Government and Tourism related websites using Drupal and or Open Source

Posted by Dale Baldwin on June 21, 2011 at 5:22am

Hey guys

Trying to get an internal tender up in the department I work for to move away from Mysource Matrix to a more open source CMS and system. Our IT guys are throwing up a number of road blocks mostly around the misconception that open source isn't used by governments and we should go for a proprietary solution.

I kinda need a list asap and I have already looked at http://groups.drupal.org/node/19885

I need to know what websites people have done with drupal or open source for Government and for Tourism related businesses, especially so if you have worked with ATDW feeds.

If you can tell me what sites you have worked on or know about and which firms might be able to help it would be hugely useful to me and may also lead to work in the future.

thanks

Dale Baldwin

Comments

UNSW

Posted by marcowashere on June 21, 2011 at 5:29am

UNSW is transitioning everything to Drupal.

Drupal sites in Australian government departments

Posted by pnx on June 21, 2011 at 5:34am

Hey Dale,

There's a great list here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/19885#Australia

The general trend is departments currently using MSM and other proprietary and pseudo-open source systems are switching to Drupal in droves.

AGIMO has also mandated the consideration of open source: http://bit.ly/jKp4jz

Let us know if you need any more ammo.

Owen

doh - just saw you'd already referenced that link

Dale, I'm currently

Posted by burgs on June 21, 2011 at 5:34am

Dale,

I'm currently developing a website for a Northern Territory Shire Council, which won't be huge, but is an Australian government site.

I also know of:

http://www.busselton.wa.gov.au/
http://ourbrisbane.com/
http://abcdigmusic.net.au/

which are government-ish websites too.

How about

Posted by nimish.jha on June 21, 2011 at 5:37am

the White House?

http://www.whitehouse.gov/

Hey Dale, There's quite a few

Posted by Freshy88 on June 21, 2011 at 5:38am

Hey Dale,

There's quite a few Australian government/public sector sites based on Drupal already. Having said that though Australia is a bit behind a lot of European countries and the USA in adoption of it - mainly due to the misconceptions similar to those coming from your IT guys now. I'm based in Queensland but have a list of sites I've run into:

Australia
Federal:
• Office of the Prime Minister www.pm.gov.au
• The Australian Law Reform Commission www.alrc.gov.au
• The Environmental Protection and Heritage Council www.ephc.gov.au
• Murray Darling Water Basin Authority www.mdba.gov.au
State:
• Bundaberg Regional Council www.bundaberg.qld.gov.au
• Tablelands Regional Council www.trc.qld.gov.au
• Office of the Information Commissioner QLD www.oic.qld.gov.au
• The Tasmanian Governor www.govhouse.tas.gov.au
• The State Library of Victoria www.slv.vic.gov.au
• Equal Opportunity Commission SA www.eoc.sa.gov.au
• Office of the Premier NSW www.premier.nsw.gov.au
• NSW Government Portal www.nsw.gov.au
• Department of Public Works NSW www.publicworks.nsw.gov.au
International:
• London City (UK) www.london.gov.uk
• Cabinet Office www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk
• NZ Government www.beehive.gov.nz
• The Whitehouse www.whitehouse.gov

As for firms to help you make the switch to Drupal - where are you based? For a government site it's obviously critical for many face-to-face meetings so geographic location will help people make a suggestion.

Good luck!

Utilities Exranet

Posted by mudsurfer on June 21, 2011 at 5:41am

Dale,
Recent had same battles. Managed to get a very small Board of Directors Extranet project off the ground - hoping it will act as a ice breaker for Drupal in the organisation.
Not only had to sell Drupal, but had to sell the idea of Open Source CMS, and even more, had to make a pitch for use for 3rd party hosted LAMP stack - can pass on my powerpoint presentation if that will help, but it's pretty high level.

Thanks guys, this has given

Posted by Dale Baldwin on June 21, 2011 at 5:55am

Thanks guys, this has given me a few ideas, has anyone got any tourism sites that are running on drupal?

thanks

Photography festival for NSW

Posted by Justin Freeman on June 22, 2011 at 4:12am

This Drupal site promotes the HeadOn photography festival (NSW) http://headon.com.au which you could categorise as tourism-related. Promotes the 90 photo exhibitions sites available state-wide during the festival period.

