; by any chance did you also look a OG as was suggested elsewhere by Jehf?
"Starter" Municipal Website
The City of Garden Grove, CA website was put together using Drupal and we really like its flexibility. I would be willing to help out on templates if this project were to move forward. I've done about 20 different sites using Drupal with about 15 of them using original templates.
It would be great if they could use one template and change colors from there like some of the existing templates.
Current Site:
http://www.ci.garden-grove.ca.us
New Production Site:
http://www2009.ci.garden-grove.ca.us
Cam
re: "starter" site
Interesting idea. What's your goal?
If your goal is to increase adoption of Drupal, I think one has to look at the entire decision tree to identify some of the major roadblocks to muni governments adopting Drupal.
For example, high in the decision tree is the question of technical resources. If there are no, or limited, technical resources to install software and manage upgrades, a SaaS solution like CivicPlus, GovOffice or Virtual Town Hall is an obvious choice compared to something like Drupal.
Were you thinking of offering this as a service, similar to these three providers?
Eliminating municipalities with no technical resources, the second question (it seems to me) is one of technical capabilities and requirements. Some organizations may be resistant to adopting LAMP-stack open source CMS software because they are .Net shops. Some want turnkey solutions with fewer upgrades, and are willing to sacrifice functionality for ease of maintenance. There are ways to address these (eg Acquia Drupal's development of the one-click IIS installation package and their commercial support options), but this has little to do with whether a muni-specific package exists or not.
So, once we've gotten down the decision tree to the group of municipalities actually interested in, and capable of, supporting a Drupal-based municipal website, what's the best way to encourage them to adopt Drupal?
I wonder if a better approach might be to develop some specific modules municipalities might find useful. For example, many municipalities pay huge amounts of money each year to codification companies who update their municipal code online 2-4 times per year. What if there was a codebook module that would allow munis to manage their own online codebook?
Or what about an agenda/voting/minutes module? Modules can be developed individually and people can try them out without having to invest in an entire site structure. That's the beauty of Drupal. And if you got a codebook module established, for example, you could ask other muni Drupallers for help maintaining it, strengthening muni Drupaller community & idea exchange.
What functionality does Wayland especially like in something like CivicPlus?
chicagomom on Twitter and d.o.
Hi chicagomom...very well
Hi chicagomom...very well thought out post. I appreciate the time you spent composing it. I too am from Wayland working along side Gordon on this project. I can tell you that our goal with respect to the town is to find the most comprehensive solution for a website that facilitates the best communication between the town and its citizens. The technology is only important from the sake of ease of use, sustainability and functionality. We have looked at the vendors you mention above, and while they provide a solid front end UI which is consistent and easy to use, it lacks the backend ease of use and rich feature set. VTH is perhaps the worst offender of this. While their customer service is excellent, their technology is beyond crippled.
Thus, we're looking to find a solid inexpensive CMS that will solve the technological barriers and perhaps find/start a vendor that will commercially support it to ensure ease of integration, use and handle technical maintenance on the infrastructure. Drupal is at the top of the list since it handles so much of what we're looking for out of the box. What needs work is building standard modules which each municipality could use. If you like, we can provide a full set of modules that would be ideal and we can even rank them according to priority. Here's a few that come to mind off the top of my head (in no order what so ever):
-Public Meeting (which includes Agenda, Attendence keeping, Minutes, Voting on motions, Time keeping, etc.)
-Voting for town elections
-Resident and Town Official Dashboards
-Local Business Listing
-Easy to use Tax Payment system that supports ACH debits
-Permitting
-Town Code Management
-Feedback forms (allowing residents to notify officials of performance, items that require addressing, report danger, etc.)
-GIS data browser (Google Maps like ideally)
-Pay tickets (i.e. Parking, speeding, etc.)
-Buy passes to public parks and facilities (i.e. Beach tags, pool passes, etc.)
There also needs to be an advanced notification system that has the following features:
-Allows registered individuals to sign up to receive notifications on X topics
-Allows officials to send notifications to X topics
-Allows emails to be send in daily bundles or instantly
-Allows registered individuals to subscribe to change notifications on any page (Wiki like)
-Alerts should be formatted for user selectable Text/HTML/Mobile
-Allows registered individuals to subscribe multiple different email addresses to different things with different formats (i.e. Text message emails for School closing alerts vs. Meeting minutes changes via HTML email)
All modules should support RSS feeds if possible and where it makes sense. Everything should have a wiki like history of changes. Changes should update in near real-time (i.e. like EditGrid.com) to allow for instant collaboration. Google Calendar like sharing and subscriptions to public/private calendars would be great.
