 So, this is a session that I call How Drupal is Transforming Government, and it comes from lessons that I've sort of picked up working in the government space in DC over the last couple of years as Drupal's been evolving, and I think that it's largely what I would consider to be a non-technical discussion, so if you're looking for, you know, what modules we used and stuff, you might be in the wrong place, but judging by the lack of t-shirts and all that stuff, I'm feeling like a lot of you are thinking you're in the right place, right? So this is like, this is the government side of it, right? None of us are wearing suits, though. So, yeah, and I'm guessing that, you know, a lot of you are probably wondering, first of all, you know, kind of what is Drupal in government? What's the connection? Why is it taking off? And I hope that's one of the reasons you're here today, because that's hopefully the answer that I'm trying to give you is, what is the connection between what's so great about Drupal and why is it successful or useful in government? So I guess it's a bad sign that I'm looking around, and I don't, I know a lot of people at this conference, I don't recognize anybody here, so except for one guy who I talked into coming here in the, in the bathroom a minute ago, and Catherine who posted on the internet that she was going to come to this session, and I reminded her about that 15 minutes ago. So that's a really bad sign that I don't know all the rest of you. So give me, can you raise your hands if you actually work in government, federal, state, local, public sector? Oh, okay, cool. So that wasn't just a joke earlier. You really do work in government. All right, good. And just at, at a curiosity, federal level, okay, state, city, local, municipality, okay, international. Okay, cool. All right, good, good. All right, so you guys are here to learn. That's great. Cool. So, you know, Drupal is obviously growing in government, and I think, you know, one of the things that, you know, people are most interested in is, is why is that happening? And one of the things that we as a community are most interested in and most passionate about is making sure that it continues to happen. So I think there's a couple of trends that we'll be talking about today that sort of hopefully tie those two pieces together. Why would you want to use Drupal if you're in government, and why as a community do we want to embrace what government needs out of this CMS, this framework, this community? What's up here is a sampling of people that are actually using Drupal in government today. It's pretty impressive. Some of these are new. Some of them have been using it pretty extensively. Some of them use it in smaller micro-site-type situations. Some of them have intranets. Some of them have public, you know, communication platforms. Some of them have big websites or series of websites. It's all over the map, and I'll talk about all those different permutations today. So, you know, the requisite why Drupal slide, everybody, you know, wants to see this. The reason I like to flash this up is I'd like to remind people, particularly people who are new to this community, what the real reasons people use Drupal for. And you'd be shocked to find out that, you know, the total cost of ownership or cost is not always the main reason that we hear. In fact, often in government, what we hear more often than not, believe it or not, is just trying to get off of proprietary platforms where people feel trapped. They feel like they can't publish their content. They don't understand how to modify their system. They feel dependent on contractors. That's certainly a trend that's been going on in government a long time. And what they liked about the open source movement was not so much the fact that there wasn't a cost to purchasing the software, but the fact that there was a very low barrier to entry. They could try it themselves. It wasn't something that, you know, someone had in a black box somewhere that they brought in from the Beltway every day. They could just go online. They could try it out. They could give it to their security guys and they could start poking at it. They could show it to their boss and do a demo. And then once they've got it up and running, they can do all kinds of very flexible things with it that they couldn't do with proprietary tools. So contrary to proper belief, more often than not, I have heard people in government and public sector, in fact, all of our clientele say that the main reasons they use Drupal are for flexibility, for their ability to control it, for the low barriers to entry and the fact that there's no lock-in to a vendor. And then cost comes up inevitably towards the end, but it's not the argument that most people lead with when making a purchase, or making, that's a bad slip, in making a decision to implement Drupal. So one of the things that I think has been most interesting for myself, I used to do government work way back in the day. In sort of the mid-90s, I was working early internet days for a big government contractor. And one of the things that I noticed at the time is that there was just not a lot of vision from the government as to what they wanted to use the internet for. And it was very frustrating because I wanted to get out there. And by late 99, you had startups everywhere. And I wanted to get out there. I wanted to be working on the web. I wanted to be working in Silicon Valley, making no money, and having paper stock options, and doing a dot-com, or something. And really just the government wasn't even looking at the web as a tool to communicate with citizens at a time. And then we started our company in 2001. We're in DC, and we had a great opportunity. We have a lot of connections to people that work in government space. And we had an opportunity to do government work, even when that was really picking up. After September 11th, a lot of the economy was having problems, and people were shrinking their budgets and things like that. But the government was spending. But our firm never wanted to do anything with government because from about 2001 to sort of mid-200s, maybe around 2006, we just didn't, again, we didn't see that the government was doing anything