Security

According to the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Database maintained by MITRE Corporation, the security record of Plone is unrivaled. In fact, the number of high severity, publicly known vulnerabilities for Plone is orders of magnitude lower than all three of its main open source rivals:

Source: Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures List, MITRE Corporation

For many government organizations, Plone’s proven security track-record is the most important feature highlighted during CMS selection.

Community

While security often takes center stage when one mentions Plone, the vibrancy and size of its developer and user community are themselves important features of the solution. Despite periods of increased and decreased interest in the project over its ten year life cycle, Plone maintains one of the strongest open source developer communities. At present, Plone’s community is massively global, with over 300 solution providers in 57 countries. There also are dozens of official local user groups and hundreds of unofficial ones thanks to Plone’s ongoing support of 40 languages. Finally, the project has strong ties to the wider Python and JavaScript (including the JQuery Javascript Framework) communities due to its heavy reliance on these languages.

Other Features

The release of the latest version of Plone in 2010 provided a major reinvigoration for the project. While continuing to emphasize security and usability, Plone 4 delivered big improvements in raw speed and scalability. These features help Plone better respond to the needs of complex web site and web application uers – the segment of the CMS market where Plone excels.

Real-World Implementations

Perhaps no better driver exists for the adoption of an emerging software solution than real-world examples of successful implementations for comparable requirements. Since its release almost a decade ago, Plone has secured a number of high-profile public sector organizations. These implementations demonstrate its ability to meet even the most complex functional and security requirements. Plone also has been adopted by thousands of local and state governments, nonprofits, and other public sector organizations. These implementations illustrate how organizations big and small can leverage Plone to build beautiful websites that meet a broad spectrum of user needs and security considerations.

Brazilian Government

The Government of Brazil leveraged Plone to power Portal Brasil, the government’s main web portal. Plone also is being used by both the President and the Parliament.

Federal Bureau of Investigation

The FBI has made a major investment in Plone. Its latest redesign demonstrates its ongoing commitment to the platform. It also illustrates the ability for Plone to support a wide variety of functional requirements through native support or integration.

U.S. Department of Energy

The Department of Energy required a web-based delivery for mission-critical documents called directives. Their emphasis was on security, sophisticated search, versioning, and role management rather than asthetics. They selected Plone for their CMS to meet their enterprise document management needs.

European Environment Agency

The EEA is responsible for producing and disseminating important environmental information to EU citizens. The organization selected Plone as its CMS of record for its main external website.

City of Bern

Bern is one of the largest cities in Switzerland. The city turned to Plone for their main website. This implementation demonstrates Plone’s potential to meet local government needs.

Chile

The National Library of Congress of Chile built an integrated website platform based upon Plone. The platform integrates with Oracle, Autonomy, D-Space, and PostgreSQL. It helps the government advance open government as well as open data.

Plone and the National Library of Congress of Chile from Matt Hamilton on Vimeo.

Unites Nations

The United Nations relies on Plone to power a number of the organization’s websites, including UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Implementation Programme and the UN Asian and Pacific Training Center for Information and Communication Technology for Development.

New Zealand

The Companies Office in New Zealand turned to Plone to meet its external communications requirements.

South Africa

The Department of Science and Technology funds a premier research facility, named SAEON, that establishes and maintains nodes (environmental observatories, field stations or sites) linked by an information management network to serve as research and education platforms for long-term studies of ecosystems. The organization’s website is built using Plone.

Nordic Council

The Nordic Council is a major intergovernmental forum that facilitates engagement between Nordic countries. The Council chose Plone for their main website.

This week, Development Seed announced the release of a full-featured map design studio that enables web developers to rapidly generate gorgeous custom maps. Based upon open source technologies and funded in part by a generous grant from The Knight Foundation, TileMill dramatically increases the accessibility of custom map generation for enterprise users, including the government. By decreasing the sunk costs required to generate custom maps and at the same time increasing the performance of these solutions, TileMill also paves the way for the next generation of geospatial products capable of meeting the open data imperative.

Why is TileMill Disruptive?

To understand the value TileMill provides, one must understand the existing custom mapping landscape. Even in the Web 2.0 world, those who desire custom maps and geospatial web services (not just a generic Google Maps embed) often need to be able to justify exponential increases in costs and/or schedule for their projects.

