Slack

How and why Los Angeles deployed open source and agile

Posted on by Luke Fretwell

Last week at DrupalCon, representatives from the city of Los Angeles, CivicActions and Acquia shared their development and project management process to begin migrating and consolidating websites across 40 agencies to a single instance using Acquia Cloud Site Factory.

The teams shared how they moved to the open source content management system Drupal, created a responsive web design theme, developed key features and integrated other services such as video and data.

The first sites included in the consolidation plan are lacity.org and lacityview.org.

The presentation also includes a retrospective on goals achieved, areas of improvement and lessons learned. The city’s LA team adopted agile development practices and, based on the success of the project, has been asked to train other agencies.

Project management and development tools used include SMACSS, Slack, Basecamp, GitHub, Google Hangouts and Jira.

Video:

Feds finally get some Slack

Posted on by Luke Fretwell

SlackIn slightly surprising but welcomed news, the U.S. General Services Administration announced approved terms of service agreements for the collaboration service Slack.

From GSA:

The team communication platform, Slack, is a collaborative working area. The tool has an array of features – one-on-one messaging, private groups, persistent chat rooms, direct messaging – and is available as both an app and web platform. Users are able to search all of the content in a team’s Slack through one search box. This TOS agreement was negotiated by the Department of State.

Other newly-approved services include IFTTT, StackExchange and Trello.