Drupal GovCon 2021

Unfortunately, when developing #WCAG2, the Working Group did not envision the current world where mobile is almost ubiquitous. For example, on a mobile device there is no continual access to a keyboard (unless someone is using it as an add-on to the device – or using a Blackberry Classic). WCAG2 requires that all content be accessible to the keyboard interface, but it does not require that all content be accessible to a mouse or to a touchscreen user – which is essential on a mobile device. WCAG2.1 does include some #mobile #accessibility requirements, but doesn’t go far enough. Gian Wild chaired the Mobile Site Sub-Committee to develop a set of Mobile Site Testing Guidelines that are available under Creative Commons. These guidelines are meant to be used in conjunction with WCAG2 (and WCAG2.1) to ensure that sites are accessible to people with disabilities using mobile and tablet devices.

Accessibility is important to all – not everyone using your mobile app, device or wearable will be fully functioning: either because they have a disability or they are simply engaged elsewhere. Gian Wild talks about the things that are essential to avoid when designing mobile apps, devices and wearables to ensure that everyone can use them. She talks about specific mobile accessibility features: pinch zoom, native screen readers, haptic keyboard etc, and system accessibility settings: font size, screen rotation, high contrast etc

🎤 Presenter(s): Gian Wild
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

The Migrate API is a powerful and flexible system to get content and configuration into #Drupal. This presentation will take you behind the curtains to understand how the migration system works and what assumptions it makes. Along the way, we are going to explore how it integrates with other subsystems like the Entity API and Field API for import operations. Additionally, we will explore how to alter #migrations programmatically.

You will learn about:
* Transforming data to match the format expected by various entity types and sub-field targets.
* Establishing relationship among entities. For example: files to media to nodes. Also, multivalue, nested paragraphs to nodes.
* Dynamically modifying migrations using hooks and events .

This session is for people who want a deeper understanding of how Drupal's #Migrate API works. Site builders and developers alike will benefit from the content presented.

This is an intermediate session. Some familiarity with the Migrate API is expected. This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBhkixY-PuA will serve as a good foundation. Attendees are also expected to be familiar with site building Drupal concepts like nodes, content types, and fields. This video talks about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02fvLzPSIjc

🎤 Presenter(s): Mauricio Dinarte
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

The U.S. Web Design System's been around for six years. What will the next few bring? Dan Williams and James Mejia from the #USWDS Core team will look at where the design system's been and where it's going. They'll discuss how the design system can grow and change alongside the evolving needs of developers and the public while staying lightweight, accessible, flexible, and predictable. As USWDS grows beyond 2.0, there's an opportunity to make subsequent versions even easier to integrate and upgrade. #Drupal powers much of the government web, and this session will be an opportunity to discuss the potential, pain, and possibility of using USWDS with Drupal projects — particularly as both your projects and the #design system mature.

🎤 Presenter(s): Dan Williams, James Mejia
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

#Retrospectives are the time within a sprint that a team has the opportunity to reflect on their way of working. They try to understand how they can become better at what they do and how they do it. When facilitated and managed well, retrospectives can propel a team towards success by building a growth mindset, which simply holds that people can learn and grow.

Retrospectives, and the growth mindset, build confidence and collaboration among team members, particularly during times of enhanced stress and pressure, as many of us currently find ourselves in. Retros aren’t always easy to run, though. When managed poorly, a retrospective can easily veer into a blame game and can give the most vocal of opinions the platform without arriving at a path forward. Teammates will often start to opt out of these sessions and you may find they are the first meetings to be removed from the calendar when time is tight.

During this session, attendees will learn how to build trust and stronger relationships within their team by focusing on opportunities for growth and continuous learning. Attendees will leave with an understanding of how to:
+ Facilitate a goal-oriented retrospective
+ Build confidence and collaboration among team members
+ Help teammates feel happier and more fulfilled

🎤 Presenter(s): Meghan Davis
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

As a tech leader, what are you doing for yourself and your team to build #resiliency and #compassion in times of uncertainty? Let's discuss what we can do to notice how we create a limited mindset that resists flexibility in those times when we need it the most. We will unpack the concept of mindful #leadership, and how we can cultivate the skills of emotional intelligence necessary for clarity, trust, and inclusion. Once you see the limitations of your perceptions, your world will open for greater alignment of your work to your life and to those for whom you are responsible.

In this session we explore the tools you will need to be part of a cohesive teams that runs on trust, accountability, and results. We may have time for a short practice and discussion led by a certified mindfulness teacher and facilitator.

