Written by:
Mihai Moscovici

 

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Drupal for Governmental Websites

The tech world is buzzing around the news that WhiteHouse.gov is now running on Drupal, an open-source, free and totally accessible to the public Content Management System.

The hype is even higher because of the remarkably excellent reviews about Drupal coming from the White House administration. Macon Phillips, White House new media director told The Associated Press: "This (Drupal) is state-of-the-art technology and the government is a participant in it. We now have a technology platform to get more and more voices on the site."

In addition, Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder, points out few crucial elements about WhiteHouse.gov, Drupal and open-source technology in general:

"Drupal is a perfect match for an open and transparent government. Drupal is a great fit to reduce cost and to act quickly. Drupal's flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems.
Governments realize that Open Source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary software they are not being locked into a particular technology... they can benefit from the innovation that is the result of thousands of developers collaborating on Drupal.
Drupal can help governments provide greater transparency, higher velocity, and more flexibility." source

However, there were concerns raised about the security level of the open-source technology. When it comes to security issues in Drupal, it is important to know that Drupal is made collaboratively by thousands exceptional developers that put all their best knowledge and skills into making Drupal the best CMS in the world.

"Security is fundamentally built into the development process because the community is made up of people from all across the world, and they look at the source code from the very start of the process until it's deployed and after," said Terri Molini of Open Source for America. source

Take a look at our Ultimate Drupal Showcase to see the multitude of governmental websites already running on Drupal from countries such as USA, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Canada, New Zealand, etc. Here are just some quick examples of governmental websites:

White House

French Government


Dutch State Service for Cultural Heritage


Belgium

More articles
Whitehouse.gov using Drupal
Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal
White House opens Web site programming to public
WhiteHouse.gov Goes Drupal
Obama elsker open source: Whitehouse.gov skifter til Drupal (Danish)

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Written by:
Mihai Moscovici

 

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Drupal for .edu

University websites are one of the most complex online systems: 1) hundred of thousands accounts, 2) wide variety of integrated components: class scheduler, financial calculator, school email, library, etc. 3) multiple sophisticated algorithms running simultaneously, 4) high degree of flexibility and customization, and many other smaller but vital components. Any .edu site requires a powerful and yet flexible Content Management System that would comply with all complex requirements, and it seems that Drupal is perfectly suited for university websites.

Many universities and colleges are already successful in using Drupal and we had presented some of them in our Ultimate Drupal Showcase. However, recently we had discovered that more universities and colleges are committing their .edu site to Drupal.

Rutgers University, the largest university in the state of New Jersey, is running rutgers.edu on Drupal.

Duke University is located in North Carolina and has about 13,000 undergraduate and graduate students. U.S. News & World Report ranked Duke's undergraduate program 10th among national universities, and the medical, law, and business schools among the top 12 in the USA. duke.edu is now on Drupal.

Strayer University, with more than 44,000 students and over 70 campuses, is also using Drupal as their primary CMS.

Portland State University (PSU), with more than 24,000 students, has recently switched to Drupal.

Stanford Humanities Center is also on Drupal.

In addition, you can watch Paul Albert of Cornell University making a case before administration to use Drupal and providing an excellent overview of how universities Drupal is perfectly suited for any .edu website.

More educational sites on Drupal are listed in the University & Research section of our Ultimate Drupal Showcase and on Drupal founder's, Dries Buytaert, personal blog, under the Education category.

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Business models of the new web

It seems micropayments are the general trend on the web. Early in September, Google announced its micropayments platform that could save the newspaper industry, or to help monetize the all free new/social media. On the other side, there are many local/regional players betting on micropayments. For instance, micropayments.dk is a new initiative in Denmark that already managed to attract on their side some of the biggest national content producers.

Yes, the micropayment system has a huge potential, but there are other solutions that offer new business opportunities and call for innovation. This is one of the perspectives found in a recent study on "Business models of the new web: The economics of content, software and social networks" by Nikita Gazarov. The research paper is about 30 pages, but it's totally worth the reading. Here is a brief summary of the study with its main concepts and statements:

The micropayment problem
There are various payment methods which balance between convenience, security and minimizing technical costs, but ultimately there is a tradeoff between them, and the overall transaction costs are generally too high to use per-article pricing. An obvious solution would be to sell access to bundles of articles... but as the demand for such content is really thin, it's never a significant part of the total revenue.

Links and visitor multiplication
Increased number of visitors means increased number of links which means that the number of visitors is further increased (both via links and searches) (the loop goes on). This effect makes it much more costly, than an oversimplified economic analysis may show, to hide the content behind a paywall. Free content would significantly increase traffic to newspapers' websites, but it would be worthless if it could not be converted into revenue.

Advertising
The fundamental problem with current advertising technology, however, is that it prevents the spread of information. It relies on pageviews and thus restricts the use of content/information to a particular website. However, if the copyright holder had a way to get significant revenue from republishing, it would be in his best interest to allow to republish their content. Actually, it's a solid business opportunity to create an advertising platform that would take the origin of the article into consideration and split the revenue from page-views between the copyright holder, the republishing website and the ad platform.

P.S. Indeed, it's easier to manage and handle a micropayments system, but it's not clear whether it would be good enough to save the newspaper industry. Having a more complex approach, like the one mentioned in the research-paper, could provide an alternative way to capitalize on online content. Anyway, the web is about openness, collaboration and socialization.

Image: feedhenry.com

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Vote for DrupalCon Copenhagen in 2010

It's time to choose the next location for DrupalCon 2010 in Europe. The voting is already open for the two candidates: Berlin and Copenhagen. It's a close tie right now (50/50), but the voting is open till October 13, and it's totally impossible to predict the final results.

The Danish DrupalCon Team has done a tremendous job and drafted an outstanding proposal to prove Copenhagen is the perfect place for the next DrupalCon. Among the many reasons, it would be worth to mention that the Danish Drupal community "has organized 3 DrupalCamps, some DrupalDay events, and a lot of meetups. The DrupalCamps have taken place in Copenhagen, each time with more than 100 attendees and a strong showing of international Drupal developers. At each camp, we have made a big effort to reach out to new users and businesses."

Denmark is quite unique in its approach for Drupal. Danish businesses, from small companies to large corporations, acknowledge Drupal as the best solution for their online needs. Just few stunning examples. The newly released fdm.dk is probably the biggest Drupal site ever built (and yes, it's made by Propeople). On the other hand, one of the biggest Danish media holding Berlingske Media is moving all their sites to Drupal. Drupal is hitting really hard in Denmark and the international Drupal community can show their support to accelerate this trend.

Having the DrupalCon in Copenhagen is an advantage for both the community and for the local business climate. The community can benefit from unique insights and case studies presented by Danish companies, while Danish businesses will feel rewarded to have the entire Drupal community focusing attention on them.

Denmark is the gateway to Scandinavia. Many Danish businesses have close connections in countries such as Sweden, Norway and Finland. DrupalCon Copenhagen will bring Drupal into focus in the entire Scandinavia and push Drupal beyond Denmark's border.

Finally, you know when in Denmark you'll probably drink the best beer in the world.

Vote now for DrupalCon Copenhagen!

P.S. DrupalCon Copenhagen proposal is both for 2010 and 2011, so make sure you vote for DrupalCon Copenhagen in 2011 also. Just to increase our chances.

P. P.S. You'll need to create a user account on Drupal.org to be able to vote.

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