TileMill is a game changer because it dramatically lowers the barrier to custom map generation and makes it possible for almost anyone (from a policy analyst to a web developer to a GIS analyst) to quickly generate professional looking, custom maps. It does so by:

1. Leveraging an innovative programming environment that requires no more than the minimal programming abilities expected for web development (ex. CSS-like language);
2. Supporting a community that is committed to making validated data sets more accessible for its users.

TileMill Custom Map Design Studio

Rather than serving as “a general-purpose cartography tool, TileMill focuses on streamlining and simplifying making beautiful maps.” This means TileMill is not planning to go head-to-head with proprietary GIS systems (ex. ESRI ArcGIS or AutoDesk GIS Design Server). Instead TileMill targets a broad set of audience needs not well met (or likely to be met) by existing products. It does so by helping the average web developer overcome their own challenges: a lack of core skills (software, training, and experience) and time required to generate complex custom maps from traditional geospatial information system (GIS) solutions. From this perspective, TileMill clearly augments and expands both the geospatial and web development marketplaces.

What Makes TileMill Innovative?

In the closed and open source geospatial community, there are many solutions and standards available to developers. What differentiates TileMill is not so much that it is free and that it is based upon a number of open source standards (both of which are true). Nor is it just the fact that a broad audiences of traditional and nontraditional GIS users find the world of custom map making to be easy to use and accessible with TileMill. In the world of Enterprise IT, where innovation often is judged on its technical merits, it’s what is under the hood that still matters most. Thankfully, TileMill does not disappoint.

From the technical perspective, TileMill’s use of Carto, coupled with its deep integration with Mapnik, helps to set it apart in the marketplace:

• Inspired by Cascadenik, Carto is a CSS-like map styling language based on less.js. It is custom designed to make geospatial mapping more accessible to the average web developer as well as to generate significant performance savings over comparable languages. For example, compared to Cascadenik, typical Carto stylesheets compile 4-5 times faster (usually in less than 100 milliseconds).
• Mapnik is a OpenSource C++ toolkit for developing mapping applications and integrates with the node.js, a super fast non-blocking server side javascript platform. Thanks to Mapnik’s reference project, the TileMill editor can even highlight correct attributes and suggest corrections when values are invalid.

Open Data at the World Bank with map tiles baked using TileMill

How Can TileMill Help Government Agencies Meet the Open Data Imperative?

With TileMill now fully integrated with other MapBox solutions and supporting shapefiles, GeoTIFF rasters, simple KML and GeoJSON, as data pulling from a local disk or from Amazon S3, it is clear that the MapBox solution set can meet a broad range of enterprise user needs (including those of government agencies and federal contractors). This was recently validated by a major media organization, who leverages TileMill to stylize U.S. Census data for their web site:

Beyond this example, TileMill provides limitless options for new lost-cost, high-impact solutions designed to meet the open data imperative. These include a wide range of domestic and international public policy challenges that require new mobile apps, web services, analytical tool sets, and real-time monitoring technologies. From this perspective, the future of open data looks more promising than ever with the release of TileMill.

Appendix: Guide to MapBox Tools and Services

In evaluating TileMill, it is important to consider the larger MapBox set of solutions. At present, MapBox is composed of the following tools and services (reproduced with permission from the MapBox web site):

U.S. Census data map styled with TileMill by Chicago Tribune

• MapBox on Apps.Gov provides federal agencies with the ability to freely use MapBox map tiles as a software-as-a-service solution.
• MapBox.Com hosts free custom designed map tiles, detailed documentation, and open source tools to help users easily build customs maps for their websites.
• MapBox for iPad enables Apple users to interact with their custom maps (including visualizing their KML and GeoRSS data) entirely offline.
• Maps on a Stick provides Apple and Windows users with the ability to distribute their custom maps using only removable media – a critical asset in low bandwidth and mobile computing intensive environments.
• MapBox Hosting offers paid premium cloud-based tile hosting for MapBox users. This ensures that organizations can quickly scale their geospatial capabilities to meet their needs.
• TileMill is a tool for cartographers to quickly and easily design maps for the web using custom data. It is built on the powerful open-source map rendering library Mapnik, the same software OpenStreetMap and MapQuest use to make some of their maps. TileMill is not intended to be a general-purpose cartography tool but rather focuses on streamlining and simplifying making beautiful maps.