I can tell you that most towns will not be able to support Durpal themselves, but with the right vendor to take care of the technical part at an attractive rate (i.e. $5k setup and $1k/year maintenance), it could be not only a solid contender in this space but perhaps the best overall.
Thanks again,
Joe Schwendt
just to clarify
It sounds like you are looking for a solution specifically for Wayland, with the idea of building it in such a way that it could be used by other municipalities. Is that correct?
So, in creating this thread, are you looking to find a developer, develop a network of muni Drupallers, develop an RFP, spec out an application? Sorry to be thick-headed, just trying to understand the goal.
By way of being helpful I've started a wiki on muni/local sites running Drupal. I'm sure it's not comprehensive, so if anyone knows of others, please add them. Perhaps this might be a start in understanding how municipalities are using Drupal currently, and some of the possibilities. The list only includes publically viewable sites (no intranets) at present; I do know a number of towns/cities using Drupal for their intranets, esp as a way of "testing out" Drupal's functionality.
chicagomom on Twitter and d.o.
Further explaination
Well...we're from Wayland and our driving force is for finding a solution for Wayland, but obviously there's absolutely nothing unique in the list that wouldn't apply to any other municipality out there. The goal of the thread is to see if anyone has already gone down this path and solved most of these issues already. If there was a company that did everything I put out there already, it would rule the market hands down. I'm not personally looking to get into this business, but if someone was, now is an excellent time and here's a ripe business opportunity to build it once and sell it like crazy.
Most municipalities will not have the technical expertise to setup and maintain a full installation. They just want something inexpensive that helps them to get the job done. Obviously Drupal is an excellent base to build upon...it just needs to be more specifically tailored to the line of business. Think of it this way: Quicken is available in many different flavors, with specific versions even created for professions like Contractors, Professional Services, etc. There's nothing stopping anyone from using the vanilla version of Quicken, but I can tell you that 90% of small businesses using Quicken choose one of the tailored versions since it takes away much of the hassle of customizing to the line of business. This makes sense in cases where there are lots of similar businesses all of the same type with the same basic requirements. There's also nothing stopping a businesses from using Excel or notepad to manage their books, but once you factor in all of the costs to setup and maintain a solution, going with something that is pre-packaged and maintained is much easier and more cost effective. No contractor wants to spend time trying to customize Quicken. They are much more effective at building, so they pay more for a packaged solution. I think you get what I'm driving at here.
I'm not at all looking for free development, nor am I advertising for a developer. I was simply answering your question about what some of our requirements were and thought it made sense to share with others looking to go down a similar route. Plus, I'm helping to lay out a business opportunity for someone. We're also willing to help set this up as a proof of concept and potentially grow the features of our site as new features are available. We believe in open technologies and feel Drupal is a great platform to build the best overall solution. What doesn't make sense is for a municipality to try to develop all of this themselves, and worse yet maintain it. This is a perfect example of leveraging the community for the great good.
I hope that helps,
Joe
Catching up with the conversation...
Hi ChicagoMom,
Wow, great list. I could only find a half dozen and some of those were off shore.
I believe the goal is to create a new paradigm - "Town 2.0" - where the town doesn't broadcast to residents but where town staff, officials, NGO's, businesses and residents all interact and collaborate online.
Interstingly I met Ben and "converted" to Drupal when I was creating a "community intranet" for the Natick (MA) Town library. Unfortunately the Director fell ill with cancer and the initiatve lost its leadership. Ben and I continued to stay in touch and created the Group.
As Joe said we are on our Town's committee evaluating electronic communications and that has no doubt informed a lot of my contribution to the Group. That said, I'm not sure we can keep Wayland from going with VTH. If there is a role for Wayland, my fantasy was that they'd be a trial site.
I concur with Joe on your observations and would add some comments to Joe's exhaustive list:
None of the local towns here in New England that we could find (including Framingham with >60k pop) run their own sites, as such, a hosted Drupal solution is not only acceptable but probably a requirement. My guess is 95% of towns will fall into this category.
Current Web 1.0 municipal sites are both the problem and the opportunity. Most towns view of their Web sites dates back to the .com days and they see posting information as an incremental workload on already over-worked staffs rather than a benefit. Instead I believe they should be thinking about integrating their web site into their internal business processes to save costs and make communicaitons more efficient.
While I agree with Joe that "communications" and transparency were big issues in Wayland, I really think the big driver/enabler longer term for towns will be be lowering costs/staff, particularly in these times.
BTW, your example of codebooks was perfect. Not only do our residents hate the online Town Code, but so do the town employees now used to Googling to find things (which doesn't work); this looks like a perfect Wiki application. I also agree with your thoughts that a series of modules optimized for Towns is a place to start. Again, a self-service solution that supports town boards and committees relieves municipal staff from posting minutes and notes and of coordinating responses to email questions and commenting by residents.