At the end of this session, attendees will be able to...
- Recognize when stress has hijacked their critical thinking
- Investigate how building emotional intelligence can be an opportunity for personal and professional growth
- Practice evidence-based strategies to enhance resiliency and self-regulation

🎤 Presenter(s): Dori Kelner
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Despite our best efforts, it’s difficult to future proof a website for #accessibility standards. Your code and design may follow current standards, but will your careful compliance become obsolete when new guidelines are released? What happens when the site is updated or content is entered? What browsers or assistive technology agents do your consumers use?

We will review a holistic approach for the complete lifecycle of an accessible website — including how to iterate on existing content without impacting the hard work you put in during the build. Much like SEO...your work is never done. It should be considered in the initial build, then maintenance, complete with sprint regression testing, etc

Attendees will come away from this session with:
- How to get started on improving accessibility on an existing site
- Tips on what useful combinations of user agents, browsers, devices, etc. to test
- A list of free tools that a site owner/content author can use to be sure their website is compliant before and after a build
- What #WCAG 2.2 guidelines are on the horizon and how they can impact your current website

🎤 Presenter(s): volkswagenchick
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

The security of our web applications plays a huge role in the success of our federal enterprise websites and their continuous improvements and updates. The recent #cyberattacks prompted the Biden Administration to issue Executive Order 14028, aimed at improving the nation's cybersecurity posture and, with that, the push to shape a new revision of the Secure Software Development Framework (#SSDF) by NIST. The process of requesting authorization to perform security testing on production sites can take a long time and is much riskier than testing locally.

In this session, we will cover the SSDF framework around our #Drupal projects and how we can use the OWASP ZAP tool, an open-source web application security scanner, to test our web applications locally before we push code to production. In this session, you will learn:
· Why cybersecurity should be an integral part of new features development planning
· What are some best practices to implement when we create digital experiences
· What tools can be used to help us audit cybersecurity on websites
· How can this help your ATO (Authorization to Operate) process for federal websites

🎤 Presenter(s): Paola Garcia Cardenas
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

This session will cover the basics of getting started with Layout Builder for #Drupal 9. We will cover how it can be used to supercharge your site building tasks so that content editors can utilize the awesome power of #Layout Builder for a unique front-end presentation.

In this talk, we will go over:
- How to get up and running and the basics of setting up a content type for Layout Builder
- Layout Builder Styles module and how it can really help with theming a Layout Builder page
- Layout Builder #Component Attributes for developers to implement custom classes and ids
- Layout builder Library to give content editors easy selection of pre-built layouts
- Layout Builder overrides

By the end of this session, attendees should have a decent working knowledge of Layout Builder.

🎤 Presenter(s): Danny Englander
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Writing Clean / Secure / Performant Code isn't THAT hard... but an awful lot of people don't bother to do it. The question is... why?

My personal take is that as in so many things in life, many developers aren't equipped with the right tools for success. This session is all about integrating the right tools into your project to help you succeed!

In this session we'll look at #PHP examples for #Drupal 9 modules, examine how a "functionally" written module can be improved with things like Dependency Injection, #performance / #security review, coding standards, etc. We'll also dig into why these things are so important and why to some folks (like me) it might mean the difference in you getting hired to do a job (if you can demonstrate these concepts) and not getting the call back.

This will be a session heavily focused on PHP development and coding, so while all are welcome, it is advised that you have some proficiency in PHP, Composer, working with an IDE and terminal, etc. to get the most out of the session.

🎤 Presenter(s): mikemadison
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

In this session we'll talk about the complexities of migrating and rebuilding the official DC Lottery website. We migrated the site from an outdated custom #CMS to #Drupal 8/9. We'll talk about the complications along the way, like the fact that we had to port over 3.5 million drawing numbers, dating all the way back to 1984, hundreds of games, scratchers, winners and prizes, along with the thousands of the active daily users.

Organizing the content in a way that made sense, but that could also be #accessible and easy to find for our users was quite a challenge, especially on a website that gets updated with new content every 5 minutes, almost 24/7. Having to come up with a Virtual Events platform & giving users access to a custom user dashboard are some of the additional challenges we will cover.

In the end we'll share how the combined strategies gave us an amazing site that has both users and our client thrilled, with plans to expand it even further.

🎤 Presenter(s): Rolando Scott
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

This might not be a popular opinion, but the Scrum Master is NOT the most important role on an #Agile team - GASP! If not the Scrum Master, then who? #Product #Owners are the most overlooked, underfunded, and misunderstood roles no one is talking about as it relates to the success (or failure) of Agile-based delivery in government. Join me to find out how government agencies can have more success by understanding the criticality of the Product Owner role and how by investing in the Product Owner and Product Management roles can lead to more predictable product (not project) delivery, happier customers, and a more successful mission.

