Towns, cities, rural districts, and other municipalities could benefit greatly by migrating from frequently proprietary and outdated software services to world-class free software content management systems built for community involvement... such as Drupal. This group facilitates work on features for people's participation or to pushing governments to provide more information and allow greater involvement.
- List of local governments using Drupal worldwide
- See also Drupal for state and federal gov't
- Catch local and other government-curious Drupalistas in #drupal4gov on IRC
Opportunity for better workflow/content moderation support in Core
The upcoming Drupal 7 update brings with it a great opportunity to provide better support in Core for advanced workflows with content moderation, but the code freeze is fast approaching and this opportunity may pass us by. I encourage all developers to check out Support Revisions in Different States in the Drupal issue queue and lend a hand.
Why you should care?
Read moreLocal governments using Drupal
This is meant to be a resource/reference list of municipal, district, department, county and other local government agencies/departments currently using Drupal. If you know of one not on the list, please add it.
A listing of
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"Starter" Municipal Website
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.
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"Newsout" event Saturday in Boston
Members of this group in New England may be interested in this event:
http://dbs.hosting.crocker.com/wiki/index.php/Newsout
Read moreHow big is the market?
Last updated by busselton on Sun, 2009-03-15 05:12
Here's a reason to focus on local government. I found it on Google Answers. The 2000 census says the United States of America market is:
city 10,016
comunidad 147
municipality 1
town 4,431
urbana 78
village 3,770
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total 18,443
There's a request to generalize our new local government site into "government". I'm good with that. Everyone else?
OG for Local Government sites?
The Mission Statement of the Local Government group suggests using Organic Groups for a local government site, citing the ability for people to run their own sections. How would you set OG up for this? Would all posts be Public, and "membership" in a Group (department) only be necessary for maintainers?
I guess you could use Roles to allow non-Admin folks to join a departmental Group just for the OG Notification features.
Read more"Award Winning Municipal Websites"
Last updated by gordon fowler on Mon, 2009-03-09 15:03
With my training wheels on, I'm going to start conversion of the Wayland ECC site over to Drupal as well as our local community television site. In the mean time there are a lot of resources the Committee gathered in the process of making recommendations on electronic communications with the Town. The site is http://www.mywayland.org.
Read moreFunctionality of a government site
Last updated by beautifulmind on Sat, 2009-05-30 05:57
The following list started out as a digest of half a dozen RFPs for municipal websites all across the United States. It lists principal requirements ordered by how frequently they are requested. Many requirements overlap and/or are trivial for Drupalers, but that's how they appeared in the original RFPs so I left them as is.
It is amazing how well most of these real world requirements map to Drupal capabilities. There's a real opportunity here, you just gotta cut through the red tape of government contracts.
- Easy Navigation
- ADA/Section 508 compliance
- Distributed Authors/Editors
Welcome to the local government group! Open thread
If you don't feel authoritative enough yet to make or add to a wiki, well first of all you should anyway, and second of all here's an open thread where you can just post ideas!
Read moreThe Issues Facing Towns Also Create Opportunies
Last updated by gordon fowler on Sat, 2009-02-21 17:19
Most medium and small municipalities lack the technical skill and resources to effectively use the Internet in their communities.
Issues:
- Shortfalls in revenue that are leading to reductions in staff and services.
- The complexity of current Web sites that limit the number of maintainers because of the need for installing desktop software and provision of training.
- The lack of integration into internal municipal business processes.
- A general lack of effective use of technology to improve productivity within towns.
Fourth sort-of-monthly MetroWest Massachusetts Meetup at Morse Institute Library in Natick
Right now you are probably asking yourself, "Why two Metrowest drupal meetups in one month?" Or maybe you are asking yourself, "Wait, what first meetup?" "Um, the one that was announced two days ahead of time," we confess, using advanced mind control (a soon-to-be-released Drupal module) to interrupt your internal monologue. To which you reply, "Just how much attention do you think anyone pays to you?"
Read moreParts of a Municipal site
Principal sections of any site
Main Site
- News and Public Notices
- Link to directories:
** Committees
** Departments
** Staff
** Elected & Appointed Officials
** Major issues - Shortcuts to most visited sections
- Calendar of events
Sections
- Government and committee
** Agendas
** Meeting Schedules
** Meeting Minutes
** News
** Bid Postings
** Job Postings and Application
** Other documentation
** Comments and feedback
** Board/committee membership & contact information
** Polls - Department (by department cross department)
Expanded Mission Statement of the Drupal for Local Governments group
Last updated by gordon fowler on Fri, 2009-03-27 12:25
Local governments could benefit greatly by migrating from mostly proprietary and outdated tools to world-class free software content management system and community managing software... such as Drupal.
Drupal, with its strengths in many levels of access control (Drupal core roles) and allowing people to run their own sections of a site (Organic Groups) among many many other features, is a particularly good fit for the needs of city and town government departments and schools.
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