Sorry for the lengthy reply. In my opinion:
Gordon
You are raising excellent points
Thanks to you both for raising excellent points. Thanks for clarifying your goals, Joe.
As a municipal webmaster myself, I see a couple of other important things up at the top of that decision tree that affect downstream CMS/social software decisions.
Chief among them is records management/retention compliance - there must be permanent archives of any materials that are made available online as well as archives of public comments, and online discussions among committees and groups of council members (no matter how informal). Many municipalities are taking a very conservative approach to enabling two-way conversations online, out of an abundance of caution regarding protecting privacy, protecting free speech (unlike a corporate blog it could violate free speech laws to remove unsavory or even erroneous comments posted on a municipal website), as well as discovery laws and what is considered public record. In some states guidelines about what must be retained as "public record" is somewhat vague. With these things in mind, municipalities looking for content management and citizen engagement tools look especially closely at things like a CMS's workflow management, document management, and versioning/rollback capabilities.
Navigating these waters can discourage even the most robust content management/Town 2.0/citizen engagement developers. I think a lack of capabilities in these areas often becomes a show-stopper for many open source content management systems.
Fortunately, there are a number of good Drupal modules out there that can help address these, and some good open source document management options that integrate/could integrate with Drupal to provide more robust document management capabilities.
In your search for a low-cost hosted municipal Drupal package have you considered approaching Acquia to see if they would be interested in creating a municipality profile when the roll out Acquia Gardens? Might be a good fit.
Acquia Gardens announcement in CMS Wire
chicagomom on Twitter and d.o.
Acquia
I know Bryan House, Director of Marketing at Acquia, and raised the idea of a municipal configuration/distribution with him when we started the group. I believe there might be an interest, particularly give the "Garden" strategy however, I think we'll need to have a solution and some evidence of traction amongst municipal governments before they'll get too involved. I've sent Bryan a link to this discussion and if he chooses to join he may share insight on their level of interest. In any event I'll follow up with him and report back.
I would also be happy to install a "sandbox" version of the Acquia distribution on my server and will check with Ben Melançon on what protocols should be followed for this. I was going to do this in any event to configure some of the modules and see how they "play".
Municipal sites and Acquia Gardens
Hi Gordon - thanks for bringing me into this thread. I spoke to the Acquia Gardens product manager, Linea Rowe, and we both really like the ideas in this tread. This is very much in line with our vision of Gardens as a service for low-cost hosted Drupal sites. We are currently investigating options to facilitate the creation of sites based on templates or install profiles created by Gardens users. This would enable someone with experience with municipal government site requirements to create a standard site "profile" and then replicate / share it for other municipalities seeking to use that profile. I can't speak to a timeline for delivery on this capability, but its something we are exploring. Let's connect to discuss potential requirements.
3 Public Facing Municipal Websites
Hi Gang,
I just stumbled across your group this evening and joined right away. I am so glad they allowed this group to be created. We at Aha Consulting have been building Drupal-based websites for local government, libraries, and universities for the past year or so. Leveraging a combination or core and custom-built modules we have been able to develop a fairly compelling macro-site / micro-site model that allows for role-based delegation of content authoring by department. As a result, we have been able to stand toe-to-toe responding to RFPs with some of the larger non-Drupal web CMS vendors mentioned above. With the maturity of Ubercart for online payments and our own custom email notifications/subscriptions module for anonymous user daily/weekly email digests , our solution is now more compelling than ever.
So much has gone into what we've done to create our solution (we call it Aha Fast Track for Drupal) that we can't do it justice with a simple post here. If anyone is seriously interested we would be happy to setup a web teleconference to demonstrate the features/functionality and let you know the key contributed modules we use for our solution.
Check out the following Drupal City websites that are currently live in production:
City of West Linn
Oregon City
City of Peekskill New York
We have another City site set to go-live in September.
I hope these websites offer confidence for some others out there who might be on the fence to see the true potential in leveraging Drupal for cities, counties, and other government agencies.
Regards,
Brian Gilday
Managing Partner
Aha Consulting
www.ahaconsulting.com
Brian Gilday
Municode
www.municode.com
Excellent
Hi Brian and welcome!
I took a look at the Linn site and would look forward to further discussions. Jefh might be particularly interested in the Land Use section and video as it's something he's worked on with his planning board.
This is the first site that I've seen that really shows signs that it could break out from the pack here in New England and I would look forward to the Web teleconference you mentioned.
I'll add your sites to the Wiki as well.
