Drupal GovCon 2019

Todd Nienkerk

Content! It’s everywhere! It’s displayed on websites and in apps. It’s streamed to smartphones, televisions, and watches. It’s heard on podcasts, read aloud by voice assistants, and explored in immersive, three-dimensional virtual realities. With so many platforms, how can you keep pace with the rapidly changing landscape of digital experiences and content distribution?

In this session, you’ll learn how universities, nonprofits, and media companies are thriving by adopting platforms built for the future of content. We’ll talk about:

Centralized content management: Collecting, managing, and distributing your content from a single location — and fostering a community of content contributors and app builders.
Context-aware content: Telling the same story using different experiences and devices.
Machine learning: Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to speed up content production, personalize content, and help us keep our content up-to-date.
Multichannel and omnichannel publishing: Distributing your content to any service or device (think Facebook Instant or Apple TV) with minimal changes.
Decoupling your CMS: Separating the management of content from the presentation of content makes it easier to support new technologies and devices.
Future-proofing your digital experiences: Content forms the basis of digital experiences. We don't need to predict the future, but we DO need to adapt our content to new devices, contexts, and experiences. How can we be prepared for these changes? What ideas should we pursue, and which should we avoid right now?
We’ll close with a couple of case studies that demonstrate how Four Kitchens' client partners have prepared themselves for the future of content:

PRI.org: Last year, we helped relaunch a decoupled frontend for Public Radio International's legacy Drupal site.
NBC: We helped relaunch NBC.com, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and Saturday Night Live as decoupled Drupal sites with an API that shares content across multiple NBC brands, devices, and apps.
This session with be the latest iteration of “The Future of the CMS,” which I have presented 14 times and updated at annually since 2014. As the change in title suggests, The Future of Content will focus on modern content experiences and delivery systems—not just CMSs.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/future-content

andrew.cox

This session digs into how content moderation has been used over 2 years on a production Drupal 8 website with over 4,000 user authored nodes and a complex content approval process.

Key Takeaways:

How to implement content moderation on your Drupal site.
How to build off of and enhance the already existing content moderation module.
How to encourage content editors to actually use the website to manage their content (instead of emailing you).
Background:

In 2017, we migrated a large publicly searchable database to Drupal 8. As part of the requirements of the initial project, we implemented a content workflow so users are able to manage their own profile data without any external approvals/interaction. Since the initial website launch, we’ve continued to develop and improve upon a multi state content moderation workflow process. With three+ levels of end user access and five content states, users are able to manage a complex content moderation workflow themselves to keep their profiles up to date. In addition to keeping content moderation easy to use, we've introduced a few customized tweaks to encourage content owners to keep their content up-to-date automatically.

Leveraging the views module to provide users with complex dashboards showing pending content changes based on their role in the workflow/approval process.
Email notifications when content moderation states change.
Alerts to show content editors which fields changed to enable quicker content reviews, along with rejection messaging.
Notifications and alerts after content hasn’t been updated for a period of time.
Additionally, since content moderation and editing remains a fluid topic in Drupal core, I will go into some lessons learned with how we implemented content moderation and continuing weaknesses Drupal has with content moderation and editing.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/making-it-easy-users-maintain-their-own-content

cmcnally

Accessible design decisions are frequently relegated to “the right thing to do” or a “nice to have,” but within us is the power of accessible design to vastly improve impact, reach, and quality of the work.

Our in-house accessibility expert, Catharine McNally, was the first person to ever in the U.S. to receive a cochlear implant, and she has a lifetime of experience being an advocate and activist in creating better digital and physical experiences - for all humans.

Join us to hear Catharine‘s powerful story, immerse yourself in hands-on empathy building exercises, and learn from our design experts how to create magnificent work that is empowered, not hindered, by accessible design principles and best practices.

Who this appeals to:

Designers at all levels who want to learn to be better at their craft and move past seeing accessibility as merely a constraint.
Product designers and managers who want to actually experience a moment with a disability in order to gain empathy and create better products.
Anyone who is not convinced that accessible design is desirable with clients and profitable.
Why attend this session?

This event is going to be FUN. Catharine’s high energy approach (she also owns and runs a CrossFit box in her spare time), invites everyone in to learn and experience together. Attendees will learn a ton AND have a great time doing it.

What will the attendees take away from this event? (personal value / professional value / tangible items / etc.)

Attendees will take away a tool kit of best practices, inspiration, and ideas of how to be better at their craft with a mindset that includes their entire community. They will experience memorable exercises in true empathy that will bring to life a critical awareness.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/accessible-design-empathy-world-no-average

johnpicozzi

For ages people have been building Drupal Multi-sites to handle similar but different websites. The allure of updating a single code base while maintaining separate databases was and still is very appealing. However, how do you overcome the need to share content, allow users and admins a single place to login, or something as basic as content translation? Here enters the Domain module and it’s ability to simplify our life and more importantly our websites.

We will use the new Leica Geosystems commerce experience to guide our conversation and illustrate the benefits of upgrading a Drupal 7 Multi-site to Drupal 8 using the Domain module. We will outline the key problems we had to address. While sharing some of the modules used to make this multi-national, multi-lingual, e-commerce project a success. That’s right, as if Multi-site vs Domain wasn’t enough we will also talk about how Commerce made our transition from a Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 easier.

This talk is for all audiences and skill sets. So join me on this crazy multi-site vs domain with commerce adventure it will be sure to not only educate, but also entertain.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/multi-site-vs-domain-commerce-case-study

vegantriathlete

Prior to Drupal 8, the most common way that a developer would make sure her/his module was extensible was by adding a "hook". While Drupal 8 still makes use of hooks in many places, there is a better way to do things. Actually there are two better ways to do things:

Writing an Event Dispatcher
Making your module "pluggable"
In this presentation I will give you an overview of the Plugin API. If you're looking to learn about writing an event dispatcher, you'll have to go to a different talk.

We will look at examples of plugins in Drupal core, focusing on the high level concepts that are involved. If time warrants, and there is interest, we may even look at a simple custom example.

Oh, and I will also make brief mentions of Drupal hooks and event dispatchers just as a point of reference.

Attendees of this session will leave with an understanding of:

Defining a plugin manager
Using Annotations
Defining your plugin namespace
Instantiating plugins
Using config (entities) to determine which plugin to use
We will not be discussing Plugin Contexts or Plugin Derivatives. Though we will definitely be looking at some code, we will not be getting too down and dirty with code level technicalities. This is a beginner level presentation and you may feel comfortable attending even if you don't have any experience writing custom modules. If you are expecting to leave the presentation as a Plugin expert, then you will want to make sure that you entered the presentation that way.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/building-extensibility-look-drupal-8s-plugin-api

bencoit , jwalpole, , rfanning

Think personalization is off limits because you run a government website? Well, it doesn’t have to be. We’ll present an actionable framework for how to develop and implement an impactful personalization program within privacy, security and compliance guard rails and help guide you on how to make it successful. During this session, participants will learn about:

The importance of understanding the context of personalization for the citizen
How to figure out the right level of personalization for your organization and its goals
A framework for how to start your personalization journey
Help building a case for personalization

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/personalization-government-odd-couple-or-perfect-match

mayela , nphilippeaux

Two years ago we started our Spanish translation project for ATF.gov. One year later, burnt out with no clear path to the finish line, we had to get creative and change our approach. Now we’ve launched 400 web pages of ATF.gov en español, and we want to share our hard-won lessons with you so that your team can avoid our pitfalls.

Key topics:

In this session, we will get into the nitty-gritty details of how to:

Ensure your core team has the right roles, skills and responsibilities
Create a budget and establish any contracts you need for translation tools and services
Set a realistic roadmap with prioritized content and multi-stage launches
Configure workflows for content upload, translation, review and download
Build and sustain an internal community of native speaker reviewers and subject matter experts
Maintain a living glossary, style guide and reference standards
You will walk out of the room with a toolkit of resources, best practices and examples for your upcoming or ongoing site translation project. ¡Buena suerte!

Who should attend:

Team leads, project managers, content managers, translators and stakeholders
Anyone preparing to start a site translation project or feeling stuck in the middle of one

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/atfgov-en-espanol-lessons-and-successes-site-translation

skstarnes , izbatt

Using Drupal just isn't enough at times. With the vastly growing SaaS market, organizations want to include more features with less overhead. Creating custom services and modules is not always the ideal way to tackle the latest technologies and enhancements.

