Government

The Institute on Governance(IOG) is located here in Canada’s capital city, Ottawa. Its vision is to be the pre-eminent, independent Canadian source of knowledge, research and advice on governance and its continuous improvement. In the past 20 years they have undertaken over 1000 projects in Canada and 35 other countries.

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.

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.

Very recently Canada's Treasury Board announced that the Common Look and Feel (CLF) for the Internet 2.0 Standard is being updated. Now, for those folks who don't spend a lot of time on Government of Canada websites it's not something that you are likely to notice. However for both people with disabilities & the Canadian tax payer at large it could be a very big deal. 

Improved Design

I want to first point out some of the good work done rethinking the CLF. Thomas Bradley's Proposal for CLF3.0 predated the public announcement for the update and presents a neat vision. More recently Cornelius Rachieru's post Thoughts on CLF 3.0 From Outside the Firewall produced a very neat vision of what is possible. Both of these visions will allow for much more visually interesting websites while maintaining an acceptable level of branding I feel.

I used to call the CLF the Common Ugly Look and Feel as CLF 1.0 was pretty terrible to look at. CLF 2.0 was a huge step in the right direction and there have been some very nice sites that still respect the standard but have a lot more flair to them.  With these two early concept pieces I'm sure that CLF 3.0 (if that is what it is called) will be even better looking. There are also some really great ideas floating around to help standardize best practices around use of emerging technologies.

Update (June 2): How could I have forgotten OpenID? I've advocated before for an OpenID server for the gc.ca, but would be great to have it integrated with GEDS. The next thing is that it's just silly that GEDS doesn't manage pagination. Try searching for 'Smith'. This isn't all that tricky to do!

For those of you who may not know the GEDS is the Government Electronic Directory Services. It's been a source of frustration for a while so I thought I'd outline some of the things that something like this could do and how it would help everyone who wants to contact people in their government.

This is a website that is trying to deliver an:

"important element of the information technology infrastructure necessary for the implementation of future government information and electronic commerce services."

So I decided to write down a list of things that would help them fulfill this mission.  It's just a few quick thoughts, but it would do so much more than the current site does.  Please feel free to add comments with more suggestions.

Ontario implemented the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) in 2005 and in January 2010 it will begin to enhance the level of services that people in this province can expect from their governments. 

Organizations Needing to Comply

The public sector organizations that now must meet the Customer Service Standard include Ontario government ministries, municipalities, school boards, community colleges, universities, public hospitals, public transportation organizations as well as some other agencies. All other organizations with over a year will have another two years before they need to conform to this standard.

The web has become a huge part of how people communicate and this act will significantly affect how organizations think about their online presence in the months to come. It is anticipated that websites by the organizations above will be required to reach compliance levels A of WCAG 2.0 (W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0). This will be a significant accomplishment as millions of web pages will need to be changed and evaluated. 

The following article was prepared by OpenConcept for Summit Magazine, Canada's magazine for public service procurement. The full article is available within the PDF copy of the magazine.

After publication I was sent this PDF about open source procurement in the Netherlands that was worth sharing.

How Can Government Responsibly Procure Free Software?

Free software is “free” in two senses: it is distributed free of charge, and can be freely used and shared because it is unencumbered by onerous and restrictive licenses. This software model has been refined over the past twenty-five years, and its use has become mainstream.

It was the first sunny day we've had in a week, a perfect day to spend on a patio after work drinking a pint. However 35 people made their way to The Code Factory to attend the Drupal in Government Showcase. This was the largest Drupal event ever held in Ottawa and it clearly demonstrated that there is interest in this Content Management System.

Having organized the event we wanted to highlight the CLF 2.0 theme that are providing to the community as well as the extensive work that we have done on introducing accessibility enhancements to Drupal.

NOTE: We have since followed up with another Drupal in Government event which was recorded future use.

We had three interesting case studies presented. Mark Stephenson of RealDecoy, presented on their work with the Canadian Human Rights Museum. Steve Etlinger of Wirespeak presented two case studies of their experience developing Drupal sites for government clients.