Honestly, you can do anything on Drupal :)

Agileware, Australian Drupal Developers
http://agileware.com.au

Also forgot to mention I'm

Posted by Dale Baldwin on June 21, 2011 at 5:58am

Also forgot to mention I'm based in Tasmania

I have recently finished a

Posted by davidseth on June 21, 2011 at 6:07am

I have recently finished a project with the Australia War Memorial - http://awm.gov.au. They launched their Drupal 7 site a few weeks before Anzac Day. There was some initial hesitation to use open source, but the project was a success so it looks to have internally paved the way for more open source projects.

http://www.ourbrisbane.com is

Posted by pnx on June 21, 2011 at 6:12am

http://www.ourbrisbane.com is the biggest tourism-related Drupal site I know of in Australia. Google has indexed 120,000 URLs in that domain and it gets about 3 million page views a month. We recently moved it across to Acquia hosting.

Big shame it's being closed

Posted by mark matuschka on June 21, 2011 at 6:32am

Big shame it's being closed down on the 30th June. For some years Our Brisbane has been the showcase Drupal site in Australia because of its breadth of content and hit rate. But now Brisbane City Council has pulled the plug. See http://bit.ly/kUGAMS.

--
Mark Matuschka
Glo Digital

our brisbane is a decent site

Posted by themselves on June 21, 2011 at 6:53am

our brisbane is a decent site in terms of content, but can't hold a candle to www.showmeperth.com.au aesthetically.

debatable

Posted by ac on June 21, 2011 at 6:59am

debatable

i assume you jest!

Posted by spyjournal on June 21, 2011 at 7:00am

yikes!

OT: Performance

Posted by skwashd on June 21, 2011 at 9:48am

I agree that Show Me Perth looks more modern, but don't judge a book by its cover. Our Brisbane has all of the basic performance options enabled, while the Show Me Perth devs missed some of the standard tasks for deploying a site to production. Our Brisbane is deployed on a high performance stack, while Show Me Perth is running on shared hosting.

When you upgrade Show Me Perth to D6.22, you might as well switch to Pressflow, you need to QA the upgrade anyway.

It's interesting that a lot

Posted by mark matuschka on June 21, 2011 at 6:24am

It's interesting that a lot of government departments consider Mysource Matrix to be open source. The source code for the basic system is freely available but there are so many licensed add-ons and paid components that the system these government departments end up with is arguably not open source.

So what makes a project open source and does it stop being open source if you add custom or licensed components?

And what importance is the developer community to an open source project?

Do you think it's fair that projects with significant non-open source components and no developer community calls itself open source?

--
Mark Matuschka
Glo Digital

CMS licensing, what's open source

Posted by arjenlentz on June 21, 2011 at 6:46am

Hi Mark,

It's interesting that a lot of government departments consider Mysource Matrix to be open source.
The source code for the basic system is freely available but there are so many licensed add-ons
and paid components that the system these government departments end up with is arguably
not open source.

The adopted term is "open core", and the debate on whether it's a good idea is fairly spicy as you can imagine.

So what makes a project open source and does it stop being open source if you add custom or
licensed components?

Depends largely on whether the project has a company behind it with a marketing/sales department ;-)

My company happily uses the community version of Zimbra (mail server). There are paid-for extras, we just don't really need them or just work "ok" without. It's like the other side of the edge case, when is something a perfectly usable package, with nice-to-have extras, and when might it be regarded as "crippleware" where you pretty much need to use the non-free version to do what you need to do....

I remember the discussion years ago in MySQL AB (where I worked), and (IMHO luckily) the "open core" ideas were abandoned.

And what importance is the developer community to an open source project?

Very, but realistically many companies do mainly open source publishing, not open source development.
Quite often, the active community works around apps, tools and -depending on the project- plugins.

Do you think it's fair that projects with significant non-open source components and no developer
community calls itself open source?

Possibly not, and I think it's important to discuss those matters without immediately putting it in to the frame of "what is true FLOSS and what's not" as that inevitably colours the debate even before you get started.

But I'd like to insert another point here, namely that for many user, the FLOSS issue is irrelevant. If the client doesn't care about FLOSS, you putting forward the argument towards the client (I'm just conjecturing here ;-) that Drupal is more open source than MySource Matrix is really a waste of time.
The "how open source is it" question becomes very relevant if the client is specifically looking for an OSS solution, and/or is looking to satisfy specific requirements. Other requirements might be service from third parties (as in service-vendor lock-in), customisation by third parties, and so on. Those can be addressed by OSS solutions, but are not necessarily specific to the solution being OSS - any OSS package may be lacking one or more of those requirements.
So I think it's most important to see what a client cares about in terms of actual requirements, not the overlay of brand or concept names like "open source". You need to figure out what they really want/need, if you can.
I'll admit that sometimes that's not possible - and then you should seriously consider whether you want to do business for that gig.

