Drupal for Cities Month: June 2011

This June we will celebrate the first ever Drupal for Cities Month.

Drupal for Cities is a month dedicated to building knowledge and sustainable community around using Drupal for cities and municipal government websites and projects.

Get involved
Start Thinking & planning
If you are interested in participating, join the conversation now. Think about what project you might like to lead, or what you would like to get out of the month. (Let us know if you will be at Open Gov West in May.)

Announce what you will do
At the beginning of June, everyone will pledge what project they will work on that month, be it a blog post about a project, or organizing a local work party to “makeover” a city, or a smaller project like teaching local city staff about using a content management system.

Stay connected in June
We will have weekly check-ins. There will be ongoing discussions. If you have events, take lots of pictures & video and notes. Document everything you learn.

Report out at the end of the month
At the end of the month, we will share our reports and create a document of the many outcomes of the month, specifically what we learned and accomplished. The goal is to make our (practical) knowledge about using Drupal in cities that much richer.

Why?

• 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cities, rural districts, and other municipalities could benefit greatly by migrating from frequently proprietary and outdated software services to world-class free software content management systems built for community involvement...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.
• Local governments do not often have the time, budget, expertise or developer support to upgrade their HTML pages and other sites to appropriate & adaptable technology.
• Most cities do not yet have communication infrastructure that support modern democratic dialogues.

What can happen in June

• Introduce ourselves
• Weekly checkin / facilitated discussion (over IRC/Skype, time TBD)
• Add more cities, municipalities, towns and local agencies to the list.
• Create case studies (blog about city sites)
• Interview cities that are not yet using a content management system and make public their needs so that more developers can help them out.
• City Makeover: Organize local sprints to help a town, city or city agency/department move to Drupal.
• Organize sprint to build “Apps”¹ for Open Public, for cities & municipalities
• Generate a wish list of Apps that cities want to be available, either for basic information needs, or for features that can enhance the voices of city residents in ways that are thoughtful and empowering.

¹ “Apps” (as I understand it) in a Drupal context means a way of packaging up Drupal site configurations & theme elements to make it very easy to install a feature. For example, an app could be “Add English & Spanish support” to my site, or “Add Snowpocalype Alert System.” It is sort of like features & drush_make. The idea is that there is a hosted ‘catalog’ of civic apps and tools that allow users with very little Drupal experience to get their site kick-started with features that are appropriate and re-useable across government contexts.

Questions?
Join the discussion about Drupal for Cities here:
(You can also contact Chach with your questions.)

Online discussions

Local Government
http://groups.drupal.org/local-government

OpenData Working Group
http://groups.drupal.org/opendata-working-group

Drupal for State and Federal Agencies / Government
http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-state-and-federal-agencies-government

Relevant hashtags & IRC channels

• #drupal4gov
• #drupal4cities
• #drupal4data

Technology Agnosticism
Not limited to Drupal! If you are passionate about a tool or community, by all means please draw ideas from this month and use it to help make your own city a better place to live. We just happen to know Drupal and there are a lot of us.