Pakistani flood relief map with MapBox

TileMill full video overview:



Over the past year, it’s been my pleasure to be one of the many evangelists of these new citizen-empowering technologies for government agencies across the country.  In the process, I’ve realized that there are many bureaucratic constraints, fears and misunderstandings about how these technologies fit within municipal government.  Further, I understand that type of innovation within government is sometimes seen as a risky concept; however, I would argue there is a science to what we do in Manor that can and should be replicated by other municipalities.

So let me brake down what we’ve done by starting at the beginning.  Manor’s innovation journey began like most- out of a means of survival.  With dwindling revenues and rising costs, we faced a significant challenge to continue providing the services our citizens demanded.  As a result, we were faced with two choices: finance industry solutions over a period of time or leverage what we have to make our own.  We chose the latter.  Now it’s difficult to leverage 34 employees beyond their current capacities, but we  do have 6,500 citizens that are each an expert in something.  It was time to tap the wisdom of the crowds.

Almost five years later, we have overhauled every department within our agency, actually reducing our information technology budget, with our citizens helping drive the change.  My next goal was to help educate other cities that they could achieve the same thing.  During this process, I continued to hit the same roadblocks, around the lines of “I don’t know where to start!”

In talking through this frustration, Luke Fretwell, the founder of GovFresh, and I decided we were going to do something to help catalyze a municipal innovation movement.  We had both been to numerous conferences that were very inspiring to the participants, but lacked the action-oriented approach needed to make things happen.  As a result, manor.govfresh was born with the intention of demonstrating that everything we had done in Manor could be replicated by other cities.  We determined that the best way to demonstrate this was by performing a makeover on another city.  Essentially, we took every citizen engagement technology we use in Manor (plus some) and applied them to America’s next ‘beta’ city, the City of De Leon, Texas.  The most amazing aspect of the makeover is that we did it in under a month.

So what does a Gov 2.0 makeover look like?

Website

For the website portion of the makeover, we used a free web technology that is typically used for blogs, called WordPress, along with the free GovFresh Gov 2.0 template, to make it easy for De Leon staff members to maintain and keep their citizens up-to-date.  Price: Free + Hosting (Approximately $54.00 per year).

Idea Suggestion

In order to channel new ideas, we deployed a Spigit platform to apply a structured and transparent process the citizens of De Leon to suggest new ideas.  In addition, citizens are rewarded for their participation, through game-mechanics, to make the process sustainable.  Price: Starts at $499.00 per month.

QR-codes

QR-codes are a type of barcode that can be read with most newer model camera phones.  Using can download a free application and simply scan the barcode using the camera on their phone.  Once a code is scanned, their phone will display the information that was linked within it.  For the De Leon QR-code program, we used a free online creator and a local sign printing company to provide a physical hyperlink for 35 points-of-interest throughout their community.  Price: Free (Just the cost of printing).

Open Data

In order to make public information more accessible to citizens, we deployed a Socrata platform to allow citizens to view and analyze public information on a deeper level without the need of an open-records request.  In addition, local developers now have access to make web applications that tie-in to these data sets.  Price: Free Version Available (Plans start at $499.00 per month).

Citizen Reporting (311)

To encourage citizen reporting, we deployed SeeClickFix to empower citizens to help ‘fix’ their community from a variety of channels including a dedicated mobile application, toll-free phone number, e-mail and embeddable web application.  Price: Starts at $40.00 per month.

Crime Reporting

Using CrimeReports, we took the City of De Leon’s public crime data, that was not accessible online, and embedded it within an easy to understand visual map.  Price: Starts at $99.00 per month.

E-Forms & Processes

Using Firmstep, the City of De Leon now has electronic forms and applications that are apart of a bigger electronic process.  This means that city forms can be processed without ever needing to print them out. Price: Starts at $300.00 per month.

Social Media

We setup the City of De Leon with a Facebook and Twitter account to better engage with their citizens using online platforms where the conversations are currently taking place.  Price: Free.