The business case for local governments using Drupal
Thanks Gordon. We are really excited about the potential for leveraging Drupal in local government. Drupal has been taking off with Libraries, and we now want to see the same happen with cities, towns, counties, and other government agencies.
By leveraging Drupal, local government agencies have an opportunity to improve communication and services to residents while at the same time reducing internal operating costs. It's a win-win.
A case in point: we recently implemented secure online payments for West Linn - dog owners and business owners can complete their applications and make secure payments entirely online. Based on ubercart and open-source TCPDF, the system automatically creates a PDF-generated business license certificate for each business owner and makes it available to them for download/print from the website. This should save the City thousands of dollars over time by eliminating the internal labor cost and postage cost associated with printing and mailing business licenses. The same is true for dog license renewals. The City no longer incurs the cost of mailing a dog license renewal confirmation letter to the dog owner. They simply have the system auto-generate an eco-friendly email confirmation instead.
West Linn city residents and business owners now have a personalized "My West Linn" page that allows them to print/download their current business license, see the status of their current dog license, etc. AND the next big plan is to integrate a resident's address with all City projects occurring within a given radius of their home. They will be able to login, go to their My West Linn, and see all city projects within a one-mile radius of their home. http://westlinnoregon.gov/mywestlinn
The other business ROI justification for moving these services online, and it is a BIG one, is increased compliance. How many times do people fail to follow-through because they don't want to take the time to come to City Hall or stuff a check in an envelope and send it? The simpler we can make it for constituents to conduct business with local government, the greater chance they will actually do the things being asked of them - removing the hurdles of property tax payment, parking violation payment, business licenses, dog licenses, etc. will increase compliance and thus increase the revenues that should be coming into the City.
The upfront cost of putting in a robust solution like Drupal is more than offset by the long-term benefits.
Why not now, why not Drupal?
Brian Gilday
Managing Partner
Aha Consulting
www.ahaconsulting.com
Brian Gilday
Municode
www.municode.com
Postal mail APIs
Awesome, Brian. Just... awesome. I came across the West Linn website back when I was looking into Granicus, and it's pretty incredible what you guys have done.
Not sure if it would be seen as a step backwards, but I know that it might have a niche: There are a few physical postal mail API's available that outsource the mailing of letters/invoices/etc to an automated third party:
http://www.programmableweb.com/api/postalmethods
http://www.programmableweb.com/api/viapost-2
http://www.programmableweb.com/api/docmail
I think the PostalMethods site is even built with Drupal, so I'm a little baffled that they don't have module already :)
I am the primary developer
I am the primary developer for Sauk County in Wisconsin and, fortunately, my boss has been looking to get away from Microsoft licensing. We have reviewed Oracle, Ektron, Wordpress, and Drupal and we decided to go with Drupal. I would have probably died had there been a Drupal distro focused on government websites. I look forward to watching what happens here. =)
Our current developer is most likely going to pull out of the project, due to not quite understanding the size of the project. We are currently looking for a developer. Brian I have sent a bunch of info via your website's contact form for a quote.
Distribution hang ups
I've been working with my colleagues at Community Site Design Group ( www.CommunitySiteDesign.com ) since June developing a distribution of Drupal for local government. And we think we've figured out 1) why there aren't more distributions out there and 2) why the distributions that are out there are all quite limited with their "out of the box" experience.
As we studied the distributions that are out there, we installed just about every one we could find. And without exception, all the distributions or installation profiles or whatever label you put on these things, get up to a certain point in the installation and then you have to "get out of the car and hike the rest of the way". In other words, the best one can hope for in a distribution of Drupal, is to have some modules enabled. There is no content. There are no roles defined. Menus are all linked back to the front page. For all the work that goes into a Drupal distribution, they are all quite disappointing as far as a finished installation goes.
What we've done is take a different tack. There is a "chicken and egg" problem that exists when following the "traditional Drupal distribution" model. And that is that menus can't link to nodes until the nodes are created and the installer doesn't create any nodes. Consequently, there is no content, no nodes and no menus. While some distributions create 'quasi-content' from hard coded text in various .php files, anybody who has a bit of web 2.0 knowledge knows that real content resides in the database. Our distribution, called eMuni Content Management System, is completely different from any other distribution out there. Ours is a hybrid of a traditional distribution and a migrated installation. By migrated installation, I mean a typical Drupal installation developed on a local development box and then promoted to a live server. This means that eMuni CMS comes with working menus, working content which guides users through customizing their site, and it comes with roles predefined, and features that work - out of the box.
We understand there are limitations to our unique approach, but we believe the benefits far out-weigh the limitations.
Regards,
Bruce Chezem
www.CommunitySiteDesign.com