I was fortunate enough to have my employer send me to Drupal GovCon in Bethesda, Maryland, in November 2023.
What it is
According to its website, "Drupal GovCon brings together people from all over the country who use, develop, design, and support the Drupal platform with a focus in government. There are also some attendees from the private, non-profit, and education sectors. Drupal GovCon is the heartbeat of the DC Drupal community. We come together for three days every year, to learn, improve, and innovate as a community. Drupal GovCon will feature a full schedule of educational, contribution, and networking opportunities."
Recordings of all sessions
Sessions I attended
- Pitching My Tent in Drupal: From There and Back Again, a Contributor’s Tale
- Starting Small, Designing Big: Initiating Your Human-Centered Design Journey for Digital Services
- Case Study: Creating Accessible Content for Lullabot's Iowa.gov Digital Transformation Project
- Creating Accessible Content in Drupal 10
- Re-framing Diversity through the Lens of Star Trek: Voyager
- Content creators want automatic accessibility checks
- Designing Content Authoring Experiences
- One State, One Platform, One Team
- Building a Robust Community of Content Managers
- Putting CX at the Center of a DMV Website Redesign
- A Migration Is a Terrible Thing to Waste – A roadmap for your next big content migration
Half-day training session
- What am I Getting Myself Into? A Drupal Crash Course for Non-Developers
Networking
- AmyJune Hineline
- Continued discussions from TC Drupal Camp about the VA and accessibility
- Ivan Stegic
- Continued discussions from TC Drupal Camp about self-hosting instead of using Acquia, and pitfalls we should avoid when we begin our site build
- Greg Dunlap
- Continued discussions from previous Confabs, siloed organizations, similar work he has done for other state governments, his session about content authoring experiences
- Kat Shaw
- Discussed how we can overcome barriers to have all our agencies on one Drupal platform, like they did for Iowa, Georgia and other states
- Colin Panetta
- Discussed human-centered design and how to start a usability testing practice
- Rod Martin
- Discussed methods and resources for providing Drupal training all our web editors
- Several others
Key takeaways
It’s going to take a long time to devise, build, and configure Drupal before we can train our web editors
During my half-day training where I got to actually play with an install of Drupal, I realized that it’s going to be a very long road, and most of it will be happening by developers and members of the Web Team behind the scenes.
But, it’s not all about the developers and the web team
I attended multiple sessions that focused on the experience of people like you – web editors – who will have to work within whatever system we devise, assemble, and configure. Just like it’s all of our jobs to make our government content experiences easy for the public and other targeted users, it’s the Web Team’s job to make our Drupal authoring and content management experience easy for all of you.
- Designing content authoring experiences
- Automatic accessibility checks for content creators
- Building a robust community of content managers
We are not alone
Several other state agencies and federal agencies have gone through what we’re going through now. And, it’s open source. There are roadmaps, blueprints, themes, templates already out there. And there is no shortage of consultants ready to help us out as soon as we have a budget and contract for them to bid on. I attended four separate sessions where presenters talked specifically about state government projects:
- Iowa (2 sessions from Lullabot folks)
- North Carolina (all in-house)
- Virginia (2 consultant agencies)