Government

For the record, let me affirm what many here already know, Drupal
truly allows the freedom to produce a scalable, stable and secure
production environment incorporating mission critical legacy
infrastructure. As part of our portal redesign project the basic
requirements included the seemingly insane task of seamlessly
integrating no less than two database formats, two server side coding
languages all within at least 3 major themes all via Drupal. Over a
four week period we worked out all the technical obstacles -- and did
so without any Drupal core module changes of any kind. I wonder if
other developers out there have similar stories of successfully
integrating legacy components into their fully Drupalized web site? I
hope to inspire someone out there with this post!

Our site URL: http://www.mbda.gov
The Minority Business Development Agency Web Portal

The BC Public Service, an organization of 30,000 employees across an immense province, relaunched its corporate intranet in April 2010. In just 50 working days from development to production, a tiny team built an interactive intranet to support employee communications and collaboration. This work was completed within the existing site budget using an open-source platform.

These are some of the modules we used:

Administration Menu
Advanced Help

I will give a presentation on the use of Drupal for national governments and parliaments. I did a research this weekend and discovered that recently more and more national and regional governments use Drupal as a CMS. For example the Ministry of Economic Affairs of Poland changed this month to Drupal.

I and many others have asked for a list of the contributed modules used to build Whitehouse.gov. After it was pointed out to me that David Cole had displayed the list in one of his slides at DrupalCon—San Francisco, I found the archived presentation video, viewed it, and paused on that frame until I had my best guess of what each fuzzy entry said. Then I confirmed names by crosschecking that list against the list on Drupal.org of all modules available for Drupal 6. For all who are interested, this post not only lists these modules but also links to the respective project page for each module.

If you are looking into creating a "Government" distribution profile, this should give you a good start.

Where plans for Drupal 7 are to move all or part of a module into core, I have noted that next to the respective entry. Generally when only part of a module will be moved into core the remaining components will continue to be available for Drupal 7 on the same project page as before.

Great stuff at the Drupalcon here in San Fransisco. I went to the Drupal for Libraries session today. I know people in J.A. will find it interesting for the planned drupal camp so look out for the video as soon as it is posted here: http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/sessions

People interested in library related topics shouls join the mailinglist at http://listserv.uic.edu/archives/drupal4lib.html

Some other useful links are:

http://drupalib.interoperating.info/

http://groups.drupal.org/libraries

http://drupalib.interoperating.info/

Please join and participate.

Recently, I was able to do a temporary detail to GSA from my agency (Veterans Affairs). My detail involved the creation of a url shortener (it's in a Beta test now, but you can see it at http://go.usa.gov).

I had amazing help from friends in the Drupal community, especially my friend SeanR.

However, there was also a lot of discussion about the usual sorts of things:

· Drupal isn’t secure,

· it’s gonna crash our system,

· can’t be done,

· it’s not safe for government,

· too vulnerable to cross site scripting,

Glad to see that there is now a Drupal Group for National/Federal & State/Province Drupal installs as well as the previous one for Local Governments. I had tried to set up a general Government Group, but for some reason at the time it was rejected.

So, i've been working on a proof of concept for use of Drupal at Capital Health. We have a gigantic site to build, and Drupal would be a perfect fit.

Traditionally, at Capital Health we're a Microsoft Shop with most of our applications being of the .NET/SQL Server flavour with a sprinkle of Oracle/Java in some cases. Many who come from this area, think I'm crazy for wanting to use LAMP + Drupal for our web presence or that anything open source in general is sub par. As we all know, that is a crock but regardless, it is someting barrier i have to overcome.

Just saw this accessibility evaluation of Recovery.gov by Jim Thatcher. Recovery.gov is the highest profile Drupal government site in North America and so it is an interesting view of how this government which is committed to accessibility & open government implements this great CMS.

All:

I've been working with semantic web technologies for about five years now and wanted to engage the drupal community on two issues: a) a set of ontologies that specify the functions of the U.S. Federal government and b) a post I recently published called the state of the semantic web: representation and realism.

The ontologies are based on what's called the Federal Enterprise Architecture and are available here ...

http://www.osera.gov/owl/2004/11/fea/FEA.owl