 Here we go. Hi everyone, I'm Sharon Clarkson, the person who drives GovCMS, C-System Secretary for Online Services at Finance. If you don't know me already, yes, I have an accent. If you can't understand New Zealand, let me know. So often when I talk at Drupal South or when I come to talk at Drupal ACT, which I actually haven't been here since before the pandemic, it's usually a flag a direction that GovCMS is going and I do that to make sure that developers, designers, private people in private practice, companies, other public servants clearly know what direction we're heading and what we want from the market and what we want from Drupal and this is another one of those occasions. So today I'm going to be talking about using a design system with GovCMS and just running through what our thoughts are on that and what we would like to see happen. As with everything we do in GovCMS, we lead by example and we lead through influence. We don't work with mandates and we don't make people do things. We try and influence good practice. So last year at Drupal South I flagged a number of places that we're going out of the blocks like a big explosion really. We were pretty constrained during COVID. We couldn't do too much new stuff but now we're off like a rocket. We'll be putting in digital experience platform tools, a range of different types. That procurement is still underway so I can't talk about that any further. We wanted to see more consistency in design and we want to address the structural gaps in government and some of those will really become exposed when agencies start to use DSP and so we're hatching a bit of a plan to do something about some of those gaps. Our principles have not changed. Create content once and publish everywhere. Create functionality once and share it with everybody. These were our foundation principles and we're adding a third one now. Create design artefacts once and share back to a community. All you know what I think is good common sense. The Australian Government design system was started by the DTA. We were always right from the start very enthusiastic supporters and that was quite a tiny team in DTA and it didn't take long before we saw an opportunity to start sprinting with the DTA and we pulled in health and services Australia and from nearly six months we all worked together building out the Australian Government design system to make it more comprehensive and we were committed to using it ourselves on our sites and we encouraged adoption within the agencies using GovCMS. So it was with some sadness that we viewed the aid UDS being retired or becoming an end of life and those of you who'd been keeping up with that would have known that it was put out on GitHub as an open source piece of work for anybody else to pick up. Come forward two years. We have a little clause in our contract with our service provider who provides hosting and that's the open source give back clause. So we require people who partner with us to commit to 30 hours of give back into open source a year as a minimum and Alfred knew that I was quite a little bit disappointed about the design system. I thought it was something Government really needed to have. It made sense for our users. It was a good thing to do. Lo and behold he suddenly unveiled that he's spent 6,000 hours of development in two years building it out from way beyond where it was when it was in Government and fully mapping every single element back to Workag 2.1 including I think in some of the pages I've seen instructions on how to implement it properly so you don't break accessibility. It's not enough to just put something in. You've got to know how to put it in. It's a very large piece of work. Three things that are really important to us that it's fully open source and I think it's good that it's now going to be in a much wider bigger open source community and I'm already talking to my colleagues and people I am, my network who are in other Governments all around the world and in Australia and seeing if we can grow this to be an even bigger thing with a lot more Government participation. Is technology agnostic? Why is that really important? Well Government often wants to deliver things to kiosk. It wants to have apps. It wants to have websites. It has transaction systems. We don't need to have two design systems or three or four or five. We can have one design system and that can be managed and deployed out to all of those different kinds of things. The fact that this is technology agnostic is a really big win and of course it's WCAG 2.1 compliant. Really important for Government. We've got to lift our game and get better at delivering more accessible access to people for Government information and services. So at the moment there's a Drupal 9 theme I guess he's going to correct me if I get this wrong. There's a patent library, Figma. That's correct, isn't it? And then there's Storybook. Yep. And I've grabbed the wrong one. So at the moment there's a Drupal theme for G9 that's been built off. There's also a GovCMS theme. Yep, that's available. And we're also looking to do View and React front-ends for it as well. So they're truly taking it out into headless systems. This is exciting. But Akil can answer. He's going to help me answer questions on the detail afterwards. So what are we doing in GovCMS? Well I'm encouraging people who use GovCMS customers, agencies, to use it as the base for any new builds and rebuilds as much as I can influence. I'm encouraging everybody to contribute back with enthusiasm. And so in GovCMS we will be very enthusiastic so that we get other people to be enthusiastic. We want to see people spending their dollars on user research, journey management, new design artefacts, and sharing these things back to expand