🎤 Presenter(s): billa
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

The #Drupal certification allows developers to demonstrate a well-rounded understanding of the fundamentals of Drupal and best practices to implement them. In this session we will cover how to prepare for the #certification, what a study guide could look like, general information about the exam, practice areas, previous relevant experience and what to expect from the test.

Attendees will have an opportunity to learn about these resources, establish their expectations as they prepare for the exam, as well as understanding the benefits and responsibilities of becoming a Certified Drupal Developer.

🎤 Presenter(s): Joe Pond
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Are you ready to upgrade your organization's #Drupal 7 website? Now is a great time to get this ball rolling, as well as an opportunity to tackle your team’s larger website wishlists.

Before actually embarking on your Drupal #upgrade, take a step back to consider what works well on your current website, and what needs to improve in the next iteration.

Specific items to consider are:
- What pain points do you have when it comes to editing content, creating landing pages with complex layouts, or reusing content.
- Are there any situations that have required you to “break the rules” to publish content using custom HTML? Have you had to get creative and use a content type for something other than what it was designed to do?
- Have your content needs significantly changed since the site was built? What content do you wish you could publish but currently aren’t able to?
- Is there any functionality or #content that exists on the site which you definitely don’t need anymore?
- What do you love about your current website that you want to replicate or expand on?

🎤 Presenter(s): Christina Crawley, briantschu
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

There are occasions when transactions processing becomes a challenge due to the dataset being large in size, large in record volume, or both. This can result in the processing failing at any point before its completion. There is a silver lining in this dark cloud, and it is queued batch processing. It is likely that you are familiar with batch processing – executing activities in the background, with cron processing being the common example. Queued #batch #processing facilitates processing the batch in smaller chunks, thus avoiding the pitfalls that might be experienced, otherwise.

Using examples of entity and file processing, attendees will learn:
• The principles behind batch processing
• The principles behind processing a batch as a queue
• Different approaches to creating queued batch processes in code
• Launching execution from a link or from a form
• Ways to manage a queue
• The steps for displaying progress

🎤 Presenter(s): Jeff Greenberg, vlyalko
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Did you know you can take your entire #Drupal site and convert it into a #static site? running the same Drupal theme? Yep. You can run your entire Drupal site as a static site now!

With a static site, you'll never have to worry about #security, scaling, or performance.

This panel will discuss the pros and cons of using Drupal static sites, and the tools you can use to get started.

VA.gov has been running one of the largest public Drupal static sites. We will discuss why they chose to go that route and what their plans are for the future.

We will also look at the tools you can use to convert your Drupal site and the changes you’ll have to make to your development and editorial workflow.

🎤 Presenter(s): Salim, Robbie Holmes, Elijah Lynn
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Machine Learning and AI jobs have jumped by almost 75% over the past four years and are poised to keep growing. Investing in your education by learning more about these high-growth technologies is a solid strategy. But if you're not familiar with the tech, where should you start? #Drupal developer Rick Torzynski has the answer for you.

In this talk, you'll learn more about: Machine Learning (#ML) and Deep Learning as a discipline; How Drupal uses ML; Current ML modules in Drupal; the role of #Python and Jupyter Notebooks in ML; new capabilities provided by TensorFlow.js; how #TensorFlow.js is a game changer and, most importantly, a demo of Rick's newest development "TensorFlow.js", an ML-enabled Drupal Component module designed to facilitate ML-processing directly in Drupal. He'll also demonstrate the future of the module, demonstrating how it can play a strong role in enhancing government agency websites.

🎤 Presenter(s): mandolinrick
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Drupal has long been known as a top-notch content management system. It’s well-know for its flexibility, meaning that you can customize it to fit your content model, and also build custom features around that content. As we move into the age of digital experience platforms, where content management is just one piece of the puzzle, we should be asking ourselves how #Drupal fits into the landscape.

In this session, we’ll talk about the future from a #content #strategy perspective and what role Drupal will play. Topics will include:
- The benefits of a content-centric digital experience platform and how Drupal stands out
- The future role of the content editor
- The right way to integrate content strategy into a redesign project, and measuring content success
- What it means to provide flexible content management tools and why that’s important
- The continued importance of a strong content model
- How to use Drupal as a digital experience platform rather than just a content management system

🎤 Presenter(s): Suzanne Dergacheva
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

The concept of IAC is increasingly getting popular lately.

The practice of setting up a stack or resources on cloud with the help of a script or template is not only considered necessary but a must have in any project life cycle.

In this session we go through why this is so important.

We will dive in to some of the basics of #Terraform and getting started with Terraform script.

