Drupal GovCon 2020

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📅 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24
🎤 Keynote by Sara Cope: Digging Into User Experience at Any Level
🕒 12 - 1 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/digging-user-experience-any-level
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "keynote-thursday"

📅 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
🎤 Keynote by Harish Rao: What Today’s COVID-19 Crisis Means for Tomorrow’s Digital Infrastructure
🕒 12 - 1 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/what-todays-covid-19-crisis-means-tomorrows-digital-infrastructure
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "keynote-friday"

📅 WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23
🎤 Keynotes by Noel Hidalgo and Joseph Castle
🕒 12 - 1 p.m. ET
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "keynote-wednesday"

🎤 Do the work! (Noel Hidalgo)
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/do-work

🎤 Open Source in the Federal Government: Anecdotes and Evidence (Joseph Castle)
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/open-source-federal-government-anecdotes-and-evidence

📅 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24
⬇️ Click "show more" for full schedule

🎤 Empowering Site Owners by Developing Custom Views Plugins (Jim Vomero)
🕒 10 - 10:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/empowering-site-owners-developing-custom-views-plugins
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 Drupal Hosted on Kubernetes (Sunil Taneja)
🕒 11 - 11:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/drupal-hosted-kubernetes
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "devops-performance-security-privacy"

✨ Watch the 12 p.m. keynote by Sara Cope: https://youtu.be/OC-rfml7-KM

🎤 Resilient Leadership in Difficult Times (Dori Kelner)
🕒 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/resilient-leadership-difficult-times
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "community-being-human"

🎤 Successful Projects Start with Great RFPs (Joe Crespo)
🕒 2:30 - 3:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/successful-projects-start-great-rfps
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "project-team-management"

🎤 Understanding Drupal (Mauricio Dinarte)
🕒 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/understanding-drupal
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

🎤 Mentoring Team Members and Promoting Growth (Danielle Sheffler)
🕒 4:30 - 5:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/mentoring-team-members-and-promoting-growth
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "community-being-human"

🎤 Authentic digital inclusion is easier than you think (Andrew Mallis, Crispin Bailey, Matthew Janusauskas, William Reuschel)
🕒 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/authentic-digital-inclusion-easier-you-think
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

📅 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24
⬇️ Click "show more" for full schedule

🎤 Why Metrics? How Metrics? Do I even need them? (Eduardo Madariaga)
🕒 10 - 10:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/why-metrics-how-metrics-do-i-even-need-them
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "content-strategy-analytics"

🎤 8 Tech Questions to Ask Before You Even Think About a New Website (Stephen Tidmore)
🕒 11 - 11:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/8-tech-questions-ask-you-even-think-about-new-website
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

✨ Watch the 12 p.m. keynote by Sara Cope: https://youtu.be/OC-rfml7-KM

🎤 The Question Is Moot! Accessibility and Dataviz Is NOT an Either/Or: How to Design Accessible, Usable Data Visualizations (Kim Locraft, Tim Shaw)
🕒 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/question-moot-accessibility-and-dataviz-not-eitheror-how-design-accessible
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

🎤 Lessons learned re-platforming VA.gov on Drupal in 12 months (Jeff Brauer, Jeff Barnes, Ryan Sibley)
🕒 2:30 - 3:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/lessons-learned-re-platforming-vagov-drupal-12-months
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "content-strategy-analytics"

🎤 My First IDE (Mike Madison)
🕒 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/my-first-ide
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 What can the USA learn from the world on accessibility policy? (Mike Gifford)
🕒 4:30 - 5:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/what-can-usa-learn-world-accessibility-policy
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

🎤 Why You Need Disciplined Agile For Your Projects and Organization (Bill Brantley)
🕒 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/why-you-need-disciplined-agile-your-projects-and-organization
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "project-team-management"

📅 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24
⬇️ Click "show more" for full schedule

🎤 Drag & Drop Content Management For Government Websites (Chris O'Donnell, Aaron Couch)
🕒 10 - 10:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/drag-drop-content-management-government-websites
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

🎤 100% Remote: Tips for Managing a Fully-Distributed Workforce (Monica Flores)
🕒 11 - 11:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/100-remote-tips-managing-fully-distributed-workforce
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "project-team-management"

✨ Watch the 12 p.m. keynote by Sara Cope: https://youtu.be/OC-rfml7-KM

🎤 Real-world example of using the U.S. Web Design System (Dan Mouyard)
🕒 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/real-world-example-using-us-web-design-system
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 Creating Layouts & Landing Pages in Drupal: the Paragraphs vs. Layout Builder Edition (Suzanne Dergacheva)
🕒 2:30 - 3:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/creating-layouts-landing-pages-drupal-paragraphs-vs-layout-builder-edition
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

🎤 Mobile accessibility: testing mobile sites and native apps for accessibility (Gian Wild)
🕒 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/mobile-accessibility-testing-mobile-sites-and-native-apps-accessibility
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

🎤 Using Post Update Scripts to Deploy Content Across Environments (Jason Glisson, Matt Calvert)
🕒 4:30 - 5:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/using-post-update-scripts-deploy-content-across-environments
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 Dealing with unprecedented scale during Covid-19 (Sean Hamlin)
🕒 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/dealing-unprecedented-scale-during-covid-19
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "devops-performance-security-privacy"

📅 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24
⬇️ Click "show more" for full schedule

🎤 Content Models: The Design Tool You Never Considered (Courtney Clark, Julia Bradshaw)
🕒 10 - 10:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/content-models-design-tool-you-never-considered
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

🎤 The future of Drupal MultiSites (Michael Schmid)
🕒 11 - 11:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/future-drupal-multisites
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

✨ Watch the 12 p.m. keynote by Sara Cope: https://youtu.be/OC-rfml7-KM

🎤 Platforms, Platforms, Multisites, and Platforms (John Doyle, Adam Weingarten)
🕒 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/platforms-platforms-multisites-and-platforms
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "devops-performance-security-privacy"