In this session, we will take a closer look at how to integrate 3rd party APIs into drupal, allowing for content to be consumed and utilized with minimal expense. Some examples include:

Elasticsearch Integration
Lambda Integration
Slack webhooks
And more if time permits
Some previous familiarity with Drupal, Drush, and 3rd party APIs is recommended to get the most out of this session.



https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1sV-XqaK5wDy8lDjbCbdSQO7R6dkXRp8gKuukL0VX3vo/edit?usp=sharing


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/complex-web-apps-skip-leg-day

nJim

Drupal includes a powerful toolset for building and extending out-of-the box content types. Content architectures are typically designed around the features of nodes, taxonomy, media, and other core entities. But how do we know when our business-needs have grown beyond the common entity types? When are nodes too lightweight or too heavy handed to meet our site goals? And what are the trade-offs and support issues when creating a new entity type?

This session will look at the landscape of core content entities and discuss the relative strengths and limitations of each entity type. We will explore common business-cases for developing custom entities and examine the level of technical debt incurred with various types of solutions. The session will consider real-world use-cases, including:

Reducing overhead: When content types (nodes) are too big.
Optimizing: When content types (nodes) are too small.
Presenting highly-customized editorial experiences.
Defining unique access control handlers and permissions
Using non-standard storage for modeled data.
Reusing content definitions through bundles.
When performance tuning is an overarching goal.
This presentation is designed for attendees in technical leadership roles. Programming knowledge is not required, however example code and links to developer resources will be shared to highlight features of the Drupal Entity API, Drupal Console, and the ECK module.

Participants should leave this session with an understanding of the risks and liabilities of creating custom content types; but also feel empowered and excited to employ them when they’re the right tool for the job.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/outgrowing-content-types-building-custom-entities

N_Andrade

How do we make site results more transparent, easy to understand, and repeatable?

How do we provide a solution to alleviate the stress of making sure customers have all their site information at their fingertips?

Answer: By implementing automated Site Audit Reports!

With 20+ applications on the platform, monitoring module versions, maintaining a strong security posture, and providing top-notch functionality can get tricky. Learn about how implementing automated reporting scripts has helped transform our platform with the Department of Homeland Security by:

Creating fast and repeatable site reports results in quicker detection of common problems
Generating reports in multiple different formats such as: Plain text, HTML, and JSON
Providing customers with better insight into available patches, security and performance settings, and other best practices
Realizing annual platform costs savings of $20,000!

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/fast-and-repeatable-site-audit-reports-edition

fen

The goal of compliance frameworks like HIPPA, SOX and FISMA is to ensure that basic security controls are met. The Federal government and an increasing number of state and local governments look to NIST’s Risk Management Framework (RMF) as the baseline for compliance management.

Because RMF is rooted in static, waterfall methods and most of compliance is obtained through voluminous Word docs and screenshots, a system’s compliance officer may spend more of their time writing and uploading documentation than ensuring actual security in an agile and ever-changing threat landscape.

Learn how you can turn a cumbersome, soul-sucking security process into one filled with joy!

First, we’ll inherit common controls as made available by (e.g.) FedRAMP systems we build on. Then we’ll create a library of publicly shareable and easily reusable system element components. DevOps? We’ll integrate component updates and management into the CI pipeline.

Finally, as documentation (really) sucks the soul, we’ll automate the creation of properly formatted MS Word docs - required by the cultural status quo - from the updated git and S3 artifact repositories. We’ll also touch on how free/libre data formats and protocols are necessary to support viable continuous monitoring as application boundaries vary wildly and threat landscapes change too rapidly to rely on black-box proprietary agents to fully monitor.

By bringing agile, open practices to compliance, security can be enjoyable for everyone.

Some links from this talk:

https://civicactions.com
https://github.com/CivicActions
https://github.com/opencontrol
https://github.com/usnistgov/OSCAL
https://github.com/GovReady/hyperGRC
https://github.com/uscensusbureau/fismatic
https://github.com/ComplianceAsCode/drupal
https://nvd.nist.gov/800-53/Rev4
https://www.agilegovleaders.org

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/joy-open-agile-government-security-compliance

CathyM

Services is a stable component of OOP PHP programming and is fundamental to programming in Drupal 8. The underlying architecture is the Symfony dependency injection component represented by the service container. Using services allows us to write code that perform certain tasks. These tasks can be swappable, with an additional feature of changing the logic of existing services. Drupal has a list of services that could be incorporated into a custom module, but we can also create our own services to use in the module. Drush commands can also be wrapped up in a service and used within the custom module.

Using a backdrop of a custom module that was developed to allow users to import a .docx file into a website, convert it into json, import it into nodes, and rollback/remove all content all with one click (well a few clicks), this presentation will portray the power of ‘Services’, both Drupal and Drush services.

Areas to touch on:

Module development
Services Drupal, Drush (core and custom)
Dependency injection
Services, tagged services and plugins

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/services-services-services-using-services-drupal-custom-modules

scot.self

You manage a site for an organization which can be broken down into smaller groups; individual "microsites", each a little website unto itself, having members, menus, content, taxonomy, etc. This could be departments within a large government or corporate entity or a site for fans of certain bands, authors, and you want to keep each site siloed off from the rest (while still being able to show aggregate lists of all groups’ microsites).

Enter the D8 Group module and other related contrib! We will describe how to build a platform with Drupal which allows users to create a group microsite while administrators still maintain control over the overall structure and features available. We will also talk a bit about how to use the popular Paragraphs module to make a really flexible page builder so users can add pages to their groups with relative ease.

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/group-microsites-harnessing-power-d8-group-module

laural2979

Did you know that if you print out all of the federal requirements for digital website it is over 2 inches thick?! How do you keep up with everything that is out there? How do you ensure that your organization is complying and provide accurate advice to stakeholders?

This session will take a look at the multi-tiered challenge of understanding and governing federal digital policy in a complex and ever-changing digital world and includes a case study of how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID/NIH) is attempting to categorize and manage policy compliance.

Key takeaways will include:

Recognizing the complexities and challenges of federal digital policy
Roadmap to breaking down policy into a consumable and shareable format
Future-proof planning
Speakers:

Tori Garten, Branch Chief, New Media & Web Policy Branch, NIAID
Laura Lacy, Program Manager, Booz Allen Hamilton
Krista Townsend, UX Designer, 712 Designs

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/how-become-policyslayer-navigating-federal-digital-policy

chrisodva

The world's greatest Agile process can't save a project that was a bad idea from the start. In this session, we will review the principles of Human Centered Design, and how applying these principles well before you even install Drupal 8 core can dramatically improve project outcomes. The session includes several interactive exercises that allow the attendees to participate in helping solve a real world Drupal related challenge during the session.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/great-drupal-websites-are-made-first-line-code-written

mdrummond

As Digital Services Georgia worked to move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, one of the front-end challenges was how to accommodate the design needs of 85+ sites, when agency stakeholders want their site to not look exactly the same as all the others.

One of Lullabot’s front-end architectural goals in implementing Georgia’s new design system was to avoid a slew of subthemes that would be difficult to maintain over time. Another important goal was to create a pattern library that would aid in the development of a component-based front-end, but which would also stay in sync with the site as we move towards launch and beyond. Finally, Digital Services Georgia also wanted to implement high-quality typography in their new design system and brought in Jason Pamental to help further systematize the typography and color usage throughout the sites.

Ultimately we found that by using a number of newer CSS techniques, we were able to create a flexible, maintainable front-end architecture.

Drupal 8 allowed us to use Layout Builder to provide a great deal of flexibility to site owners in how they laid out their home pages and landing pages while using the same set of components throughout all of the sites. We achieved further flexibility by allowing each site to select a particular color palette, using CSS variables to handle color variations per palette. Systematized typography—using variable fonts!—helped as we built out a large number of components. Using the full range of modern layout options like CSS Grid and Flexbox also helped to achieve complex designs within tight timeframes. And yes, all of these newer techniques have fallbacks for IE11. Finally, with Twig in Drupal 8, we were able to fully integrate components that could be used in both Pattern Lab and Drupal 8, so that the pattern library can stay maintainable without making updates in multiple places.