In the end will have a demo on creating Aws resources to setup #Drupal. We will automate this through Azure #Devops CI/CD

🎤 Presenter(s): Wilfred Arambhan
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

We believe fast cycles of #prototyping and testing accelerate learning, reduce risk, and improve outcomes. We started a dedicated internal team to explore new processes and tools for using web-based prototyping to help our delivery teams lower the barriers to making ideas more tangible more quickly.

As part of the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience, government agencies are required to modernize their websites using the U.S. Web Design System (#USWDS) to improve the public’s customer experience. Our team is working to empower designers to take ownership of prototyping in the web medium and enable them to better collaborate with developers through the common language of the USWDS.

A typical need we see in government is for people to fill out a simple screener before they complete a larger task. When these screeners are long, onerous, and confusing, they lead to wasted time and bad data. Drawing inspiration from one of our HHS projects, we decided to build an accessible, plain-language, effortless template to allow for rapid iteration of a screener, before starting on any production code. After making and testing 3 versions in less than 4 weeks, we demonstrated major improvements in user experience, accessibility, and usability that laid the groundwork for a better product.

Attendees will learn how our designers are using USWDS, GitHub, and other tools to better collaborate with their developer counterparts to align on #design intent early in a project and build confidence in what we’re implementing. We will demonstrate how attendees can use our template to build their own screener, or use it as a starting point for building their own templates.

🎤 Presenter(s): Philip Levy
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Based on knowledge gained from working with teams who are moving or upgrading, we'll review the right people to bring onto the r#edesign committee, guidelines and goal-setting, the minimum viable product, an approach to structuring content, categories and taxonomies, success #metrics, the #RFP, the vendor review, kickoff, the plan for migrations, and how to handle the buildout process from feedback cycles through launch.

#Drupal has been increasingly viewed as a flexible, scalable, and secure platform for universities and government agencies, and powers websites around the world.

🎤 Presenter(s): monicadear
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

One of the key strengths of #Drupal is its flourishing ecosystem for contributed modules. Best of all, you can jump in and add your own module! All you really need is a good idea, though of course some #programming knowledge, understanding of Drupal coding standards, and a few other technical things would help.

This talk will focus less on how to write code or what code you should write, and more on the process of creating a module, submitting it on Drupal.org, and getting it adopted by the #community. We'll touch on such topics as:
- Looking for similar modules that already exist
- Getting help from the community
- Submitting your module - sandbox or full project?
- Getting the word out

You'll hear about the firsthand experiences in developing Smart Date, which went from an idea to one of the top 500 most popular modules on drupal.org in less than two years.

🎤 Presenter(s): mandclu
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Editors say they want flexibility when creating content and landing pages, but this leads to a lack of consistency. Content is difficult to re-use. Your target audiences may be confused or ignored. But what if you could have flexible layouts and structured content?

Lullabot helped Georgia.gov develop a new landing page #design tool that gave state agencies the power to customize their home pages, landing pages, and programs without breaking the mobile-friendly responsive design. Even with this flexibility, the structured #content model made it possible to keep critical information up-to-date across websites and automatically expose rich metadata for search engines.

In this session, you will learn:
- How can I use research to inform decisions around editorial tooling? How do I meet the desires of editors while meeting the needs of other stakeholders and audiences?
- What tools are available in #Drupal to build flexible-yet-structured content?
- What are the pros and cons of these tools, and how can I use them to improve my authoring experience?

🎤 Presenter(s): Greg Dunlap, marsepstein, rachelh_design
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

This session will share how NIAID used structured #data to upgrade its clinical trial section just in time for SARS-COV2 arrival in the US. We'll talk about how we got where we are and where we still need to go to improve the public's ability to access #clinical #trial information.

🎤 Presenter(s): Tori G.
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Solarwinds. Keseya. Attacks on the supply chain are increasing. This session discusses recommended approaches to add #SecDevOps to your development process with some specific recommendations in response to recent supply chain attacks. Followup discussions encouraged.

🎤 Presenter(s): Solomon Gifford
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

In a rapid-changing industry such as web development, the traditional top-to-bottom development approach is no longer practical nor sustainable. Luckily for everyone, a new development approach is quickly becoming the new standard for building robust, scalable and performant #Drupal website. Component-based Development focuses on breaking a webpage down into smaller, more consumable pieces and individually build those pieces. This approach is similar to using lego pieces to build great and better things. There are many advantages to this approach for everyone involved in the development process, these advantages include:
- Reusable #components. Build something once and reuse it as many times as needed.
- A living styleguide which becomes the single source of truth for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
- Better #Collaboration between teams
- Avoid repeating code and reduce regressions by targeting components and reducing scope of work
- ... and much more.