🎤 Smithsonian + Google - Open source web components for visualizing and interacting with 3D objects (Vincent Rossi, Ha Pham, Jamie Cope, Emmett Lalish)
🕒 2:30 - 3:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/smithsonian-google-open-source-web-components-visualizing-and-interacting-3d
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 Let’s Talk about the "A" Word: Tips for Helping Reluctant Teams and Organizations to Embrace Agile (Mike Knight)
🕒 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/lets-talk-about-word-tips-helping-reluctant-teams-and-organizations-embrace
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "project-team-management"

🎤 Building Sites from the User’s Perspective via Effective Content (Karl Kaufmann)
🕒 4:30 - 5:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/building-sites-users-perspective-effective-content
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "content-strategy-analytics"

🎤 Granicus meeting and asset importer (using Drupal + Feeds) (Jen Lampton)
🕒 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/granicus-meeting-and-asset-importer-using-drupal-feeds
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

You're in it. Development has begun. You're building out content types, sorting out view modes. But wait. You have a LOT of questions for your designer. Do we really need these two components that are nearly identical? From where does this component pull data? Is this populated manually or dynamically? Why wasn't this all documented earlier?!

During this talk, I’ll show how designers can help their developers sooner. It starts with a robust content model, plus components and content view modes definition. And how developers can get clarity in the design phase, way before getting to code.

During this session, you’ll learn:
* How a content model can be a tool for developers and designers;
* How to define content view modes in a content model;
* How to collaborate with the full team earlier on in the process for fewer unknowns and better outcomes.

By the end, you’ll have a new method to achieve more efficiency in your development process; reduce friction in the design to development handoff; and speak the same language among the full team.

Presenter: courtneyclark

Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/courtneyclark/content-models-the-design-tool-you-never-knew-you-needed

By combining design systems with Layout Builder and Drupal features such as blocks we can deliver a "Wix" like drag and drop experience to site builders tasked with managing Drupal 8/9 websites.

In this session attendees will learn:
* How to integrate design systems with Drupal
* How to combine component libraries with Drupal Blocks and Layout Builder
* How to use Emulsify to manage your component library for the website
* How to leverage prebuilt built components on other websites
* How this approach builds on Drupal's inherent flexibility

Non-technical attendees will learn how this approach increases agility while decreasing costs by enabling reuse of previously completed work.

Presenters: chrisodva, acouch

Views is an indispensable tool for Drupal site builders - allowing them to create complex queries and displays without writing a single line of code. But too often developers like myself avoid these interfaces. We feel constrained by the GUI and want to reinvent the wheel for the sake of efficiency, performance, and extensibility; or we hit edge cases that Core simply can not handle.

This session will explore creating custom Views Plugins to add functionality and custom logic to the Views interface. We will discuss common reasons a site may need features beyond out-of-the-box functionality and we will look at real-life examples of Views Plugins. Topics include:

* Introducing how Views builds, executes, and renders queries and displays.
* Exploring business cases for using Views Plugins vs altering data by hooks.
* Adding custom Fields, Filters, Arguments, Sorts and Joins beyond what is offered by default with Views.
* Reviewing example code and practical use cases for modifying Views queries.

View Plugins can allow developers to keep their code organized, abstracted, and highly functional. We can package custom code into the standard Views interface. Most importantly, these plugins empower site-builders to create applications that use the standard Drupal workflows and interfaces.

This session is for anyone who is comfortable (or willing to try) writing code in a custom module. Advance knowledge of Drupal or databases is not required to get started.

Presenter: nJim

Metrics has become one of the most popular terms when talking about team introspection, especially in the software industry. So much so that a new term "Vanity metrics" has appeared to refer to metrics that stand for... well nothing really!

In this session, we'll go over what they are supposed to be and how to use them. In particular, ways of tailoring them for Drupal to make sure your development makes it on time! Drupal is a fast development & slow tailoring kind of process and you can quickly get sidetracked to thinking that you will make it: only to end up with weeks of Bug Fixing and months of O&M. Is there a better way

Presenters: eduardomadariaga

IDEs are an incredibly powerful tool. They are also an incredibly complex and intimidating tool if you've never used one (or are new to them). However as you tread more into #Drupal 8 and 9, an #IDE is a critical tool that will drastically impact your ability to write functional code. The difference in code quality / functionality / usability written in an IDE vs. code written in a text editor (e.g. Sublime) or terminal (e.g. VIM) is obvious and on more than one occasion I have "fixed" broken code that someone else wrote just by opening it in a Drupal project in my IDE and reading things that the original developer's "other tool" didn't show!

Topics Covered:
IDE basics for Drupal
Using an IDE with other tools (such as Git, Composer, etc.)
Setting up and using a #Debugger
Standardizing your project team's approach to development

Audience:
Anyone who is interested in learning about development in an IDE! A basic understanding of PHP and YAML files would be helpful (but not required).

🎤 Presenter(s): mikemadison
🔗 Session details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/my-first-ide

Monica will share practical knowledge on how to manage #remote teams based on the experience of the 100% distributed team at Lullabot. COVID-19 has dramatically changed how most companies work and teams collaborate. Project manager and certified #ScrumMaster Monica Flores will give managers some much-needed tips on how they can support their remote employees while keeping projects on track.

Lullabot is a design, development, and strategy agency that supports Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, higher education, and publishers. Teams work across 9 time zones using tools like scheduled meetings, #Slack, #Paper, #Google, #Jira, and #Zoom. We’ll discuss fundamental ways to practice compassion, respect boundaries, and foster psychological safety based on lessons learned in the field.


🎤 Presenter: monicadear

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/100-remote-tips-managing-fully-distributed-workforce

Do you feel distracted by a suite of automated tools, pages of report data, and feedback on work that was designed and developed weeks and weeks ago? If your antidote is achieving #WCAG 2.1 AA conformance, you may be leaving more people behind than you think.

Accessibility and digital inclusion can be easier.

Authentic digital inclusion means ensuring that every end user can actually use a digital asset as designed and intended. Let’s start there.

In this presentation, representatives from the American Foundation for the Blind and Kalamuna will discuss how organizations can benefit from usability-centric development policies and processes. Strategic, agile approaches will demonstrate how a spirit of digital accessibility can be achieved.