The key goal of this session is to show how front-end architectural decisions aren’t about code and CSS alone—these decisions can help to solve real business and organizational needs. We will take a look at some fun front-end details too. Hopefully this session will have good takeaways both for organizational stakeholders and for folks who like to make diagrams illustrating the stacking contexts of their z-indexes.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/forest-designs-without-subthemes-implementing-georgiagovs-front-end-drupal-8

John Franklin

Ensuring the integrity of a site's code is an important aspect to ensuring the security of a site. In an upcoming release, Backdrop & Silkscreen will add digital signatures to the module downloads to help ensure sites remain secure. In this talk, John will provide a primer on digital signatures, discuss the challenges and ongoing work creating a code signing API, and deploying it as part of the module release workflow.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/code-signing-modules-backdrop-silkscreen

chrisarusso

Those of us who work (and play) in the open-source software world tend to think of contributing back to open source software as something highly desirable to do. It's practically a given for most professionals who use open source software that we should contribute. Ideals of democracy, decentralization, volunteerism, and altruism genuinely motivate many who contribute.

In the best-case scenario, an open-source project is comprised of a virtuous, reciprocal community in which participants donate their time to improve a tool that is freely available to all people. However, this scenario doesn't always sync with how open source really works in the wild.

And, what does it require to contribute to open source projects meaningfully? Should open-source contribution be an expectation of organizations that use open-source software and those who they employ?

As skilled designers, project managers, engineers, et al., are open-source contributions the most impactful way to spend our precious, valuable, voluntary time, or are there alternatives we should consider as individuals and the organizations who benefit from using open source tools?

We'll use the Drupal community as a lens to explore the broader world of open source and lend a more nuanced analysis on how open source contributions stack up against alternative means of spending our volunteer time as organizations and individual stakeholders of an open-source community.

Spoiler alert: it's all gray, though strong opinions will be shared and are expected to be challenged!


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/should-you-contribute-open-source-its-complicated

roshanad , kevinmcclos4

Pattern Lab is an incredibly powerful and flexible atomic design system that allows for rapid frontend development, and pairs well with our favorite CMS - Drupal.

Much of the styling in Pattern Lab is a mixed bag of CSS, HTML, and Twig files; Twig being a template engine for the PHP programming language.

Additionally, Pattern Lab provides the ability to use PHP for display page preprocessing, and jQuery for DOM manipulation and event handling.

Our team is using the upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 as an opportunity to integrate Pattern Lab with our Drupal 8 instance, and enhance our frontend capabilities.

During this session we will go over the case study of how we create components in Pattern Lab, how to utilize them with Drupal 8.

We will cover how we have setup Pattern Lab and our development cycle, and also discuss lessons we’ve learned from our Drupal 8 Pattern Lab experience.

Presentation Itinerary:

- What is Pattern Lab?

- Benefits of using Pattern Lab to build out your frontend

- Logistics of implementing Pattern Lab w/ Drupal 8

- Live demo: Building out a simple content display page (and/or view page) from scratch

- Live demo: Taking advantage of preprocessor hooks


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/integrating-pattern-lab-drupal-8

dangur

A naked Drupal Core installation is inconceivable. It’s the contributed extensions that make Drupal magnificent. But how do we decide which of the 23,706 projects to use? We’ll look at some popular (and some lesser known) modules, themes, and profiles, and delve into combinations and configurations of a handful that are particularly well suited for govies. The special needs of government programs will structure our journey through the landscape of archetypal solutions for accessibility, analysis, compliance, design, mobile, open data, search, security, and usability requirements. Join us and let’s share some of our favorite “contrib” projects with a focus on what works best for Government applications. Toward the end we’ll open the floor for your, the audience to offer suggestions of your favorites too!

Key topics

Problem / Solution Fit
Combinations & Configurations
Audience faves
Who should attend

Everyone who uses contributed modules, themes, and/or profiles
Drupalers interested in how to best leverage projects for Government apps
Those wantinging to share fitting projects with the Drupal Gov community

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/few-my-favorite-things

N_Andrade

Photos, and videos, and audio files, Oh My!

Finding a central location to store digital assets for an entire enterprise may seem like a long-shot, but we have the solution, and that solution is EMERALD.

EMERALD is a digital asset management system designed to house openly available digital assets and present them on the public-facing government websites and other interconnected resources like mobile applications or intranets.

The Department of Homeland Security is leveraging EMERALD to reduce support costs, deliver on a government requirement for Open Source, migrate to a cloud-based infrastructure, and implement support for scalability in the enterprise quality web application.

Learn about the vast benefits DHS employees will experience while using EMERALD and we will touch on those most important ones: including, but not limited to:

Attractive, easy-to-manage user interface
Micro-service image processing and transcoding
Architectural accommodation for high traffic and heavy computer load scaling
Best-practice security updates
Efficient database architecture

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/digital-asset-management-theres-no-place-emerald

robertsonba , carlosrfm

Have you ever wanted to create a single Drupal instance that hosts multiple Microsites—without using the “Drupal multisite” paradigm? We wanted to allow content managers to create basic websites for Conferences, so we did exactly that. Now we want to show you how.

Join this session to see how our development team built a Drupal instance that can rapidly create and deploy these microsites. Content managers can create multi-page micro sites on the fly using just a single node.

What you get from this session:

Why create multiple micro sites within a single Drupal instance? What’s the benefit?
Why not use Drupal Multi-site?
How and why would one create a multi-page microsite from a single node?
How did we create multiple pages from a single node?
Additional tools for expanding this paradigm
Lessons learned—what did we have to go back and fix? What would we do differently?
What are the drawbacks of this approach?

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/single-node-website-rapidly-producing-microsites

gerardo , Charlie

Please Note: this session is listed in PM and will span multiple tracks, touching on project management, information architecture, content strategy and coding.

Reliable access to contraceptives is a key component to empowering women, reducing HIV prevalence, and building stronger communities. And yet, 214 million women of reproductive age in developing countries who want to avoid pregnancy are not using a modern contraceptive method.



This unmet need for contraceptives is too high, which is why the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) works to improve access to contraceptives in many countries where it works. As part of this work, USAID funded the development of the Contraceptive Security Indicators Dashboard — an interactive online dashboard that country governments, policymakers, and advocates can use to monitor progress toward contraceptive security.



In this session, we will showcase the work done to develop this interactive dashboard, including how we standardized the data, implemented ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) on an existing Drupal 8 website, and how we exposed the data in a way that it could be consumed by a progressively decoupled dashboard application written in React.



Session attendees will learn:

Why access to contraceptives is important
How improved access to data helps governments and advocates monitor progress towards contraceptive security
Techniques to assess the need to decouple
Methods to prepare and transform data
How to let users update complex information
Integrate highly interactive elements into existing Drupal 8 implementations


The Contraceptive Security Indicators Dashboard was implemented by the USAID Global Health Supply Chain Program-Procurement and Supply Management (GHSC-PSM) project in partnership with Bixal, a Fairfax, VA-based digital communications and technology firm.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/progressive-decoupling-drupal-improve-access-usaids-contraceptive-security

tobby , fhaynes

You have heard that D7 is going to be sunset next year, and that D9 is just around the corner. Now what? How do you get everyone onboard to move, how do you plan and prepare for that move, and how to smooth the way for upgrades in the future.

This session will be a guide to building your plan to move from D7 to D8 (with an eye toward D9 readiness). We will cover:

Reasons for migrating now and how to sell it to your organization
Why you don’t want to wait for D9
What you should do now to make your move to D8 easier
How to assess your technology and content
How to plan your move
Preparing for Drupal’s future versions in this move
Do you have challenges…

Planning, sizing and budgeting for a D8 migration…
Getting your team on board with moving to a newer platform…
Justifying migrating to D8 when D9 is just over a year away…
You know you need to migrate, but aren’t sure where to begin…
…then this session is for you!


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/why-migrate-drupal-8-now

stephencross

In 2005 I made the switch from Windows to Mac as my primary desktop working environment. Thirteen years later I made a similar switch to Linux. And eighteen months after the switch, this Apple 'fan boy' is not looking back.

