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We've created a bit of a buzz in the eGov universe and we expect the buzz to get a little louder in the coming weeks and months.   What's the big buzz?    The buzz is a multi-faceted buzz.   Here are the buzzy issues - from our perspective:

• There is a lop sided and perhaps unfair competition between "Copy Left" and "Copy Right" eGov web sites and web site "products".
• Wrapping our old-school-business-brains around the relatively new-school Open Source revenue models takes some tugging and stretching.
• How does a web development shop create both proprietary products and open source products?

Although this list of issues is fairly short, they are really huge, tip-of-the-iceberg, kind of issues which impact the way we at Community Site Design Group shape our business and how local governments buy software services and products moving into the future.

On one hand, Open Source sucks.   We've all heard about GPL and free software and all that.   And we've all asked the same question, at least those of us who've been in the business as long as I have, "How do software developers make any money with Open Source?".   Quite frankly, we're still scratching our heads over that one.    Apparently there are about three different revenue models that keep rising up.   And the only viable one from our perspective is the model which creates revenue - not from the software, but from the value added services we can provide to those who use the software we provide.   We mean services like hosting, training, maintenance and support.  

On the other hand, Open Source is wonderful.   Because Open Source software is often confused with free software and the free software movement, for all intents and purposes the software is becoming a natural loss leader for the other products and services software developers in this sphere may provide.   And the other wonderful this is that there are a ton of developers working to improve your Open Source product and we don't have to pay them a single nickel for their effort.

Open Source sucks.    But there is a price tag for free software and Open Source software.     Any developer, any 5th grade egghead or anybody with an internet connection for that matter, can download, use, and declare himself an EXPERT in that software he just downloaded.   We see it all the time.    Just because you know how to download Open Source software, doesn't translate to Open Source software expert.   To a local municipality, that could spell real trouble in terms of money, learning curves, and release schedules.   Who are the real experts?

Open Source is wonderful.   The opportunity in the face of adversity is this;  Community Site Design Group is working toward creating certifications for users of eMuni Content Management System and certification for our own help desk associates.   eMuni CMS is built around the popular Open Source content management platform, Drupal.   As far as we know, there are no certification programs available for Drupal users or Drupal developers like there are for Microsoft certifications or Oracle or Rational.   But we believe, we can create a standard for our own clients and our own staff and certify our users and staff to those standards.   Look for more from Community Site Design Group in coming months about eMuni Content Management System user certifications and software engineer certifications.

It's quite easy to get caught up in the excitement of releasing a new product.   And such is the case with eMuni Content Management System.

Several weeks ago, I announced that CSD Group would be releasing eMuni Content Management System on Dec. 18.   That day came and went without any further announcements or fanfare because we missed the release date.

Gary, CJ and I are struggling with some issues with the installer as it creates the default menuing system.    I hate that word 'issues'.   It's so nondescript.   But the fact of the matter is that creating eMuni Content Managment System and getting it to do the same thing over and over in a variety of environments and with a variety of users guiding the installation is quite the challenge.

And its not that making a Drupal distribution is really that challenging because it's really not.   There are quite a few Drupal distributions out there that really do nothing more than install Drupal core and place some contributed modules in a folder...big whooop.    If that were the sum total of eMuni Content Management System, we would have had that distribution done in about 3 hours.   

Our goal with eMuni Content Management System is to give any user the tools to install a working web 2.0 site complete with built-in configured theme, rotating banner images, modules installed and enabled and configured, with roles and permissions already set up.....a real website ready to go.  

For any of you who have already installed a Drupal site, you already know that the installation process for plain vanilla Drupal is no intuitive task.   It took me 21 days to set up my first Drupal website, and it was no Picasso.   

Our goal with this product, is to add the intuition into the installation and set up process so that setting up a local government site can be painless, turn-key and exciting...but not like climbing Mt. Everest exciting, more like opening a birthday present exciting.

While we're developing eMuni Content Managment System, we still have to keep the lights on.   

And we've tossed around a few ideas on how to do that.   One guy suggested standing out in the rain and cold in the Home Depot parking lot until somebody drives by and asks us to dig sprinkler ditches.   This idea remains a suggestion.

Another guy suggested putting out a call-to-action.    'Wow', we thought to our geeky selves.   'How can invoking the 'ToAction' function bring Drupal projects to CSD Group?'   So we asked Another guy, about that.  

Another guy explained it to us.  He said, "Ask for the sale.   Put it out there on the CSD Group web site that you are accepting new or existing Drupal projects.  Tell the world that it doesn't matter if its local government, big goverment, big business, or a Mom-and-Pop business.  Make sure you tell the world that it doesn't cost anything to get a quote for work.    And make sure you tell them you have a ton of experience cleaning up other developer's Drupal messes."

