 All right everyone, I'm gonna go ahead and get started. Welcome and good morning and welcome to Drupal Khan. My presentation today, as you can see, is titled The Story of Energy.gov. The ins and outs of turning energy.blah into energy.awesome. Before we get started this morning, I wanted to take a few minutes to actually tell you a little bit about myself and some of my experience. So I've been in this intersection of politics and public service and digital strategy for about a decade now. I've held a variety of positions across that decade from being a field director using digital tools to being a campaign manager, to being on communications and research teams, to also doing online fundraising and advocacy for some of our most popular nationwide nonprofits. Most recently, I directed Digital Rapid Response in 2008 for the Obama campaign. What this was is that I had a SWAT team of writers, engineers, designers, videographers, that worked with me to build digital products that we could use to influence the new cycle. After that, I moved on to the White House and was the deputy new media director there where I helped to build out the first new media department at the White House with our director there, Macon Phillips. And then after that, I moved on to where I am currently serving at Academy Level Agency as the Department of Energy, where I serve as a senior advisor and director of digital strategy and communications. And the focus of my presentation today is gonna be about my experience there and building out digital strategy there. So this is the business side of me. So let me tell you a little bit more about the behind the scenes part of me. There's five favorite things that I love in this world. One is puppies. Two is the Pittsburgh Steelers. Three is Journey, the greatest band ever. Four is Wine. And last but not least is my husband over there in that particular order. Now I'm sure in all fairness that once he realizes that's the photo I use, I will drop from his top five and to his top 10. So now down to business. Things that I'll be talking about today. I'm gonna be giving a kind of a 10,000 foot view of the strategies that we employed to build a enterprise platform at the Department of Energy. Now what you will not hear in this presentation are the specific details of our Drupal Instance. If you want those answers, I am happy to direct you towards the front of the room where our engineering team happens to be sitting. Rather, I wanna focus today on all the different pieces that we had to pull together in order to achieve this. So I'll be focusing on resource strategy, what we use to develop the team and put together the team to build an enterprise platform, to our content strategy, what we wanted to build and last but not least, the business strategy to help us execute. So energy dot blah. When I started at the Department of Energy a couple years ago, two years exactly in May, this is the site that greeted me. If the purpose of this site was to house all of the logos at the Department of Energy on the homepage, it succeeds. There's at least 21, if you wanna count them, 21 on the homepage. However, it didn't succeed as much else. The Department of Energy plays such a vital role in our nation, building the clean energy economy and developing our energy portfolio with an all above strategy. Protecting our national nuclear security and expanding the frontiers of our knowledge and science and technology. These are very critical and important things that the Department of Energy does but in no way does this site tell that story. And it doesn't just not tell it in an aesthetic way and also with its content, but the platform that supports it also prohibits us from telling that story. So this brings me to what we uncovered in what I've now called a coined, the Etch-a-Sketch problem. The site I just showed you, the energy.blow was actually redone in 2006. And I believe it was the first time that Energy.gov had moved to a content management system. And that system at the time was good for very specific things. If you wanted to go up and down or left and right or post a press release, take it down, you could do that really well just like in Etch-a-Sketch. You could do those things really well. And if you were really good and you practiced really hard, you can make a pretty good circle. Well, if you got really good at working with the Gundam Etch-a-System, you can maybe post a video and expect it to play, sometimes. So what we quickly uncovered was that the CMS we were using wasn't gonna be able to adapt and be flexible enough to meet the communication demands of the environment that we were in. And we needed something that would. So we needed something that was gonna be flexible. To add to this problem, I wanna play a little game. So when I was in second grade, we played this game where we had jelly beans in a jar and we guessed how many jelly beans were in the jar and we got all the jelly beans. Now, this is where I'm gonna play a similar game, except if you guess the number of websites correctly, you will not get all the websites. I will save you that. So how many websites do you guys think the Department of Energy has? Who said that? Okay, that's pretty good. That's close. Any other guesses? 50? 350. 350? 450. You guys are good. Oh, way back there? 