innovative, interesting, fun, exciting. They weren't pushing the curve on the internet. And I think what's interesting now is that if you look at the people that are using Drupal and you look at a lot of these examples, there's actually really innovative stuff coming out of government. And there's been some great case studies here today, some people that I've had a chance to work with in the past. And I've got little snippets of their stories, and if you missed their case studies, maybe you'll see a little bit of it here. But what I see changing in government now on the web and using Drupal is, one, a focus on usability. And that means actually caring about what the citizen's experience on the website is. Believe it or not, that's a relatively new thing to most government websites. Second thing is actually doing something useful and presenting that data that they have. Government has a wealth of data that we don't often understand what to do with. It's just there, and it's public domain. So that's starting to change. And there's a lot of tools out there we'll talk about that are helping that. The third is what I call platform building, which is really it's about standardizing on a single framework that you're going to use throughout your agency or your department or whatever kind of organization you're in, and doing it at a big scale. So we're talking 50, 100, up to 1500, in some cases, websites already that are running off of Drupal platforms. Collaboration, which is actually using that inherent sort of what they've called for a while, Gov 2.0 or Web 2.0 interactive functionality that comes out of the box with Drupal when you have a single user profile that connects to another user profile, and they can actually network and have a relationship online. Reuse, which to me is one of the best reasons why government should be looking at open source. There's very little that differs, particularly when you have federal regulations between the way one organization has to do something on the web and another. In fact, there's a lot of best practices that get codified in a module or something like that. And if we're not sharing those things, if we're just rebuilding them, putting procurements out to buy these things over and over and over again, there's just so much money being wasted, just building the same solution over and over again. And open source can really help with that. And then the last is engagement, direct citizen engagement, true open government that's just starting to emerge now. So first example I have is the FCC site, FCC.gov. They launched last year on Drupal. And the project was actually headed up by Steve Van Runkel, who is now the CIO of the US, took over for Vivek Kundra. And I think that's actually a really cool thing for Drupal. Think about the fact that basically the guy who's now the federal CIO for the whole country is his last gig was putting a really nice Drupal site up. I'm sure he did more than that, but that was one of the things he did. So one of the things that I like about this site, again, is the Federal Communications Commission is a fairly relatively obscure regulatory agency for the average person. Not everyone understands what their mission is or what they do. And this is their website as it looked about a year ago before they went to Drupal. And I mean, really, honestly, this is what I was talking about. There's absolutely no focus or sense of what the user experience side of this is. There was really no tension paid to that. It's literally just we have this information, we're required to put it out there, just stuff it out there as hyperlinks. And without that kind of focus, you're barely ever really scratching the surface of making a connection to the citizen. So just links to people who do things there. This is an example of how they're starting to humanize that experience now. They've got faces to names. They've got the ability to contact these people in a true sort of transparent open government way. One of the things that I really like is they've got better search mechanisms to identify the documents that they have. So you can do filtering. You can look at, you know, date ranges and topics and categories. And they do all that with taxonomy in Drupal because they've tagged all this content in their migration effort. They're actually able to now use taxonomy to do filtering and things like that. And that's really useful, especially for people that have to come here, attorneys and people that are using this site every day. So the takeaways from an experience like this, while it's relatively obvious to someone who's in, you know, maybe a commercial setting where you're out looking, trying to get customers and sell your product or whatever. In the public sector, you know, just the focus on UI is a really, is a really important thing because citizens don't have a good sense of what you do as an agency. And so that's kind of important. And you really have to sell your product, just like a storefront would with any commercial product, you have to be able to explain what you do for people and how they can get stuff from you. How do they find that information on your site? And I think FCC does a great job of that. So that's a usability example. A visualization example, this is the energy.gov site, Department of Energy's flagship site that launched a little over a year ago, also on Drupal. This site actually was featured in a case study earlier. Kami Croft, who was the project head here, was she here, is Kami here? Is she in the room? Okay, so I can say anything I want, right? Okay. Just kidding. No, so I'm not going to try to cover all the things that she did in hers, but what I found particularly interesting about this site was visualization. So Department of Energy had all this information, and I think they just did a magnificent job of actually, so the challenge was really not having the information, did a magnificent job of actually transferring from that model. I was talking about earlier of like, you know, look at just dumping these data files out here that no one can really do anything with, and then actually transforming that now into usable, visualized information. The technology that's being used here is Mapbox, which was developed by Development Seed, who's