OK....what he said.   Here's the call to the ToAction function:

function to_action()  {

Get_in_touch(phone_call, e_mail, contact_page );

Request_quote(free_of_charge, no_obligation);

Print('CSD Group is accepting new Drupal projects');

}

When it's a Parish or a Borough.  

I was reading the definition of 'county' on wikipedia.   Why was I reading the definition of county?   Because I wanted to know how far off my 'personal definition' was from the common definition.   To me, this was really fun and interesting reading.   Did you know Maryland abolished county government in 1960?  I didn't either. 

The rest of this post was lifted directly from wikipedia.   And there's even more on the source wikipedia page.

In the United States, a county is a local level of government below the state (or federal territory). Counties are used in 48 of the 50 states; Louisiana is divided into parishes and Alaska into boroughs.^[1] Parishes and boroughs, as well as certain independent cities not part of counties, are considered "county-equivalents." There are currently 3,143 counties and county-equivalents in the United States. Independent cities, which are not part of a county, are different from consolidated city–counties, entities in which are city and county that have been merged into one unified jurisdiction and is simultaneously a city, which is a municipal corporation (municipality), and a county, which is an administrative division of a state, having powers and responsibilities of both types of entities.

The average number of counties per state is 62. The state with the most counties is Texas, with 254; the state with the fewest counties is Delaware, with three. As of the 2000 Census, the average county population was about 100,000. The most populous county is Los Angeles County, California, with an estimated population of 9,880,000 (2009 Census estimate), larger than all but eight U.S. states. The least populous county is Loving County, Texas, with some 80 residents. The largest county or county-equivalent is Unorganized Borough, Alaska, which is over 330,000 square miles. The five largest counties or county-eqivalents are all in Alaska; the largest county by land area elsewhere is San Bernardino County, California, which is over 20,000 square miles. The smallest county by land area is Arlington County, Virginia, which is 26 square miles.

The nature and power the county government exercises, as well as the distribution of power among the state, counties, and municipalities, varies widely and is defined in each state's statutes and constitution.^[2] At one end of the spectrum is Connecticut, which abolished county government in 1960 and has functions carried out in other states by counties carried out in city and town governments instead, maintaining its eight counties only as geographical designations and to organize its judicial and state marshall system. At the other end of the spectrum is Maryland, which has few incorporated municipalities and has its 23 counties and the independent City of Baltimore handles almost all services, including public education, which in most other states is the responsibility of a separate school district, a special-purpose district usually governed by an independent-elected school board.

The site of a county's administration, and often the county courthouse, is called the county seat (or in Louisiana or Alaska the "parish seat" and "borough seat," respectively). Several Northeastern counties officially use the term "shire town" to refer to the county seat. Common sources of county names are names of people, geographic features, places in other states or countries, Native American tribes, and animals. Quite a few counties bear names of French or Spanish origin.

The following post was written by Jeff Walpole and posted on GovFresh on February 4, 2010. 

5 Government Sites Using Drupal Effectively for Open Government Initiatives

By now, most people in the Gov 2.0 community have heard of Drupal, the popular open source social publishing system powering close to 500,000 websites ranging from big government to Britney Spears. Drupal has seen steady growth from its inception as a Belgian grad student’s experiment in 2001 to one of the most heavily used open source content management systems in the world, downloaded by a quarter million people per month. A growing trend the Drupal community is following closely this year is government interest in the platform to further open government initiatives and broaden adoption across government.

Why is Drupal important to the the Federal government? That is the main topic I will cover in a 3-part series here on GovFresh. I’ll start with some high-profile examples of who is using Drupal effectively in government and why Drupal is a great fit for what these sites are trying to achieve. My second post will focus on the unique aspects of providing web content management for government that are relevant for Drupal (i.e. what can Drupal learn from Government?). My final post will provide ideas and predictions for the future of Drupal within the Federal government.

Who is using Drupal effectively now at the federal level? Not as many agencies as we’d like. While open source provides a great return on investment for Federal CIOs under budgetary pressure, open source adoption on U.S. government websites has not yet hit critical mass. I believe this will change in 2010 due in no small part to the success of early adopters in demonstrating cost savings, time to market and features critical to government to citizen outreach. So while growing in popularity with CIOs, it is New Media Directors that have found the tool most useful because of its ease of implementation and flexibility to extend sites to include the best of social media, user participation and collaboration and data integration.

Here are five sites using Drupal effectively to achieve the objectives of the open government directive and promoting the use of open concepts to improve the business of government.