2000? Are you guys actually counting the number of etch-a-sketches in there? So the federal government, so this is actually quite a complicated question to answer. The federal government manages 24 to 25,000 second level.gov domains. The Department of Energy is responsible for approximately 87 of those. Within those 87, there are several other websites. And we have done a couple of data calls and to our best estimate, we have approximately 359 websites at the Department of Energy manages or runs. That's a lot. So in thinking about the web presence for the Department of Energy and how we could really elevate and improve the user experience and digital communications as a whole and also elevate these other sites that have similar experiences of whether being in an outdated CMS or not being a CMS at all, how can we elevate everybody? So we needed something that was gonna be flexible and could scale to many different requirements. So this brings in our solution, the energy.gov platform. We wanted something, again, that was gonna be flexible and scale to many different requirements. Some of them we knew, some of them we learned along the way and others that we haven't yet uncovered. In addition, so I mentioned that the last, the energy.blah that was launched that I came into, that was redone in 2006. And in just such a few short years, it became outdated and inflexible and wasn't meeting our needs. So it was also gonna be very important to find a solution that was gonna be able to evolve as rapidly as our users' needs were evolving. And this is why we moved towards an open-source solution that was gonna be flexible, scalable, and evolve rapidly over time, something that Dresen has a presentation, a continuous innovation. So this helped us develop the vision of what we wanted to achieve. And that is developing a single platform solution via energy.gov for the energy department's public-facing headquarter websites. So there's a little bit of government-y language in this and that's the public-facing headquarter websites that I'll explain. There's a vast array of rules and regulations and organization, complex organization that makes up the energy department. This vision helps us have a clear focus on something that we can achieve and succeed at and helps us hone in on that goal so that we can be successful. Along the way, when you're in the federal space, there's a lot of things that you can direct your energy and attention to to fixing. We've been approached about fixing our intranets because we have a lot of those as well. Our data processes are how we execute multimedia projects, but we wanted to, we don't wanna tackle, break off more than we could chew, so this vision helped us give us a laser focus on something that if we dedicated our resources or time and energy to it didn't let other things get in the way, we would have that initial success and be able to build upon that later. So, this vision developed. Now, I'm gonna need some help to achieve it. So, I gotta build a team. I need some resources. So have you guys seen The Money Ball? I love this movie. So for those of you who haven't seen it, I don't think I'm giving anything away. Basically, Billy Bean is struck with this problem that he keeps trying to compete in the same way for building a team and executing on that same strategy, he keeps losing, he keeps getting the same result. So he's gonna change things up and build a team in a different way to be victorious and get the win. So I wanted to take that same approach. We need to rethink how we were getting the resources and building the team that we needed to build this successful enterprise platform. So I didn't wanna follow the normal, the normal vendors or the new, or folks that have already been doing this because last I checked, a lot of folks think or think federal websites suck. So we wanted to change that. First and foremost, I developed an Office of Digital Strategy responsible for owning the web presence of the Department of Energy. Now, before this, our public affairs office, you know, they handled content and our office, our chief information officer own the technology. However, no one was waking up every day thinking, how can we do this better? How can we better meet the needs of our audiences? And so without having a clear owner, the result was 21 logos on the homepage of energy.gov. So we developed an Office of Digital Strategy that was empowered to own that digital presence. And that team consists of an editorial team of digital communication specialists that focus on energy issue areas, curating content from across the department and elevating that on our top-level energy.gov pages. It includes our multimedia team, which works on video, photography, data visualizations and infographics to help tell the story of our content. And it also includes our user experience in digital technology team, which also works very closely on our digital reform project. Now, this office, and this is actually everybody on the team. This office, one of the things I realized was it was gonna be really hard for us to recruit the level of an engineering talent in a rapid way that we needed for this project through the traditional hiring process in the federal government. In fact, it took me several months just to get our content specialist. And lastly checked, Drupal engineers were going for a pretty high price on the market. So I needed, we needed some partners. So we reached out across the Department of Energy and found a partner that was willing to work with us to get the top level of talent that we were looking for. And that was Energy Enterprises Solutions, EES, who was gonna work with us to help us achieve this vision. And with them, they helped us find BlackMush to do our cloud hosting. And they have specific experience in doing Drupal cloud hosting. Acquia, who provides us with our Drupal maintenance and support services, as well as Treehouse, our Drupal engineering strategist and team. And the funny thing is about Treehouse is at the time when we were working with EES, it came down to phase two in Treehouse and we didn't really know who to go with. And today I'm pleased that I'm excited to know that now that they've combined forces, so I now get the best of both worlds. So that's good news. And last but not least, we partnered with Huge for user experience and design. And some of the key things about this is that these weren't the traditional folks that had been working on web projects in the Department of Energy. In some cases, for example, Huge, it was the only government project that they ever had heard about. So we did, working with EES, we did a lot of work to recruit and find top-much talent to help us build the platform that we knew we could build. So this next part, decision-making, a very important component of your resource strategy. So what I wanna show a video, it's about four and a half minutes. It's funny, so hopefully you won't fall asleep during it. That really kind of exemplifies a typical decision-making process in a large organization like the federal government. Where are seeing reports that people don't know what to do at an intersection? Some