hanging out at our booth. If you guys want to see these maps and action that are right out here, it's really fantastic stuff because basically what you're doing is you're taking that data and you're now putting it out there as something useful to the citizen. You're actually giving them a context through which they can determine whether the information that's coming from the agency has value to them. So this is a great example. This is alternative fuel stations mapped throughout the US. So it's just data points mapped on an open source map using Mapbox, and then you know an overlaid data set there you can drill into or look at. You know they did a great job with search. I think one of the things that's really important here too is you just couldn't find stuff, and again they're sort of like taking that data and they're actually educating and engaging you, explaining what you can do with the information that the agency has and makes available. So again more visualization, so I like these sort of like histograms sort of you know things that they tell you from a taxonomy perspective what kind of content is on the site and how much of it is there. Things like that make it a little bit more engaging, a little more interesting. Again here's some map examples I think that are really cool. So using the same mapping set, you know again about reuse, using the same mapping set, different data sets, and different tiles, you just have basically a different style to the data and you're presenting in this case you know workforce training programs across the country for smart grid technology. So you know if you're trying to figure out you know and how to find a job in this economic recovery and you're looking to do something in smart grid, here's the Department of Energy providing you useful information on how you can go do that. Another example would be again beautiful totally different rendering it's using a very different tile in the background but essentially it's another it's the same map set being reused on Drupal with a different mapping. This overlay here is for energy consumption per person per state. So you can look at your state you can figure out what your energy consumption is and imagine them you know what people are thinking there but you know so these are sort of the things that I think make this site a little bit more interesting. It actually educates and tells a story with the information that they have. They take their data and they do something with it so that you as the citizen understand A what they do for you, B what they have to offer you and C provide you a service that you can you know find an alternative fuel station find a job and you know in green technology or something like that. So it's actually a resource and that's a relatively new thing on the web for government sites and I think Drupal as a platform is really helping to enable that it's pretty cool. So that's the Department of Energy and Visualization. I want to talk a little bit about platforms. So you know one of the things that's great about Drupal is you can actually roll Drupal out in a variety of ways from a multi site, a virtual site. You can have all kinds of configurations in which you're sharing modules or using installation profiles to deploy maybe you know an army of sites that go out and do a variety of different missions. So we were engaged in a project at the House of Representatives to do this and it's a pretty interesting way to think about challenges that you have at building websites in an IT group. So they have you know a website for every congressman and every committee and that totals somewhere in the 600s and what the policy was before was basically you know every individual congressman some of whom just got elected yesterday can just go out and have some commission someone to build a website for them, right? And so you get this hodge podge of any website you can possibly imagine you know stuff built by the you know the kid in his garage in his hometown because his dad was the campaign director all the way to you know pretty big companies that do this for living and branding and things like that. And the quality varied the maintenance of it was a nightmare and they had some pretty high profile security hacks. So they decided they were going to roll out a standard platform and they selected Drupal based on its flexibility and its ability to do you know what I would call platforms. So take a single template and roll out potentially dozens hundreds or even thousands of sites relatively easily that all adhere to the same template so that they can be managed in the same way with the same kind of maintenance, scalability, security applied to all of the you know the whole fleet of sites. So basically what we did here is again talking about the old way you know the most important thing about all that is you know you think about how wasteful again it is to build all these sites over and over again and all the time that went into trying to reinvent how do I get the Twitter feed for my congressman on the home page? How do I get the calendar with the bill you know the number of votes that are coming up and when the votes are happening? How do I post all these issues and press releases and stuff like that? Well we cracked that problem once and then we replicated it out as a platform. So what ended up happening is the sites actually got built they built or they the client actually built about 100 sites with very little Drupal training at all in two weeks because they had a platform that they could build and each of them ended up looking different being configured differently and delivered to an individual office with slightly different content and they did all of that in two weeks in their internal team because literally the code changes and the deployment of these sites was minutes. It took no time at all. All the time was spent really just configuring the theme and the modules. So an example would be also you know so these are examples of sort of the old websites that were all different they're all hard to manage some of them were just straight HTML and you know the new ones which you know have better standardization better efficiency they're certainly more secure and they can essentially extend this