Records Retention (Online)

In order to maintain and comply with records retention laws, we used PageFreezer to auto-archive all of the City of De Leon’s online activities. Price: Starts at $199.00 per month.

Mobile Application

The City of De Leon will also have access to the first location-based-service application for government (Think of Foursquare for government). This application will empowers citizens to interact with their city no matter where they’re at.  Price: Free (Extra features are available).

Internet Telephone System

Developed just for this conference, the City of De Leon now has access to the MuniVox Internet phone system (VoIP). MuniVox makes it easy for small local governments to implement a sophisticated phone system using open-source software.  Price: Free.

E-mail/Document Management

Using Google Apps Standard Edition, the City of De Leon has access to a very cost-effective and robust e-mail and document management system.  Price: Free (Up to 50 users).

Project Management

Using Manymoon, with direct integration to Google Apps Standard Edition, the City of De Leon can better manage their daily operations and tasks.  Price: Free.

Are We There Yet?

Nope, and we will never fully arrive. In the spirit of being in a continuous state of

improvement (‘beta’), we can never fully arrive. Technology and citizen services

will continue to change and we must always be listening.  I hope that what we did inspires you to go ‘beta’ and embrace technologies that can revolutionize the way you interact with your citizens.

There is a guide available on the BetaCities website with more detailed information for other cities interested in deploying these technologies.

Special thanks

Luke and I didn’t pull this makeover off on our own. We built this with the help of our community. Along with the partners listed above, and our planning committee, supporters and sponsors should get most of the credit for making this vision a reality:

Planning Committee

• Mark Headd
• Geovanna Ricaldi
• Kevin Curry
• Sara Moore
• Robert Greenberg
• Andrew Krzmarzick
• Sid Burgess
• Margarita Quihuis
• Pam Broviak

Supporters

• Code For America
• OpenPlans
• Gov 2.0 Radio

Sponsors

• Texas.gov
• Spigit
• OpenPlans
• Manor ISD
• Manor Education Foundation
• Bluebonnet Electric
• BLGY Architecture
• Bridge Born
• G&H International Services, Inc.

Gov 2.0 Radio is hosted by Adriel Hampton and co-hosts GovTwit founder Steve Lunceford and GovLoop founder Steve Ressler.

• @gov20radio on Twitter
• #g2r hashtag on Twitter
• Subscribe to Gov 2.0 Radio on iTunes
• Gov 2.0 Radio on BlogTalkRadio

GovFreshTV interview with Gov 2.0 Radio host Adriel Hampton:

Discussing Gov 2.0 Hero Day on Federal News Radio with Chris Dorobek:

Follow

• Gov 2.0 Hero Day on Facebook
• @gov20heroday on Twitter

Celebrate

• Share your Gov 2.0 Hero stories, videos, photos, links on the Gov 2.0 Hero Day Facebook Page.
• Write a blog post (‘My Gov 2.0 Heroes’) or feature your heroes, why they inspire you, what others should know about their work and how you can help them.
• Tweet your Gov 2.0 Heroes on Twitter with the hashtag #gov20heroday.
• Get creative!

Drupal is an open source platform and content management system (CMS) for building dynamic web sites. Supported by a vibrant developer community, Drupal is establishing itself as a leader among social software solutions. Having already gained a small but significant share of the domestic and worldwide public sector CMS market, the solution appears on-track for continued growth. The expanding list of high-profile government organizations adopting the solution, along with its recent recognition by industry analyst Gartner as a visionary product in the marketplace, will only accelerate its growth.

Community

One of the most important “features” of Drupal is the breadth and depth of its community. This was made evident recently when DrupalCon 2010 San Francisco attracted over 3,000 attendees. Within this community, there is widespread support for leveraging Drupal to innovate new public sector solutions. In fact, one of the keynotes of this year’s three DrupalCon keynotes (and the only sector-specific one) was entitled “Open Source in Government,” which featured representatives from the White House and New York Senate. The overwhelming sentiment shared by these officials and others is that the strength of the Drupal Community is a key reason why the public sector is embracing the solution. In conjunction with the emergence of Drupal enterprise service providers, the growing Drupal Community extols confidence in the platform and its long-term innovativeness, security, and supportability. (Disclaimer: Michael Walsh served on the DrupalCon keynote panel as the moderator.)