people are slowing, others are accelerating, small percentage are backing up, and the rest are crashing. So we're looking for signage that makes people want to bring their vehicle to a standstill before they continue. Essentially a sign that tells people to stop. Essentially. If you look on page 16 of your brief, you'll notice that about 50% of HVMs are female. Yeah, HVMs. Oh, home vehicle managers? But don't neglect the other 50% who are primarily male. Okay, so we're basically targeting all drivers? No, we're targeting women, but we're also targeting men, secondarily. But really think this thing through if you could, okay? We're looking for stopping power. Yeah, I mean, I still get up by tomorrow. Love where you've taken this. You guys nailed it. Yeah, I think this is pretty spot on. Having said that, we're getting some additional details from upper management since the initial briefing we gave you at it. I think we have the opportunity to make this piece hit a little harder. Yeah, harder. The main message is still the stopping occasion, but we're also going to need to include personal safety cues on any appropriate right of legal and our partner logo. And as far as red goes, we love it. But we got word from our creative standard group that the fire department kind of owns red, so we're gonna have to lighten it up on the Pantone scale. Lighten it up like pink? Based on our female target market, I don't see it down side. Yeah, well, what about our male secondary market? Maybe we do pink signs in the female intersection zones and blue ones in the male ones. And which intersections are the female ones? I got it. Why don't you go with pink and blue until we get you an answer on that? Brilliant. Way to crack the code. I think we're done here. Go up just a little bit? Yeah, sure. We just got word from the UN that we can't use our logo. Then let's buff up the EPA logo. OK. I think somewhere on there we need to show the stopping occasion. It needs to be telegraphic. Yeah, some people just don't read, you know? It's great. Can we try a new line? I showed it to my daughter and she didn't really get it. Yeah, circles feel very 90s to me. Can we try a different shape, too? Can we try a softer headline, though? And a web address in case people want more info? Maybe a burst that says new. If it doesn't make it too busy? Keep imagining a line of cars stacked up at the intersection? Yeah, I think we need a more complete call to action so people know exactly what to do after the pause. I'd also like to see maybe some people smiling on it. You know, to remind drivers that stopping isn't required. It's also fun. You guys got all that? I have to say, I think you finally got it. You guys did an amazing job of fitting all of our suggestions in on one side. You throw together a look of success for a selling meeting this afternoon? And that's how it all comes together, guys. I mean, if I were at that intersection, I'd stop. Me, too. I don't see how anyone couldn't. Let's get these things printed and out the door. You guys can see that there's a lot of similarities between that stop site at the end and the homepage of energy.gov from 2006. So we wanted to make sure that we were doing something different to avoid this kind of group think, so that we had clear decision-making within our organization so that we were giving very clear guidance to all of our partners during the build. So senior leadership in the Department of Energy gave me the ability to have decision-making authority on this project. In addition, I knew that I couldn't be up to date with everything on the day-to-day. So I also relinquished some of that authority to our Director of User Experience and Digital Technology, Elizabeth Meckes, to make day-to-day decisions as needed in my absence to keep this project moving. And it's important to note that when you're, even though you have a clear decision-maker, it doesn't mean that collaboration doesn't happen. It means that there is a time for it, but at the end of the day, somebody's making that decision and owning it and moving on. All right, so we have our team. What do we want them to build? Let's talk about content strategy. So our goal at the outset is a pretty ambitious one. We wanted to make energy.gov the resource for energy information and set a new standard for federal websites. We wanted it to be different. We wanted it to be bold. We wanted to make a statement, and we wanted it to be really good. Going back to the mission of the Department of Energy, three main pillars of what we do, energy, science, and nuclear stewardship. So how do we connect all of those? We're gonna connect all of them with public services, and here's why. We can achieve our national priorities through meeting an individual's needs. So when we look at our national and global issues, the way that an individual interacts with them is on a local level. And then they make decisions and influence those issues also on a local level. And then at that local level, those local issues that influence the national priorities. So the result is when we address needs at the individual level, we can achieve our national goals. So another reason that we wanna focus on the individual is that those talking about energy and the work that we do in the digital space, it's overwhelming. There's a lot of competition, a lot of noise. And one of the ways that we can break through with that is by focusing our public services, our information at that individual level. Where it's gonna be the most impactful. So with that goal in mind, we did a bunch of personas. Here's one, this is Pete. He lives in Buffalo, New York. He's a contractor, he's 47, he's married, he's three kids, and he's looking for a new truck. And for those who have seen this persona, for you, Pete's been looking for a new truck for a long time. So how is Pete affected by energy policy? Jobs, gas prices, utility prices, economy, neighborhood issues, taxes pollution, variety of different ways. This is how energy issues are affecting Pete. What Pete cares about? Well, he cares about what a lot of us care about. He cares about his wallet, his job, his family, his town, and his new environment. What Pete doesn't know? He doesn't know how to save energy to