 All right good morning and thank you very much for attending. Today I'd like to talk about J-Grants that we are building and managing as well as to share our vision on how government services can be better delivered. So the content of the presentation looks like this. We'll give a quick introduction and then I'd like to talk about J-Grants and finally I'd like to talk about our vision on the delivery of government services whose architecture and components would closely would be closely related to J-Grants. So a quick introduction. Who I am, my name is Mori Sugimoto. My screen name on Drupal.org is Doc Mori. I've been around in a community for a long time I suppose and I'm based in the Netherlands at the moment. And who we are, we are Annai. We were established in 2007. We specialize in Drupal and we're based in Japan. Having said, we are fully distributed so someone like myself who's based abroad also works for the company. And what we do, we specialize in Drupal as I mentioned and we build and manage enterprise solutions. We provide site audits and consultancy and we contribute which I will explain in a bit more detail later in the presentation. And we also empower developers. So we for example supervised the Japanese translation of AQUIA certification exams. We also published the first Drupal 8 book in Japan and we are working on the D9 version at the moment. And we are also developing hands-on Drupal training system which comes with an automated evaluation feature. So with the with the system you don't just follow instructions but you your actions on the website and code you write get evaluated automatically. And after looking at many Drupal sites that don't follow best practices we think we need to train more skilled Drupal developers and having a scalable training system like this would be a great help in that front. So that's what we do. Okay, so let me now move on to Jay Grants. So unfortunately we had to at the beginning of the project we had to sign this you know piece of paper called the NDA. Because of that although there's a number of cool features and things under the hood we can't talk about it or we can't show you unfortunately. But I'll give you a good overview of the system. Right, so Jay Grants is Grants application management system that was built for the Ministry of Economy Technology and Industry of Japan. And Meti is the ministry that is spearheading the digital transformation effort of the Japanese government. And the reason why they wanted to build Jay Grants was because the existing application process for Grants are very complex and time-consuming. And for example it's you know paper-based, the traditional one's paper-based. That says it all pretty much doesn't it? So you know we need to use the postal service for that and you know form gets passed around within the secretariat and so on. And this is a Japanese business culture I suppose but there's this thing called Hanko. It's essentially a seal or stamp which is used instead of signature in Japan. And for it being a physical object you can't for example sign documents while you're away from the office and if you don't have the seal with you and just you know ask more latency things like that. And you know if there's any questions you'd have to make phone calls or they make phone calls to ask you questions and if you're not present you can't answer. And lastly this is quite interesting but there are hundreds of variations to the process. This is because each secretariat as in an office which handles application process. Each secretariat can design their own application process as long as they adhere to certain laws that pertain to Grants. So there's no single process that you know all the secretarietes follow which makes it a nightmare to you know turn it into a system. So their wishes were to first unify the varying processes and simplify the complex process so that we wouldn't have to handle so many steps or so many exceptions when we convert it into a system and also speeding up the process and also improving the user experience for example businesses only need to fill in their basic information once only. Businesses can apply for as many grants as they want and every time they have to fill their basic information and that's quite inconvenient. With the new system they wanted to allow businesses to enter it just once and forget about it. So how we approached it, we extracted the common denominator if you like from numerous processes and then we simplified the process through BPR which stands for business process re-engineering and we adapted agile methodology to accommodate changes. So none of us knew what the system was going to look like when we started. So as the clients as well as our understanding on the system deepened it was inevitable to add new requirements or change existing ones so waterfall just didn't work so we didn't use waterfall. So main features for secretariates again you know what's what's available for log team users is considered confidential so I can't show you screenshots things like that but I'll just explain in words. So publication and management of grants information, configuration of approval and notification workflow per grant so after unification and simplification of the process we still wanted to give secretariat some flexibility so they can design their own workflow and requesting and accepting reports from businesses after the approval of the application and also dispatchment of notifications for example if your application gets accepted you receive notification and so on and as for features for businesses viewing and applying for grants of course and pre-filling basic information for easier application which I mentioned earlier and the custom temp save feature this one's pretty cool so there's a module for this on Drupal org but it uses the web storage and in in excuse me in Jgrant's case sometimes multiple businesses use a single computer to fill the form so we considered it not very secure so we we built our own system and also submission of various reports which they are required to after their project starts and login via third-party authentication service called GBS ID which is a government-owned authentication service okay so let me now talk about our vision on the delivery of government services so we I'd like to explain it I'd like to make