Municipal Site Installation development

Thanks to everyone who attended the DrupalCon SF 2010 BOAF sessions on Local Government (and State/Federal too).

As discussed at those sessions, a number of us are planning on working on one (or more) distributions geared toward some level of municipal solution. While it's clear that Federal and Town level solutions are going to be very different, the differences between a Town and Village might be minor, and between a City and Town solution merely a matter of more complex departments (for example). The Split between State/Fed and Local seems like a natural one, and I think a good way to avoid introducing too many variables into the mix. If someone from a State department/focus decides to adapt the 'Municipal' solution to meet their needs, more power to them of course.

Brian Gilday of aha consulting has pledged large pieces of their codebase already in use successfully on a number of sites as a starting basis for this distribution/profile.

After sitting in on some discussions of the state of installation profiles on drupal.org, it seems that D7 is likely going to end up far better supported in the long run (ie by the time full d.o support for profiles is complete, D7 will be production quality), while in the meantime, D6 is the realistic short term target, but better done as a less 'fully automated' answer.

With that in mind, I'm proposing the following:

1) A D7 target for an installation profile on drupal.org. Based on our D6 code (see #2), we'll shoot for being ready for D7 release sometime after D7 is out (6 months or so?), when all of the modules we use in D6 are D7 ready, features and other external code are better supported in installation profiles, and other stumbling blocks are resolved. This would be the long term goal, including trying to ensure that a migration path existed from any D6 code released in the meantime.

2) A D6 codebase, built as a mix of features, some sort of drush make install profile, external libraries, etc. Likely hosted off of d.o, due to the mix, but open and public, a rich ecosystem of developers to get it featureful, and hopefully in use in a variety of places. The goal is to have something ready quickly as a base, to spur discussion and feature development, and still allow supportable deployment, including commercial support by developers interested in this market.

3) Discussion will remain on g.d.o. (the 2 gov groups) and/or in a profile issue queue, with the potential of a dedicated demo website in the future.

4) Wiki discussions to address feature potentials, goals, problems, principles, and other bigger picture discussions best held by the community to help focus development better. Accessibility, User experience and other big picture issues will certainly be topics, though hopefully we can stay focused on the direct case, and direct larger discussions to appropriate venues such as other g.d.o groups and/or issue queues for respective modules.

How can you help?
Post with your interest level, your desired contribution level (coding, theming, testing, etc), focus (if any), relationship (developer, user, governmental bureaucrat with a large budget to fund development (wink wink nudge nudge), etc), questions and more...