save money. He doesn't know the sources of his power, and he doesn't know the cost of energy next year. There are lots of things about his energy environment that he's just not aware of, and is ill-equipped to make decisions on. So we, the Department of Energy, we partner up with the Environmental Protection Agency to provide Energy Star rebates. So we have this information about how to get energy-efficient appliances, and we offer you an incentive to do so, a rebate. This gives Pete the incentive of financial savings to purchase an energy-efficient appliance. And this, in turn, helps us achieve our national priorities because it's spurring the energy efficiency retail market. At the end of the day, he's also saving energy, lessening our demand overall. So go back to the main point. By achieving national priorities by supporting local decisions. So this is the main premise, the main content strategy that we want our site to meet. So a couple of big goals or imperatives within that. First imperative is that we're gonna use energy.gov to deliver local services and information to consumers and businesses. So the top-level pages of energy.gov are gonna be oriented to that specific user. And this is how it works. So we have a variety of different content types that do very specific things. One, they inform. So we have energy visualizations, technical information, statistics, energy definitions that inform our users. Two, we can inspire them with success stories and projects that are happening in their backyard. Three, we can encourage them to act with energy incentives, NEPA calls to action, social media shareables, contests, challenges, forms. And last but not least, we can give them feedback on that action and create this loop of user engagement and the ladder of engagement for our audience. Second imperative for the site. And this is a really important one because going back to all those edge sketches in a jar, this is how we're the vision of how we're gonna figure out how to serve the content needs and the audience needs of all those other sites that the department owns and manages. And that is, we wanna serve specialized audiences through our sub-sites and affiliate sites. So how does this work? Well, again, at toplevelenergy.gov pages, which are topically oriented rather than organizationally, we are meeting the needs of our consumer business audience. So when they search for something on vehicles, they're laying on a page that talks about vehicles. However, we have lots of sub-sites within that content ecosystem that's providing more specific information for these niche audiences, for these stakeholders, such as researchers, academics, policymakers, advocates, staff and contractors, press and media, et cetera. And the way that this kind of works in the site model is that our digital specialists are working with the energy.gov top-level pages and curating this content, helping it bubble up from all these different affiliate sites, from a lab, from our program offices, from our staff support offices, from our operations offices, from our administrations. All this organization, which is how our site was originally oriented, is now oriented topically-based and we're feeding this information up so the audiences that are looking for it can more easily find it. Third imperative, connect with users where they're already engaged. And I won't spend a lot of time on this, but basically I know that energy.gov isn't your home page, even though I wish it was. And I know not everybody is coming to our website. In a lot of ways, people are finding out about energy information in other places. So we want to partner with those other popular sites to provide our information in those same places. So for example, it's tax time. Wouldn't it be great when you're filling out your taxes on TurboTax if we also were providing our tax incentive information in that same place? So you're learning about that in a place where you're actually executing upon it. And this also applies to social media. And also, in talking in the appropriate way to the social media audiences, that you're gonna get the most bang for your buck. So that's our content strategy. So we have the team, we have what we want to build. Now we just need the momentum and the ability to actually get a bunch of people on our side and build it. So one of my favorite things to do these days is in presentation is find a way to incorporate cats on the internet. So when I Googled cats and business strategy, this cartoon came up and it was so appropriate. So this is my cats on the internet slide. Business strategy. Sometimes it actually feels like this is what we're doing to accomplish this. So there's a lot of different folks involved in building a web enterprise platform. If you think back to the 359 websites that we run as a department, getting those folks on board requires a very strong business case. And for us, it's too prong. One, we wanna eliminate wasteful spending. There's a lot of web infrastructures, a lot of them outdated and not meeting our current needs. In addition, maybe a lot of them not in content management systems that we're owning and running and all of that duplication is expensive. If we pull our resources together, we can get rather than have a bunch of blah platforms, we can create one really awesome one. In addition, it's also about improving digital communications. Also across those 359 sites is a wide array of user experiences that makes it really, really confusing for any audience to figure out how to find the information and services that we provide. So by pulling in our content into a coherent user experience for our audience, it makes it easier for them and gives them a much more pleasurable experience for finding what they're looking for. Now, for a lot of folks, this made total sense. They're on board, they're with us, they're, you know, where do they sign up? They're ready to go. But at any time that you're trying to do a really large project and trying to get a lot of people involved and moving a lot of people towards change, there's always gonna be a few folks that just that no matter your argument and no matter how strong it is, aren't gonna see it. And in those cases, I'm sure you've all