Kiwigov: a new era of Drupal and Government

This is a great idea. Do you think it is more of a marketing problem though? Maybe it could just be a version of aGov, that is renamed, and with a different logo to appease the NZ government, but all development could be combined with the aGov project? Then both countries governments and any other governments around the world can benefit?

Hey everyone, and thanks Dallas for putting this up

We're in conversations right now with many other stakeholders / NZ entities at DrupalSouth regarding what the best strategy for this would be. Lots of ideas and options which we need to turn into a concise proposal of what would make sense for NZ Government. KiwiGov has been in the mix for well over a year thanks to dman / Sparks, but this past month, and especially at DrupalSouth, the momentum behind it has totally taken off. I feel certain it's going to materialise soon in some form - this bird has wings!

The strategy is still formative but it's a good time to throw around ideas and get peoples' views. The core group of Drupalists leading this from the Wellington Meetups are collaborating on putting this all together in some kind of white paper so that we can communicate the ideas clearly to government and other Drupal shops.

There are questions around hosting and meeting NZ requirements which we are working through, as well as thoughts around how to maximise the benefit for New Zealand. There are also differing views on aGov vs govCMS and NZ servers vs off-shored SaaS. We need to approach this carefully and with sensitivity, as it could have far reaching effects.

But one way or the other we're moving ahead with this initiative, and we have some very real opportunities in front of us to offer the NZ public sector an enormous amount of value and advocate the solution directly to the stakeholders. For example, there could be opportunities / forums coming up whereby we may be able to engage directly with government strategists and deliver our ideas, which I'm working on.

For now, sharing thoughts / feelings / getting reactions from NZ Drupal communities is a great thing to do. We also crucially need to build a corporate consortium of companies that would be willing to support and use a KiwiGov solution - so if you're a Drupal company owner or manager, please put up your hand to get behind this.

It seems Drupal in NZ is moving into a new and very exciting space, and it's up to all of us to have an input and help shape or influence the strategy.

I'll be keeping an eye on this thread and working with others to put together the white paper and formulate a path forwards.

The implication of:
http://www.ict.govt.nz/services/show/CWSP

Hi,

I haven't been involved in these forums for a while, but this one sparked my interest, please read below...

I'm really keen to get on board on a strategic/planning level. My role at moment is heavily involved in AWS consulting, strategy and other stuff that doesn't mean a lot of Drupal, except for providing dev ops templates/strategy for companies.

But I'm really interested in this because as an ex-govt. consultant (Drupal as well) I have seen how these politics play out. Sometimes the convincing that is needed is not at the technical level, but more so at the CIO/CX level especially when it comes to DIA, State Services etc...

What needs to be sold to the government are the benefits (many) and cost savings of Drupal with real world data to support this and it needs to be weighted against existing contracts (e.g. Silver Stripe) and services offered by other incumbents and players. Put yourself in a government customer's shoes - they are going to be evaluating and measuring the toolsets etc..

A final comment is that the design of the KiwiGov has to be done in very close consultation with government agencies, stakeholders etc... If it is done in a "bubble" then this may affect the outcome. In addition to this, Silverstripe's current contract for all of government is up for 2 year renewal next year so

And all in all. Drupal is the best CMS in the market so there is no reason why it can't become the preferred platform for government in the future.

I'd suggest if we have some people serious about this then get a pool of Drupal vendor representatives together with not the goal of selling their "own" solution, but with the goal of "collaborating" together with their strengths... about 6 people in total is a good start. I'd be happy to facilitate and be involved as someone with virtually no vendor interest, but definitely the industry interest.

cheers,
Ben

@dreambubbler, @kiwifellows and others..
Guys, it sounds like you've not been informed of the rest of the story until now. It's great to see you getting excited about it, and we'll be happy to let you know more in the near future - Alex is probably taking names to register this second wave of interest right now.

• We've been pulling together and in discussion with the consortium of like-minded agencies to get behind this project, and discussing and collaborating on bits of it since 2011 - through the local Drupal Meetups mostly. Please come along to those!
• The consultations and relationship building with stakeholders has been progressing in Wellington for a long while. Buy-in exists in many places already.
• The cases for cost-saving and re-use have already been made long ago, and we can dig those out from earlier presentations (made at Wellington meetup, DrupalSouth 2014, and now DrupalSouth 2015) as well as various other white-papers that are in draft.
• The case for technical advantages has also been convincingly made to technical stakeholders, and I'm taking on board some re-focussing of that story following some discussions I had at DrupalSouth.
• We have collaboration models sketched out for all Drupal Houses of various sizes to produce (and receive) the inevitable synergy, though the exact implementation is still elastic.

... there is much more to the product offering, and many many more important factors I'd like to discuss in time. There are also a number of take-aways we are making from things learned from this weeks aGov presentation both technical and strategic that I'm hoping to assimilate.
Alex or I will be happy to invite you to the next upcoming strategy session for the team - upcoming date TBD AFIK, but it looks like it will be sooner rather than later.
.dan.

We spoke about possibilities of a KiwiGov distribution taking hints from the Australian govCMS distribution both in terms of code included and governance model at DrupalSouth in Melbourne last week.

As another member of the govCMS team, I'm really interested in helping in some way to bring Drupal on public cloud into New Zealand for the government there.

Thanks for the clear endorsement Owen.

I've taken away a number of ideas re automated builds, managing patches, and subclassing distributions, that give us a clear way to get the best of all worlds WRT re-use, and WRT contributing back upstream where commonality is found.
The synergy that has been apparent so far in the contrib module selection, and the way the aGov+govCMS testing has been able to test and push those modules to breaking point and create better upstream patches is the sort of thing I envisage for our participation also.

My current task is making those processes (automated build/tag/release etc) as frictionless as possible for our contribution team from the different agencies who all use different workflows, and try to keep it cohesive.