Gathering Input About Government Procurement of Open Source Software

I attended an excellent talk last night about GCPedia that was presented by Jeff Braybrook, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Canada at a Third Tuesday Ottawa Gathering . It was excellent to hear more about the history of the adoption of the open source tool Mediawiki within the Government of Canada. Jeff described Canada's CTO office as being "Hawkish about open source", and wanting to use it as much as possible. At a time when procurement officers and IT departments are still questioning whether or not open source can be used within government, this was great news. His view that...

Bringing in Twitter Into Social Marketing Mix

Even earlier this year I was pretty convinced that I wouldn't be twittering because I thought it was going to be a waste of time. Who has the time to send out 'interesting links', quick dinner ideas or to follow what people are thinking about, even in issues I'm passionate about. Well, apparently in 2009, I've found the means to bring Twitter into my life . I did so because I saw the efforts I was already putting into Web 2.0 tools and realized that I could link these applications together. I was already using Del.icio.us to keep track of...

Quick Accessibility Patch Accepted Into Core for Drupal 7

For a list of Accessibility issues for Drupal 7 . Wanted to make a brief announcement about a small patch that OpenConcept contributed to Drupal 7 to enhance accessibility. Drupal's accessibility is quite good, but there are always ways to improve for any software. In this case someone reported a problem with radio buttons where the tag was not being associated properly with the appropriate form elements. I looked at this problem, and rolled a patch for it (which included checkboxes as well) and then attached it to the project. As was discussed at the March 2008 DrupalCon, unit testing...

Building a Strategic Web Communications Plan

OpenConcept has been working with our clients since 1999 to ensure that their content is positioned well. There have been a lot of changes over the past decade and we have been involved in many organizational efforts to understand the web. We have only recently started offering strategic planning workshops for organizations who want to come to a greater understanding of how to make better use of the Internet. Involving both technical and senior communications staff we can walk through issues that all national organizations are struggling with. The web moves quickly and it is critical that those people who...

Reading More About WCAG 2.0 & SEO

I've been blogging a lot recently about accessibility. This was started recently by the work that we have been doing around the Common Look and Feel of Government of Canada websites, but I've been involved in disability issues for a long time and so really would like to see the Internet be friendlier to a whole bunch of people with different abilities. If WCAG 2.0 is the current path to make information more accessible, it is in my best interests not only to have a checklist of items that our sites need in order to be Level A, AA or...

Fangs, Unique Strings and Drupal Discussions

I started a discussion about the need for unique strings withing the Drupal Groups Accessibility forum. The new WCAG 2.0 standards discourage webmasters from linking to different places with the same text. This does totally make sense and has some reasonable SEO implications as well. "Read more" is useful only if you have the visual reference to know where it is situated. "More about Example Article Title" is a much more descriptive way to link to a new page, but it is harder to program. It's also difficult when you have other types of generic links at the bottom of...

Living Leadership, the Executive Leadership Program of the Canada School of Public Service

The goal of this project was the establishment of an online collaborative work and learning environment for a group of distributed learners in the Living Leadership, the Executive Leadership Program of the Canada School of Public Service. The participants are executives from the public sector using the website to access information, documents and participant information. Each participant has a blog as well as a customized learning plan page maintained by the staff. The website is bilingual and features a calendar of events for the program. These elements were required to fulfill the Living Leadership Program’s blended learning needs. This was...

Government Wiki Implementations

So I decided it would be interesting to do a bit of a search within the Government of Canada's public pages for use or mentions of wiki's. There's been quite a lot of discussion on this front in 2008, so wanted to see where things stood at the beginning of 2009. Unfortunately there were only 404 references to the term wiki within domains with a *.gc.ca domain . Most wiki's aren't public so that isn't too surprising, and the two big instances of wiki implementation within the Government of Canada (GCpedia & NRCan's wiki) certainly aren't visible outside of their...

Translation Tips and Modules for Multilingual Drupal sites

Drupal has some excellent translation functions but deciding which modules to use and how to configure the modules is challenging. There are many different possible configurations depending on your website needs, domain names and content. You'll find there are a lot of choices of modules for setting up a multilingual site.... then there are a lot of key configuration items to enable depending on your website. This post focused on Drupal 6 modules and issues. We will give some example of the difficult decision making involved in translating content. There is no out-of-the-box configuration that seems to work, it all...

Government Accessibility Initiatives

I spent two days earlier this week in presentations to largely government employees about accessibility issues. It was organized by GOL Communications and we were invited largely to do with our work on the working to establish a collaborative CLF themes. There were more presentations about WCAG 2.0 than I'd ever heard prior to this event, and it was interesting to have it broken down int for principals that were pretty understandable. We must all strive to make websites perceivable, operable, understandable & robust. Surely focusing on those priorities as content developers would make our sites more useful for everyone...