Gov 2.0 Radio interview with Andrew Hoppin (New York Senate) and Michael Walsh (Forum One Communications):

DrupalCon Keynote Discussion with Dave Cole – White House, Andrew Hoppin – New York Senate, and Michael Walsh – Forum One Communications

Modules

As an open source solution, Drupal’s success is tied to the Drupal Community’s ability to innovate new modules (plug-ins for Drupal that extend, build, or enhance Drupal core functionality) to address marketplace needs. The modules can take two forms: contributed modules (shared under the same GNU Public License as Drupal) and custom modules. While the public sector benefits from many of the same contributed modules that are in use by other sectors, a number of public sector modules have been created by government for government, and subsequently contributed back to the Drupal Community, as outlined below. These modules now form a growing code base – specific to Drupal – which public sector organizations can quickly leverage for their own requirements. By reducing development costs and improving the efficiency of government web site design and development, modules like these are helping to justify the business case for Drupal for an ever-expanding list of organizations.

• GovDelivery Integration – Provides integration with the GovDelivery On-Demand Mailer service, a web service for GovDelivery customers that sends messages directly based on configured account information;
• Node Embed – Improves web site compliance with accessibility standards for specific content types;
• Akamai – Enables integration with the Akamai Cache Control Utility (CCU) Web Service, thereby supporting the purge/invalidation of cached URLs in the Akamai Global Network in response to different site events;
• Context HTTP Headers – A set of context reactions that allow developers to set HTTP Response Headers for each context on a site and thereby add new metadata and instruct servers on how to manage specific pages, such as cache scheduling;
• Whitelist – An Input filter that can be used to specify and limit outside domain names that can be referenced in content created on your web site;
• OpenLegislation – Retrieves legislation information from the NYSS OpenLegislation search engine.

Distributions

Senior members of the Drupal Community have been championing the value of distributions for some time. These “ready to use” solutions offer developers pre-configured Drupal installations, usually including a selection of modules and themes coupled with Drupal core. The value of distributions is that they provide the developer community with extensible solutions that can be rapidly implemented to meet the functional and technical needs of a specific sector/vertical. This supports economies of scale in open source development by eliminating the need for each independent developer or development shop to develop their own baseline solution for the common set of requirements for a given sector/vertical. This allows developers to focus more on derivative innovation and reduces the total cost of feature development and software defect fixes. For these reasons, distributions are a critical component to the growth of Drupal’s adoption, especially in the public sector. As Dries Buytaert says: “Without Drupal distributions, (the Drupal Community) won’t be able to successfully compete with commercial vendors.”

Acquia Drupal

Downloaded over 125,000 times, Acquia Drupal is a social publishing platform developed by Acquia to simplify the development of interactive, community-based publishing web sites that feature both editorial and user-generated content. By selecting only the most important modules for online communities (e.g., blogs, articles, forums, mashups, and web content), Acquia Drupal enables developers to quickly stand-up high-quality web sites that can be easily customized to meet the specific needs of their users. This GPL licensed distribution is available for free download and organizations can turn to Acquia for 24/7 private paid support. (Disclaimer: Forum One Communications has implemented web sites for clients on Acquia Drupal.)

PressFlow

Pressflow is a specialized distribution of Drupal developed by Four Kitchens which features extensive performance, scalability, availability, and testing enhancements required to support high traffic sites. One of the key features of Pressflow is that it supports multi-tier proxy layers. Since no version of Drupal can properly handle this architecture, this is a key benefit of the distribution. To date, Pressflow has been implemented by a number of governments and multilateral organizations, including the United Kingdom and World Bank.

Open Atrium

Downloaded over 90,000 times, Open Atrium is a collaboration platform distribution developed by Development Seed to meet the knowledge management needs of large and mid-sized government organizations. The platform provides “out-of-the-box” team collaboration functionality, including blogs, wikis, microblogs, and content dashboards, that enables web developers to rapidly deploy highly customizable social intranets and extranets. This free and open source solution therefore allows a growing number of organizations to substitute proprietary social business software solutions (such as Salesforce and Jive) with Drupal. Within the U.S. federal government, the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Veterans Affairs have already adopted the platform. Looking ahead, one of the platform’s key strengths is its supportability, as demonstrated by the growing ecosystem of open source development shops implementing the solution and the recent announcement that the platform will soon feature private paid support. (Disclaimer: Forum One Communications has implemented web sites for clients on Open Atrium.)