For a full stack Drupal developer, a Linux development environment makes sense. In this session, I will share the reasons why I switched to Linux, how it has impacted my day-to-day tasks, the ease and pain points of the switch. We will cover:

Reasons to switch to Linux
The easy way and the hard way
Choosing a distribution
Transition plan
Software compatibility and alternatives
Breaking away from the Apple ecosystem or not
One year after the switch and moving forward
SLIDES: https://stephencross.github.io/i-switched-to-linux/


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/i-switched-linux-you-can-too

Janessaworrell

Are you a Cersei, a Dany, or a Jon Snow? Do you rule with an iron fist or through collaboration with others? How do you utilize your team, process and technology choices to make decisions that will best benefit your organization?

Successfully managing a platform requires more than just writing good code. Platform and digital governance is a decision-making framework that defines the people, processes, and technologies used to support an organization. It is critical when managing a successful platform.

In this session we’ll cover:

Why you need a good governance plan, no matter your team size
The objectives of governance
Different governance frameworks
How to apply governance to design, code and content
Ownership of tasks
How do you strike just the right balance of governance? Come find out how to make the tough choices!


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/winter-coming-how-use-good-governance-prevent-your-organization-becoming-game

coryjurentkuff, katieekline

Content strategy has come a long way since the wild west days of the dot com era. And, gone are the ways of tables and gifs in design. But there are some aspects of content that stand the test of time. These fundamentals of content strategy will define the next round of trends to hit the digital realm in 2019 and beyond. In this presentation by two seasoned content strategists, this brave new world is explored, and the top five emerging patterns in content strategy are outlined for those who are on the cutting edge:

Empirical decision-making
Stakeholder engagement
Conversation/content design
Structured content
Governance

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/whats-trending-content-strategy

Aaron Pava - Co-Founder & CXO, CivicActions
Delali Dzirasa - Founder & President, Fearless
Arden Klemmer - Director of Product Design, &Partners
Dan Levenson - Chief Strategy Officer, Agile Six

Mission-minded government digital service companies always intend to deliver measurable value with the public sector partners we serve. However, procurements rarely provide quality information on program outcomes and agency metrics for success.

What questions must we ask of the prospective government partners at the outset to know our values align and we will be proud of our work post-launch?

This panel of top Drupal, agile technology and government design firms will share the frameworks and practices they use to evaluate new projects, consider values alignment, ethical considerations, incorporate team feedback, discuss strong dissenting views, and make the hard decisions of choosing when to say no.

Topics to be explored include:

Determining values and ethical alignment when evaluating government agency RFPs
Explore process and frameworks for bid/no-bid decisions (e.g. IMPACT Scorecard)
Collect team-wide feedback and considerations on questionable engagements
Provide structures for how to measure impact of digital services work
Leverage reusable templates for future learning and evaluations

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/are-we-really-transforming-government-aligning-values-and-measuring-impact

jasonhamrick

“Is my content strategy working?” “Do I need to do something different?” “Am I spending my budget effectively?” These are the questions that keep senior leadership awake at night. Often, the monthly analytics report does nothing to answer these questions. Full of charts of graphs about last month’s performance, it says nothing about what to do next. Beautiful to behold - then forever filed away in the bottom desk drawer.



In this session, we’ll review a method to explicitly tie your organization’s goals to the metrics you gather. We’ll discuss how to provide reports that stay out of the bottom desk drawer, and how you can use what you learn to monitor the effectiveness of your content and your underlying content strategy.


In this session, we will explore:

How to identify metrics that matter to your organization, stakeholder by stakeholder
How to gain insight into the effectiveness of your marketing and outreach efforts
How and when to report metrics to your leadership




Speaker: Jason Hamrick, jhamrick@phase2technology.com


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/measuring-what-matters-using-analytics-inform-content-strategy

jrockowitz

This presentation will explore how governments can leverage the Webform module for Drupal 8 to build accessible forms that securely collective massive amounts of data. We will discuss three big digital concerns for governments: accessibility, security, and scalability.

Topics include…

Introduction to the Webform module
Common use cases
Building accessible forms
Protecting user data
Securing forms
Collecting a lot of data
Integrating with third-party services

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/webforms-government

mjovel , nxs

This session offers a behind the scenes look at FDA.gov’s migration to Drupal 8. In particular, we will focus on how FDA.gov move to utilize more robust structured content, the redesign of the site to be user-focused and mobile friendly from the ground up and how we leveraged the Labcoat Design System to speed up development and create consistency.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/hex-drugs-rock-n-roll

TheAmy

When it works well, it’s a match made in Heaven. Your website shows up for the right search terms and has quality content that is useful for your audience. But SEO is more than just keywords and content strategy is more than just organizing content around those keywords. Both are multi-faceted and complex in a way that often leaves us wondering how we can best make both work together. And with Google updating its search algorithm around 500 - 600 times a year (Source - Moz) making sure your site’s content keeps up with Google AND your audience’s changing needs is important for keeping your site top in search results.

Designed with content creators in mind, this session will examine:

What are on-site SEO elements, what are off-site SEO elements, and how both work together to help your website be seen by the right people.
How to identify opportunities for and apply structured data to your website content
How to organize content through landing pages/pillar pages/topic clusters
How to identify and capitalize on high-ranking but outdated content and make it relevant again.
How to connect content strategy and content marketing for maximum impact.

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/content-and-seo-better-together

stephenpashby , David Minton

Do inaccurate estimates frequently lead to you and your team burning the midnight oil or working through your weekends to meet project deadlines? Our team takes both meeting project deadlines and work-life balance seriously and we have developed a system to both accurately estimate projects and manage our team’s capacity to make weekend work the exception rather than the rule.

We will share:

Our process of estimating at different stages of a project
How to use historic data to inform estimates for what you have done before as well as what you haven’t
How to plan for the unknown in a project
How to get a high-level view of your team’s capacity across multiple projects

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/successful-project-estimation-how-get-your-weekends-back

ccrampton

Over the years, I've been shocked at the number of colleagues and fellow Drupal developers who don't use a debugging tool like Xdebug. These developers have been 'var_dump'ing and 'dpm'ing their entire career, and may not be aware of the immense time-save, clarity, and utility that a debugger/profiler provides. In this session, I'll go over general Xdebug pros and cons, give real-world examples of Xdebug usage in a Drupal 8 environment, and show some neat tips and tricks developers can use in popular IDEs.

In this session, I'll cover:

Pros and cons of using a debugger over old school methods
Why Xdebug is great for Drupal developers
General installation instructions for local development
Anecdotal examples of where Xdebug was vital in my day-to-day
Live demos of how I'd solve common problems using Xdebug.
My live demos will use my typical stack (Docksal/Xdebug/PHPStorm), but generally apply to all environments and IDEs.

My primary audience includes new Drupal developers and developers who haven't made the leap to Xdebug, but even current users of Xdebug will probably be able to pick up tips or features they didn't know previously.

Non-xdebug users should leave the session with an immediate desire to go install it and start debugging the smart way!


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/vardumps-are-chumps-introduction-xdebug

jonpugh

The Aegir Hosting System has been used for hosting thousands of Drupal sites for over 11 years, using Drupal as a web interface for managing your servers and sites.

In classic Aegir 3.x and earlier, you still need root shell access to install and configure a few things before Aegir can work.

in 2016 I set out to solve this by creating server configuration tools in Ansible and integrating with Cloud server providers like DigitalOcean, Packet, and SoftLayer.

The result was the Aegir Cloud and Aegir Ansible modules.

Now with a single form from node/add/server, you can:

Create a cloud server instance with your choice of data center, OS, memory, etc. and automatically authorizing the Aegir user's SSH key.
Select the services you want installed, like Apache or MySQL preconfigured to work with Aegir.
Add custom Ansible playbooks to each server.
Add custom Ansible variables as YML into a simple text field.
Automatically discover the server's IP address and set DNS records for the server's hostname.
Wait for SSH access via root.
Run the chosen Ansible playbooks with the generated and manually entered Ansible variables.
Get a Red or Green or Orange result if any of those steps failed.
Come to this session to see how we are using this combination of totally free and open source tools to power our platform-as-a-service, devshop.cloud, where we create and destroy DevShop servers on the fly.