platform as a whole. So if they decide now that they want to add a new feature something like you know new social media thing or a new bill search or something like that they can actually deploy that module now across the whole platform with one deployment and it can be enabled on any site that wants to accept that feature change. And that kind of I guess scalability and extensibility if you will to the sites is very powerful because essentially before if they're each hand rolled and individually built there's really no way to get a change that permeates out to the entire fleet. So that's what platforms are about and you can imagine in government there's numerous examples where this can be really helpful. Some of the federal agencies out there today some that are using starting to use Drupal and some that don't have upwards of 500 600 websites. I believe NASA who is looking at Drupal right now has about 1500 websites that they want to standardize and just think about sort of the cost to the citizen of maintaining and building all these disparate sites on different technologies versus that standardization. So that's what platform building is all about. In terms of collaboration Drupal is fantastic a collaboration and we often tend to focus a lot on using Drupal as a CMS to power a website. And one of the most prominent websites that we all hear about in government is the White House site which converted to Drupal October 2009. Well a lot of people don't know but they also have an intranet and the intranet situation for the administration was horrible because basically what they've had is this sort of homegrown internet intranet that had been done in basic HTML pages strung together as a side job for somebody at one point and it was just carried on for years and years and years. And it really was like a bunch of links on like how to get to figure out what lunch they're having in the cafeteria and how to get your forms for security clearance and stuff like that. But there was no search and there was no collaborative element. There was no tagging. There was no nodes. There was no like views in Drupal. All this stuff is and there's no asset management for all these documents. It's just individual web pages floating around out there with no way to find anything. So if you think about what Drupal is really good at is good at organizing information and it's good about organizing people, individual objects like people, nodes, documents, and pulling these things together through taxonomy. So what the team did is they basically designed an intranet that mirrored some of the technology from the public website and the design and they went through and they reorganized and re-tagged and migrated all their content and got it all organized both organizationally so they could go drill hierarchically I apologize. There's a lot of lore and MIPSM up there for protecting the and this is not a public facing site but you know basically for hierarchically finding information as well as doing searches for information. And so this is basically a really powerful asset now to them whereas before it was kind of a joke. And so I think Drupal again shined in this situation from an organizational perspective. Look at things like common processes. So if you have an intranet and you're thinking about the way that someone uses an intranet think about using taxonomy and Drupal to be able to daisy chain together a variety of different assets forms nodes whatever into a process like an onboarding process. How do you say OK click on this thing and I will walk through all the steps of a process and let the CMS serve all that content up to the user. So that's the kind of stuff that they're doing here obviously forms are a big part of it. Again searchable PDFs with solar. So solar technology will actually let you make all the information inside of those PDFs searchable as well. And then being able to actually flag or sort of paste up a favorite link something you're going to use every day. So you know computer services you know you're the worst user in the world and you always delete your account. So you're going to need to go talk to them a lot whatever it is. So you know again this is Drupal being used as a framework not as a CMS and as someone who has a company who's done a lot of Drupal in the last five years I can tell you that Drupal will impress you in some cases more when you go to use it as a custom framework for something like this than it will as a public facing website. It's really powerful at that and people tend to overlook that. It's something that's a little bit unfortunate about the community right now. So that's collaboration and in one example. And the last one I want to give you again and not to steal the thunder of anyone else. Tom Cochran from the White House spoke earlier about this in detail and I don't want to again steal his presentation but I think it's a really, really powerful example of Drupal in government and I think it's something that everybody who is looking at Drupal needs to understand. It's basically what we call like a petition tool. So the president of the administration invited every citizen to be able to create a petition online. And this is true open government. So you hear about open government being done in a variety of forms and I think there's some great examples out there. I've talked about a few already but true open government here is basically saying hey come to this website that has been running on Drupal now for two years and now I want you to create a log in whoever you are however many of you there are create a log in and submit a petition that goes to the top people in the West Wing and tell them what you care about what you're interested in or what you want them to act on. It's a pretty bold move and it's not the kind of thing you would do if you didn't trust your CMS. So yeah, what could possibly go wrong, right? I mean, can't imagine. So it's called We the People at launch this summer and if you haven't looked at it I'd highly recommend you look at it and also if you didn't go to Tom's session maybe look at the slides from that because I'm sure he knows a lot more about the details of the strategy and all that but essentially it's got a very sort of flexible interface