Cheers,
Arjen.

Developer agreement is not open

Posted by peterx on June 22, 2011 at 11:19am

Mysource Matrix core might be free to download in source form but the usage and developer agreements prevents you extending the core modules to compete with the proprietary modules and that makes Mysource Matrix core closed. Compare that with Joomla where there are add-on modules with expanded proprietary modules but there is nothing to stop you contributing an open module to provide the same functionality as a proprietary module.

Drupal is closed, compared to Joomla, because of Drupal's decision that add-on modules are derived works. That makes it impossible to use Drupal as a framework. Many of my applications and modules existed before Drupal. They do not become a derived work just because I replace a PDO function with a Drupal function or replace an XML configuration file with a .ini file.

"Open" is relative to how you want to use something. The Zend Framework is open enough for all my work. Drupal is open enough for some of my work. Mysource Matrix core does not have enough functionality complete any of my projects and I would have to buy at least on eof their proprietary modules, making Mysource Matrix closed for all my projects.

petermoulding.com/web_architect

Small point

Posted by rcross on June 23, 2011 at 8:04am

Without going into too much debate here, its important to realize that Mysource Matrix / Squiz are leveraging the distinction I mentioned in my comments below. They hold copyright on the code and dual license it under the GPL and their own proprietary license. When you pay them for their custom modules, support, etc you are getting the proprietary license. When you don't you dont' get their "special sauce" code and get the code under GPL. By controlling the code base this way, it doesn't have the same level of community support and contribution that a project like Drupal or Joomla or Wordpress have. You can't really say that it isn't open source software, but you can say that when you pay them for support you are not getting an open source solution because you are not under the GPL at that point.

See http://matrix.squiz.net/evaluations/licence

--Ryan
Ryan Cross
Drupal Development Services
ProjectPier project management and collaboration software

http://www.ourbrisbane.com header logo fix...

Posted by cmwwebfx on June 21, 2011 at 6:30am

Hi Owenlansbury....

Please do me one favour and fix that header logo on the orbrisbane.com site.....
I think this little bit of CSS shall fix it up nicely...

img.png-ob-logo {
    border: 0 solid #000000;
    clear: left;
    float: left;
    margin: 0 19px -31px 9px;
    padding: 28px;
}

Sorry - we had nothing to do

Posted by pnx on June 21, 2011 at 7:24am

Sorry - we had nothing to do with the design or content! What browser are you seeing wobbles on?

You know, cmwwebfx, as a

Posted by nicolash on June 21, 2011 at 10:32am

You know, cmwwebfx, as a Tightarse Tuesday special I'll fix that for you tomorrow. Who knows, maybe people with adblockers contributed to our demise, given that commercial incentives seemed to pop up randomly throughout the lifetime of the site without many specifics.

Hmmm... I am sorry if I dont

Posted by cmwwebfx on June 21, 2011 at 11:09am

Hmmm... I am sorry if I dont understand your dim wit or sarcasm.... I just happened to look at the site and saw that it looks stacked if someone had adblocker turned on..
Ummm, perhaps you were offended. Oh well, life is always full of smart nuts, and we love people like you, it keeps us from getting bored.

care factor

Posted by spyjournal on June 21, 2011 at 11:54am

i think nicks carefactor - 9 days before he loses his job is probably somewhat low...

Nope, no offense. It was

Posted by nicolash on June 21, 2011 at 10:16pm

Nope, no offense. It was Tuesday and I said I'll look into it. The adblock comment was tongue in cheek....cheer up.

Firefox with

Posted by cmwwebfx on June 21, 2011 at 7:36am

Firefox with adblocker...
Anyone with any ad blocking attatched will see the header stacked...

Dale This one for the Greek

Posted by larowlan on June 21, 2011 at 8:36am

Dale
This one for the Greek National Tourist Organisation (which is both govt and tourism)
http://www.my-greece.gr - happy to pass on some contacts if they want to talk to fellow Govt IT folk about it.
Lee

Also FWIW the my-greece.gr

Posted by larowlan on June 21, 2011 at 8:46am

Also FWIW the my-greece.gr one was built from nothing to prototype in 10 days, because of Drupal's wealth of contrib and strong api, if that helps with the sell! After that we had a couple of weeks of new features/design changes but at the end of the day it cost them way less than they'd traditionally paid for websites, by a number of factors of magnitude.
I've quoted on ATDW jobs before and this is something that would be compatible with feeds for import/update of nodes on your site. The beauty of Drupal being you could add additional fields to the ATDW nodes to extend them to your particular use case - this was part of the previous job I quoted on.