Attendees will learn:

Why usability is the most important component in an organization’s accessibility approach
How to get started incorporating usability in the development and design process
What are the most important workflows to focus on for usability
Why policies and processes are so critical to ensuring digital inclusion
How to create knowledge transfer in your development and design teams to create and sustain authentic digital inclusion

Plus, a demonstration of usability testing in action!
=============
This will be lively and generous exchange between the consulting practice of a national nonprofit for the blind, and an agency responsible for creating open source government websites and ecosystems.

The material we present will make sense and create relief for those responsible for the accessibility of their institution’s platforms.

Our demonstration of a usability test will drive home the importance of usability testing, but more than anything else, it will help attendees conceptualize how they will advance their institution’s approach and effectiveness for actually becoming authentically digitally inclusive.

Kalamuna
Kalamuna is an Oakland+Toronto-based agency that designs and develops institutional websites that solve complex challenges, simplify and improve user experience, and tell better stories.
https://www.kalamuna.com

American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)
American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) is a national organization with nearly a century of experience in setting standards and achieving milestones to improve the quality of life for people with vision loss. AFB Consulting offers a variety of services that address tactical, strategic, and programmatic needs to help organizations reshape their culture to promote disability inclusion.
https://www.afb.org/about-afb/what-we-do/afb-consulting

🎤 Presenter(s): Andrew_Mallis, crispinbailey, Consulting@AFB.org, wreuschel

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/authentic-digital-inclusion-easier-you-think

Drupal is an extremely flexible system. To achieve this, various layers of abstractions were built into it. A lot of concepts were created to explain these abstractions. Unfortunately, they are not always intuitive. This session aims to explain the basic building blocks for assembling a Drupal site and how they relate to each other. Many examples will be presented to help you understand Drupal and why it is so powerful.

Learning objectives:

What is a node?
What is a content type?
What are fields and why are they useful?
What is a block and what can I do with it?
What is a view?
How are users and permissions managed?
How does the taxonomy system work?
How can I create the navigation of my website?


🎤 Presenter: dinarcon
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/understanding-drupal

Drupal MultiSites are great, at least they initially sound great:
Managing hundreds or even thousands of Drupal sites from one single repository, with the capability to upgrade all sites at once to new Core or Module versions sounds like a security and management heaven.

Unfortunately anybody that ever has ran any decent amount of Drupal MultiSites knows, that this heaven can turn into hell fast:

* If one single site has a problem and needs a code rollback, all sites need to be rolled back as well
* If the upgrade is quite big an involves a database upgrade, all sites need to run this database upgrade. With multiple hundreds of sites, this can generate a huge resource burden on the database, sometimes causing outages
* Installing a module for one site might it available for all sites
* There is no simple way to have development environments for a single Drupal MultiSites
* Local development is very hard and cumbersome

In this talk I will present an alternative to Drupal MultiSites and our experience with it:

With modern container systems we have the capability to create so called "Base-Images" of containers: Allowing a centralized team to control which Drupal Core Version and Module is installed, while still giving developers of the individual sites the flexibility of adding modules and themes without interfering with other sites.

This talk will cover:
* What are Base Images for MultiSites and how are they used
* How Base Images allow for less downtime deployments and individual site rollbacks if needed
* How each individual sites can have development environments that are independent of the whole MultiSite installation
* How Local Development suddenly is a breeze

None of this is just a technical idea or proof of concept, today hundreds of websites (Governments and Enterprises) use this Base Image system and I'm gonna share their experiences with the Base Image Systems as well.

Presenters: Schnitzel

Open source is free... so why does it cost me so much to keep my websites running? Why am I spending so much time updating my websites and not enough time using them? How do I consolidate my various websites across technologies and vendors into a single streamlined platform?

Imagine a world where you could manage your updates once and apply them to all of your web properties. A world where you could develop a new crazy awesome feature and immediately utilize it across all of your existing web properties.

In this session we are going to dive into the platform conversation and provide you with the answers to the following questions:

*What is a platform?
* Do I need a platform?
* How do I determine if building a platform is right for my organization?
* Where can I host my platform?
* How do I manage my platform (and does my hosting solution impact this)?
* What are the benefits (and considerations) of using a platform?

Target Audiences:

* Site owners looking to increase the efficiency of the digital ecosystem
* Architects looking to reduce the complexity of running/supporting multiple websites
* IT teams looking to follow the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle

Learning Objectives:

When you walk away from this session you should understand:

* If you should consider a platform for your organization.
* Approaches for building a platform.
* Where you can host your platform and how that impacts management.
* Benefits I can achieve by using a platform.

Slide Deck: https://www.slideshare.net/secret/rZJwU27Jxknb4m

Presenters: _doyle_, adam.weingarten

The year 2020 came in with a bang. Our plans were put on hold, our lives were changed. We all ended up with zoom fatigue trying to satisfy our human need for social contact and social change.

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 open ourselves up and 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 skills 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.

We will include time for a short practice and discussion led by a certified mindfulness teacher and facilitator.

🎤 Presenter: dmkelner

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/resilient-leadership-difficult-times

🎤 Presenter: wabranty

Disciplined Agile (DA) is the most comprehensive agile and lean body of knowledge in existence. It can be a toolkit to help you to choose your way of working (WoW) for your projects, programs, and organization. DA is a toolkit of processes you and your team mix-and-match to build a unique workflow for your organization’s specific needs.

In this session, I will explain the lean and agile concepts behind DA, how to use the DA processes to build your workflow, and how DA can transform your organization. Go beyond the agile and lean practices of other project frameworks like Scrum. Learn how DA can supercharge your projects and your enterprise.

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/why-you-need-disciplined-agile-your-projects-and-organization

For years there’s been a lot of ink spilled about how the RFP process is broken, particularly when it comes to technology projects. This session isn’t going to litigate various viewpoints on that front, because RFPs are not going anywhere anytime soon — especially when it comes to government projects.

Ignore the naysayers! Your RFP can be brilliant!