experienced this, have you ever wished that there was some ultimate decider that could come in and save the day for you and get people to join, even though you couldn't do it? Well, in our case, we did have that. The president came to our aid and got our backs. And he launched his campaign to cut waste, which was about finding and rooting out wasteful spending across the government space. And there was a specific component of that for website reform. And that was looking at the 24 to 25,000 second level.gov domains that we own and manage and figuring out how to simplify that and eliminate that duplication. And so this helped us, this added not only to the rationale for our strong business case, but also gave us an executive order and a higher authority to help push along the initiative. Another key component of our business strategy was also developing relationships. And two of the big ones that I wanna talk about is leadership and grassroots. So of course, leadership is very important. And they're important in a way that you wanna keep them updated and excited and involved, but not so much so that they're micromanaging and telling you what buttons to put on the homepage and what logos to put on the homepage. So it's a very fine line to balance. So we wanted to make sure that they were, our senior leadership was involved as much as possible, but also recognize that we were bringing a special expertise to the table and to get them to trust us to execute accordingly. And fortunately, at the Department of Energy, we have a Nobel Prize-winning physicist on our side and he kinda gets it, he gets the stuff. He knows that I won't tell him how to do physics and he's not gonna tell me how to do websites. So we also wanted to build relationships with the folks across the department that are doing this work each and every day. Because at the end of the day, it's their day to day. It's their nine to five that's gonna be changing. And they need to know what that means and what impact it's gonna have on them. So this is a picture of the Jedi Council, which is the model for the DOE web council. Working with some of the web and the media staff across the department, we developed the Energy Department web council to bring together all these folks who work across the department on digital strategy and digital communications and technology to share best practices and get their guidance on our next steps and give them a place to have their voices heard. And last but not least, quick wins was a key part of our business strategy. So when starting this project, it became very clear that it was gonna take about a year to really do the first build of the site and to launch it. We didn't have a year to show progress. So this is an example of one of the ways that we did this. We incorporated piece of moments, victory moments or quick wins into the process so that we could show the department. And a lot of it was internally that there was a team in place and they were making shit happen. And one of the things that we did was we did a reskin of the website within six months of the office being set up. So it was in January of 2011 when we launched this. And really this wasn't a big thing for the public because the information, none of the IA changed, no new content. Mostly it was to win over folks within the department and show them that we knew what we were doing. And to show them that we were here and we could have successes. And this went over really well in that regard. In addition, it also got those same folks used to change. So the number of people that emailed Liz Meckis after this launch and said they couldn't find anything on the site even though we changed none of the content was an astronomical number. So it was part of the baby steps to get people ready for the bigger launch where information was gonna change and get them okay with that. And there's other places where we've also tried to celebrate each like benchmarks in the project and have others join us in that celebration to help build momentum in the project. So this brings us to energy.awesome which is the site that we have right now. This is the site that we launched in August of 2011. That summer we had 11 participating program offices launch with us with 16 affiliate sites. Very exciting. In the first six months of launch we've seen an increase in unique visitors of 328%, which is fantastic. In addition, what's key about that data is that prior to launch approximately 42 to 48% of our audience was coming from folks within the forestal building of the Department of Energy. 42 to 48% of our audience came from within that building. In six months since launch, now just nine to 12% of that audience comes from within that building. And it's not because they're going away and not using the site. No, it's because we're reaching external audiences that we've never reached before. In addition, we've also, and I'm sure our engineering team, we could elaborate on this, we've also been able to contribute several modules back to the community. One to much fanfare has been Bean, which is exciting, where's Roger? And data visualization, among a couple of others. In addition, it's not as if we're done. So one of the things that we ran into before is that you relaunch a site, you're done, check that box, great, I'm moving on. But what happens is the space is so rapidly evolving, you can't do that, you're never done. So we had to set up a system that we were doing iterative innovation, continuous innovation. So we are in the phase two of building our web of Tripoli's platform. Phase two means there's nine other program offices by the end of this year who will be part of this platform in some way. So that is undergoing. In addition, we're always adding new tools, new features, and making them accessible to all of those that are part of the platform. And I'm also excited to say that on August, not August, but April 5th, we'll be launching energy.gov slash developer for community like this to provide you specific resources for how to engage and partner and work with us with our content. And that'll be specifically around apps for energy to get us into the mobile space. So I want to take a moment to recap about some of the points that I went over