the design system. We don't want to see everybody spending their money building the same types of things over and over again. Very much like the concept when we started GovCMS, 350 different content management systems in government just in this town. No opportunity to collaborate. I only ever got to MVP one or two and never got any further because we've all got limited amounts of money. Same thing again. If we can pull our resources and we can get so much further and I think with the with the XP coming we're going to find that agencies are going to realise that they have a lot of work to do around audience segmentation, about journey mapping and planning and they may not have that work done and that's really where their investment needs to go. So this is what I say when people ask me to explain a design system. I know this isn't scientific and it won't end up in a book but a quality design system allows a wide diversity of online experiences to be created and tailored for specific audiences does not meet all websites of the same. So I think a good quality design system can spin up a really engaging site for a youth market and it can deliver the defence white paper which is usually because of the type of site it is very plainly packaged and branded. It does mean as a user and I think this is what's really when I was at the DTO and we did the user research, the initial user research is often quoted and what we found was there wasn't so much a problem with people going from website to website across government because they often had to crisscross more often state anyway and local. It was more that understanding where things were in the real estate of a page, understanding what things were called and I think just one look I had I found 35 different examples of what the words we use on buttons that mean submit will go or next. We're just using an enormous array of language, there's no consistency. People don't often know how government sites are going to behave because of the ontology issues, the real estate issues, the lack of patterns. That matters much more than having everybody had the same blue banner and crest although I know the crest is important. So for me it's about consistency, where things are, what they're called and how they behave, that's what gives us usability and I think if you know I'm going to use Microsoft here but it doesn't matter which Microsoft product I pick up, I know where I'm going to be able to save my work. I know that it's going to be in the same menu, in the same place, there's going to be a drop down, it's going to save save and it's going to have save as. So I've been trained to know how Microsoft products work and that is a design system because it's across all of their products and this is what we mean around consistency. So yes for developers, I know there's a lot of you here tonight, there are already 60 Drupal theme ready components. It's flexible enough to extend and customise for the more sophisticated work that you do should reduce some of the testing load if you're focusing only on delta features and maybe that will give you more time to get further down a customer's backlog and delight them. Unexpectedly delight them as opportunities and for designers, I don't think your work's going to drop off. I think the design we need in Government right now is slightly different and it's going to change quite remarkably when DXP comes to the fore. So I want to see more time improving UX and service design, understanding the audience, mapping journeys, faster design of customer components and better accessibility compliance and I hope that a design system will help you do all of that better. I certainly don't see Government agencies no longer needing design services because we've got a design system. And for agencies, faster builds lower build costs, four sites that are able to use starter themes and pre-existing components. How many of our sites would just go that far? I don't know the percentage but it's pretty low. Okay so it doesn't mean everybody's just going to pick up our starter site and they're never going to contact the rest of you again. That's a particular subset of GovCMS sites. Usually there's much more of a desire to engage and to change something in the community and those sites and they want to do things that will engage the user. Design consistency for their brand artefacts across all the things that they own, transaction systems. Eventually I hope this kind of thinking will go a whole of Government so we're not just thinking about it in our own agency space but we're thinking about it in a cross-government capacity and of course DXP coming into GovCMS will kick-start a lot of those conversations and overhead maintenance reduced a little. So if you want to find out more about the civic theme that's the homepage and they have a roadmap that's published so you can see where the plan is to go. The more of us that engage with this design system, you know noting that's open source product, the better off we all are. Yeah I mean a lot of people would lock this up as some sort of commercial product really there's an enormous investment in hours here and we commit also in GovCMS to driving adoption within our community and encouraging give back into that community as well. We need to have a central you know something to work to and we have to pick something as GovCMS so we'll pick open source over other things as usual. Yep so that's my talk. Any questions for Sharon? So the civic theme is built on the components module right for the Drupal implementation. Maybe my better question is what technology inside of Drupal is the civic theme built upon and I'm guessing it's not built on the single directory components. Can you like are you going to use that in the future or