Come join us and learn how your team of designers, digital strategy, content strategy, site-builders, and developers can benefit from a revolutionary approach to building better websites for the government.

🎤 Presenter(s): Mario Hernandez
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

This session includes the interaction between the #AWS #Rekognition service to identify objects and faces in photos and the #Drupal site using the Media Entity and Media Entity Image modules.

Functionality
- Upload images to drupal.
- Stream wrapper set to s3 bucket
- Cloud watch notifies lambda trigger
- Asynchronous task is run and data sent back to Drupal
- Data used in Drupal to set categories the Images

Resources used.
- Drupal CMS
- Drupal s3fs Module
- AWS::S3::Bucket
- AWS::Lambda::Function
- AWS::IAM::Role

Putting it all together Cloud formation is an amazing, seamless way to run an asynchronous task, reducing load on the main server, the way server-less is working is just amazing.

Next steps, upload code to Github, after making it more generalized.

🎤 Presenter(s): joshua1234511
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

It is now actually possible to run #Drupal as a #serverless application.

Serverless Drupal scales continuously and is also optimized for cost and performance. So why are people still managing Drupal on servers?

In this talk, we'll look at a few different ways of going "serverless" with Drupal and the pros and cons of each approach.

We will look at the research done by Voice of America (VOA.gov) to see what #performance and cost benefits your organization can gain from a serverless approach.

The session will be a high-level overview with examples and links to how-to guides.

🎤 Presenter(s): Salim, Joel Lehman
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Our websites are maturing into feature-rich publishing platforms, allowing collaboration across organizations and delivering content across multiple channels. But the out of the box publishing experience is fairly flat -- with content either published or not.

Content moderation is not a trivial feature. It’s a big responsibility to write software that dictates how someone works. Workflows should be a reflection of your individual creative processes. Creating interfaces that are too rigid or don’t allow collaboration will stifle good ideas and accidentally impose an unwanted layer of governance.

This session will explore common offline/institutional workflows and how they map to functions of the #Drupal CMS. We will discuss the lifecycle of content from concept to published copy and look at ways to manage content as it moves through the roles of your institution. Topics include:
* #Moderation: Defining states and transitions that match the roles of each stakeholder.
* Dynamic Permissions: Changing access rules based on content state, history, and ownership.
* Revisioning: Reviewing, purging, and diffing sets of content changes.
* Notifications: Sending messages to stakeholders on content transition.
* Dashboards: Developing interfaces and reports based on content states and the roles of your team.

We will look at real life workflows inspired by client work, including a publications #workflow, a job application website, and a tech-support ticketing system. Finally, we will discuss the benefits of centralizing your content management processes, leveraging features of Drupal over getting lost in a mess of spreadsheets and emails.

🎤 Presenter(s): nJim
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

You know all the buzzwords... Dependency Management, Version Control, Continuous Integration, Virtual Environments. But do you know how to work with all of them?

This session will setup all of the necessary technologies for a new #Drupal 9 project. We'll start with a composer scaffold, setup the necessary git parameters and ignore rules to work with composer, provision a #VM, integrate front end technologies via NPM, and more!

The goal of this session is to equip you with basic knowledge to handle all the #devops you need to successfully own and operate a Drupal 9 site.

🎤 Presenter(s): mikemadison
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Too often, business (mission) teams and development teams work on their own cadence that are often misaligned and out of sync. This tends to cause avoidable delays due to communication breakdowns, bottlenecks, and priority misalignment between teams. This session will review how #Agile methodologies can be leveraged to synchronize planning and execution across interdependent non-development and development teams to better delivery value in a consistent and predictable manner by planning and executing better together.

🎤 Presenter(s): billa
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

The time has come! #Drupal 8 is going end of life VERY soon (just a few weeks after the end of this conference). If you and your organization are still running D8, you are about to lose #security coverage (which is a big problem).

This session is all about the last minute, mad dash to the finish to get you and your site across the line and into Drupal 9 before the end of Drupal 8!

Things covered in this session:
- Finding and fixing #deprecated code using automated tools
- What to test and how to fix the problems you find
- What the update actually looks like, how it works, etc.
- How to avoid this mad dash when Drupal 9 goes End of Life in 2 years (November 2023).

While this will be a technical session, non-technical people may benefit from the strategy and discussion on the topic. There will be some code reviewed, but it's not a coding session.

🎤 Presenter(s): mikemadison
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Have you worked on a project where product requirements change half way through, drastically increasing scope? Perhaps there's a need to iterate in the design phase far longer than originally planned? In Project Management, this type of impact on budget, timeline, and/or #scope is often referred to as an 'incident.' And in some shape or form, we've all had to manage an #incident.