during this presentation. So bottom line, what are some of the things that it takes to build an enterprise platform in a doc.gov environment? So one, laser focus on a clear vision that your team understands. Two, talent. Don't be afraid to think outside the box and look in other places to get the team that you need to succeed. Three, empowered decision makers with Hutzpah. So folks that are willing to make a decision and own it and not be afraid. A user-focused content strategy, organizing your content not based on your organization but based on the topics that people are searching for is very important. Having friends throughout the food chain. So from a very top level of the administration, all the way down to the folks that are posting press releases for your smallest program office. Reach out to all of them. And iterative innovation. Once you launch, you're never done. That's just one phase. You gotta keep going. And have a system set up that's built for that. And last but not least, the biggest thing that I think is important, going back to one of my favorite things. The biggest thing that's important for building an enterprise platform in a doc.gov environment is don't stop believing. It takes an immense amount of persistence and willpower to pull off a large project like this. There are always things that come up that you may not have been aware of, whether it's some additional form or rule of regulation or some other requirement that you need to fill. But it's okay. You're gonna get through it. Just have the patience and cross your T's, dot your I's and you can make it happen. So just be a little cheesy. If you, wait for it, don't stop believing anything is possible. And that's it. So questions. Oh and if you're gonna ask questions, I've been instructed to ask you to come to the microphone and the middle of the room because this is being recorded to be posted on the web. Don't be shy. How many months or weeks did it take to convert from the whole platform to the new one? If you include, from the very beginning of developing our resource strategy, it began in May of 2010 and we launched our first phase in August of 2011. So it took us several months just to acquire the team that we needed to pull this off. Two quick questions. To what extent did you all embrace Obama administration's open data, open government directive? And the second is from a support standpoint, how much internal capacity does your team or the department have to support the platform versus how did you outsource and what are the SLAs and how did that strategy work? So two questions. One about how is this part of the open data, the open gov movement and then also the balance of resources between internal versus external. So this is actually energy.gov is one of our initiatives that are part of our open government plan for the Department of Energy. So thinking back to the three principles of the open gov initiative, transparency, participation and collaboration. This, the goal of this is to hit upon all three and our next, we actually are publishing our next round of open gov plans come this April. And another part of that is actually gonna be our outsource energy challenge, which kind of focuses on the collaboration piece to an extension of that. Going back to the question, the second question of internal versus external resources. And others have made, others across the government's face have made a different choice on this than myself. But I found it really hard to kind of figure out a way to attract and recruit top notch engineering talent to work within the federal government and to do so in a quick way. You guys are in hot demand. So when it comes to our engineering support and also our maintenance support, all of that is external, but our internal team runs content, user experience and design. Does that help? I had a question about, you mentioned personas, did you actually do usability studies before and after your implementation? We did, we conducted a usability study on the initial design. And we have in our, with actually our front end partner and user experience, huge, actually has a usability center in their offices, which is really helpful. And got a lot of initial feedback from a wide spectrum and demographics of folks. We also are scheduled in our development processes to also do a semi-annual usability analysis as the platform develops and also make sure that we're also set up to develop and improve the platform based on that feedback. Did you also do the usability studies during those early stages of development before you got to your, I don't want to say finished product, but your current site? We all, I want to say no, we only did the one after our first. Yeah, we find issues with orientation when we go through quick stages like that. So I was just curious. Yep. One of the things that you said in the beginning of the presentation was you were trying to sort of become the next standard, if you will, for government websites and communications digitally. Have you had any other agencies reach out to you and ask, hey, how did you do this? Or were we really like X, Y, or Z after you launched? So they kept telling me to repeat the question. So other agencies reaching out to see what we did. Yes, we've had a variety of folks reach out, especially there's a lot of folks that are also making the move to a Drupal environment and rethinking their front end design. So folks from USA to post office to I'm part of the federal web managers council, which includes representatives from across the federal space that I've spoken to give presentations to that council as well. So there's been a lot of interest. Hi, my name is Jerry Pan from Oak Ridge National Lab. Hi. So yeah, very good presentation. Thank you. I have two questions for you. First one is I'm working on data related to science research from Oak Ridge National Lab and the other government agency. Since you mentioned a couple of times that your system can be used for data curation. So the question is, do you think is actually a broad question? Drupal as a platform, is that suitable for data curation of particular science research results or publications? My second question is, where trying to push in Drupal usage in our