Slides available: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JYtG7KPoJF4IipIb8j2YBS9Gtupgkrrh0rj4qBxn4Zs/edit#slide=id.p

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/cloud-management-drupal-and-ansible

nJim

Drupal’s extensibility allow us to create the perfect CMS for our organizations. But too often the same level of design is not considered when building out the editorial interfaces. The default tools are often scary for first-time Drupalers and include confusing words like ‘nodes’, ‘taxonomy’, and ‘blocks’. Making Drupal friendly for clients means checking internal jargon at the door and building interfaces that are intuitive and distraction free. Topics include:

Creating personalized dashboards for authors and editors;
Modifying the entity add and edit forms;
Adding contextual help to administrative interfaces;
Using constraints to provide meaningful form validation; and
Choosing field, widget, and storage types that are best fit our content.
This sessions is for attendees in site-building and technical leadership roles. Participants should leave this session with ideas for: taming their content forms, building out useful content dashboards, and enhancing their editorial workflows.

Programming knowledge is not required, however example code and links to developer resources will be shared to highlight features of Drupals Core APIs; Views, Field UI, and Contributed modules; and custom code for taking control of your theme and admin interfaces.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/making-drupal-friendly-editors-and-clients

wesruv

Join Wes Ruvalcaba for magical debugging of CSS and Javascript.

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/debugging-css-and-js-it-just-looks-magical

dsayswhat

Over the last year, Digital Services Georgia has worked with Lullabot and other vendors to design and produce a new Drupal 8 platform for their 85+ state agency and elected official sites, currently on Drupal 7.

Starting with content strategy and design, pattern libraries and media management all the way through infrastructure, migration and deployment, there have been numerous challenges to face.

In this presentation, we'll look at some of those key challenges and how we faced them. In addition to the design and development issues described above, we'll talk about things like:

* what kind of planning is necessary for a major multi-site project to succeed

* a repeatable migration process for multiple sites

* how do you go from The Big Idea at the start of your project to successfully launching sites?

* what kinds of team processes make a large-scale Drupal re-platform project succeed?


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/georgia-govhub-case-study

jgreenberg

Even though migration has come a long way since D7, there are still numerous opportunities for headaches.

This session is a case study of three issues I faced and how I resolved them:

- Needing a video field type widget, prior to the release of Media, that could be added to any content type on any site.

- Migrating D7 Location field content to D8 address fields

- Populating the value portion of a body field from its D7 counterpart, but the summary portion from a completely separate field

The solutions make use of a field type widget, a migration plugin, and a hooked migration.

Code samples used in the presentation can be found at: https://github.com/jayengreen/migration_migraine


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/migration-migraine

ClintonAtMobomo

Hey, bro. Is your Drupal site headless? Decoupled? Headless and decoupled? Is it on a blockchain? Data-driven and cloud-first? Oh, and by site I of course mean ambitious omnichannel digital experience. Sorry for the (inevitable) confusion!

Yeah, we're pretty tired of the buzzword arms race too. That's why this lighthearted and at-times irreverent talk will break down the 19 most maddening and meaningless Drupal-adjacent buzzwords of 2019 and show why each of them deserves to be banned from your vocabulary faster than a microservice architecture serves a page request.

Along the way we'll identify the real, plain-language concepts behind some of these terms and show how the buzzword mania can often distract from and interfere with our shared goal of finding elegant technical solutions to complex problems.

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/why-we-cant-have-nice-things-19-overused-drupal-buzzwords-stop-using-2019

Andrew_Mallis

I was a self-taught Google Analytics user. I thought I was getting by OK.

But, since working with professional analysts, I’ve seen how my data wasn’t as complete or accurate as I thought I was. And with bad data, it’s easy to tell the wrong story.

I’m here to level you up, and share best practices for setting up your Google Analytics accounts.



In this talk, we will:

provide recommendations on best practices for setting up your views, filters, and goals
explain the connection between users, sessions and pageviews
look at the power of Search Console for unlocking SEO insights
outline strategies for UTM link generation and recording
demystify (and devalue) bounce rates
show how to improve the accuracy of your referral traffic
point to how GTM can be used to unleash features like video tracking, heatmapping, and more
Demonstrate how you can debug GA tracking in real-time
and more!


Attendees will walk away with a handy and concise 3-page guide to take them from basecamp to summit.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/google-analytics-201

dboeger

Building modern, accessible, mobile-first government websites is complex. Thankfully, we have Drupal and the new v2 U.S Web Design System.

A panel of Drupal and USWDS experts will discuss the benefits and challenges of working with these two together so that teams can get up and running and turbo-charge your future government website builds.

Join USWDS team members and USWDS Base and USWDS Drupal theme maintainers to learn about implementation best practices, what to be aware of and the roadmap for future development.

Key topics

USWDS v2
Drupal Theming/Sub-Theming
Q&A
Who should attend

Designers
Developers

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/big-government-website-bang-drupal-and-uswds-v2-panel-discussion

suniltaneja

Plan your Drupal implementation for a decoupled architecture. Using Drupal as a data platform, gain benefits for code reuse across different versions of Drupal. Use the latest front-end technologies and development workflows. This session will focus on the pros and cons, cost benefits, and real-world examples.

Making Drupal a data platform
Decoupled architecture: benefits and future proofing
Building advanced user experience (UX) and user interfaces (UI)
Examples for advanced form development
Examples for reporting and advanced search interfaces

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/decoupled-and-headless-drupal-planning-future

dboeger

The recently-released Version 2 of the U.S. Web Design System has changed significantly from Version 1, and we'll unpack all the differences.

In this follow-up to "The Big (Government Website) Bang: Drupal and USWDS v2" panel discussion, we'll look at hands-on best uses of USWDS v2 for prototyping and site building, including tools such as integrated Accessibility and Page templates, combining these with tips and tricks for full website customization, from colors, fonts to widgets.

We will also take participants on a short tour through sub-theming and customizing the USWDS Drupal theme.

Key topics

USWDS v2
Accessibility
Prototyping & Customization
Drupal Sub-theming
Q&A
Who should attend

Designers
Developers

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/drupal-and-uswds-v2-prototyping-and-site-building

sbrackat

In the age of decoupled CMSs and single page applications, users expect dynamic and performant web experiences. As the primary scripting language for the web, Javascript is an indispensable tool in transforming the user experience, but is it accessible for all users?

Short answer: Yes but not without a little work. Join Forum One as we share best practices and tools to improve the accessibility of your Javascript.

What we’ll cover

Basics of semantic markup
The role of Aria attributes for dynamic content
Focus management
Accessibility best practices in React
Debugging and linting tools

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/javascript-everyone-accessibility-and-javascript

ybom

If you’re a new Drupal 8 developer or you aspire to be one, you should seriously consider learning Symfony first! In this presentation, I will share eight reasons why.

With the adoption of the Symfony framework, Drupal 8 became a better structured and robust content management system. The decision to integrate Symfony, though, came with some trade-offs, including added complexity and a complete re-architecting of Drupal’s codebase.

For developers who have worked with previous versions of Drupal and even others who have not, understanding how Drupal 8 works behind the scenes can be challenging.

On a recent project, I was able to dig in and understand how to develop a web application with Symfony, a much lighter and straightforward framework than Drupal. One key take away of my participation in this project was that learning Symfony before learning Drupal can make learning Drupal 8 much easier.

The goal of this talk will be to help you build a better foundation to start (and continue) learning and implementing Drupal 8 projects. Session participants will learn about Symfony and its components and to become more comfortable and confident in writing custom code in Drupal 8.

Session attendees will learn:

· How Symfony works

· How Symfony works inside Drupal

· Symfony components and how are they used by Drupal

· And much more


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/learn-symfony-you-learn-drupal-8-reasons-why

bendygirl

Ever wonder what it takes to make Drupal GovCon a thing?

Ever wonder how we started and why the name change (Looking at you Drupal Gov Days and Capital Camp)?

Ever wonder about our budget or teams?

Well, you are in luck. This year, I'm gonna share the history, the work and the costs associated with putting together Drupal GovCon.

Attendees will learn:

Capital Camp beginnings under an escalator at Drupalcon Chicago
Drupal Gov Days Europe, at Commerce and finally hosted by NIH
Co-hosting with other groups like Mil-OSS
Team Structure
Planning process
Budgeting and costs
The people past and present
and finally, why did we include Gov in the name.


So, come and hear, see and experience what it takes to make Drupal GovCon a thing and find out how you can participate later in the week.