are we sticking with whatever way you've got right now? I'm just going to phone a friend because I've got Alex. Alex is online. Alex is online. Alex Kripniku is the solution architect for civic themes online so I'm just trying to see if he's still listening and going to answer me that question so in the meantime hopefully is an yeah okay I didn't think it cool. Any time like do we have a time like is is there part of the roadmap like I just had a check and there's not on the roadmap at all but like are you looking for people to help you migrate things or in terms of moving away from like Drupal or no so in 10.1 Drupal introduced single directory components as a core module. It looks like the way that Drupal wants to start handling components in general so I'm asking are we going to move if we use civic theme do I have to know something else or should I be just using core Drupal? And if so do you want help like migrating those things to SDC? Well I mean for help we'd be happy to help and get contribution and put towards the product that'd be great. Do you have an answer? Oh it's going to grab the mic. No it's good. Good questions. When we use it for gov same as it's an experimental branch but yes. So Alex's answer is that we put on the roadmap document soon. SDC's were not available two years ago. We will be providing migration paths. Okay that's cool. And you say of course they'd love some help. Yeah of course anyone wants help right? Yeah yeah yeah it'll be interesting actually. Anyone any more questions? Um nothing that's... Do we know the adoption rate of civic theme because when I talk to agencies it's still not quite widely known and I think if it's going to get support across government it needs sort of broader adoption so I'm just wondering do we know the sort of metrics around how this has been picked up? Yeah there's definitely some sites already being built on it. Now that when we have people coming for new builds coming to the platform we tell them all about it. We point out where it is. We suggest that when they go out to market they ask for someone to implement the site using the theme as at least a starting point. It doesn't mean... I mean the things I mean you know two years post coming out into agds retirement there's so much more that could be built for a right. So I'm hoping that if new sites coming to GovCMS go to it as a matter of course then more and more components are going to get you know given back to the design system. So yes in GovCMS we're talking about it. Remember we don't have a marketing budget. We have very few opportunities to go out and talk apart from our megamates and occasionally here but we do a lot more talking that you don't see behind the scenes. We're talking to people all the time. So new sites sites that we know are going through a reasonable size rebuild or refresh. That's a time that we'd inject ourselves as hey what about this? Talked about it at Drupal South. We've started to talk about it. That's some of our internal GovCMS events and we'll be talking about it again at the megamy but I think really we're at the start of really pushing it hard and starting to have those kind of conversations. Also I've been doing a lot of work across government at SES level to say look at this. Look at this. Don't go building one. Yeah I think it's going to be awesome if it gets adopted. Design systems have been talked really about a lot these days so it would be good to have a consistent one that we can all use. Let's just say from my point of view obviously we're trying to tell everyone about it and get the word of mouth out there as much as we can obviously with groups like GovCMS especially are able to get that word out there more for us. They have much wider reach than we do obviously so yeah the more we can get it out there the more adoption obviously then there's benefits for that so yes as much as we're doing be great if others. Now the other thing is tricky that we've just we're talking about earlier tonight is that we can't tell who's actually using it so it's open source people are using it they're modifying it do what they need to but we can't actually necessarily tell and it's been attributed so we're wanting to kind of see how we can register or track that that'd be fantastic to kind of see the adoption rate specifically. We have that issue with the GovCMS just true it's widely used around the world it's used by a lot of other governments I can't remember how many governments but we've we keep tripping over don't we central Africa and Bahamas I think yeah city of London some things in London it pops up everywhere it pops up in provincial governments and local governments around the world and again we don't know who's using it we'll suddenly find out why accidents and think oh that's pretty cool but I think you know we've got to remember this has not been built for GovCMS and the Australian Commonwealth and state governments you know and the local governments that sit on GovCMS this is a design system and more and more businesses need to have fully compliant accessible you know sites because that makes good business sense right and more and more they're being held to the same standards particularly larger businesses so this is the design system for a range of different universities big business small business government you know nonprofits everyone can use this that there's a theme that's been built for GovCMS there's just one more way of extending that design system so if we're all contributing to the core design system we can build something strong and vibrant and something that helps us all do our jobs and just to just to add to the end of that yes we've probably got about half a dozen sites at the most on the platform on the GovCMS platform using Civic Team I