I’m a former project manager and recovering developer, and now that I read and respond to RFPs for a living, I have a pretty good sense of what your partners are looking for and what you need to know from them in order to help you select a great fit for your project.

This session will discuss:

* When being prescriptive is necessary and when it can hurt your project
* How you can use initial goal-setting and audience work to frame your project
* How aligning your stakeholders before the RFP pays dividends throughout the project
* Why it’s important to include in your RFP the project constraints — like timeline and budget
* How to get apples-to-apples comparisons from the proposals you receive
* What you need to know from your potential partners

Presenters: jeff.brauer, jeffrey barnes, ryansibley

What attendees will gain:

From this session, attendees will walk away with a set of key learnings and guidance for shipping value to customers of the government even at the highest visibility, largest scale products.They will bring back to their organization the learnings from a real Government MVP delivery, and a product-centric approach to the content model that led to success at VA.

In the session, we will highlight how the VA.gov CMS project represented state-of-the art product development, how we addressed the tension between established web-patterns (built with the U.S. Web Design System) and a content-first design, PIV single sign-on, and a decoupled architecture.

We’ll also share our lessons learned for questions such as:

* How do I avoid boiling the ocean to deliver real value to my customers in the first year?
* Will the entire site (and all my stakeholders) need to migrate to Drupal at once?
* How do I build a content model that can launch quickly but is flexible enough for my entire site?
* What about the actual users of our platform - the editors? Where do their needs rank?
* What does iteration of a content model look like?

The VA.gov Case Study:
Drupal, Drupal GovCon, Baltimore DrupalCamp, drupal4gov, GovDrupal
A small team assembled by the US Digital Service, in partnership with the VA, set out on an ambitious mission to stand up a custom Drupal CMS for the Department’s flagship website, VA.gov. The team created the de-coupled infrastructure and developed the content model while migrating the highest priority content from the existing static site, while simultaneously re-imagining, re-designing, and re-writing, VA’s largest digital presence - the Medical Center sites. The team delivered major portions of VA.gov including the homepage and primary Veteran-facing content hubs in staggered releases over the first 12 months, and launched the new VA Medical Center site after 15 months. There were some stressful times, many exciting moments, and a lot of lessons learned.

Presenters: jeff.brauer, jeffrey barnes, ryansibley

🎤 Presenter: Danielle_Sheffler

Many times, team members feel like they can't mentor others unless they are a manager or a team lead. However, mentoring allows for growth of both senior team members and junior team members.

Mentors and mentees help each other see how the other can improve, mentors can help generate ideas, and mentors can provide the right balance of encouragement and "tough love." Both parties feeling empowered can benefit the cohesion of a team and generate new processes and ideas to help support a team and the business as a whole.

In this session, we'll discuss:
* Why is mentoring others important?
* What does each party get out of the mentoring relationship?
* How do you find a mentor and make sure it is the right fit?
* What are some good qualities of a mentor?
* What are some sample topics you can discuss during mentoring sessions?
* How do you put what you learn from your mentoring sessions into practice?

🎤 Presenter(s): stidmore-mc

It’s happened to you: You’re putting together requirements for a new website, but when it comes to your existing technology, you don’t know what you don’t know. Do your third-party software platforms integrate with each other? How much content needs to be migrated? Where does your DNS live? You need to gain a clear picture of your current technology so that you can move forward with your new website as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Based on over 20 years of experience building websites, we’ll explore the most common tech issues we see when beginning a new web project. You’ll gain valuable knowledge around processes like content migration, CMS requirements, single sign-on, and everything in between. You’ll understand what questions to ask your internal team before involving an outside agency or getting too far along in the process. We’ll walk through some real-world examples of how to evaluate what you’re working with and what tools you’ll need to meet your organizational goals.

By the end of this session, you should be able to:

* Ask the right questions upfront to make the entire website process more efficient
* Work with internal IT teams to get an accurate lay of the land
* Evaluate existing tools—and craft accurate requests for work
* Use tech to reach your goals

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/8-tech-questions-ask-you-even-think-about-new-website

🎤 Presenter(s): suniltaneja

Run #Drupal and other workloads such as SOLR, Elastic, Redis or Memcache in #Kubernetes. In-depth analysis of which services are much more suited for Kubernetes.

This session will focus on concepts and real-world use-case scenarios to move your Drupal installation away from traditional Virtual machines to a scalable and cost-effective Kubernetes environment.

* What are the basic concepts of kubernetes and what makes it so compelling for a multi-workload hosted environment.
* Does it make sense to host everything in Kubernetes? which are better suited for Kubernetes as opposed to managed services from a cloud provider. Key concepts will be presented to make these decisions.
* How does it make it easier to manage, deploy and be more secure in a Kubernetes hosted environment. Concepts for Rolling updates, rollbacks and version management will be explained. Tools like Kubectl, HELM and others will be introduced.
* A complete turnkey solution with all the components will be shown in an existing Kubernetes hosted environment. The solution will show variations needed for installations in Azure, and considerations to all the major Kubernetes providers, such as Google (GKE), Amazon (EKS) or Microsoft (AKS).

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/drupal-hosted-kubernetes

Canada, the European Union and the United Kingdom have all developed legislation on web #accessibility since the #Section508 Refresh process was enacted in 2017. It is most likely that enforcement will likely continue to be done through lawsuits in the USA, but what can be learned from other jurisdictions that might help individual departments.

This session will highlight some of the different approaches that are being tried by government around the world to keep up with the challenge of digital inclusion.

🎤 Presenter: mgifford

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/what-can-usa-learn-world-accessibility-policy

Two requirements that come up constantly on projects are “How do we make it easier for non-technical users to update our website?” And “How can we give content editors more flexibility?"

At the same time, responsive design, content portability, and accessibility concerns are increasingly important. Now more than ever, we need to make sure that by adding flexibility, we’re not sacrificing semantic markup and data.

In this session, I'll show the differences between how Paragraphs and Layout Builder solve these problems, and give suggestions about which to use to solve different use cases. I'll draw on usability studies comparing the two platforms, and draw from this blog post comparing the two options (https://evolvingweb.ca/blog/designing-flexible-content-model-drupal-layout-builder-paragraphs). I'll also talk about alternatives like Acquia Cohesion and Gutenberg and how they fit into the ecosystem.