Introducing Open Atrium from Development Seed on Vimeo.

Drupal Commons

Currently under development by Acquia and its partners, Drupal Commons will be a free, open source distribution designed to make the process of building intranet and extranet community sites easier and less costly than commercial social software applications. Slated for official launch this summer, Acquia expects that Drupal Commons will enable the Drupal Community to more easily develop web sites and web applications that require basic social collaboration functionality, including blogs, status updates, and social networking, coupled with seamless document sharing through customized wikis, group discussions, task reminders, and activity streams. Like Acquia Drupal, Drupal Commons will be commercially supported by Acquia.

Real-World Implementations

As the age-old adage goes, “the proof is in the pudding.” Perhaps no better driver exists for the adoption of an emerging software solution than real-world examples of successful implementations for comparable requirements. In the last few years, the list of successful adoptions of Drupal by domestic and worldwide public sector organizations has exploded. This is especially true of federal, state, and local governments in North America and Europe, particularly in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. To illustrate this point, the showcase below features some of the most important examples of government and multilateral organization web sites and web applications currently powered by Drupal.

White House

In 2009, the White House decided to re-launch WhiteHouse.Gov on Drupal. The decision to power one of the most targeted web sites in the world with an open source content management system garnered significant interest from both media and industry. The White House’s decision and associated media coverage helped validate Drupal as a mainstream CMS solution for all-levels of government.

New York Senate

The implementation of Drupal by the New York Senate demonstrates the potential for Drupal at the state level. Experimenting with the platform, the organization was able to extend the existing platform through new innovations specific to their organizational needs, including OpenLegislation and Whitelist.

United States Army

The U.S. Army‘s Black History Month web site, ForLoveofLiberty.Net, features powerful, audience-centric design (including interactive Flash-based elements) and deep integration with social media sites (including YouTube, Flickr, and Issuu). Designed primarily for students, educators, and veterans, the site serves as a great example of how government organizations can use social publishing to bring history to life and enable public discourse on important topics. (Disclaimer: Forum One Communications developed ForLoveofLiberty.Net for the US Army.)

U.S. Department of Education

Drupal is the foundation behind the Department of Education’s main organizational web site. The site demonstrates how a federal department or agency can leverage Drupal to help make information, resources, tools, and funding opportunities more transparent and accessible to citizens.

French Government

The “Portail du Gouvernement” serves as the official French government portal. Like the White House, it serves as an important example of a trustworthy Drupal implementation by a high-profile government organization. It also demonstrates the ability for Drupal to easily support localized content requirements and customizable design.

City of London

The Greater London Authority’s web site demonstrates a successful implementation of Drupal at the local-level. This informative web site makes excellent use of the content management features of Drupal but also leverages social features to encourage public participation with their government and community.

U.S. Department of Commerce

The Department of Commerce chose Drupal to power its Open.commerce.gov site, which was launched in response to the Open Government Directive. The site provides a great example of how government organizations can achieve a simple, yet effective, implementation on Drupal that fosters transparency, accountability, and collaboration.

New Zealand ‘s Ministry for the Environment

NewZealand’s Ministry for the Environment chose Drupal to power its sustainability web site. The features of the site enable users to participate in polls, establish conservation and sustainability goals, discuss topics related to the environment, share ideas, and rate and comment on content. This site is a compelling example of how Drupal can be used by government agencies to shape behavior, change perceptions, and build momentum around important public policy and social issues.

World Bank

Earlier this month, the World Bank launched Data.WorldBank.org, an open data initiative aimed at making the 2,000+ World Bank data indicators more transparent and accessible to the public. Using MapBox, OpenLayers and Flot, the World Bank was able to create a powerful data analysis and visualization web application supported by an intuitive user interface. This visually appealing site not only demonstrates the potential of off-the-shelf Drupal modules like Features, Context, and Views 3, but also points to the inherent extensibility of Drupal when properly coupled with other open source solutions. (Disclaimer: Forum One Communications was a subcontractor to the vendor who designed and developed this web site.)