know of about a dozen close to 20 who are looking at adopting it and I get even more questions than that about you know can we use it who's starting so it feels like the noise is starting but a lot of that is happening on our service desk where of course it's not visible like a conversation like this I think that's that's certainly helped yeah for those of you not familiar with Australian Government architecture they are talking about it in there so they're also talking about us in their GovCMS so there's some more visibility there but yeah it's certainly doable on our platform and people are very interested yeah so Alice is referring to the new DTA website the AGA the Young Government Architecture site and Civic Teams on there with GovCMS yeah I think it's understanding like in the government context you know what kind of role you play in educating whoever comes forward and seeks build services or design service for websites because you probably those of you working in the private sector probably think that largely there's the digital team that's in charge of the government websites in that agency and yes there is but that's not how a lot of sites are created and a lot of sites will happen in a big project and it's the project manager for the big project of which the website is one component or an app is a component that will kick off with project staff who may or may not be public servants who may be largely a contractor staff who will not have been part of the conversations that we have with the digital teams in their agency who may not be talking to the digital team in their agency and who have no idea about GovCMS in many cases or have no idea about design system the second way these things start is in a business group that's not part of the digital part of the agency and sometimes sometimes we have had experiences where we're dealing with I'll give you one case study we were dealing with a particular agency I shall not name and we had seven different websites different projects on GovCMS or quite different and then we realised they were all being run from seven different teams and the seven different teams had never met each other so we organised the meeting we invited all seven teams and we introduced them to each other we do that a lot okay so you do have a role to educate you do have a role to say hey did you know your colleagues across Government are doing this and if you're not sure ask GovCMS they'll tell you what they think of it you know we really do rely on developers and designers to let people know what good practice is we can't guarantee they're going to come through the the teams that we are engaging with regularly I think we're out of time for one more question if anyone's got one Yes so I think I think you got you answer the most of the question I I'm trying to ask I think we do actually have we spent one month for a resource to actually try to you know use CIVICASIM so we actually have some feedback but probably not a good idea put here so when you see actually you know the open design system it was remember the time when the open design system published within the DTA that was big wave that's big push everyone tried to adopt the design system they do actually have public website have the documentation everyone can jump into have a local war how we're going to implement the different component based on that so I didn't actually see anything happen for CIVICASIM so wondering are you going to integrate or cope with some other agencies such as DTA to promote this design system I think that's my question I don't know if I can answer that I couldn't quite hear I've got deaf during COVID can agencies or can we encourage agencies like DTA to talk about and and encourage use of a civic theme we can't obviously do that on behalf of them have we done that so if you go to the Australian Government architecture site run by the DTA you'll see that govcmes is now their preferred provider of content management services for government but it was a not mandated okay we heard that off but also they list there they actually have a list for civic theme and they are they've seen it they've had a good look at it and they're recommending it too now so it's not just me and just while that's happening to answer your question about feedback we do actually have a slack channel Alex has mentioned here which is a civic theme dash design system on the Drupal slack channel so if you need questions conversation it's all there yeah so look if there's any critical feedback naturally we'd love to hear but there's one thing else and I just hope I've understood your question right but one other important thing to to call out is um so obviously this the former strength government design system has been decommissioned we all know that that's public knowledge now um we have um a special document it's if you go to civictheme.io front slash AUDS for Australian AU for Australian design system there is a I don't know if it's a 50 or 100 or 200 page document that shows the lineage to all the original DTA design system components and all the rationale for those that we adopted versus those that we uh uh tweaked and the rationale with supporting evidence for why the adjustments that were made so it shows the the lineage at a component you know based on atomic design principles etc so it's probably worth also understanding it's just a good piece of document that shows the the lineage and the rationale for any adoptions adoptions and new components that we've introduced yeah really encourage you all if you haven't seen it go and have a look and have a patrol around the site and see what's being being offered and it's free I'm just going to mention I think uh Alex has also mentioned if you have any issues please raise it on Drupal.org