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/drupal-govcon-making

Cellar Door

As developers, we are capable of many amazing feats. We can create experiences that touch the lives of millions, brings aid to the corners of the world, empowers new businesses and bring a voice to the voiceless. But just because we can, should we? Additionally, with this capability, we must also take on the responsibility for the people, and data, we interact with. This isn't something we should take lightly. We are building the sites, the systems and the communities that future generations will inherit.

During this session, we’ll look at the ethics of privacy, secure web design and architecture, and the impact our decisions have on the community and our users. Using real world examples of where ethics and technology intersect, we'll walk through what it means to create and how to do so in a way that is inclusive, secure, and with the implications thought out. Mixed in will be how to manage sensitive data from clients and users, compliance with various regulations and laws around privacy, and how to foster a culture of security even while you manage distributed teams. I'll share my experiences from almost a decade in Drupal and some of the mistakes and successes I've had along the way, and some of the questions it has led me to ask. We'll also go over recent efforts to team with groups outside of Drupal to help create a standard for privacy on the open web.

This should be a lively discussion on how we should set our community goals of privacy as Drupal continues to empower more and more of our digital world. It is up to us to decide as a community how we will work together to make the world a better and safer place for people no matter where they come from.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/ethics-privacy-and-technology

populist

If you site is not running on a CDN, you are missing out. Modern websites receive enormous benefits in terms of speed & reliability when utilizing a content delivery network - and setting one up for your site has never been easier.

CDNs offer the best in class support for making websites fast utilizing techniques such as HTTPS/2 (soon HTTPS/3), image compression, global points of presence, TLS integration, cache tags (in D8 core!), & much more!

This presentation will review how a CDN works, how to integrate it into your site, and how to get the fastest and best site on the internet using other peoples servers around the world.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/mastering-cdn-present-future

wesruv

Is the Drupal 8’s new Layout Builder UI the holy grail of editor user experience? We’ve created a new version of Lullabot.com using Drupal 8. A huge goal for this project is to put our Head of Marketing, a non-technical user, in total control of the site.

Drupal 8 was just rolling out Layout Builder in core as we started the project, and the timing was perfect to use Layout Builder as the basis for our newest solution.

We had some successes and learned some lessons. We’ll talk about:

Our final Layout Builder editorial experience on Lullabot.com.
Modifications we made to core Layout builder, including configurable css and a way to add titles to layout sections.
• Block editor user experience improvements we made.
• What makes Layout Builder different than other approaches enabling editors to manage the UI.
• Whether you should Layout Builder all the things.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/layout-builder-real-world

gobinathm

In this session, i will focus on the Jenkins CICD pipeline setup done for D8 project, which can be reused by majority of D8 project with minor tweak. The talk with touch upon

Quick Walk-thru of Jenkins Setup
Artifacts Building
Code Coverage
Combined this with some code quality using Sonarqube
PHPUnit for Code Coverage
Behat
QA
JMeter for Load Test
Screenshots (For Visual Validations)
Deployment
Post-Deploy Verify
Post Build Notifications
This pipeline should help any team to cut the time spend on reviews / deployments while increasing the quality of the output. This should help you improve the release cycles while keeping the quality of deliverables.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/speed-drupal-deliveries-cicd-pipeline

Amber Himes Matz

What is the state of Drupal 9? What can I do now to prepare for the upcoming release? Learn how innovation happens in Drupal 9 through semantic versioning, scheduled releases, and experimental modules and why a new major release is still necessary. Hear about the various processes that are taking place to prepare for Drupal 9, including deprecation processes, and which major 3rd party APIs will be updated. Finally, learn what the support time frame for Drupal 7 sites will be and checks you can perform now to ensure Drupal 9 compatibility for a future migration.

By the end of this session, you should have a better understanding of why Drupal 9 is being released, the processes and planning currently taking place, and how to prepare for this upgrade.

This talk is based on a slide deck developed by Gábor Hojtsy, to help spread the word about Drupal 9.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/state-drupal-9

alison

A "how-to" session for Drupal 8 site builders who don't know how to use D8 Configuration Management (CMI), and/or don't know how to version-control your site configuration, and/or aren't sure about committing configuration code.

Target audience: people who've done site-building work in Drupal (ideally Drupal 8), and who use version control (git) to manage their codebase.

We'll cover:

What is Configuration Management ("CMI")
How to use CMI, with and without committing config code
Using CMI with Dev to Live
Site config in your code
(Still not sure?!?!) Why you should Commit! Your! Config!
Modules
Questions? Lingering concerns?

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/commit-your-config-primer

dmkelner

In a user-first world, content is the basis for ensuring great user experience. A content audit lays the groundwork for aligning organizational objectives with site visitor needs. It is the preparatory work for the site architecture, content model, and page layouts. It addresses content governance and the content creation process.

Additionally, a content audit can be a tool for building collaboration, credibility, and respect for the role of the content strategist on the web team. We can embrace and agree upon values, goals, and realities that set the stage early in the project for ongoing cooperation.

This session will provide content strategists both the understanding of how to conduct a content audit, as well as the insights for making the content audit a key tool for website collaboration.

You will learn how to:

Conduct the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the content audit.
Tie the audit to the needs of content creators for creating sustainable content.
Collaborate with all team members, with a fresh understanding of where content fits into a web project.
Build credibility within the organization for the practice of content strategy.

rrabiela , lylydia20148

So your team has gone agile? But the ecosystem has not fully moved…You’re sprinting, but not sure what work is being developed…You need stories to sprint, but still getting a 100 page requirements document…You want quick decisions, but still have the approval processes…

You’ve won the RFP, you’ve hired your scrum team…everyone on the team is excited…The project is initiated, Sprint 0 is completed, and your team is ready to sprint…how does Sprint 1, 2, and 3 look like?

Did you experience broken sprint commitments? Did you have estimations that were off? Did you have misunderstanding of requirements?

The government ecosystem will not change overnight, and what must be understood is that accountability is still key in the government space — showing evidence of work and audibility of work and requirements.

At the end of this session, you will be able to understand how to use the Design Thinking Framework to take a requirements document and break it up into agile Epics, Features and Stories to create a roadmap on how you will deliver all that’s being asked. Specific techniques to use in order to achieve your goals:

User Personification
Affinity Mapping
Reason for vertical Slicing of Requirements
What constitutes a good feature or user story
Roadmap creation
Whether you’re a developer, tester, project manager, scrum master, or product owner, this session will benefit all who work in an environment who is transforming from traditional project management to agile management of work.

3 main concepts for you to takeaway:

1.Understand empathy is key to deliver value. Be more curious about people and how to involve them in your everyday life and work

2.Convert a requirements into features . how to break up a requirement document into features and then slice them into well form stories with a clear definition of acceptance criteria

3.Epics into Features into Stories

If you can identify ONE thing that makes sense with your processes, we will feel accomplished; so take notes then take action! we really hope that you will learn something new and Link in to us, connect with us, and ask questions.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/maneuvering-agile-requirements-government-projects-using-design-thinking

dangur

Implementing Single Sign On (SSO) can be a struggle. This session will illuminate the reasons for using SSO, along with the use cases, and how-tos. We'll clarify the jargon and build an understanding of concepts as well as steps to install and configure SimpleSAML Service and Identity Providers. Learn what questions to ask the parties involved and see how simple single sign on can be. Finally, we’ll look at how we can leverage MAX.gov to make SSO even more integrated into existing government systems. Basic knowledge of server administration and Drupal will be helpful, but not required. Presentation will be closed captioned for the hearing impaired.

Key Topics

Concepts
Terms
SimpleSAMLphp
Drupal integration
MAX.gov
You should attend if you are interested in:

Increasing security
Simplifying user management
Learning about SSO
Discovering configuration options

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/single-sign-drupal

jasonschulte

Finding good engineers is hard. Finding great engineers can seem impossible.

You have a job description. You think you know what you’re looking for but none of the candidates seem to meet your criteria. You are hunting for a unicorn, the perfect engineer who doesn’t seem to exist.

Maybe you’ve found your unicorn and they’ve joined your team. The job market is still highly competitive and recruiters are relentless. How are you going to keep them around?

Mobomo’s VP of Engineering, Jason Schulte, will share strategies for evaluating candidates and how to effectively communicate with them during and after the hiring process. He has over 5 years of experience hunting and shepherding unicorn’s for Mobomo.

