How Procurement Can Shape Software

OpenConcept believes in the importance of community & the power of open source. Drupal is a great software product, but the community behind it is bigger and better than the software itself. Open source approaches are really disruptive when they are applied properly because they can disrupt the producer/consumer mindset which has been drilled into our heads over the last 50 years. When we realize that we can contribute something which helps others and by making the community stronger also helps ourselves. Sadly there are a few process in place which really hinder that participation. There are a lot of...

Bits are Abundant - So Lets Start Thinking That Way!

Buckminster Fuller was a real visionary, but he died in 1983 and the backbone of the Internet TCP/IP was only standardized in 1982, so it would be hard to imagine how he would have been able foresee either the World Wide Web, let alone the re-thinking of intellectual property that has come about with the growth of Free Software (or Open Source Software). He definitely thought out of the box as he strove to "make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation." One of his main critiques of our economic system was...

DrupalCon with Vincenzo

We did it! The Drupal community successfully fundraised to bring Vincenzo Rubano to DrupalCon Portland. Vincenzo is a blind Italian student that has been contributing to Core for the last year. This was one of the first successful crowdsourcing efforts in the Drupal community and we were really happy to show that it can work. This proved that Drupal developers and shops are willing to use alternative means to bring folks to DrupalCon. The week went fast, but I wanted to highlight a few key elements of our discussions from the conference. The first person we wanted to meet with...

Drupal Association Guest Blog: Drupal Crowd-Funding Success!

We did it! The Drupal community raised $5k to bring Vincenzo Rubano to DrupalCon Portland. This is an amazing accomplishment that demonstrates that crowdsourcing to support the Drupal community can work very well. Although it's been an idea that's been brewing for a while, we've been doing all that we could to bring Vincenzo to a DrupalCon . Vincenzo is a blind Italian student who is just finishing high-school. In the fall he started contributing enhancements to Drupal 8. As a screen reader user, he has been able to identify & test problems and effectively communicate them through the issue...

What Managers Need to Know About Security

Viagra & Government Sites - A screencapture from Google
This is was originally titled What Communications Managers Should Know (and Do) About Web Security , but that was just way too long a title. Security is something that everyone needs to understand on a basic level in our modern society, but staff need to know more as their organizational mission can also be jeopardized. For people in management it is especially important as they set the tone for everyone else. IT security simply cannot be left to the techies to take care of. The risks are huge, it’s complicated, and unfortunately if management ignores it, it won’t just go...

Crowd Funding for Drupal Accessibility

Photo with John, Vincenzo & myself in front of the DrupalIcon
We were successfully able to raise the funds to bring Vincenzo to DrupalCon. Thanks everyone, was a great community effort! I first encountered @falcon03 in the Drupal 8 issue queue in September of 2012. At that point I didn't know why he was interested in accessibility issues or what, if anything, he had to contribute to the discussion. With the Drupal 7 Core issue queues, over 400 people have participated in the discussions, patches and tests. Most are active on just a couple issues out of the many that were tagged with accessibility. A few of the participants, like Jason...

Videos from DrupalCamp Ottawa

We really enjoyed the opportunity to be part of organizing Ottawa's first DrupalCamp. It was a great success, and as a platinum sponsor we were happy to see it take place. There were a lot of good presentations, but we'd like to highlight a few of them here on our site. The first is a great talk by Tom Erickson, CEO of Acquia talking about Drupal & government around the world. As an Acquia Partner, OpenConcept was really happy that so many of their team was able to come in to participate in this event. It was also a pleasure...

Ontario.ca Chooses Drupal - A Win for the AODA

Ontario government home page
We were happy to see that at the end of 2012, the main website for the Government of Ontario(GoO) moved to Drupal 7. Their new site demonstrates that it is possible to have a visually interesting site that meets the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act(AODA). Many folks reading this blog post will know that the AODA requires a wide range of organizations within Ontario to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0 AA). WCAG is an International standard organized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), they are responsible for a number of standards for the Internet including...

Drupal 7 WET/WxT Variant - The Government of Canada's Distribution

We've been strategizing, evaluating & deploying the Government of Canada's (GoC) Drupal 7 Web eXperience Toolkit (WxT) since it was first released over a year ago. We've implemented this for government agencies inside & outside the GoC because it is clear that so many agencies need to meet the dual challenge of a site which is both bilingual & accessible. The Drupal Variant of the Web eXperience Toolkit is an open platform for web publishing which has a critical mass of public sector agencies collaborating with it publicly in GitHub. It is also exciting to see institutions like the University...

Drupal 8 Accessibility Sprint Roundup

After sprint beers
Drupal's first Accessibility Sprint was a great success with around 30 people participating either on site or remotely. It was graciously hosted in the offices Evolving Web , where we were able to take advantage of their great location in the old port of Montreal. It was organized by the Montreal Drupal Association and we're really fortunate to have both accessibility maintainers present as Everett Zufelt & Brandon Bowersox-Johnson , were able to make their way up. The biggest impact of the sprints are the things that you can never quantify. The building face-to-face relationships within the Drupal community is...