Clear communication internally to the project team and externally to the stakeholders/clients is critical for when the unexpected occurs. During this session, we’ll explore how to foster open and clear communication through the decision making (advice) process and incident management protocol. We'll discuss how this method can be used to manage the high stakes during incidents, keeping them as low as possible, and how it can guide a potentially stressful situation and lead to positive outcomes.

At the end of this session, attendees will be able to:
- Efficiently respond to change without massive disruption to the project
- Deliver value to the client and enhance their experience of working with your team
- Use the session's tools and techniques to improve internal team communication and build trust

While this is a Project and Program Management focused session, the discussion makes it especially appropriate for all members of and roles on a team (at all skill levels) who are working with a client.

🎤 Presenter(s): Meghan Davis
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Media, layouts, and modern administration design are fundamental to creating a delightful user experience for everyone building with #Drupal.

The Easy Out of the Box Initiative is making the editorial experience clear and empowering from the moment Drupal is installed, by getting the Media, Layout Builder, and Claro modules finished up for the Standard profile.

We'll give an update on where these features are now, where they are going, and how you can get involved! We'll also show a case study on how the NSF is using all of these features right now.

🎤 Presenter(s): Emilie Nouveau
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Olivero is the brand new front-end theme for #Drupal. Developing this carried with it lofty requirements, knowing that it will be used with millions of people and devices during its lifetime.

A website's primary navigation is a critical part of its #usability and #accessibility, and is relevant across all websites throughout the web. What may seem simple at first glance rests on a complex foundation, the intricacies of which we will walk through in this in-depth exploration of primary nav development. In this highly entertaining and informative talk we take attendees on a journey through the development of Olivero's primary navigation.

Attendees will learn about:
- Various accessible #navigation patterns
- The challenges of designing a primary navigational bar for a theme in an open source content management system
- Proper use of aria roles and attributes within this context
- Issues (and solutions) to specific accessibility issues
- Real-world accessibility and usability testing on various assistive devices and environments.

While this presentation delves heavily into accessibility, and #UX, attendees will also learn about testing, usability, and even squashing an errant XSS security vulnerability.

🎤 Presenter(s): Mike Herchel
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

It’s 2021 and we have all heard about #accessibility for people with disabilities, maybe even looked into ADA Section 508 or #WCAG. We frequently design and test our system with accessibility in mind, run our automated testing software, and when they pass the tests, we bask in the glow of a job well done. But should we?

Accessibility standards should not be the end goal, but only the bare minimum. We should be striving to create systems that are not just accessible but fully usable and inclusive for people with disabilities.

The problem is disability is not a monolith and the solution is not just designing for screen readers. There is no single "disabled user" persona to use in research, planning, and testing. People with disabilities face a wide range of challenges, and use a wide range of assistive technology to to interface with everything from computer systems to common every-day objects.

Learn first-hand from our panel of experts, including those with disabilities, on the challenges they face, and why bringing #usability to accessibility is so important. Develop compassion by stepping beyond empathy, and committing to becoming part of the solution.

Key learning objectives/takeaways:
* Learn directly from people with varying disabilities how they interact with computer interfaces
* Develop compassion through new understanding of the challenges people using assistive technologies face
* Gain insight into how accessibility standards mark the bare minimum and should not be an aspirational goal
* Motivate the use of UX best practices to create usable systems for people with a wide range of disabilities

🎤 Presenter(s): David Minton
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

#Acquia Lightning has been a cornerstone of the #Drupal Community since Drupal 8's release. However, thanks to significant advancement in Drupal core's own capabilities, many of the features Lightning once provided no longer come from the profile itself. As a result, Acquia has decided to end of life the profile.

Obviously for sites that are using Lightning... this is problematic! Thankfully, the Acquia team has provided a procedure for uninstalling Lightning (without having to totally rebuild your site).

This session will be focused on:
- The necessary tools and tasks to change a Drupal install profile (even on a production website)
- The overall process of uninstalling Lightning and transitioning to a different profile
- A review of some of the gotchas and pitfalls in the process
- A brief look at the process for community / contrib profiles that themselves rely on Lightning
- While this session will be technical in nature, it's not going to be very technically challenging so anyone can attend.

🎤 Presenter(s): mikemadison, rlnorthcutt
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

We would like to share our experience with migrating an over 20-year-old static HTML/Java site to #Drupal 8/9.

