Design for America: Participating by Redesigning DOL.gov

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.

Drupal in Government Part 2: Drupal: The New Gov 2.0 Site Builder?

I have been writing a series of guest blog posts at GovFresh on Drupal in open government. GovFresh works to inspire government-citizen collaboration and build a more engaged democracy through Gov 2.0 best practices, open gov news, guides, TV, tech, people and official U.S. government feeds, all in one place.

This month, I discuss how Drupal is close to being the perfect Gov 2.0 solution for savvy agencies – and soon perhaps a default solution for open government web initiatives in my post today entitled Drupal: The New Gov 2.0 Site Builder?

Last month I wrote about how Drupal supports five of the most effective open government sites in Five Government Sites Using Drupal Effectively for Open Government Initiatives.

Let me know what you think of these posts and what else you would like to see written about on this topic.

IASL volunteer project covered by the New York Times

When I first started duplicating DVDs as part of a volunteer project organized by Carl Malamud, I never thought the project would garner any media coverage, let alone interest from New York Times. But, I'm thrilled because the project is important for freedom of information and for democracy.

Drupal in Government Part 1: Five government sites using Drupal effectively for open government initiatives

Why is Drupal important to the the Federal government? That is the main topic I will cover in a 3 part guest blog series on GovFresh. GovFresh works to inspire government-citizen collaboration and build a more engaged democracy. It features Gov 2.0, open gov news, guides, TV, tech, people and official U.S. government feeds, all in one place.

The first post Five government sites using Drupal effectively for open government initiatives provides some high profile examples of who is using Drupal effectively in government and why Drupal is a great fit for what these sites are trying to achieve.

My second post will focus on the unique aspects of providing web content management for government that are relevant for Drupal (i.e. what can Drupal learn from Government?) And my final post will provide ideas and predictions for the future of Drupal within the Federal government.

What Does the Open Government Directive Look Like?

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?

Tattler Starts Beta

Today we announced the start of beta for our topic-monitoring tool Tattler.