ATDW

Posted by nicolash on June 21, 2011 at 11:51am

ourbrisbane.com has been importing ATDW content over the last few years. Because we started in D5, we had to write our own SOAP client, but in D6 and onwards the services module would probably simplify a lot of this. Although ourbrisbane.com is now on D6, we did not bother about re-coding this, since the closure has been known to developers for some time.

They (ATDW) have been one of the early adopters of at least trying to move to a standardised data exchange model in Australia...kudos to them. There's a lot of services here that would like to exchange data, but are just making a bit of a mess of it. However, it's getting better bit by bit.

If you'd like more info on ATDW content in relation to Drupal, let me know. They can certainly play together.

Here is an example integration: http://www.ourbrisbane.com/see-and-do

Some of the content is ATDW sourced on that page, but once you use the search form "Find attractions, tours and hire stuff", all of it is.

I have ATDW feeding into

Posted by Dale Baldwin on June 21, 2011 at 12:05pm

I have ATDW feeding into lumina.discovertasmania.com which I built, at the moment trying to convince the powers that be to switch discovertasmania.com onto drupal, or at least something thats not squiz. Getting atdw in isn't so much the problem, convincing management that it's doable and also being done by others is the hard part. The risk aversion where I work is pretty steep.

Right. So is the perceived

Posted by nicolash on June 21, 2011 at 11:37pm

Right. So is the perceived risk regarding the ATDW data, as in whether there may be better solutions/providers? Given that you have it running, the "doable" part should be solved?

Very nice theme, btw...

A few more Govt and Tourism sites

Posted by jrsinclair on June 21, 2011 at 11:42pm

Here's a few more sites that weren't on Shocker88's list:

http://foi.accc.gov.au/ - ACCC's FOI website
http://www.canberradiaspora.com.au/ run by the ACT Chief Minister's department could be considered a tourism site.
http://www.nla.gov.au/ - Could also be considered tourism-related (among other things)
The Australian Crime Commission also use Drupal on their intranet and will be migrating to Drupal for their public facing site soon
http://www.gundaroobushfestival.org.au/
http://aciar.gov.au/

As a disclosure, I work for OPC IT in Canberra, and we have some experience in helping Australian government agencies migrate sites to Drupal.

Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations

Posted by Justin Freeman on June 22, 2011 at 2:52am

DEEWR, http://www.deewr.gov.au

Are migrating ALL their websites from MS Sharepoint to Drupal.

Agileware, Australian Drupal Developers
http://agileware.com.au

Nice one mate!

Posted by sime on June 22, 2011 at 3:01am

Nice one mate!

ok that is impressive

Posted by Dale Baldwin on June 22, 2011 at 3:21am

ok that is impressive

Yay

Posted by mark matuschka on June 22, 2011 at 3:30am

Yay. Are you assisting them with that?

--
Mark Matuschka
Glo Digital

Doesn't seem closed to me...

Posted by sean.gardiner on June 23, 2011 at 2:31am

From my reading of the FAQ the modules are very open (GPL).

http://drupal.org/licensing/faq#q7

I say good luck Dale! plenty of evidence that Open source is a more than acceptable approach, and of course My Source Matrix it self is "open source" http://www.matrix.squiz.net/evaluations/what-is-matrix which really should open up the possibilities for you, as the precedent is already set for you to look at any open source system.

Sean

GPL 2 is open or closed depending on...

Posted by peterx on June 23, 2011 at 6:13am

Sean, The GPL 2 is interpreted in two ways. The first says it is completely open for use anywhere. The second interpretation, the one used by Drupal, says add-on modules for Drupal are derived works and have to inherit the GPL 2. Drupal.org also has a policy of accepting only modules using the GPL 2. I have some large applications that could connect to the Web through Drupal and I do not want them all to be GPL 2 because that would, in turn, restrict the types of licenses my customers can choose.

Something up for discussion is the use of modules calling libraries. I could create an application as a library using an LGPL or BSD license, load it into all/libraries/example, then create a dummy module to load into all/modules/example. The dummy module would be GPL 2. Drupal developers refer to the dummy module as a shim. Given the Drupal.org interpretation of the GPL, shim modules can only work if the shim modules are LGPL to stop inheritance.

