Betsy:
With the official close to the DrupalCon Denver session process on Monday, we have entered the final days of voting. Now, I believe the final tally for proposed was 565, and our team was happy to be a part of that. So take a moment this weekend and peruse the fine selection of submissions (by track) from the team here at Phase2.
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.
Betsy:
I can't wait to see everyone at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre tomorrow morning for OpenGovDC. Based on the conversations I've had with the panelists over the past few weeks, every session is going to be full of real-world experiences implementing and managing large-scale government open source web projects.
Betsy:
With only 4 days remaining until OpenGovDC, we are down to the final tickets. So if you haven't registered yet, here's some added incentive!
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.
Samantha:
There is nothing more frustrating than going to a website that is hard to navigate or poorly designed. Users seek information and when that information is difficult to access, it causes a breakdown in communication, frustration, and a bad experience.
Jeff:
On the first anniversary of the President's inauguration, I wanted to share some thoughts about the historic Open Government Initiative and discuss the implementation details of last month's Open Government Directive. Since we are developers, we wanted to do more than talk and write about what open government is, we are interested in how it actually looks and works to a user on the web. So we prepared some mock-ups for this purpose and shared it around town. This mock-up demonstrates both our concept for the user interface and content of a great /open site, but also prototypes what a simple approach to open government data and communications could be through a templated installation of Drupal we would like to build if some agency wants one?
Jeff:
"Does the world really need another URL shortener?" Asked TechCrunch in a snarky post by Erick Schonfeld on October 13, 2009 entitled Go.USA.Gov! Our Taxpayer Money Hard At Work Shortening URLs. He was referring to Go.USA.Gov the new URL shortener that lets government employees create short .gov URLs for their links. Go.USA.gov also tracks the number of clicks each shortened URL receives, so you can measure the impact of the spread of those links. We feel this is more like an example where the government rapidly and inexpensively deployed something innovative that will protect the reputation of government assets on the web.
Tiffany:
In his latest podcast, Semantic expert and writer Paul Miller talks with Jeff Walpole, Frank Febbraro and Irakli Nadareishvili. They discuss our work with Drupal, semantic technologies and the recent trend to make Government data more usefully available via open source and semantic tools.
Tiffany:
On Tuesday night, a group of the DC areas leading online news practitioners gathered in a bar (go figure) to learn about the best sites and solutions for covering and digging into the new trend of government transparency. There were great presentations from Washington Post.com's Amanda Zamora and Phase2's Jeff Walpole.