The goal of this presentation will be to help government agencies using non-CMS powered websites and why they should port to websites to Drupal given our own experience. Topics that will be covered are what it was like managing an over 20-year-old static website, giving content authoring power to the users, #508 compliance with a modern theme, what it was like working with a large number of internal/external stakeholders, integrations, migrations, web policy, challenges faced, using Google Analytics as a measure of success, and why Drupal was a perfect fit for our needs.

🎤 Presenter(s): Steven Luongo, Sebastian Zang
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

It's easy to forget that our programs actually run on metal; where ones and zeros are stored as charges in physical components. Modern #programming languages give us a false feeling of separation from these circuit boards. Interpreted languages like #PHP offer such flexibility, we often don't consider the low-level issues, such as how our code affects #memory allocation.

This beginner session explores computer science topics related to memory in PHP through practical examples. The goal is to demystify memory allocation so that we can write more efficient scripts. Topics include:
* The basics: What is memory and where is it allocated in the PHP lifecycle?
* Dynamic types: How ZVals allow us to change a string to an array to a boolean; and the costs associated with this flexibility.
* Simple benchmarking: How to capture memory metrics without installing large frameworks or profiling tools.
* Memory leaks: A look at garbage collection in PHP and how to reduce the memory consumption of our scripts.

As processors become faster, the way we use memory can be one of the greatest factors slowing down our program execution. Attendees should leave this session with a better understanding of how memory works and feel empowered to reduce their memory footprint.

🎤 Presenter(s): nJim
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

TikToks and other super short content is all the rage on social media. But for government agencies, we need in-depth reports, resource guides, and toolkits to convey all out data and details. But analyzing this lengthy content is tough. When it's all on one page -- or in a PDF! -- what can you do? Google Analytics' pageview reports don't tell you much.

This talk covers my tricks for getting data on both what your audience reading - as well as *how* they are reading it. I also cover how to use that data to understand your users' interests and plan future content.

Attendees will be able to...
- Use lesser-know feature in web #analytics to understand how people read these documents.
- Use data to identify new topics and gaps in your content strategy.
- Understand how to set up Google Analytics tracking for #metadata in #Drupal and use that data to shape your content.

🎤 Presenter(s): Emily Patterson
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

This session will describe the new #Drupal 9 mtc.ca.gov website.

This site was recently migrated from Drupal 7, but has a handful of interesting new features, including a new approach to the #Granicus meeting importer (as demonstrated at last year's DrupalGovCon).

🎤 Presenter(s): jenlampton
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Understanding your users can uncover the ways they work and the challenges they have interacting with each other inside and outside your institute.

Learn how the #usability team at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) identified a need at their institute and created ways to showcase the people behind the research at NIAID. Learn how they worked within their #Drupal content management system to create new tools for research collaboration inside the institute and with their external users.

In this presentation, you'll learn usability best practices like:
• Internal and external user interviews and testing.
• Persona development to capture the goals and challenges of users
• #Journeymaps to help visually map the user experience
• Service Blueprints that show how key people and processes affected the users' journey
• Testing wireframes and prototypes with researchers in the labs

You'll also learn how the team developed and refined metadata based on user input to help structure relevant content and solidify a content infrastructure and created new content fields that allow for better searching by expertise, location, the field of research, or name of researcher or lab.

🎤 Presenter(s): Rebecca Mayeaux, Kevin McDermott
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

#Accessibility, 508 Compliance, Usability, #WCAG, Americans With Disabilities Act, VPAT - the list goes on and on and more often than not induces yawns from your clients. This isn't their first rodeo - they just want to know you're taking care of the basics to keep them out of trouble. The truth is that navigating the accessibility guidelines doesn't have to be such a headache. In this session, we'll go over the basics of pushing for focus on comprehension over checkboxes and review some examples of common inaccessible #Drupal components / modules that I've gotten tripped up on in the past, and how we've been able to make them work for users with disabilities.

Outside of that, we'll chat briefly about the following:
- Quick introduction to the basics of where accessibility and government work meet
- How to manage your projects with accessibility baked into the process
- When to bring accessibility into the conversation for Product Managers
- Rethinking reporting (operation: No More Yawns)
- VPAT's and how to use them
- Bringing everything together to get the client excited and involved with the work
- What’s our accessible future looks like

🎤 Presenter(s): Scott Spector
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Working with the #Cambridge City Kid's Council and citizens of the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts we have built a #Drupal Distribution of Find It, an online deep program resource locator to help people easily find local activities, services, and resources.

Find It Cambridge distribution was informed and further inspired by extensive initial research done by Code for Boston with the City of Cambridge. As the city concluded the research, Agaric was tasked with building the software needed. After scoping out the level of interactivity needed and the multiple roles adding content as well as the depth of the search capabilities, of course, we chose Drupal and Solr as a base.