🎤 Presenter: pixelite
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/creating-layouts-landing-pages-drupal-paragraphs-vs-layout-builder-edition

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: gianwild
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/mobile-accessibility-testing-mobile-sites-and-native-apps-accessibility

I would like to do a quick show-and-tell of a neat feature we're using on about 5 government sites I help maintain. This is a tool I built for #Drupal 7 using the feeds importer and a handful of additional modules. We are currently in the process of upgrading it to Drupal 9.

The #Granicus meeting importer pulls in information about upcoming meetings including date, time, location, agenda, packets, and other information like whether the session is open or closed. After the meeting has concluded, the importer will update the meeting with the minutes, and add a link to the video recording.

Because the Drupal tool uses standard #Feeds importers, it's fairly simple to adjust as needed for any given site.


* There's one HUGE caveat to using this tool: Granicus does NOT provide a feed suitable for pulling in this information. It will also be necessary to hire a developer to leverage TWO different Granicus APIs (both undocumented, and unmaintained) to generate a feed containing all the data needed to run this program.


🎤 Presenter: jenlampton
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/granicus-meeting-and-asset-importer-using-drupal-feeds

The EPA started using the U.S. Web Design System in 2016 to guide the look and feel of EPA.gov. During the migration to Drupal 8, we rebuilt the theme from scratch. One major goal was to make it easier to keep up with the latest changes to USWDS.

Learn how we incorporated the latest version of USWDS into our process:

Integrate with a Drupal 8 theme
Leverage USWDS theme settings and Sass mixins
Use Pattern Lab to show and document components


We also created an open-source Drupal 8 theme that you can use as a starting point. https://github.com/forumone/gesso-uswds


🎤 Presenter: dcmouyard
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/real-world-example-using-us-web-design-system

This session will discuss two open source web components for visualizing and interacting with 3D objects, Google's model-viewer and the Smithsonian Institution's Voyager, and how the Smithsonian leverages these technologies along with Drupal and open-access content to create engaging learning experiences.

Presenters: rossiv, sharkbaitdc, gjcope, elalish

This session focuses on how we rolled out large amounts of content using a #Drupal post update script. This method was used for several tools on Farmers.gov, most recently The Disaster Assistance Tool. A post update script can build pages, create paragraph types or blocks, and can fill in the content. After running the post update script, all pages will be up and running with properly placed blocks and paragraph types filled with content significantly cutting down on the time needed to launch tools, features, and large content elements. This method is particularly useful in rolling out the same content across environments when you don’t have the manpower or time to recreate content repeatedly.

Presentation by Matt Calvert & Jason Glisson with an introduction by Ashley Miller of USDA.

Synopsis:

Setting up pages, blocks, paragraphs, and content on various environments can often times be a pain. If you deploy from your local environment, to a development environment, a QA environment, a client facing staging environment, and then a production environment, valuable time can be spent creating the same content over and over again. And if the pages you are rolling out include creating a large number of new paragraphs and blocks as well as placing them in a content type, the process can become monotonous and drag on for hours.

Configuration files can help with some of this process such as creating content types, paragraph types, or block types. However, filling in the content, embedded blocks or reference types can sometimes cause issues or simply not work properly with configuration. Properly placing block types, view blocks, module produced blocks and paragraph reference may not even be an option in configuration at times.

Enter Drupal's Update Script. With an update script, entire tools and large sections of a website can be rolled out flawlessly with all content in place and ready to go in a matter of seconds. The days of copying and pasting content from environment to environment are behind you! Simply run drush updb, and your update script will create your content, place blocks, create paragraphs and embed them, upload images, create views, etc. The possibilities are nearly endless.


USDA's Farmers.Gov initiative has used update scripts to roll out very large interactive tools with high volumes of blocks and paragraphs that would take hours on end to setup manually. By spending the time on an update script, we've cut down on setup time across our environments and reduced production launch time to just seconds.


🎤 Presenter(s): tk421jag, ashleyfmiller, MattC
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/using-post-update-scripts-deploy-content-across-environments

Covid-19 for some sites has meant a massive surge in traffic. Some of the health related sites that we look after at amazee.io have experienced a 80x traffic increase over the last couple months.

This talk is about dealing with this scale of traffic, and what things you can do to help here.

Some of the things that will be discussed:

Horizontal scaling and getting this sized this the best
Database sizing and tuning
Redis tuning and gotchas
Minimising origin hits
CDN tuning
Building a culture of continuous improvement
The talk is aimed at anyone with performance in mind, from developers to devops, to sysadmins.

Presenter: Sean Hamlin
Slides: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/sites/default/files/session/slides/2020-09/Drupal%20GovCon%20-%20Dealing%20with%20unprecedented%20scale%20during%20Covid-19.pdf
Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/dealing-unprecedented-scale-during-covid-19

📅 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
⬇️ Click "show more" for full schedule

🎤 Planning your Drupal QA: how to tackle a Monster? (Eduardo Madariaga)
🕒 10 - 10:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/planning-your-drupal-qa-how-tackle-monster
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "project-team-management"

🎤 Automate all the things (Colan Schwartz, Christopher Gervais)
🕒 11 - 11:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/automate-all-things
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "devops-performance-security-privacy"

✨ Watch the 12 p.m. keynote by Andrew Sinkson: https://youtu.be/n4MM0SLzqDM

🎤 Self-Help Tips to Better Manage Your Drupal Site (Shani Felder)
🕒 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/self-help-tips-better-manage-your-drupal-site
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "community-being-human"

🎤 Battle for Online Privacy (Dan Moriarty)
🕒 2:30 - 3:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/battle-online-privacy
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "devops-performance-security-privacy"

🎤 Component-Driven Theming with Storybook (Aaron Couch, Evan Willhite, Brian Lewis)
🕒 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/component-driven-theming-storybook
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 Correctly Nest Entities and Build Healthy Multilingual Relationships (Aimee Hannaford)
🕒 4:30 - 5:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/correctly-nest-entities-and-build-healthy-multilingual-relationships
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

