Innovative Collaboration with the aGov Drupal distro
Pia Waugh, Director of Coordination and Gov 2.0 for Technology & Procurement Division, at the Australian Government Department of Finance recently gave a talk about collaborative innovation. She challenged attendees from the public sector to step outside their organisational silos and work together to make the most of their resources. She acknowledges the constant pressure public servants are under when being asked to deliver more and more with less and less, but suggests collaborative innovation as the key to doing exactly that.
The open source community epitomises the principle of innovative collaboration. Competitors often work together to drive technology forward. It’s a strange concept for some. But for those of us in open source software development communities, it’s as natural as breathing.
aGov is a Drupal Distribution. It forms the foundation for govCMS, the new hosted web content platform for Australian Government agencies. The Australian Government is joining a growing list of governments around the world adopting Drupal as the standard baseline for publishing content online. The Canadian government is using a Drupal distribution, as does the Estonian government. The Dutch government has also benefitted from agency collaboration on a common Drupal theme.
aGov is open source. Anyone can participate in the ongoing development of this platform on Drupal.org. To actively collaborate on the project you will first need to register an account. It’s easy, and free.
Once people are signed up, they’re able to search the Drupal issue queues, comment on issues, and even post their own issues, feature requests, give reviews and submit patches. For more information on how to contribute to the Drupal community see https://www.drupal.org/contribute.
With an open platform beneath us, we have to wonder, what might the future hold for Government web content management? govCMS and aGov represent an enormous opportunity for the Australian Drupal community to heed Pia’s rallying cry and engage in some innovative collaboration.
Let’s work together.