United Kingdom Datastore

Whereas many other government sites utilize Drupal’s social and interactive features and emphasize citizen participation, the UK’s Data.gov.uk site builds on Drupal’s other skill set: content management. The UK leveraged Drupal’s content and database management capabilities to build a publicly accessible data store.

Young Professionals in Foreign Policy

While not specific to the public sector, Young Professional’s in Foreign Policy’s organizational web site is a wonderful example of a Drupal implementation to support large, globally distributed user communities seeking to collaborate on foreign policy issues. The organization’s simple design reflects the tradeoffs international governmental and multilateral organizations can make to enable cost-effective social functionality with Drupal. (Disclaimer: Michael Walsh is the Chair of the Public Diplomacy and Cultural Relations Discussion Group at YPFP.)

311 is an abbreviated dialing designation set up for use by municipal governments in both the U.S. and Canada. Dialing 311 in communities where it is implemented will typically direct a caller to a call center where an operator will provide information in response to a question, or open a service ticket in response to report of an issue. The difference between 311 and other abbreviated dialing designations (like 911) can be summed up by a promotional slogan for the service used in the City of Los Angeles:

“Burning building? Call 911. Burning question? Call 311.”

311 is operated in most large cities in the U.S. and several smaller jurisdictions as well. 311 is also a designated dialing code in Canada, and has been implemented in a number of cities in that country as well. A primary justification for 311 operations it to reduce the volume of non-emergency calls to 911, helping ensure that 911 operators are not burdened with calls that are not of an emergency nature. The first municipality to implement 311 was the City of Baltimore, Maryland (October, 1996). The largest 311 operation is that of New York City, which handles an average of 43,000 calls per day, and provides translation services in 170 different languages. On June 20, 2007, the NYC 311 service received its 50 millionth call.

311 on the Web

A key function of 311 services is to provide easy access to general information from municipal government. A March 2010 report on the City of Philadelphia’s 311 operation by the Pew Charitable Trust’s Philadelphia Research Initiative found that the overwhelming majority of callers to the service were looking for basic information:

“On average in 2009, seven in ten callers to Phillly311 were looking for basic or general information. On average, 19 percent needed to be transferred to another department or line, a rate that Philly311 likes to keep low. Another 9 percent were asking for a service, requiring an agent to submit a formal request to another city department.”

Because the web is an ideal medium for providing standard information in response to general information requests, most 311 operations include a web component with lists of frequently asked questions and information frequently requested by callers. This web presence for 311 helps offload callers from call center operators and provide options for more web savvy and connected citizens. Several 311 operations (including NYC and San Francisco) have worked to incorporate Twitter and other social media tools into their services.

The Rise of the 311 API

The first 311 API was deployed by the District of Columbia, which deployed the first version of its API in May of 2009 to coincide with its “Apps for Democracy: Community Edition” development contest to encourage the development of applications that use the API. The winner of the Apps for Democracy contest was a combination iPhone / Facebook application called SocialDC. DC is currently working with leaders of the Open311 initiative and officials in other cities like San Francisco to standardize the next version of its 311 API on the Open311 specification. In early 2010, the City/County of San Francisco became the second city to deploy a public API for interacting with its 311 system.

The Open311 Initiative

The Open311 initiative is an effort to create a uniform specification for 311 APIs. The goal is create a standard specification for a 311 API that would be deployed in multiple cities, allowing application developers to build applications that would work with any municipal API that conforms to the standard. The API deployed by San Francisco conforms to the Open311 standard, although the standard itself is likely to change as more municipalities and developers become involved in the Open311 initiative. The District of Columbia is working with the Open311 initiative and others to standardize its existing API to the Open311 specification. Other cities like Edmonton and Boston are set to deploy Open311 APIs in the near future.

311 and Open311 Video

More 311 and Open311 links

• 311 on Wikipedia
• Open311.org
• A Work in Progress: Philadelphia’s 311 System After One Year
• 311 on Vox Populi
• DC Open311 API
• DC311
• Apps for Democracy: Community Edition

Overview:

To establish an advisory committee to issue nonbinding government-wide guidelines on making public information available on the Internet, to require publicly available Government information held by the executive branch to be made available on the Internet, to express the sense of Congress that publicly available information held by the legislative and judicial branches should be available on the Internet, and for other purposes.