it clear that this is not like Jgrant's 2.0 but this is something that we we've been thinking as we built Jgrant's so in order to explain what this is about let me first explain about the application process flow of grants and how it can be applied to other applications right so this is a very simplified workflow of what grants application process flow looks like so it is just so you know this is not specific to Jgrant's but it is a general application flow even if you are you know filling out the form by hand so at the beginning you apply you know businesses apply for a grant and then there's a validation and if all the information that's being requested is submitted it goes through a selection process and if it is accepted the grants issued and if it's not accepted then it gets rejected so that's a very straightforward flow and just so you know I intentionally I intentionally left out the reporting step which would be somewhere around here for in order to make make it simple to to explain now if you look at it it's it's actually a rather general flow you might notice so for example if you're applying for passport if you're applying for a passport or driving license as certificates or allowances benefits the flow would more or less be the same wouldn't it also um if you are getting married you would notify the municipality that you know you've been married and you know it gets accepted and you get a confirmation or if you are if you are applying or if you are requesting for your birth certificate it would still be more or less the same you know or even if the government posts on RFP then you know companies apply for it and they either get the project or they don't so all these um you know application process flow are strikingly similar so different application processes share the same flow you know as we've seen and in Japan local governments are building their own system I mean each of the local governments are building their own system to manage such applications and there are hundreds of municipalities in Japan so you know that's that's a lot of waste so you know I'm sure we can build a system that caters for every process so having said um you know each process has some some unique steps so um some processes um and some processes are more complex than others and some processes would have um some steps which others don't have so um you know it should be modular some some steps should be pluggable or swappable and it would also be really useful to be able to access the system via um API so that you can integrate with third party services and applications you know one important thing to note is that large organizations are usually hierarchical and has a complex structure and managing user users access becomes a challenge if you just try to solve that with the roles and permission system in Drupal core so um we built or we didn't build we sponsored the development of this thing called the subgroup module so um we sponsored it and it was built by Christian van den einde at factorial he's the he's the maintainer of the group module which some of you may know so the group module allows you to manage user user and content entities by creating groups and you can create roles and permissions for each group so um and it still doesn't handle the hierarchy so the subgroup module um is there to handle that part and um this is the the part where I mentioned um which I mentioned about the contribution so in terms of contribution to the community we've submitted various patches and organized Drupal counts and events and this is the most recent contribution that we've made so with the subgroup module um by the way this is available today so you can you know start building it today and with the subgroup module you can build hierarchies with groups as I mentioned and permissions can be inherited between groups so for example um users who belong to the unit a1 and unit a2 have read access to um some of the documents or some of the content entities which belong to division a for example so with this you can configure quite complex roles and permission inheritance between groups so to wrap up um the key features of DGov would be um complex access control customizable workflow evaluation of applications bulk operations payment handling and apis and we see that GOVCMS provides not only its code but um it's provided as software as a service and even platform as a service and we find it very interesting and we'd like to follow that path and we think that DGov can benefit more than just a single country you know um we'd love to collaborate internationally and also see it used around the globe as well so um if you're interested I'll let us know and that's it for my talk thank you very much hello um I'm looking at the live Q&A uh well by the way thank you very much for attending um well if you have any questions um please um share you're welcome you're welcome thank you for lots of thank you messages much appreciated um okay um Tony uh there's a question from Tony so is there a form of digital oh it moves is there a form of digital hunger for signing grants um well um I can't talk about um talk about uh j-grants but um in general uh we don't really at the moment use um digital hankers they are available uh some some services provide those but they're not very popular many many companies um or even officials don't really like it so um has a very limited use having said that it's um it is quickly changing um so in the last few weeks actually um one of the one of the ministers is pushing hard to abolish hankers so um yeah it will it is likely to to change the situation is likely to change in the new future but at this at the moment they are um yeah the use of digital hanker is not very uh common all right um another question from bob um do you maintain some kind of audit trail for the approvals um I can't give you an answer for that because um it's it's related to the specification um which is confidential so sorry about that right yeah there there are many questions I can't answer to be honest um okay any other questions we have 50 seconds I we can just we can all sit and wait if there are any questions or you look at the discussion just in case there's nothing cool yeah I think the the time's up so thank you very much for attending uh very much appreciated enjoy the rest of the event bye