on top of it that allows you to in a very cool way kind of work quickly amongst all these petitions you can do signatures you can do social media sharing and obviously you can draft one as well and so you just create an account with the White House. So this is an example of just a single petition and its signatures. Not surprisingly day one who comes out but you know it's PETA and the marijuana lobby or like waiting at the door and they've you know just flood it with like 20,000 submissions immediately but so this is a great example again of both Drupal being used as a CMS and I think Drupal also being used as a individual collaboration or in this case citizen engagement tool and the numbers on this thing the number of people that actually used it really testament to why you would want to do something like this if you were you know the administration it gets your it really puts your open government policy out there you put your you really put it where you know put your money where your mouth is when you do something like this and it's really cool that Drupal was able to do this for them. So it was high traffic again engagement tools a focus and a concern for security accessibility and scale all at the same time while being open and receptive to the individual citizen very difficult thing to do very big challenge for Drupal and I think it did a great job with it. So that was my last example or sorry my second last example my last example is about reuse and I mentioned this earlier from really not so much from a technology perspective but from an economic perspective and think about all the time that goes into building all these different tools that are essentially the same everywhere. I mean if you have to comply with the Freedom of Information Act for how a request is submitted on your website and that comes straight out of a regulation and you're applying you're applying 20 other security and legal regulations and social media policy guidances and all that to the way that you're doing it I mean how different is the other agency's requirement going to be for that same thing or more importantly how different should it be did they just interpret it differently or implement it wrong because if you're all if you're all stuck in that same little tiny box on how far you can move you'd think once it's done right and it's done well you ought to be able to share that with everyone else I mean basically it's citizens money right you shouldn't be out you know procuring these things individually and reinterpreting these regulations every single time as well as hiring IT contractors giving them your own specs because you know better than the other guy and then doing going through the testing and making sure it works and all that stuff the reuse aspects of open source are the really the key to what's going to be the most successful thing in government and if you think about it like this is a great example I love to use Department of Education because they do some of the coolest Drupal stuff if you haven't seen some of their stuff they've used it for everything use it internally externally they use it for data sites like data.ed.gov they use it for a variety of different things and they've gotten really a lot of reuse out of this and this is a cool example so they're using open atrium on as their intranet and in this case they they built an ideation app and this ideation app is basically a way for them to pull their individual citizen or their individual employees about things they want to change in the agency. We took that app and we actually put it and we contributed it and we actually put it into our open public distribution for government and we're able to then take that and anyone that downloads that distribution can install that functionality and use the same functionality like a module but it's there and installed and enabled immediately when you download the distribution so we've actually seen it used both on a public site and an intranet site the same functionality and I just have a lot of examples like that like in the municipal level think about like 311 applications and citizen information things think about the FOIA example I gave earlier there's all these little niche things that happen with government that if we can just get them into apps get them into modules get them into features I don't care what aspect of Drupal technology you're using let's get them out into public domain in the open source community and let everyone else draft off of that same functionality it's the place where I imagine the module system of Drupal being the most powerful and useful thing so that's kind of that's kind of what they did there with innovation the point I really have was more about reuse and innovation but they're both exciting of course so that's my examples usability visualization platform building collaboration engagement and reuse those are the things I think we as a community are doing right with Drupal in government and I think government is using Drupal for the right purposes when they're getting these things done so those are the examples I have I'll also say that one of the things that's really neat is when you build this kind of toolkit this open source toolkit it gets better every time and I was talking about this this morning I don't know that in the proprietary software model that anything like this exists that every time a website is built on fat wire or vignette or something like that every time does the next one benefit from that? Can it really actually draft off of the hard work and the thought and the innovation and the improvement that was done? It's not possible, right? So what we have in this case is every single time we've launched as a community a new gov site in the federal space it's drafted off the work that's been done from the prior ones and one of the efforts my company's led is called Open Public which is a distribution around this kind of sharing but you know even if you don't use that you there's modules out there that are being built from these things the White House has contributed modules things like the federal IT dashboard have been contributed there's all kinds of really neat sort of innovative stuff being contributed and I encourage you from a government