🎤 Nothing about us without us: Engaging stakeholders on RaleighNC.gov (Joe Crespo, Sally Shaughnessy, James Alberque, Pete Weber)
🕒 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/nothing-about-us-without-us-engaging-stakeholders-raleighncgov
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

📅 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
⬇️ Click "show more" for full schedule

🎤 Benefits and pitfalls of integrating Drupal into a decoupled, static site build process for VA.gov (Elijah Lynn, Robbie Holmes)
🕒 10 - 10:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/benefits-and-pitfalls-integrating-drupal-decoupled-static-site-build-process
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 Behavior-Driven Development with Drupal and Cypress.io (Philipp Melab)
🕒 11 - 11:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/behavior-driven-development-drupal-and-cypressio
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

✨ Watch the 12 p.m. keynote by Andrew Sinkson: https://youtu.be/n4MM0SLzqDM

🎤 Putting veterans first in the design of a pilot hospital site on VA.gov, the largest hospital system in the US (Kevin Walsh, Jodi Leo)
🕒 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/putting-veterans-first-design-pilot-hospital-site-vagov-largest-hospital
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "content-strategy-analytics"

🎤 Drupal & USWDS: It’s Time to Get Things Started (Dustin Boeger, Brian Seek)
🕒 2:30 - 3:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/drupal-uswds-its-time-get-things-started
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

🎤 Automated Accessibility Testing: Using Pa11y and Continuous Integration (Mike Madison)
🕒 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/automated-accessibility-testing-using-pa11y-and-continuous-integration
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

🎤 Taking Maximum Advantage of Drupal Core's Composer Template (Michael Anello)
🕒 4:30 - 5:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/taking-maximum-advantage-drupal-cores-composer-template
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 best of both worlds: improve your Decoupled Drupal with external personalization (in Firebase) (Jitesh Doshi)
🕒 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/best-both-worlds-improve-your-decoupled-drupal-external-personalization
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

📅 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
⬇️ Click "show more" for full schedule

🎤 Cleaning Up Your (Data) Mess: Lessons from Dozens of Analytics Audits How Not to Create a Huge Mess (Emily Patterson)
🕒 10 - 10:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/cleaning-your-data-mess-lessons-dozens-analytics-audits-how-not-create-huge
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "content-strategy-analytics"

🎤 EEOC.gov – Modernized Experience & Performance on Drupal 8 (Ben Coit)
🕒 11 - 11:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/eeocgov-modernized-experience-performance-drupal-8
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

✨ Watch the 12 p.m. keynote by Andrew Sinkson: https://youtu.be/n4MM0SLzqDM

🎤 Enabling the Change-Makers: Redesigning Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs Website (Suzanne Dergacheva, John Cloys)
🕒 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/enabling-change-makers-redesigning-princetons-school-public-and-international
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

🎤 mock-chain: a library for easier unit testing in Drupal (and beyond!) (Dan Feder, Gerardo Gonzalez)
🕒 2:30 - 3:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/mock-chain-library-easier-unit-testing-drupal-and-beyond
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 The State of the Union('s Data) (Kim Davidson, Susana Siman, Stephen Tsai, Jacqueline Gu)
🕒 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/state-unions-data
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "community-being-human"

🎤 Supercharge your CMS - Powered by Data (John Doyle, Adam Weingarten)
🕒 4:30 - 5:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/supercharge-your-cms-powered-data
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "content-strategy-analytics"

🎤 Relationship Advice: How to get more from your technology partner (Gena Dellett)
🕒 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/relationship-advice-how-get-more-your-technology-partner
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "project-team-management"

📅 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
⬇️ Click "show more" for full schedule

🎤 Architecting Effective Data Dashboards (Karl Kaufmann)
🕒 10 - 10:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/architecting-effective-data-dashboards
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

🎤 Decoupled CMS Architecture in Government as a Best Practice (Justin Winter)
🕒 11 - 11:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/decoupled-cms-architecture-government-best-practice
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "project-team-management"

✨ Watch the 12 p.m. keynote by Andrew Sinkson: https://youtu.be/n4MM0SLzqDM

🎤 Recurring Events Module (Owen Bush)
🕒 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/recurring-events-module
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 My best (and worst) strategies for dealing with high-demand work (Michael Schmid)
🕒 2:30 - 3:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/my-best-and-worst-strategies-dealing-high-demand-work
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "community-being-human"

🎤 Drupal 9 migrations for non-coders (Mauricio Dinarte)
🕒 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/drupal-9-migrations-non-coders
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

🎤 Improving Federal Agency User Experience - Scaling MVPs as a Marathon, not a Sprint (Jason Glisson, Ashley Miller, Iva Hutson)
🕒 4:30 - 5:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/improving-federal-agency-user-experience-scaling-mvps-marathon-not-sprint
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

🎤 Boost Your Visibility in Google Search: Implementing Schema in Drupal 8 (Ryan McBurney, Nate Mow)
🕒 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/boost-your-visibility-google-search-implementing-schema-drupal-8
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "content-strategy-analytics"

After four years of auditing (and fixing) clients’ disorganized Google #Analytics set-ups, convoluted Google Tag Manager implementation and other web #data messes, I’ve learned a lot about how NOT to set up your organization’s #website data. This presentation contains the top four common mistakes I see – and what I recommend to fix these issues.

We often think about what to track (Button clicks! Form submissions!) and how to analyze the resulting data. But this presentation takes a step back and asks: “do I have the data I need?” and “can actually trust the information I’m getting?” Here are the top things you will learn from this talk:
- How to plan for a new site: Launching a new website? Here’s what to think about ahead of time – so you can get reliable data on day one. Tips to decide if you need a new analytics account or Tag Manager container.
- Um, is my data even correct? Practical tips for troubleshooting your Google Analytics events and goals. Make sure what you think you are tracking is actually what you are tracking
- How to keep it simple and scalable: Tips for setting up your analytics accounts so it’s manageable by your team -- and can grow with your organization.
- Permissions, permissions, permissions: Don’t get in a situation where you need to chase down former employees for access to your own website data. How to set up your accounts, so you don’t ever have permissions issues.

