Powering Your Organization s Web Presence using Open Source and International Collaboration

Transcription

1 Powering Your Organization s Web Presence using Open Source and International Collaboration

2 About Us Andrew Sinkinson Statistics Canada (613) Stephen Russet Ottawa, Mourad Faid Statistique Canada (613)

3 What is Drupal?

4 What is Drupal? - Largest Open Source project in the world! visit Drupal.org - Completely free to download and use - It s a development framework - A platform for online content and user communities - Can be adapted to virtually any visual design - Built around a strong culture of collaboration - Powers some of the busiest sites on the web - Can be adapted to virtually any visual design

5 What is the Web Experience Toolkit? WET

6 What is the Web Experience Toolkit? - A code library for building innovative web sites that are: - Accessible, usable, and interoperable - Mobile friendly (responsive design) - Multilingual - Highly flexible (theme-able templates, reusable components) - Mega menu, multimedia player - Auto-generated charts and graphs - Tabbed interface and lightbox - HTML5 polyfills (handles browser support gaps) - Open source software - Developed by the community, and free to use

7 What are Drupal Distributions? - They allow for very quick setup of complex web sites in fewer steps - Some examples

8 An Example: The WET Drupal Distro. Visit drupal.org/project/wetkit

9 What makes Drupal stand out? - A very mature Web Content Manageemnt System - In existance for over 12 years - Over 2 Million sites in production worldwide - Fully accessible and WCAG 2.0 compliant - Enterprise ready - Scalable, Secure - Open architecture (easily extensible while preserving the core) - Modular (over 18,000 modules) - Low entry costs - Free to start - A very large collaborative community (over 1 Million members)

10 Some Drupal Features - Multilingual - Enable User Accounts and Privilege management - Support Taxonomies - Automatic Metadata/ HTML data - Integrate Search capabilities - Enable Content Deployment - Include Web Feeds and Workflow - Is responsive - Provide out of the box Analytics and Reports

11 Some Drupal Features - Automated content migration - Sophisticated means for importing and transforming data into WCMS - Supports quick migration roll-back and re-run until satisfied (Essential when dealing with very large amount of content to migrate!) - With out-of-the-box sample migration scripts - Scripts are easy to extend

12 Along with a commitment to Open Standards - Extremely Flexible - Expandable (easy to add new functionality) - Integrates with a wide variety of systems

13 Which Canadian organisations use Drupal?

14 How did we build the Distro.? - The project was setup on on GitHub - Discussions were handled using Issues Tracker - Encouraged sharing of challenges and ideas - Welcomed external contribution (from all fronts) - Pull requests - Developped using well formed Design Patterns - Fully tested and documented - Code integrity ensured through multi-level reviews

15 How did we build the Distro.? - We reached out to over a 100 contributors - Selected GOC departments - Provinces and Municipalities - Private sector - Academia - We created 5 working groups - Access, Quality Assurance, Technical, User Experience and Web Interoperability Working Groups The Result - A number of organisations have adopted the WET Distro.!

16 Few things we have learned along the way - Many are relunctant to post issues, questions, or simply request for help! is something many do not know/do not like to use - Due mainly to habits, cultural norms (when to cc) - Usernames/Handles of people is part of the learning curve - Managers cling to printable issue reports rather than adopting issue queues

17 Few things we have learned along the way - Government staffing practices (contractor, temporary help) are not geared towards Open Source projects - Procurement services / Project managers not familiar with open source practices - Biased perception with respect to public viewing of code, code ownership and intellectual property (IP) - Community code review and participation is uncommon - Some best practices - Set the project as an Open Source first. Defer to later whether to open source - Submit patches to upstream libraries to avoid break in upgrade support!

18 Few things we have learned along the way - Allow for a learning curve for use of markdown and GitHub - Users are familiar with WYSIWYG, , and desktop tools (MS Suite) - Some best practices - Encourage staff to check issues on a continual basis (rather then of post and forget!) - Everyone can contribute content back to issues irrespective of job description/title - Use GitHub to become an active part of the conversation and the solution!

19 Some myths we had to demystify - Open Source Software - Not secure - Not scalable - Not supported (you are on your own!) - Unknown quality (not tested) - Difficulty to get out of the organisation silos - What s in it for me in a collborative approach? - How do I get my priorities addressed? - Am I going to devote too much time to others? - What about IP? - Is the code I deploy secure?

20 Looking Ahead - Better alignment with GOC guidelines (CLF, etc.) - Increased reusability and standardization - Templates and module ready to be used and deployed - Streamlined web publishing process - Simplified maintenance - Separation of content from presentation - Controlled access - Enforced rules (through template usage) - Content back to the experts! More Benefits to Come

21 Looking Ahead - Within GOC - Within Provinces, Municipalities, Universities - Internationally - US Government (25% of.gov sites run on Drupal) - UK, Australia, France, India, UN, and 130 countries More Opportunities to Collaborate

22 Looking Ahead - Be passionate and you will attract and be surrounded by passionate staff! - Be inclusive: Anyone can contribute and help make a difference - Create a vision around Collaboration and Sharing - Inspire people to be part of greater plans! - Be patient: It takes a lot to grow an Open Source project - Use this opportunity to innovate faster! Oh by the way, it s not just about code it s about building communities that work together to solve common problems / challenges faced by all!

23 And last: Aim at the next level of WEM! - Systems enabling more than just publish content - Attract users to your web site - Provide dynamic and interactive experience - Make users want to come back!

24 Eager to Collaborate? - Over 100+ members from 50 organization contributing to WET Drupal - Drupal.org project page - Join the project on Github - Try it for yourself at: Documentation at:

25 Thank You! Andrew Sinkinson Statistics Canada (613) Stephen Russet Ottawa, Mourad Faid Statistique Canada (613)