This session will cover:

What you need to know before interviewing a candidate.
How to evaluate a candidate’s technical skills and culture fit.
When to take a risk on someone who doesn’t me all of your criteria
Why an exact set of technical skills are not always required.
Where to focus your efforts in order to keep your unicorn
Whether you currently have unicorns or are looking to add one to your team, you will come away with strategies for finding and keeping great engineering talent.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/unicorn-hunting-how-find-and-keep-great-engineering-talent

btopro

SLIDES: https://www.slideshare.net/btopro/future-proofing-design-work-with-web-components

Web components are a W3C standard that's been adopted by all major browsers as of October 2018. The Version 1 specification is a joy to work with and brings the web into a composing context from a raw materials one. That is, we can now directly repurpose and leverage our efforts to build bigger and better experiences (like modern home development practices) instead of constantly reinventing the wheel (like molding bricks out of clay to work on our house).

As of this writing, the ELMS:LN team (4 people) at Penn State has created 433 web components for generalized use. We've built an editor, a CMS, integrated those elements into Drupal (multiple versions), delivered static sites, worked on desktop apps, and done design work entirely, end to end, using web components and a uniform process for creating and deploying them.

Talk structure:

What are web components, can I use them, answering questions of libraries, polyfills, SEO, and accessibility
Examples of who has adopted them and what they doing with them
Community resources like polymer slack, webcomponents, and open-wc.org
Detailed examples of adoption in production, Drupal and non-Drupal environments, lessons learned and unthinkable wins
Our WCFactory tooling that automates much of the workflow of producing a sustainable element portfolio
How teams can leverage web components across projects
Where Drupal 6,7,8,9 fit into the future with web components
Where the future is going with HAXeditor and HAXcms, the future of micro-site generation and management
Our team is in love with web components and we think you will too! Join us and build better, more sustainable design systems of the future (today)!


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/future-proofing-design-work-web-components

klocraft , courtneyclark

You may have heard of the benefits of accessibility or know you need to prioritize it in your work. But you’re a little confused on what that means, where to start, and what steps you need to take.

This session will clear up confusion and help you speak confidently about accessibility by providing:

An overview of accessibility in today’s digital landscape
An understanding of why it is important for government and non-governmental organizations.
A recommendation on what level of accessibility you need.
An understanding of what it means at every stage of your project, from discovery to design to delivery.
Practical advice so you can start improving your accessibility today.
Tips on how to build your team’s passion for accessibility.
By the end of this session, you will have the right knowledge and tools to take immediate steps towards turning accessibility challenges into solutions.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/accessibility-and-design-how-create-best-online-experience

zombree , pbarclay, mgreen

Having tackled two multilingual builds in the past year, one with just 2 languages and the next with 5 (!) -- including a Right-to-Left language -- we want to share what we've learned. We will walk you through the building blocks and the underlying concepts that go into creating a multilingual Drupal 8 site. We will also touch on decisions that need to be made around translations and managing the content.

Things we'll talk about:

An overview of the multi-language experience that we wanted to create.
The structure of multilingual content, and decisions to make when migrating content.
Managing the translations process
A review of the core modules involved, and the basic setup required to enable multilingual translation.
The difference between content, config, and interface translations.
A look into translating views.
Considerations for search.
Right-to-Left language challenges.
Making sure your custom code is translatable.
Gotchas, tips and tricks, lessons learned.

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/multilingual-101

Rahul

Composer is a must-have tool for any Drupal developers toolkit. Everyone has heard about it but isn't aware of the migration process to composer based Drupal management. This session will help you understand the importance of composer and walk you the pathway to implement Composer functionality in your Drupal project. Composer is here to stay for long and will make Drupal development easier and fun!

Outline:

Composer is an open-source one stop shop tool for updating (or reverting) Drupal core, modules, and patches that will also manage all of their dependencies while also help improving your site’s security. This presentation will show you how you can use this powerful tool for your project and what you need to do to use Composer with your current Drupal site.

Abstract:

Composer makes the developer life easier by managing all the external libraries/dependencies for a project. Developer talks to composer for the external libraries he needs; Composer gets these dependencies and organizes them. Using composer in your project alleviates the pain of maintaining and managing the modules and its dependencies. We need to follow certain steps to migrate our existing Drupal project to a composer-based Drupal project.

Things to take away after the end of this session:

Understand the Composer functionality.
Start using Composer workflow in your project.
Understand how to migrate your Drupal site structure to a composer-based Drupal template.
Generate a thought over implementing better development workflows with composer in your project.
Overview of Discussion:

1.What is Composer and Why should we use Composer?

What is a dependency management tool?
How does Composer alleviate the process of managing and maintaining the 3rd party code/External Libraries?
How Composer makes it easy installing, updating and removing modules and its dependencies?
2. Advantages of Using Composer

Understand what differentiates Composer from Drush and Drush-makefile.
Recursive dependency management.
Composer autoloading.
Drawbacks and work-arounds of Composer.
3.Composer Installation Process

Composer can be installed globally or can be installed locally per project.
4.Composer Mania

Learn all about the Composer functionality.
Setup a project with drupal-composer/drupal-project template.
Understand the structure of the drupal-composer/drupal-project template and the reasons on why this structure is different from the usual structure of a Drupal project.
Do’s and Don’t with Composer. Good Practices.
5.Version Constraints

Understand the different version constraints used to download the package dependencies.
Understand why the version constraints really matter.
Tilde vs caret, release tags.
5. Applying Patches using composer

Learn how to apply patches to contributed modules or Drupal/core using a composer plugin and persist the patch even after an update.
How not to create a patch.
6.How to migrate your current Drupal site to composer-based Drupal site.

The challenges we face while migrating our Drupal site to drupal-composer/drupal-project template.
Steps to be followed to migrate your current Drupal structure to a drupal-composer/drupal-project template structure.
7. Development workflow

Learn some of the best practices used for managing drupal sites using composer and for managing deployments.
I started applying composer functionality in my project by realizing its importance from the Drupal community. During this process, my project had modules/themes installed both from the UI and the Composer. Instead of handling both types, I converted everything into a composer-based module structure. I realized the Importance of having the composer-based Drupal project Structure and migrated my site to the same.

In this presentation I introduce the composer approach and share my experiences during the migration of Drupal project to a Composer-based Drupal Project, specifying it's importance.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/composer-101-govern-your-drupal-project-composer

andersontqa

Create a more robust regression suite by adding automation of node creation and verification with Selenium and Python. This session will cover automation techniques for completing content fields in the Drupal backend, saving the content, and verifying that the content appears as desired in the node view. We will also go over test results and different methods on how to verify and display them.



The following items will be covered in this section:

Automating Drupal back-end field completion
Techniques for overcoming automation roadblocks in Drupal back-end field completion
Methods on how to verify that content in node view displays appropriately
Different ways of verifying and displaying test results.

elpatterson

Oh, the dreaded monthly web analytics report! Compiling website -- and email and social media -- metrics into a regular report often falls to the content management team. But even though you spend hours each month creating these reports, you may feel like they don't provide the insights you need.

This talk has practical tips for putting together meaningful reports and preforming useful analysis of your website’s content, conversions and audience. Using real examples from other government (or gov contractor) websites, this talk provides concrete ideas that web managers can implement on their own sites.

What you’ll learn about digital metrics:

The web’s most misunderstood metrics (hint: stop reporting pageviews and bounce rate) and what you should measure instead
How to get insight into engagement on your site
Tips on using Google Analytics to capture more meaningful data on your site
How to save time (and sanity) by automating your reports
(I presented this topic at the DC Drupal meetup in November 2018 and as a webinar. I provided the link )

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/stop-reporting-pageviews-other-tips-actually-useful-reports

alison

Now we're gonna have some INTERMEDIATE FUN!

I'll share some of my favorite things to do (cherry-pick, blame, change the author so it looks like my coworker did something I just did)...
Wait, what's a tag? Wait, what's a release? (HINT: THEY'RE THE SAME. SORT OF. OMG I SAID SORT OF, CHILL OUT.)
Forks and pull requests: COOL STUFF you can do on GitHub/BitBucket (and of course, GitLab!)
Feature branches -- yes, they're what they sound like.
Cherry picks and Merges and Rebasing -- what's what?? and, differences, benefits/drawbacks, etc.
A bit of conflict resolution, detached tags, merged branch cleanup, multiple remotes...
We'll go over some "omg what did I do" scenarios (and a few online resources).
THEN, if y'all bring your own pain points, we can talk about them and I'll do my best to help!