Video intro to POIA:

Press conference with Rep. Israel, Sunlight Foundation Executive Director Ellen Miller and Personal Democracy Forum Founder Andrew Rasiej announcing the bill:

Israel and Miller discuss POIA on MSNBC:

More POIA

• Introducing POIA by Sunlight Labs Director Clay Johnson
• Sunshine online Washington Post editorial
• POIA Website: thepoia.org
• POIA on OpenCongress
• #thepoia hashtag on Twitter
• Full text of legislation

These resources can be rapidly self-provisioned online with no service provider interaction. The service is fully managed by the provider, freeing users from the finer details of system maintenance.

Services are sold on-demand and provisioned on a pay-per-use or metered-use basis, similar to a utility. Services are also elastic, meaning they will automatically scale to meet fluctuations in demand so a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time.

Cloud services typically fall into three broad categories:

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Software services can include anything from Web-based email to specialized inventory control and database processing software. The user interacts with the software product through a front-end portal and because the service provider hosts both the application and the data, the end user is free to use the service from anywhere.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Platform as a Service provides a set of software and product development tools hosted on the service provider’s infrastructure. Developers can create custom software applications on the provider’s platform over the Internet. Service providers may use APIs, website portals or gateway software installed on the user’s computer to enable interoperability with other systems. (*note: There are currently no standards for interoperability or data portability in the cloud)

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Sometimes referred to as utility computing, Infrastructure as a Service provides virtual server instances with unique IP addresses and blocks of on-demand storage. Users can start, stop, access and configure their virtual servers and storage via the provider’s application program interface (API). Users pay for only as much capacity as is needed, and the cloud provides more capacity automatically as soon as it is required.

Advantages of cloud computing for the federal government

Cloud computing offers a cost-effective and service-oriented approach for sharing computing resources across the government. Being able to access a powerful pool of common infrastructure, applications, information, and solutions greatly improves communication and collaboration across government in addition to providing incredible cost savings. The overall objective is to create a more agile federal enterprise, where services can be provisioned and reused on demand to meet changing business needs.

How cloud computing enables government transparency

Cloud computing is an excellent tool for fast, easy, secure and economical data sharing. By using a hybrid cloud environment, a government agency can easily port data sets into a secure computing environment and that data can be safely accessed by outside parties via open data APIs or commercial cloud services such as Amazon EC2 or Goggle App Engine.

Government clouds underway

• NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform
• DISA’s Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE)

More on cloud computing

• National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition of cloud computing
• Wikipedia: Cloud computing
• NIST: Cloud computing
• Apps.gov: A collection of Cloud services available to Government Agencies
• Vivek Kundra’s apps.gov announcement: Streaming at 1:00: In the Cloud

Federal cloud bodies

• Cloud Computing Advisory Council
• Cloud Computing Executive Steering Committee

Videos

The Benefits of Government Cloud Computing

Technology, Innovation and Government

Vivek Kundra introduces apps.gov

Aneesh Chopra, Federal CTO discusses Cloud Computing

Linda Cureton, NASA CIO discusses Cloud Computing

Popular private-sector clouds

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
• Google App Engine
• Rackspace
• Salesforce
• Microsoft Windows Azure

About Crisis Commons:

CrisisCommons is a grassroots organization that facilitates partnerships and maintains a network of technology volunteers to respond to specific needs in times of crisis. People work on projects based on their skills and interests to create technological tools and resources for responders to use in mitigating disasters and crises around the world.

We are an international network of professionals drawn together by a call to service. We are developers, specialists, communicators, first responders, project managers, and people who just want to help! We focus on neutrality, transparency, and collaboration and believe in the power of one person, and collaboration with others, to make a difference.

About CrisisCamp:

When there’s a crisis or a need for us to respond, we come together for action. Our events are called CrisisCamps. It is an individual event with an overall purpose to better understand crisis response needs, and to create specific tools for specific problems. CrisisCamps may happen in multiple locations at the same time. The world is connected – we are connected.

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