🎤 Presenter: Emily Patterson
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/cleaning-your-data-mess-lessons-dozens-analytics-audits-how-not-create-huge

#Drupal allows for fast pace development of very complex systems: a #QA nightmare. How will you be able to sleep at night? Plan Ahead! Don’t let it become a monster in the first place and you’ll realize it was a lovely kitty all along.

In this session, we'll discuss tactics of how to approach your QA infrastructure to provide support and help you create a Test Plan and/or Test Strategy for your project. We'll also cover example scenarios and how one should react to them.


🎤 Presenter: eduardomadariaga

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/planning-your-drupal-qa-how-tackle-monster

What do the books Essentialism (McKeown), The Year of Less (Flanders), and Girl, Stop Apologizing (Hollis) have in common? What about The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Kondo) or The Total Money Makeover (Ramsey)? They’re all books read by those, like me, in pursuit of a more meaningful, less stressful, and even better way of life. They promise clean homes and clear minds, but what if the principles of these books don’t just apply to managing our mental health or cluttered closets? They might apply to how we work, and more specifically, how we work with Drupal.

In this session we’re going to explore how some of the practical advice in popular self-help books can help us better perform our tasks in creating and managing Drupal websites. We’ll discover:

Why keeping the essential tasks at the forefront of your Drupal project is a must
Why decluttering your content enhances the morale and productivity of your team
Why focusing on one thing at a time is more efficient than focusing on all things at a time
How to let go of what you’ve always done, or what you’ve always used, for the better

All experience levels welcome.


🎤 Presenter: sfelder

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/self-help-tips-better-manage-your-drupal-site

The key to delivering an impactful new website is listening.

There is a popular slogan right now, “nothing about us without us,” that asserts that no policy or product should be decided on without representation from the end user group(s). No truer words were spoken.

A serious risk of not listening to your users’ needs is building the wrong thing. This results in poor adoption, lack of support from the community, and inadequate content maintenance, and worse – the dreaded backlash of bad PR.

The needs of the City of Raleigh’s constituents and city staffers are far-reaching, as expansive and diverse as their audience set. Aten and the City of Raleigh team planned and engaged stakeholders throughout the course of the year-long website project to first listen, then validate decisions and ultimately design and develop what users need and want. Feedback before launch was promising. The listening has continued post-launch and is positive as well. The efforts to engage various user groups has paid off!

Together we established audience groups and priorities, and then proceeded with an exhaustive effort to engage front-end users and back-end content editors. We:

Facilitated surveys to gain an understanding of aspirations and concerns
Hosted focus groups to listen to build empathy for the different users
Organized card sorting activities to inform information architecture
Held a staff-wide town hall to gain alignment on the road forward
Conducted collaborative, strategy-driven workshops to generate ideas and build a shared vocabulary for design
Road-showed the new site to citizens, business leaders, city council and the mayor as a preview before the official launch
Provided documentation and training to content editors and city staffers ensuring they can provide consistent and accurate content moving forward

This session will discuss how we:
- Established and prioritized audience groups
- Developed a project roadmap with isolated milestones to engage stakeholders
- Chose the methods to engage stakeholders
- Synthesized stakeholder feedback to create an elegant and joyful experience
- Prioritized the feedback prior to launch

Your teams will walk away with an understanding of why it’s critical to make decisions informed by user needs and ensure your users are heard. We will provide tips on Strategic listening exercises you can use in your next project.


🎤 Presenter(s): jcrespo, sallyann716, jalberque, peteweber

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/nothing-about-us-without-us-engaging-stakeholders-raleighncgov

Accessibility is a critical component of any modern website (and double so for government sites). This session is all about building a safety net for your site / platform to ensure that you do not regress the accessibility of your site as you continue to make improvements, fix bugs, develop new features, and apply updates.

Topics Covered:
How to integrate Pa11y into your Drupal project
How to execute Pa11y tests during continuous integration
How Drupal configuration and custom development impacts accessibility
How to provide default content for accessibility testing
What sorts of things cannot be automated

Presenter: Mike Madison
Slides: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/sites/default/files/session/slides/2020-09/2020%20-%20DGC%20Pa11y.pdf
Session Details:
https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/automated-accessibility-testing-using-pa11y-and-continuous-integration

In this session we will discuss a bit about why and how we implemented the VA.gov CMS (Drupal 8) as a backend Content API to feed a decoupled, Metalsmith static HTML build and deployment system for the frontend.

We will also reveal some notable challenges that we faced in implementing this piece of the overall architecture of which some were expected and some which weren’t. We’ll discuss how we overcame these challenges, including discussion of tradeoffs that our solutions entailed. Finally, we will share some lessons learned and guidance for other teams who may be considering implementing a decoupled, static HTML frontend + Drupal CMS at other agencies.

Speakers:
Robbie Holmes (RobbieTheGeek) - United States Digital Service (at time of project)
Elijah Lynn (Elijah Lynn) - Agile Six Applications

Slides: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/sites/default/files/session/slides/2020-09/Benefits%20and%20pitfalls%20of%20integrating%20Drupal%20into%20a%20decoupled%2C%20static%20site%20build%20process%20for%20VA.gov_.pdf
Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/benefits-and-pitfalls-integrating-drupal-decoupled-static-site-build-process

As component-based #design principles evolve, the actual implementation in #Drupal can be performed in many ways. Most, if not all, component-based site building approaches rely on Entity Relationships. Adding multilingual support that is Correct and Predictable can be a challenge to configure. In this session, we'll surface best practices of #Multilingual configuration with entity relationships.

Oh, but how many types of entity relationships are there? It shouldn't be that hard, right? Paragraphs, Layout Builder, referenced nodes, custom entities, media entities, taxonomy terms. The list goes on.

And did you want to nest those entities? How many blocks can include other blocks that include Paragraphs that include taxonomy terms and Media Entities? Hmm... does this sound familiar? Perhaps a highly configurable component?