Recovery at Commerce

The Department of Commerce loves Drupal, and for good reason: a site like this can be developed and launched quickly and inexpensively. Being on the front lines of the economic recovery efforts, Commerce has a lot to share with the public and good reason to do that quickly and efficiently. Unlike its better known federal-wide parent site, Recovery.gov, this agency transparency initiative is still running on Drupal. Regrettably, Recovery.gov which was running on Drupal was replaced by SharePoint when a re-compete to the contract famously switched platforms and vendors. It will probably be known to Drupalers as “the one that got away” for a while to come. The Commerce department’s recovery site makes use of Drupal’s ease of integration with mashups. Data and reports are easy to find and download in original .xls formats and I can get an RSS feed of major communications and activities. While still a fairly simple site, it’s simplicity makes it accessible and easy for the common citizen to find what they are looking for. It is easy to see how this site could blossom into a model destination for Commerce communications, collaboration and participation on all things recovery.

Federal IT Spending Dashboard

Launched in July of last year by Vivek Kundra, the Federal Chief Information Officer, the dashboard was created to allow CIOs of various government agencies to show the effectiveness with which they have managed government IT spending. As such, this site has been featured very prominently as an open gov example for its transparency, its use of open data and a very strong sense of government accountability. Kundra explains the site as a place that “… allows you to see what IT projects are working and on-schedule (and which are not), offer alternative approaches, and provide direct feedback to the chief information officers at federal agencies – in effect, keeping tabs on the people who are responsible for taxpayer dollars for technology.” Ultimately, that hits on all three tenets of the directive and does it in a visually appealing and useful way that does not get the user bogged down in text. The graphing techniques are unique and unconventional like the budget year tree map (well okay that one still confuses me a bit, but it still proves that transparency can be fun to browse and explore).

Federal Labor Relations Authority

This is a simple, effective example of a government site that can be easily stood up with Drupal. It is a great example of how government agency sites don’t have to be overly complex to achieve their mission. The FLRA is an independent administrative federal agency. As such, the FLRA mission is fairly straight forward: carry out five (5) primary statutory responsibilities as efficiently as possible. This site provides good direction on what the agency does and how the agency can help a citizen worker. What caught my attention is that it promotes the /open aspect of the open government directive (OGD) prominently on its homepage (though technically I believe the FLRA would be exempt from this requirement) and links to 3 (albeit incredibly light) data sets in XML format. This is what the OGD is asking all cabinet level agencies do and someone here read the memo.

Data.gov.uk

This new UK government site is a shining example of the merger of open source, open data and the semantic web. This is my second favorite government site running on Drupal. It illustrates that Europe has a lot to teach us about open government. The site is the product of Sir Tim Berners-Lee (most notably the guy who created the World Wide Web) and Professor Nigel Shadbolt as a project for the UK’s efforts to make data more open and accessible on the web. This site is the UK’s answer to our data.gov project. Reportedly they selected Drupal for both its flexibility as a CMS and its native integration with semantic web concepts and technology. With an Apps download section, idea galleries, forums, a blog, a wiki, and the ability to search, browse and query against the data sets, this was done in the spirit of try it all and see what sticks. I admire the pragmatic goals of the site.

The White House

Currently a shining star of Drupal in government, the conversion of this site in October of last year sparked a lively and interesting debate on the use of open source in government (Disclaimer: my firm was the developer on this effort) While it served to squelch much of the criticism over the scalability and performance of Drupal as a platform for very high traffic sites, it also forced people to question whether the security of open source was ready for prime time. Many critics cited the openness and availability of open source code to be a weakness, while others claimed it as a benefit. Tim O’Reilly’s post did a good job of refocusing the discussion to the benefits of choosing Drupal for the White House site:

“More than just security, though, the White House saw the opportunity to increase their flexibility. Drupal has a huge library of user-contributed modules that will provide functionality the White House can use to expand its social media capabilities, with everything from super-scalable live chats to multi-lingual support. In many ways, this is the complement to the Government as Platform mantra I’ve been chanting in Washington.”

In addition to these attributes, the site features a robust blog, multimedia delivery and is the home to many micro-sites that can be quickly stood up to address various initiatives, councils and committees that fall under the purview of the Administration, including the king of all /open sites, whitehouse.gov/open, home to the open government directive itself.

There are many great examples of Drupal use for the betterment and opening of government. For more about the use of Drupal in government, stay tuned for my next post. Also, for those interested in a more comprehensive list of known government sites using Drupal both in the U.S. and at large throughout the world, check out the Drupal in Government group on Drupal.org.