Government

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

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

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

· Drupal isn’t secure,

· it’s gonna crash our system,

· can’t be done,

· it’s not safe for government,

· too vulnerable to cross site scripting,

Project

A major federal agency is redesigning its public facing website using LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP) stack based open source technologies and web 2.0 features. The goal is for the new site to push the new administrations and the department’s policies, messages and information to various stakeholders. The web 2.0 features such as bulletin boards, blogs and wikis will be used to provide a rich medium for the stakeholders to interact with the department.

Responsibilities:

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

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

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

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

The NY State Senate is looking to hiring one drupal ninja, a systems engineer / integrator and graphics designer.

From Andrew Hoppin, the NY State Senate's new CTO... "The New York State Senate is back in Democratic hands for the first time in 43 years, and there is an immense amount of new technology-driven government transparency & efficiency work underway. I've taken on a newly created position as CTO, and we're hiring asap in Manhattan, Albany, and around the State."

Specifically on the geek side of things, they are looking to for three or four full time people in New York City.

All:

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

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

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

Hi Patrick, et al,

I just wanted to introduce LiquidCMS – a new Ottawa based Web Design company specializing in Open Sourse CMS (including Drupal, TikiWiki, Zen Cart, phpBB, and others). Hopefully myself and my partner (Marc McDougall) will be regular attendees at GOSLINGs and any Ottawa Drupal events in the future.

Feel free to check out our company site at: www.LiquidCMS.ca

Also, feel free to check out a mock up we have done of a National Research Council, Common Look and Feel, Drupal 4.7 web site. The theme/site we have developed has some neat demo capabilities to show various graphic region options as well as an adjustable menu colour demo. The site is also what I would refer to as FULLY bilingual – by this I am referring to not just bilingual content and menus, but URLs as well. The basis for the CLF demo site was a project (non-Drupal) that I did a few years ago for the National Research Council (http://nrc.allanalog.com).

Last week, the planning committee of the Fall 2006 Government of Canada "Information Management Day" (GC IM Day) met, and we flushed out some ideas on what topics to put on the schedule. In our current planning, one track will have the "Leading" flavour, in the sense of leading change, and that one or two sessions under that track will specifically deal with Web 2.0 implementations in the Government of Canada - existing, proposed and suggested.

IM Day is an event planned by Public Servants for Public Servants, held in Ottawa every Fall. It is very well attended by key individuals in information management throughout federal government. There are chances are that our keynote speaker (not selected yet) will be "web 2.0 enabled" this year...