If an add-on module inherits the GPL 2 then the library would inherit the GPL 2 because the library would be a derived work of GPL 2 code. http://drupal.org/licensing/faq#q10 says Drupal.org does not restrict libraries to the GPL and lets them use any GPL compatible licence. That is a bit weird because it blows away the reason for using the GPL for the add-on module.

The LGPL is the GPL with a specific statement that the licence is not inherited by other software. If the Drupal API functions were in LGPL libraries, or add-on modules could be LGPL, we could use other licences for our applications and use Drupal as a framework. based on http://drupal.org/licensing/faq#q7 and http://drupal.org/licensing/faq#q10, I would have to write a dummy add-on module under the GPL 2, then call a library under the LGPL, and the LGPL library could then call other code using any licence. This seems too complicated to me.

MySource Matrix is GPL but all submissions to MySource Matrix are controlled by a usage agreement where you agree to not compete against the proprietary MySource Matrix modules. Again there is that control outside of the GPL by restricting your submissions to their site. Mambo was going the same way and the main developers created Joomla to circumvent the development restrictions of Mambo. After the split, Mambo moved to a Joomla style development system.

The GPL 2 is open or restrictive depending on the interpretation of inheritance. The LGPL does what most people think the GPL does.

petermoulding.com/web_architect

Absolutely Peter...

Posted by sean.gardiner on June 23, 2011 at 6:40am

Totally agree Peter. Although in in Dale's case the modules should not need to be redistributed and if they did I would doubt (but Dale would know better) that they would worry that the developed modules fell under the GPL licence.

Would look at sticking to the

Posted by Dale Baldwin on June 23, 2011 at 7:00am

Would look at sticking to the existing Drupal and existing module code base, not looking at this point to create our own modules though may look at funding a ATDW SOAP to node module at some point. If that was the case we would likely put it back out under GPL only on the grounds that there will be features others may want to add that we might like to use in the future and also from a shared maintenance point of view.

And not to mention the...

Posted by sean.gardiner on June 23, 2011 at 7:24am

And not to mention the fluffy feeling you get about contributing back to the community ;)

I agree that you are correct

Posted by gordon on June 23, 2011 at 7:25am

I agree that you are correct about the GPL in that all Drupal modules are derived works and thus must be licensed GPL, I disagree with your implementation.

AFAIK there is nothing in the GPL that requires me to distribute back any changes that I make to the original authors. eg. If you are to write module x and give it away under GPL, I can take module x and use it. I can also make changes to module x and I do not have to give the changes back to you. But if I give client c module x with my changes I have to give client c the source code (which in php terms is how it is given) and I still do not need to give you back my changes, however I can't stop client c from giving you my changes.

So being under GPL is not that restrictive for us. As for "infecting" other projects with GPL, under PHP this is very hard to accidentally do this. As long as you don't directly call their code, or access it via other means, such as a PHP extension or via an API this is not going to happen. Besides this I would very much doubt that anyone within Drupal or the Association is going to demand that this happens or any other project or organisation.

This is my understanding and this is how I act concerning any code that I develop for my clients, but I always encourage my clients to allow me to put as much code as I can back to the community. In the end I am the owner of all the code that I develop and that I develop for my clients.

--
Gordon Heydon

Small nuance

Posted by rcross on June 23, 2011 at 7:46am

You're mostly right Gordon - the GPL doesn't require you to distribute your code or changes. It just says that if you do distribute them (to a client, the public, whoever), they must follow the same license terms. It also doesn't have anything to do with charging for your code. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney

--Ryan
Ryan Cross
Drupal Development Services
ProjectPier project management and collaboration software

2 small points

Posted by rcross on June 23, 2011 at 7:41am

2 small points:

1) this discussion was for gov't sites on drupal in australia. Lets try to stay on topic.

2) The GPL may or may not be conducive to your business model, but usage of GPL code is not dependent on various interpretations. There is also a fairly well defined industry understanding of the interoperability and inheritance of licenses. There is also an important distinction between a person/company's copyright and intellectual property and how they decide to license that IP. A professional legal opinion should be consulted for any specific case where people are worried.

Lets move this discussion elsewhere if necessary. I would also recommend looking at http://opensource.org for an indepth understanding of "open" licensing - specifically their license discussion list. There is also a good set of faq's at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

--Ryan
Ryan Cross
Drupal Development Services
ProjectPier project management and collaboration software