organization? I don't know if you're, again, to share or pushing down experience you have with energy.gov down to the subsidiary like the national labs. Can you repeat your first question? I'm not sure, using Drupal for data? Data curation, curating data. Curating data. Preserving long term access, that kind of thing. And the other question was adoption of Drupal, right? And championing that. Pushing down to subsidiary like all of that. So a couple of things, I think there's a lot more that we can do when it comes to data on energy.gov. We actually brought on someone specifically, this is the best title ever, data integration specialist. As a full time person in our Office of Digital Strategy to think through those very questions because I think there's a lot more that we can be doing there. And he's actually the one that is organizing the apps for energy challenge where we'll be putting out a challenge around green button data, utility data. And encouraging developers to develop apps around that in a couple weeks. So I think there's a lot more that we could do there and I'm happy to put you in touch with him. To get some of your ideas. And the other thing about adoption of, you know, encouraging adoption of Drupal in some of our satellite offices and labs. It's actually, there's a lot of labs that are moving in that direction. Right now, Argonne is moving that direction. Where's the gentleman from Fermi who was just talking to me about it? There we go. And there's a lot of others that are exploring this. One thing I will say, one of the big reasons that we moved in this way was because of the flexibility, scalability and iterative innovation components. But also when the White House made that move and figured out a lot of the security issues and made it, it helped us make that argument because a lot of the pushback, we weren't getting from a usability or flexibility standpoint. It was making sure the security question was addressed. So that helped a long way as well. So I'm actually gonna be chatting with the lab communications directors later this week. And I've been given a bunch of presentations about adoption of Drupal at some of our OpenGov conferences. So I'm happy to talk with anybody at your office to help you as well. Hi. Hello again. This is Stan Asher from JBS International. You had mentioned in your presentation that you had contributed a data visualization module back to the community. What module is that? Do you have another name? Can I direct the question to? This is Tim from Treehouse. So it's called Data Visualization API for the recording. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Hi, I'm Ed Oust from the Alameda County Office of Education in California, in Oakland. I mean, Hayward. I loved the video clip you showed. And I was wondering, could you say a little more about the process that you had to go through to select an empowered decision maker with Chutzpah so that you ended up with an actual stop sign and not, you know, an end product that really worked? I think there's a couple, so the question is how, the process that we put in place to actually have a decision making ability. There's kind of two components to that. One is like coming into Department of Energy, there was already some precedent in understanding that public affairs kind of owned logos and public facing design. So the process that they had gone through in 2006 of having, you know, a common, so that beautiful design from energy.bluh was actually, you know, pretty well adopted across the space. So that was already there. And one of the things, and I think this is one of the benefits of when you transition from White House to, you know, a cabinet department, one of the things that was part of those negotiations coming into the department was, I needed to be empowered. If they really wanted me to overhaul the web presence and make it better, I needed to be empowered to do so and be able to have that decision making authority. Of course I would make sure that they were involved and I sought their input, but they needed to trust me in my experience there. So at the get-go, I felt that I had that trust to be able to say, you know, the buck stops here, this is what we're gonna do. Hi, I'm Catherine Cool from IQ Solutions. I was really interested in the reskin you did as one of your quick wins. When you did the reskin, did you just change the CSS on the site and kind of move around some things there or did you move it into Drupal and then start the redesign in the Drupal space? No, we, well, we had our blog in Drupal because our other CMS, which we actually launched earlier in July because our other CMS couldn't support a blog, but the reskin that we did was purely aesthetic. We did not launch anything on the back end. Cool, thank you. Hi, my name's Jeff Bach and I'm an industry analyst that focused a lot on Drupal. Dries has announced that an authoring environment is going to be a major goal for the release of D8. And I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the authoring environments that you currently use within energy.gov. And then the second part of my question is that if you were to make recommendations to Dries and the design community about what needs to be improved in the authoring environment, what would you recommend from the perspective of somebody who deals with a lot of content in the public sector? I think it's a great question. And actually, one of the big goals of moving to a single platform was also to give us the ability to have some consistency in training for the folks who were like empower communicators to our subject matter experts across the department to be publishing to the web and getting their information out there. Now, for the specifics of your question about the authoring environment now and what we would recommend to Dries, I'm actually gonna pitch it to Liz Meckis and Tim from Treehouse. You guys can go ahead and answer. Oh, I should give you guys a microphone. Hi there, whoa, sorry about that. So one of the things that we did, Cammy mentioned the BEAN module. That is one of the things that we did to improve the authoring experience. So a lot of what the sub offices wanted to do was to be able to aggregate their content easily. And