Our session will start with highlights from this project, with most of the research conducted by the city before anything was built. We will then take you through the iterations of design and mockup testing led by Todd Linkner, our design partner. We will also cover what we learned from the initial user testing done by local people in a library computer lab. Research and testing relied heavily on real-world conditions for this website! Finally, we will show the iterative improvements that continue presently as we are regularly informed by feedback from people using the site in real-world conditions.

We highlight the challenges of balancing client feedback with user feedback and offer strategies for making sure user needs are prioritized, including how to be a user advocate no matter what your role in a project is. We will take you through some of the client-developer decision processes and present what we have learned and how we plan to continue building on the lessons learned as we continue to support and build on this amazing citizen resource that can be used for any city or large organization.

The philosophy throughout has been listen, watch, learn, and then use the knowledge gained to develop and prioritize enhancements and new features. The most interesting parts, as they often do, lie in the details. This session will also present things that could have been done better, and the future opportunities for improvement. Lastly, we will reveal how this distribution can be utilized by anyone wanting to repurpose it, as Agaric has been doing, and for anyone to set up Find It for a city or a group using the Drupal Distribution of: #findit.

We are currently repurposing Find It as an Immigrant Navigator for a Haitian community in Boston and seeking grants to make it a resource locator for recently incarcerated people.

🎤 Presenter(s): Agaric Collective, benjamin melançon (@mlncn)
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Solutions like Acquia Site Factory and Pantheon Upstreams can be effective (but platform-specific) tools for managing multiple sites with similar requirements. The session will discuss a less scalable, but more portable approach using forked repos in Gitlab, that allow for development and site building from a central, template repo, while adding site-specific changes to individual sites that extend off the template.

🎤 Presenter(s): mandclu, Chris McInnis
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

More and more, federal web projects are going #Agile -- at least in theory. But many of these projects have a fixed start date, a fixed end date, a fixed budget, and (at least to some extent) a fixed scope. What, if anything, does it mean to be "Agile" in this context? Focusing on #Drupal implementations and modernizations, we'll talk about how to leverage Agile product management concepts within project environments that still retain many vestiges of traditional #waterfall development.

🎤 Presenter(s): Ryan Learmouth
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Items to #audit within your #Drupal 8 or 9 application to ensure optimal #security.

🎤 Presenter(s): Beverly Lanning
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

Advances in #Drupal Core's Migrate API and its contributed module ecosystem have made migrations from older versions of Drupal more streamlined than ever before. However, holdouts do remain, particularly when it comes to migrating paragraphs and other more complex entity structures.

This session will focus on some of the techniques our team used to get around some of those issues and the lessons we learned along the way.

In this session we will cover:
1. How to design and map out your #migration strategy.
2. How to leverage contrib modules like Migrate Plus, Migrate Tools, and Migrate Upgrade to identify which plugins to use, and how to set up your migration configurations.
3. How to deal with nested paragraphs and paragraph fields
3. The "hacks" and strategies we used to test and #debug our migrations.
4. Where to turn to for help along the way.

🎤 Presenter(s): mmelkhatib
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE

This session is for project managers, product managers, content strategists and other technologists interested in taking product-centric approach to government digital services.

In early 2019 #Drupal was introduced into a robust VA.gov product ecosystem, in which dozens of product teams design and deliver Veteran-centered digital tools and services, with outcome-oriented approaches.

Drupal’s role was modest at first, as the new home for content powering a couple dozen pages about health care benefits for #Veterans.

Since then, VA.gov CMS has expanded to house ten distinct products, each with their own editor base, outcome orientation, Veteran-centered design, and unique governance needs. CMS-supported products range from VA.gov homepage, to the marketing-oriented Campaign Landing Pages, to content about the VHA health system, the largest health care delivery system in the United States. And there are more products on the way.

In this session, we’ll describe some successes and failures we’ve had in taking this product-centric approach to building with Drupal in a broader product ecosystem at the VA’s Office of the CTO - Digital Experience. We’ll dig into:

* Managing the tension between “Core” platform features vs product specificity, in the content model and in the rest of the application
* #Enterprise governance tools and processes
* What we’ve learned about optimal (and dysfunctional!) team structures and relationships
* Approaches to customer service (help desk, training, and product documentation)
* How we’ve made make Drupal “self-aware” of its product orientation, with a layer that helps teams to leverage a product orientation throughout the application.

Attendees can expect to learn more about what to do–and what not to do–when taking a product-oriented approach to building with Drupal.

🎤 Presenter(s): Kevin Walsh, Rachel Kauff
🔗 Session details: LINK TO SESSION ON DGC WEBSITE