Jeff:
What a year for Drupal in government! After several major launches for Drupal at the Federal level from the U.S. House of Representatives, FCC.gov, and Energy.gov, I am very pleased to announce that the Georgia Technology Authority will be migrating from the commercial CMS Vignette to OpenPublic, the Drupal distribution our team developed and open sourced for use in the public sector.
Jeff:
When we created OpenPublic, we set out to build a completely open source platform that could help public sector organizations achieve Open Government using open source technology. What we learned in the process was the importance of re-use and consistency: solutions that are replicable, that prevent duplication of services, and that provide examples of best practices that could be repeatable. Our method of instilling consistency for OpenPublic users is a module concept called Apps.
Jeff:
The discussion has started. Whether you're wondering where apps fit in the Drupal ecosystem or just want to get started building one, you've got questions about apps. We're ready to get started, so let's get to the questions first.
Jeff:
Session voting has kicked off for DrupalCon London and Karen, CJ, Tobby, Erik and Jeff have all submitted some great entries.
Jeff:
Based on the fact that our newest product, OpenPublic, is all about community -- open-source, data transparency, government publishing, citizen engagement -- we couldn’t think of a better forum to introduce it formally than at DrupalCon 2011.
Jeff:
Today we are announcing the purchase of Open Atrium, a team collaboration tool and Managing News, a pluggable news and data aggregator both developed on Drupal. This represents the first step in a new collaboration and a far-reaching partnership with our friends at Development Seed who created these distributions and with whom we share a love of developing great open source products.
Jeff:
When the Obama Administration directed agencies to be transparent, collaborative, and participatory, a new era of using open-source technologies in the public sector was born.
Jeff:
I spent the day at the Tech@State conference at the U.S. State Department and I am reinvigorated about the progress of Drupal adoption in government!
Jeff:
Session voting for Drupalcon 2011 in Chicago started over the weekend and I am very proud of the great entries that our team at Phase2 has prepared for the conference.
Jeff:
The November Washington, DC Drupal meetup is tonight - November 8 - at 7:00 pm, and it will be a great opportunity to see some of the different kinds of sites that can be built with Drupal. Tonight's meetup will be showcasing several different kinds of Drupal websites in '2-minute site tours'.