If not, I'll briefly cover a fairly universal pain point: git + Drupal code contribution.

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/git-users-git

dmkelner

We are told that we just need to take a vacation, buy something nice, or achieve work/life balance. But those action do not get to the heart of burnout. Within days, the stress returns as fierce as ever. Without addressing the causes of habitual stress, we will never experience the wholeness of our lives.

A majority of US adults suffer from on-the-job burnout. This can lead to serious physical and psychological illness, low productivity, and declined motivation. Business suffers when employees experience high stress, as evidenced by rising turnover rates and healthcare costs. In modern organizations, we see stress manifested as a focus on short-term goals, lack of vision, and routine thinking.

The growing public health crisis that is stress can be understood from a scientific perspective. We all have a choice as to how to respond in our daily interactions once we tap our boundless ability to to care for ourselves and those for whom we are responsible.

Join a trained mindfulness teacher, with a many decades long IT career, as we discuss the causes of burnout in the workplace. We will address how the C-suite and management can adjust the culture of the organization to reduce burnout. We will touch on the concept of mindfulness, what is it and what it is not, and how mindfulness practice can help us to alleviate stress, leaving us empowered, productive, and fulfilled, despite all the digital noise.

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/managing-burnout-tech-community

adam.weingarten

No one likes a slow web page. People’s attention spans are short. Every second of additional load time can cost you user engagement and less time spent on page.

This session will look at how you can weave end user performance into your sprints so that by the time you launch, your site is already fast! Want pages that load in less than 1 second? We’ll show you we applied the following techniques on the upcoming Association of American Medical Colleges site:

Evaluating designs and style guides for performance pitfalls
Identifying libraries that can cause slow downs
Evaluating HTTP requests
Attacking page weights
Using Drupal image styles
Using developer tools to find bottlenecks in you render pipeline that prevent the first paint of your webpage
Preloading key resources
What frontend optimizations you can safely ignore because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze
Finally, we’ll look at some other example sites and analyze them together in real time to identify performance bottlenecks. By the end of this session, you’ll be ready to apply these techniques to your next site, and even if you have an existing site that needs some love, you’ll be able to bolt these onto your current build.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/making-your-site-scream-building-frontend-performance

NoahWolfe

Story:

When a government project is not going well and you're caught up in compliance, reporting, and procedure the work can feel like a grind. What is often forgotten is that one of the greatest accomplishments in human history - landing a person on the Moon - was a U.S. Federal government project. How was that accomplished? Today agile and Scrum are all the rage. NASA pulled off that mission long before iterative design, user testing, and demos were key components of modern technology development. Landing on the Moon was achieved without agile! ...Or was it?

When humanity was figuring out the very dangerous work of launching ourselves into space the U.S. space program used basic agile principles to develop the most cutting edge, unprecedented technology in human history. NASA's space programs from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo are textbook examples of the principals that should guide any modern technology development... including government websites.

Takeaways:

After this talk PMs and govies should be inspired to do greater work after seeing how their projects have parallels to NASA's Moon landing. They should feel that the same agile methods used to develop life saving tech for astronauts should work just as well for their Drupal sites where lives may not be exposed to the same level of risk. They will also see how today NASA has evolved their agile approach. We'll look at the user story based contracts that are currently fueling the inspiring work at SpaceX and Boeing. We will see some of the incredible results like the SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule and Spacesuit. Walking out of the session attendees will have a better understanding of how agile methods like iterative design, user testing, demos, and user stories have been effectively employed in Federal work and the incredible results that those methods can produce.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/neil-armstrongs-lessons-building-government-websites

stephencross

Development workflows, continuous integration and automated testing are a hot topics, and should be. As teams rush to implement and improve their DevOps strategies, one thing hasn’t changed, testing is a afterthought. Effective automated testing begins with effective User Acceptance Testing (UAT). This session will explore a proven strategy to implement Behat into your development workflow.

Topics covered:

What is User Acceptance Testing
The positive impact simple UAT has on the development process and team
Steps to implement UAT
Getting started with Behat
Effective use of Behat
Tips for using Behat on a Drupal project

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/user-acceptance-testing-automated-testing

ClintonAtMobomo

Okay, so what is this Koober-neetees thing anyway and what does it have to do with Drupal? We break down the hype around the world's most popular open-source container orchestration engine and discuss strategies for using it to power, well, the world's most popular open-source CMS, Drupal! Some topics we'll cover include:

What is Kubernetes and what makes it a desirable platform for running Drupal?
What are some potential pitfalls of hosting Drupal on Kubernetes vs. a more traditional virtual machine-based infrastructure? When is not a good idea to use Kubernetes?
What cool stuff -- including rolling deployments, self-healing infrastructure, "infinite" scalability, and instant rollbacks -- does Kubernetes allow us to do?
Why the heck should we care about immutability anyway?
How can Drupal-on-Kubernetes be made a whole lot easier by using meta-orchestration tools like Helm?
After introducing some key concepts, we'll walk through a turnkey solution for deploying a Drupal application on a Kubernetes cluster such as Google (GKE), Amazon (EKS) or Microsoft (AKS).

Some previous familiarity with Docker containers is recommended to get the most out of this session.

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/running-drupal-kubernetes-easy-way

claymarshall, jabaliwilliams, marcrambeau

In this session, members of the U.Group Experience team will present our approach to tackling the digital strategy for Federal Agency clients looking to modernize and consolidate multiple legacy websites to Drupal 8. We will demonstrate how this approach aligns with the 21st Century IDEA Act, particularly around key elements focused on customer experience and data-driven analysis when designing websites. To uncover users’ needs and desires, we use tactics such as navigation model testing, usability sessions, focus groups, surveys, heat mapping, interviews, and analytics. Finding the happy medium between internal stakeholder needs and external user desires is the challenge. A well-designed site must take both into account and balance what the user wants against what the organization is driving towards. Participants will leave understanding an effective approach to strategy, development, and UX.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/better-idea-user-first-federal-agencies

laura.gates

Five ways managers can become champions of web accessibility… like a BOSS! As a manager, it’s very easy to feel overwhelmed by web accessibility with everything from acronyms and technical jargon to federal and state laws to learn. This talk seeks to help managers:

engage with their leadership about web accessibility
raise red flags when design and/or content has suspicious accessibility
introduce free tools to test for web accessibility

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/web-accessibility-boss

sk33lz

Explore DevOps techniques, tools, and best practices for Drupal and other web applications.

This session will expand on the following topics:

DevOps philosophy
Local development environments, version control, and development workflows
Automation, testing tools, and deployment processes
Storing server configuration in code and provisioning servers from code
Docker and containerized applications
Drupal sandbox testing tools and cool testing APIs
Logging and monitoring tools
Backups and disaster recovery
Security best practices
Those who are involved in the daily operations of managing servers or other infrastructure in your organization will benefit most from this session. However, the tools and techniques discussed in this session will enhance your knowledge of DevOps for Drupal and other web applications regardless of your current skill set.

This session will be loosely based on material used for Zivtech's DevOps for Drupal Training at Drupalcon Seattle 2019. This session was accepted and will also be presented at Drupaldelphia 2019, https://drupaldelphia.org/session/devops-drupal-and-other-web-applications.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/devops-drupal-and-other-web-applications

cleake

What do entity relationship diagrams (ERDs) and database design have to do with content strategy? More than you’d think. Web content lives in databases, and how you structure your content determines the shape of those databases. Learn how modelling your content can have benefits throughout a web redesign project’s lifecycle — from better specifications to clearer content types to smoother migrations.


https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/erd-word-simplifying-content-structure

Danielle_Sheffler

Have you ever wanted to give feedback to a coworker or manager and were afraid of what their reaction would be? Have you ever had a project that was going off the rails and you were worried about how the client would react?

We've all been there. No one likes having a difficult conversation, but there are ways to successfully communicate your thoughts without the other party getting defensive or upset.

During this presentation, we'll discuss the following:

How to build relationships so that difficult conversations are easier
The concept of radical candor
Following up after a crucial conversation

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2019/program/sessions/how-give-feedback-while-keeping-your-head