transparency to innovation civic technology keynote case study at drupalcamp ottawa

Drupal in New York:From Transparency to Innovation

WHAT HOW NEXT

Andrew Hoppin | [email protected] | @ahoppin | http://nuams.com

mailto:[email protected]


http://nuams.com

http://nuams.com

2009: Year of Open Government in USA

NY State Senate: Gov 1.965, not Gov 2.009

An Institution in Need of Transparency

“News Clips” Tech from 1970 ($1,500,000/year)

“CRM” Tech from 1989...

“CMS” Tech from 1999...

Hosting 1.0

Falling Government Budgets

Rising Government Needs

http://flickr.com/photos/rocketqueen/1573565705/

Distant...


New NYSenate “CIO Office”

Open-Source Value Proposition

• No vendor lock-In / choice of consultants / ability to build in-house capacity • Collaborate w/ our peers (White House)

• Security transparency (US DoD is a major consumer for this reason)

• Open-Source platforms often pay more heed to open formats and standards (e.g.: DCAT, RDFa, OData, JSON vs Shapefiles, PDF, etc.)

• Innovation: healthy open-source projects can aggregate more engineering effort than proprietary alternatives, propagate great new extensions faster

• Freedom of Hosting Options: consume as a cloud-hosted service today, change our mind and host in-house tomorrow, etc.

Selected Drupal Because

• Considered Joomla, Django, Drupal and Wordpress

• Platform & Community Maturity: •>1 million sites (2% of all sites), 3,718 Code commits/wk, 6,388 issue comments/wk•transparent governance process for upgrades•trajectory of the platform & community since 2004

•Extensibility: •18,489 Modules, 1,512 Themes, 21,009 Contributors•module feature set for constituent use cases

• Vendor Ecosystem:•local availability of Drupal and PHP/MySQL talent•Drupal specialized commercial cloud options

High Velocity Project

• Contracted outside consulting firm for requirements gathering, design, coding, hosting

•*During* external development, hired one in-house developerone project manager, & trained existing in-house staff for training & QA

• Deployed 3.5 months after project start

• Maintained by one programmer and one project manager

• Hundreds of bugs and features implemented since

New Drupal CMS


Sites for Every Senator


Senators as Structured Data

All Senate Events Calendar


Sites for Every Committee (Structured Data)

Open Data (all $ spent)

Live Streaming

Legislation as Easy As Google..

...or ON Google! (good SEO)


Public Comment on All Bills


Easy to Share...

...Anywhere

“[NY Senate] is taking a critically important step to help restore trust in government. At a time when confidence in government in general has

hit bottom, this is an extraordinarily valuable step forward” - Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law

“..clearly setting the place that all other legislative bodies will have to follow. The U.S. Congress ought to be taking some clue” -Ellen Miller,

Executive Director, The Sunlight Foundation.“..demonstrates the New York State Senate’s commitment to a

transparent and accessible government” - Dave McClure, U.S. GSA Associate Administrator

“With this new system, New York State takes a leadership role in accountability and transparency” - Craig Newmark, founder,

Craigslist.org & Craigslist Foundation.

“[We] applaud the State Senate for its efforts to further open the legislative process,” Barbara Bartoletti, Legislative Director, League of

Women Voters.

Winner of three “Best of New York” Awards

Results: Transparency, Yes...

• No technical skill required to manage content

• Content managed as mashable data

• Modernize Antiquated Systems, Terminate Expensive Software Licenses

• Open-source platforms & developer tools, & collaborative development

• Government-certified Commercial Cloud hosting

• Net saving $1MM off ~$8MM budget

But Also More Efficient...

• 10,000s watching live events

• 100,000s of YouTube views

• 100s of public comments on bills

• @NYSenate 1000s of Followers

And Newly Participatory...

Collapsed the geography between NYC and NY State

Put Bureaucrats AND Hackers...

+

...on the Same Team

Publicly Commit to Aggressive Goals

Establish Open Policies


Adopt Open Standards

• e.g.: XML, JSON, .ODF, .JPG, .CSV, RDF

• e.g.: SOAP, REST APIs

Encourage Sharing of Your Data…

...and Your Software


Reduce IT Barriers withOpen-Source, Cloud Hosting, App Stores

Invest in Civic Entrepreneurs: Coworking Spaces, App Contests, Startup Funding

Facilities


Socialize IT: Unconferences & Hackathons

Ask for Feedback Early and Often

Facilities

In NYSenate, Republicans Now Extending It...

Other NY State Agencies Are Adopting...

We’re Sharing Code Between State & National Gov’t

White House “We The People” Drupal Website

“We The People” --> Petitions Drupal “Distribution” on Drupal.org

Step 3: White Label Theme+Petitions Distro = Quick & Easy for Any Government to have “We The People”

“Distributions” are Making Drupal the “Default” CMS for Governments Worldwide

And Helping Hackers Build New “Civic Apps”

And Helping to Market These Civic Apps

Driving Reuse of Civic Software...

Globally... (a Drupal Distro for App Catalogs & Hackathons Everywhere)

Drupal Now Also Becoming a Public Sector Data Management System (“DKAN” is a “DMS” Distro)


Drupal Powers Data.gov, OpenGovPlatform, DKAN, etc.

EMERGING GROWTH

Open311 Transit?? Weather

MATURE

GPSGov CMS

Distributed innovation

API

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Build The Next Great Innovations in Civic Technology

Distributed innovation

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EMERGING GROWTH

Open311 Transit?? Weather

MATURE

GPSGov CMS

Or in other words, be like Canada! :)

Andrew Hoppin [email protected] | @ahoppin | nuams.com

