One of the first Drupal sites was recovery.commerce.gov pictured here.
Kirsten Burgard, program analyst at the Department of Veterans Affairs and co-founder of Drupal4Gov, shares her expertise on Drupal.
So, you might be thinking, ‘Drupal, what’s the fuss?’ Well, since I love using straw men to make an argument, let’s just go ahead and burn this one up.
Drupal, a content management system, has become widely used in government since early 2009. Recovery.gov (which is no longer a drupal site) and Recovery.Commerce (from the good people at the Commerce Department) were the first out the gate with Drupal, and then, it’s like the floodgates opened up and we had drupal just about everywhere in government.
Here’s the thing, it’s not just the U.S. government. Drupal seems to be catching on as the preferred open source tool for governments worldwide. From the country of Papua New Guinea to the streets of Sao Paulo.
This explosion in use has put a strain to the community to provide new, more flexible, faster, and just way more awesome code.
But how do we do this?
Coders are not an infinite resource, and I’m not just talking within government here, but Drupal, too. So, the Drupal community did what any good community would do, we started revitalization efforts. Through local events like Drupalcamp, we get to meet each other to network, solve problems or run code and documentation sprints. We even have way more ambitious projects like the Drupal Ladder Project or the Skill Compass Project which work to make it easier to learn drupal best practices and ultimately, be able to contribute through modules and themes or even through core. We volunteer and work together building community as both government employees and contractors to offer events like the one being hosted at the National Institutes of Health on February 21st on Accessibility and Theming where we’re planning to provide a drupal ladder sprint to contribute to the Canadian Government’s Web Experience Toolkit. Or perhaps a follow up to the wildly successful Drupal Government Days event hosted at the Department of Commerce last May. We had such a startlingly massive response that we were not able to offer all the sessions submitted, we were forced to cut down on transition times and session times, and we had way too many people for our host facility.
I was thrilled with the response and still am, but I have to admit, it was a bit overwhelming for our band of merry volunteers.
I’ve been playing in and working with Drupal for several years now. Sadly, though, I am not Certified to Rock, no, really, I’m not. But maybe someday, I will be, until then, I’m going to keep plugging away at building the community. You see, we’ve got this saying in the Drupal community, ‘come for the code, stay for the community’. It’s the best, truest thing I can think of to describe Drupalers. I hope, after you’ve poked around a bit, you’ll see the power of the Drupal community.
So, take a few minutes and get started with Drupal, I’m positive, you’ll be glad you did. And, if you get stuck, let us know, we’re a community and we’re happy to help! I promise!
For more information, watch the webinar Kirsten participated in on-demand or learn more about Drupal and other CMS tools for government.
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5 comments
Mary Smith says:
March 12, 2013 at 9:26 am (UTC -5 )
This advanced tech needs to be adopted by every government agency. Navigating some agencies is an impossible quest!
Kirsten says:
March 5, 2013 at 2:52 pm (UTC -5 )
The video of the event is on the NIH site http://videocast.nih.gov/Summary.asp?File=17818&bhcp=1
Keep in mind that the audience was a technical one, so some of the sessions are also pretty technical. I also highly recommend the keynote, you get to hear the Canadian Government talk about their Web Experience Toolkit which is just freaking awesome!!
Bill Brantley says:
March 4, 2013 at 10:24 am (UTC -5 )
Shout out to Kirsten for brilliantly leading the charge on bringing open source to government.
Ryan says:
February 27, 2013 at 5:01 pm (UTC -5 )
Thanks for the helpful post. Several good resources I plan to follow up on.
LiveIntent says:
February 27, 2013 at 9:34 am (UTC -5 )
We like to use Drupal because its easily integrated with social media and advertising platforms that are essential to online marketing for Government, business and not for profits.