• How to propose Drupal as a solution to meet collaboration technology platform requirements for the Open Government Directive plan
• Training and support for setting up a Drupal site at http://www.[agency].gov/open
• Planning for security and scalability of  an organization’s OGD Drupal site
• Design and implementation of Drupal sites to meet specific OGD requirements
• How to get Drupal Certification and Accreditation for Drupal for your agency

Acquia’s vice president of business development, Tim Bertrand, explains:

“Drupal has always seen great success in the government sector and now with the OGD in play, we expect that even more agencies will see the value of Social Publishing in meeting these requirements.”

Acquia will also offer a seminar series for U.S. federal, state and local governments to discuss adoptions and best practices for government use.  This is definitely a smart move as risk averse government agency IT decision makers will take comfort in the successes of their peers with Drupal Social Publishing.

Acquia appears poised to take advantage of the growing interest in open source and social media.  Increased use of Drupal will open the door further to open source usage within governments, in the U.S. and worldwide.  In doing so, Acquia is definitely playing its part as a founding member of Open Source for America.

Comments

Last week the Dutch government hosted the first ODF plugfest: creators, implementors and end-users met up to improve OpenDocument interoperability for real, and it worked out well.

House’s ruless were clearly set, NoiV program and the OpenDoc Society created an appropriate environment to avoid flaming and to concentrate on fine tuning ODF interoperability.

I have been long advocating the need for public administrations to take part in the process to certify standards’ compliance, and it is a pleasure to testify the merits of the Dutch Government.

>”The fact that this ODF Interoperability Workshop was organized is a clear sign that we are moving in the next phase in supporting ODF,” said Ineke Schop, Programm Manager at Nederland Open in Verbinding. “The use of open standards rely on available implementations and interoperability comes via these implementations. So I am extremely pleased with the support and commitment from vendors and open source projects at the workshop.”

Ineke Schop – who actually was originally supposed to join the ForumPA open source session – and her colleagues made an excellent job, showing the world what can be done.

Among the many results the Plugfest’s testing environment (officeshots), not open available yet (and also ODF cloud validation is on the way) and a draft working definition of interoperability (open to proposals).

IETF showed the way years ago, making clear that IETF was and is interested in working systems that can be quickly implemented. I am looking forward to participate or to organize another ODF Plugfest, the upcoming OpenOffice.org  Conference 2009 seems an appropriate venue for the event.

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