perspective to use that as a resource to figure out what other people have done successfully and draft off of that so that collective experience is what makes open source really cool so that's it and I guess I have some time left so I'm happy to take questions if people have them questions I guess they did want if you do have a question maybe use the mic because it's being recorded so you do want to get that on tape as well one brave soul two brave souls Hey Jeff Jason Hibbins with opensource.com I just wanted I saw a lot of hands raised here federal, state, local, government and you kind of alluded earlier that NASA was looking at Drupal yeah what can you what can these folks take away is like if they want their agency or organization to start using Drupal what are the keys for them to go to their IT department or go to whoever they need to go to to start the process and catch on to this draft that's happening with Drupal right yeah that's great question I mean one of the so every year at DrupalCon we've had typically a bof one or two bofs on this topic and it's people who are starting to look at Drupal and need to sell their boss on it or their boss's boss or make a business case for it and they typically look for what are the resources and what are the places to start that's gotten better progressively in situation that's actually one of the reasons why I do this talk is it's gotten better because precedent is very powerful in government when you can say to your you know your security guys well you know FEMA is using it and the White House is using it and all this you know then it's sort of this this idea that other agencies have felt comfortable with it is very encouraging in that cell but I think that one of the best things you can do is prepare a list of like government organizations kind of like I did here but maybe hit it from you know these are other people that are in the same mission or you know like agencies or things like that take that figure out what they've actually done well and then go explain that in that way say this is what the department of such and such was able to use Drupal for and you know actually reach out and talk to that person so there are groups there's a there's a government group Drupal for Gov in DC is a group of of individuals who are in the government federal space who all get together regularly and talk about ways in which they've implemented Drupal and ways that they're trying to convincing their boss and others in government to use it so. Thanks very much great presentation. I wondered a little bit more about the House of Representatives example and if you could talk a little bit more specifically about how you deliver that tool set to them and in terms of themes they all look very different and installation is that one is that multiple just a little bit more that the details on that. Yeah the tricky thing about the platform question is Drupal is so flexible in this regard that we've done all permutations of platforms I mean there are examples out there where you literally have virtual sites with using the domain access module where the sites are the same instance of Drupal same modules you can run up to I've heard 1,500 I've heard people running 1,500 virtual sites off the same instance of Drupal that's actually not the way we chose to go here at the House of Representatives we chose to use almost the opposite side of it which is a straight up installation profile so we took an early version of what ended up becoming open public and we made of essentially not really a distribution I call it an installation profile that sets up all the modules the views and all those things it comes with templates they can add templates to it it downloads the right modules and it has those modules installed and then you just do a little bit of configuration you pick the theme and then you can do some CSS modification on top of that so they actually have an in-house design for an end team that was capable of doing CSS level changes so they do those for kind of logos, colors, fonts stuff like that and that between the different themes the different layouts and the different CSS you were able to create enough permutation that 100 websites with people's individual interests could vary wildly in the way they look and really if you looked at it from a code perspective they're identical two quick questions first about the house of representatives are those all built off the same installation of Drupal so like if you're going from Drupal 7.2 to 7.3 are you updating it 600 times or are you just updating it once and it spreads out to everything and then my second question on the energy side I saw how all that data was turned into the great looking graphs and maps and things like that was that done with a Drupal module or was that done with a separate program? Yeah, so I actually unfortunately can't speak specifically to the technology ironically so my company merged with Treehouse Agency and Treehouse Agency actually did that work so that people now in my company might know the answers I'm not one of them but the technology is Mapbox which is open source and again those guys are actually here Eric Gunderson and Jeff McCollis of Development Seed created that and they're right out here at the booth and you can talk to them about the way that works I don't actually know the integration there but your answer your question about the module updates for the distribution or the installation profile you can do shared modules so you do like a multi-site configuration and you actually have modules that are hosted centrally so you can do updates to those module security patches and things like that and have them apply out to all the sites but when you want to do core updates to the sites then you do I believe you do have to go out and do them individually and for that purpose part of our platform work that's been continuing is adding like automation tools like Jenkins and deployment tools and things that can script out a lot of the updates so that's about as deep as I could possibly go without exposing my lack of technical knowledge on the subject I like what I see with the government websites but I represent a membership association and I wonder if I'm alone in the world in the