that's something in DRIPLE you would normally do with views. But the problem with that is that we would be exposing the views permissions to regular users which is not really something you want to do. And also it gets cumbersome to continually generate specific views for specific use cases. So we actually created a module called BEAN which stands for block entities aren't nodes which is a joke that's funny if you're a programmer but not really to anyone else. And what that allows you to do is basically generate blocks, custom blocks and to have user permissions on them that are more restricted. So we tried to basically empower the user without giving them permission to destroy the site. And so the BEAN was one of the things that we did. I'm trying to think of other good examples. A lot of the content, the content is basically structured with organic groups and that helps each, am I still on? No. So we use organic groups to allow the individual sub offices to own their content without polluting or interfering with any of the other offices content or the top level energy.gov content. We came up with a system however that allows us to also cross post that content between the different organic groups so that if the Office of Indian Energy say has an article that the Office of, I'm gonna get this wrong, let's say General Counsel because that's one that I can remember. If General Counsel finds a piece of content that an Indian energy may that they want to use, we have a system for them to allow that content to be posted over there. So those are two things that we did. Does that help answer your question at all? Yeah, that does answer for the current. Now, what would you recommend to the D8 design community in terms of requirements that they should have? Lots and lots of user experience testing. I know this was already done. One thing that we've started to do in our development process, especially when we're doing ongoing maintenance, is I talk to some of the users. I actually have a weekly meeting set up with the woman who is basically the front line in educating these people on how to use the system and she's the one that hears all the complaints about how the system is hard to work with. And so we meet with her weekly. I explained to her new features that we've dropped in in this production cycle and she tells me what they're having difficulty with. It's sort of an informal ongoing UX testing. But in terms of recommendations to Drupal 8, a lot of UX testing, basically. Thank you. Hi, I think we have time for just the last couple of folks in line for questions. Hi, my name is Boris. Just retrospectively, do you think you could have done something a little bit different? You know, looking back at it right now in the beginning. I'm having trouble hearing you. Can you say that again? Do you think there's something you would like to do retrospectively like deep in the beginning? Now you guys sort of. Something that we would redo? Yeah. You know, it's a really, it's a great question. I think if we could allow, allow for more time to educate and bring up the, you know, our first 11 partners with the program office, our 11 program offices. If we had, if we were able to have more resources and more one on one time with each of them to get them ready for our first phase launch. I think that was a big thing. We've adjusted that with our second phases to give them more time. But in a project like this where you need to, sometimes you just need to rip off the band aid to get folks to focus and meet a deadline. It was hard to do that. But I think going back, we would have done a lot more education and sit down with those folks to make the experience a little easier for them. Thank you. Hi, my name's Eric Schwafson from ACEEEE. And I wanted to ask you real quick about content and specifically how you had to change the workflow for your employees to get content onto the website, if at all, and whether that process was streamlined or changed at all. Thank you. Well, I mean, there's so much evolution that happened over the course of the project. When we started, there were two folks that were kind of working on content for the site in the basement of the forestel building of the Department of Energy that brought up to the seventh floor and had to focus on, okay, what are we gonna say on energy.gov today? But we didn't have an environment that allowed for dynamic content. So one of the first things we did was attach a blog in Drupal onto the main energy.gov site and start generating that content and get the department, the department never had a central energy.gov blog before. So get the department used to working with that and thinking about another communication avenue that they could use to reach the public and then building it from there. So, and also we didn't have a big team. So now we have five folks on our editorial team. There's one managing editor and four specialists that focus on specific energy issue areas so they can develop a subject matter expertise with working with some of our offices. So there's a lot of, and also breaking down some of our silos. There's a lot of offices that work on solar, for example. Well, that content specialist is responsible for working across that organization to curate content in a way that's gonna be the most effective for our consumer and business audience. And that kind of works itself out in some other issue areas. In some issue areas, like environmental management, there's one office that does that and that one's a little easier. But in some of our others where it's cross cutting, we wanted to structure our editorial team in a way to kind of break down those organizational structures because people aren't searching for information by the Office of Electricity and Reliability Office. They're searching it, they're typing its market. So that's, I don't know if that quite answers your question, but we've had quite an evolution with not just the site itself, but also the team supporting that over the last two years. All right, well thank you guys all for coming to my session. They asked me to put up this slide so you can give me some feedback so we can prove for next time and have a great rest of the week at DrupalCon. Thanks. Thank you.