Community

Hopefully this blog entry will help a few people overcome some of the hurdles in setting up a donations system. We are a drupal shop so all the following is for drupal 6.

Just Vision is an organization that, through award-winning media, community outreach and an array of educational tools, informs, connects and engages people in Palestinian-Israeli civilian efforts to resolve the conflict nonviolently.  

OpenConcept was lucky enough to work with this passionate organization to help them develop a truly unique Drupal-based website. Just Vision had previously implemented another CMS solution and as such, had an existent, complex database that linked interviews from a diverse selection of 'peacebuilders' on a variety of themes. Developing the appropriate taxonomies and linking interviews with themes, footnotes, glossary terms and profiles was challenging but something that Drupal was able to handle well using content types and taxonomies.

You can visit the Just Vision website at http://www.justvision.org

I do think that more people need to be aware of two collaboration tools that Google has made available for free that can help with community or campaign organizing.  Many people have probably heard of Google Docs, but Google Spreadsheets also has a front end form input so that anyone can develop a webform to collect information from a community & have it organized in a nice, sortable spreadsheet. 

So I'm going to flesh out here an example that took me about 15 minutes to put together and doesn't require any technical experience to make.  It's an approach that can be used for all kinds of group situations. I first ran into the use of Google's spreadsheets as a means to collect information like this two years ago at a non-profit discussion in Washington, DC.

Simple Online Forms

Let's say I wanted to offer a session for people who want to learn more about the use of technology to campaign. For this I need to collect standard information (name, organization, email, phone).  Now you with every initiative, you might want to collect a slightly different set of information like say a preference of times for people to choose from.

By creating a spreadsheet & then making the corresponding form (which is a pretty automated process) you can provide a customized web page that you can send people to. 

The Drupal Showcase that we organized on June 15th was a great success. This event was organized & sponsored by OpenConcept and we were able to bring together over 75 people to learn about how and why public servants are using Drupal effectively to communicate.

We had representatives from 15 government departments including: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA), Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC), Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB), Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (FAIT), Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), Department of Justice (DoJ), Library and Archives Canada (LAC), Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), Public Works & Government Services Canada (PWGSC), Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat(TBS), and Department of National Defence and the Canadian Forces (DND) as well as the City of Ottawa.

The showcase began with an overview of why Drupal by Lee Hunter who works as a government contractor and is also a member of the Drupal Documentation Team.  This was followed by a presentation by Devin Crawley & Michael Keara about implementing a user-centred approach in Drupal and outlining the approach used by the Ottawa Public Library (OPL).  It was great having the OPL present as the event was also held in the Library & their support helped to bring more people into the event. Patrick Lajeunesse gave a great talk about using Drupal to prototype a CLF compliant Intranet and provided great examples from Agriculture Canada. The final presentation from government was by the Department of National Defence whose presentation outlining their use of Drupal for their Social Networking Intranet was quite inspiring. Jayson Peltzer provided some examples of how they are using Drupal & MediaWiki for all of their social networking needs.  The last presentation was by CIPPIC's David Fewer & Kent Mewhort who addressed their findings on Government of Canada contributions to GPL Projects. I decided not to present my report on the Drupal 7 Accessibility Initiative and it's implications for the CLF & AODA, but will find time to do that in another time. 

The event was recorded thanks to volunteers at FOSSLC. FOSSLC is a non-profit corporation dedicated to education, community, and business development involving open source technologies. They have been very active in promoting free software around the world and will be putting on an Open Source Technology showcase in August. Emma Jane Hogbin will be presenting a workshop there on Basic Design for Drupal.

I took some pictures of the event and added them to a Flickr Set. If there are other photos you've taken, please tag them with drupalgov.

For the last month we've been actively organizing to set up a showcase of Drupal sites in Government here in Ottawa. There are a lot of departments that are using this great CMS and this is the first event of it's kind working to get the public sector together and talk about the work they've done.

We've already got more than 50 people signed up for the event on Tuesday, June 15th. We are quite happy with our list of speakers and know this will be a great opportunity for people to hear about the variety of ways this tool is being used in the public sector.

Lee Hunter will start by providing an overview of Drupal.  This will be quite useful for the majority of people in communications who may not be all that familiar with what this content management system is or how it affects them.

The event is going to be at the Ottawa Public Library, and we are happy to have both Devin Crawley & Chris Simmons present on their implementation for their public website.  Their focus will be on implementing a user-centred approach.

One of our most popular pages is the Text List of All Countries in the World. Strangely this little piece of data has gotten over 60k hits since we posted it and has received a wide range of very positive reactions from around the world. What started as just something that annoyed me personally (how to get an updated list of all of the World's countries in on easy to copy/paste location) proved to be something that a lot of other people were looking for too.

Now, when I first did this I didn't expect that generating a list of countries was going to be quite so controversial. Apparently, lots of folks were concerned that my list didn't contain a country that they wanted to see. Now, I didn't have a lot of time to moderate this so just settled on Wikipedia's list of countries as the final value. This I think satisfied many people.

This data should be readily provided by the UN in a machine readable fashion. There is no reason why this data (and even lists of countries that are being considered) shouldn't be made available. Countries change their boundaries & names regularly enough that there are a great many data sources that regularly need to be updated. Why not make it easy?

This is a reprint of the post I wrote for GovFresh. It's mostly a re-write of the earlier blog post I wrote specifically for the Canadian government.

Most western governments have in the last decade developed an accessibility strategy for their websites, often based on WCAG 1.0. At the end of 2008, the WC3 announced the final version of WCAG 2.0 and the public sector is now struggling to keep up. In Canada there was a recent announcement about a revised Common Look and Feel (CLF). In the USA the Section 508 is in its first of six revisions, part of which will be to adapt to the new approach to standards. I’m not sure that most citizens will notice the changes to government websites, however for both people with disabilities and the tax payers, it will be a very big deal.

I'm happy to hear of the Government of Canada's recent announcement that they will no longer be supporting Interent Explorer 6.  This is not an easy decision as many government departments chose to develop applications for a single proprietary browser rather than based on international standards. It will be expensive to retrofit many outdated systems, but it is important to fix what is widely understood to be tragically short term thinking.

Although IE6 held considerable market share historically, many security problems are causing governments around the world to officially drop support of this old browser. Both hackers & foreign government agents are able to hack the system to gain access to critical systems in governments and business.

Google's reduction of support for IE6, starting last month, is also a consideration. So many Web 2.0 tools are connected to Google these days and with the government looking to connect more with it's citizens, this is going to be a problem.

As designers, something that we all wish at one point or another is for non-technical users to be able to style their contributed content according to the styles we have defined in style sheets. Users usually want to be able to easily do this as well. If a WYSIWYG is involved it often means a user will be selecting colours and fonts that will end up inline with the element; hard coded in the HTML like <div style="{background-color='green'; font-size='2em';}" >.

Earlier this year I found out about Ada Lovelace Day (March 24th), and decided that I would pledge along with 1600+ others to blog about women who have contributed to science and technology. Fortunately, I am a Drupal developer, so there are lots of great examples of women taking leadership roles. I'm called to blog about the contributions of Angie Byron, known in the community as webchick.