conferences are any membership associations related or had we worked with this or done something similar with associations? Yeah, so there's actually quite a few associations that use Drupal I don't have a comprehensive list I don't track it as closely but we are in DC so we've done a lot ourselves another company here it's in DC forum one over here they also do a little bit larger kind of public policy type organizations but nonprofits and a lot of them tend to be membership organizations they're a great fit for Drupal again, you get a lot of the same benefits that you'd see in the public sector I think one of the things that is often difficult about membership organizations is the web requirements are all about the AMS the association management system or whatever your CRM component is for membership and those companies have gotten so heavily into what they do on the web that they give you the CMS for free so when we run into it we always see Vectra or somebody like that already has some aspect of the CMS but I do know that Drupal is often used in conjunction with those CRM tools so that's about all I know Hi, I'm from New York City government and these sites are great for inspiration but we found in particular with the IT dashboard that you mentioned it's very difficult sometimes porting this for a state or local government because it's been engineered specifically for the federal government and some of their backend systems the data that feeds it and after trying to build it and failing and then doing a study on it we've found that it's just frankly cheaper to leave the open source code there that was created and just build it from scratch rather than rip it apart and trying to create it for our purposes Hmm, yeah Yeah, I think it's a common problem in all aspects of government but yeah, I know NYC is undergoing a lot with the re-invent NYC campaign and there's a bunch of procurements and stuff out there that the problem I've heard more often than not is that it's that legacy technology that ties into the backend and it just doesn't necessarily integrate nicely but I think I guess I don't know if there's a question in there or if I Just a statement just in fact our issue is not our backend system but the fact in that case it was tied to federal OMB and it was so deeply rooted within the code that it didn't make sense to spend a lot of money ripping that out so it's open source so you can look at the code but I think the conventional wisdom now is no one else can really use it Yeah, yeah, yeah It's too bad My name's Antoine Green I actually work with the Federal Communications Commission and it was amazing that you did mention energy.gov's use of Mapbox We are also using Mapbox and as of yesterday we have released our Drupal module on Drupal.org for the use of Mapbox So I just wanted to put that out there so I know some people have some questions about that Yeah, thank you that's actually gentlemen down here had that question that's actually so there's a blog post about it the company's called Seaborn Consulting and they released an app sorry, a module that does integration with Mapbox Intranet example have you seen much demand for integrated project management or integrated document management? Yeah, so this is really hot right now and a lot of people are looking for the document management solution out of Drupal and to be honest it can be a little bit of a weakness of Drupal relative to other sort of so-called ECMs like enterprise content management tools So a big trend has been people are looking at Alfresco and Drupal integration which has been promised and done on some level for a long time but now seems hotter than ever and I can only assume that a lot of that has to do with records management requirements you know, Alfresco passed the DOD's pretty stringent records management compliance or whatever and that makes it a candidate The problem I see with Drupal and asset management in general is it's also not historically been very good at workflow and now there's some better tools in Drupal 7 like Workbench that we use a lot for kind of routing things which tends to be a bigger deal in government but I have not seen integration between that and Alfresco and I don't know if that's underway if anyone's working on that but that might be an area to explore it's certainly a key part of what you need to do when you're putting documents up online So, all right Well, I guess that's those are the only questions so do we have one more? Last one Have you found Drupal to be more helpful or not helpful in terms of 508 compliance? Yeah, so we've done it we've done an enormous amount with 508 compliance in Drupal on some of the projects we've worked on I mean, out of the box I think it's great I don't think it solves all the answers I mean, a lot of the problem with 508 is there's basically three places where it can break down The code itself which could include modules so those have to be looked at and evaluated to make sure that they're not putting up things like pop-ups or things that can be a problem Second thing would be the theme layer even if you have perfectly compliant 508 or accessible code you could wreck it with your theme layer if you had bad theme code so that unfortunately is going to be unique probably to virtually every site so you're always going to have to go through and do an individual review of all that and so those are the places where it tends to break down but then the third problem you have is it depends on the content too so people put in content that has its own markup converted from their site or they put in non-captioned audio, video, assets multimedia assets, stuff like that you can't necessarily control that so there's really three components to look at and frankly we have actually contributed a lot of stuff lately on 508 and into the community through OpenPublic and a lot of that has to do with the theme layer like I said but really you're never going to get out of I think doing individual reviews of how compliant you actually are and frankly the 508 guidelines are relatively low bar anyway I mean you really need to be looking at something a little bit higher than that and look at true accessibility so cool well, thanks everyone I really appreciate your tennis