And how many permutations of "multilingual" can there be? Well, there is #translation vs. #localization. Each requiring Drupal's CMS and page display to be configured for Correct and Predictable Display. Even for those complex nested entities.

We'll cover:
Common multilingual use-cases and configuration approach with nesting
Considerations with leading component-based site-building architectures
Tools that exist in the community, and those that may need to be developed!

Learning Objectives
At the end of this session, attendees will be able to:
Understand the challenges of multilingual and entity relationships
Identify use-cases that they may leverage on their sites
Make good decisions architecting their multilingual site-building strategy
And more!

Target Audience
This session is geared for seasoned site-builders, themers, or developers that need to provide multilingual component-based solutions to their clients.

Although beginners can find some value, we are going to cover a lot of topics and terms, assuming the audience will understand them.

Prerequisites
Attendees will get the most out of this session by being familiar with:
Site-building principals
Content entities and their creation
Component-based design principles and implementation in Drupal
Understanding of entity relationships, how to create them, and how Drupal renders them
Basic understanding of multilingual configurations (come along for the ride if there is no previous experience)

🎤 Presenter: aimeerae
📌 Supporting documents: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/sites/default/files/session/slides/2020-09/SpatialPath%20-%20Drupal4Gov%20-%202020-09-25%20-%20Nesting%20Multilingual%20Entities%20in%20Drupal%208.pdf
Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/correctly-nest-entities-and-build-healthy-multilingual-relationships
🔗 Session details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/correctly-nest-entities-and-build-healthy-multilingual-relationships

Component-driven theming is gaining popularity in the Drupal and in the greater front-end development worlds. Taking a component based approach offers greater consistency, flexibility, re-usability and velocity for front-end development.

This session explores component-driven theming using the Emulsify Design System. Emulsify combines a starter library of Drupal-ready components with Storybook as well as some other useful tools.

This session is for developers and will walk through building a project using the new Emulsify - from building components in Storybook to connecting them in your Drupal templates.

We will cover building a feature from the foundation of atomic design all the way to a page layout. We will address common questions and issues that arise during component-driven development as well as show examples of how Storybook and its add-ons can help increase your project stability from accessibility to testing to demos.

Presenters: Aaron Couch, Evan Willhite & Brian Lewis

The Recurring Events module is a Drupal 8 and 9 plug-and-play recurring events and registration system designed to be site agnostic and extensible.

The module allows site editors to create and manage events that recur in a variety of ways - including consecutively, daily, weekly, monthly, and custom recurrence configurations. An event series comprises of multiple event instances, each of which inherits data from the series, but can also be managed and viewed independently from the series itself, this offers great flexibility when it comes to modifying event instance dates and times or removing them altogether.

In this presentation you will hear about the current offerings in the Drupal core and contrib space, the unique features built in to the Recurring Events module, and the module's current state and releases.

🎤 Presenter: @OwenBush

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/recurring-events-module

Dashboards and #data displays—features often presented with the “wow factor” in mind—can be deficient in providing end users with critical information. To effectively serve as an information resource—proper architecture is critical, and requires a ground-up approach. I’ll show you how—through discovery and co-creation with users, accounting for cognition and #accessibility, as well as selecting and refining effective #visualization types to tell an accurate data story.

In this session, you’ll learn:
* Discovery techniques for finding out what your users need, not just what they say
* Case studies on dashboards—and how you can apply them to your challenges
* Properly aligning users’ data needs with effective visualization types
* Refining these discoveries through iteration—with an eye on accessibility and #cognition

This session is geared toward anyone interested in helping users better understand their data story through improved dashboard and visualization experiences.

🎤 Presenter: karolus
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/architecting-effective-data-dashboards

🎤 Presenters: tk421jag, ashleyfmiller, ihutson

This session will investigate how MetroStar’s Lean/Agile approach has enabled the iterative development of a popular USDA web tool that matches farmers with potential disaster assistance programs. More specifically, we will discuss how we went from a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) to a more mature Vue.js app in Drupal, and how we used user analytics to engage our customer in the process.

As part of the vision for Farmers.gov, the Secretary of USDA, Sonny Perdue wanted to create the most customer-centric public website for US farmers to learn about available programs, financial assistance, and self-services. Based on that guidance, we have created numerous user-friendly tools and resources meant to aid farmers and simplify their complex environment.

Some examples of the tools we've created include navigating numerous types of loan program, understanding the process of hiring temporary foreign agricultural workers, and applying for disaster assistance programs that meet their needs.

In this talk, we will walk you through a case study of how we were able to iterate on one of our tools while navigating organizational logistics and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) release train priorities. Today, we will dive into how we partnered with our development team to gain buy-in from the product owner and numerous stakeholders by making evidence-based arguments why the minimum viable product (MVP) should be scaled and enhanced.

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/improving-federal-agency-user-experience-scaling-mvps-marathon-not-sprint

🎤 Presenters: ultimike

If you're looking to build a modern Drupal 8 or 9 site, then you're probably going to want to use the Drupal core Composer "recommended-project" template. Debuting with Drupal 8.8, this modern, (officially) community-supported Composer template gets your project off on the right foot.

This session will both deconstruct and provide examples, tips, and tricks for making the most of the drupal/recommended-project template. We will compare and contrast it with the "Drupal Composer / Drupal Project" template, and introduce some additional dependencies to help manage your project's codebase effectively.


🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/taking-maximum-advantage-drupal-cores-composer-template

🎤 Presenters: colan, ergonlogic, lamech

Ever heard of #infrastructure-as-code? The idea is basically to use tools like #Terraform and #Ansible to manage the composition and operation of your cloud systems. This allows infrastructure to be treated just like any other software system. The code can be committed into Git which allows auditability, and reproducibility. It can therefore be tested and integrated into full continuous delivery processes.

Terraform for infrastructure:
Terraform makes it easy to provision and manage any cloud, infrastructure, or service (such as VMs, load balancers or object storage) with easy-to-read declarative configuration files. Entire infrastructures are fully reproducible, and can be set up or torn down with single commands.

It's also very easy to mix and match cloud IaaS providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP, or those running OpenStack.

Ansible for configuration:
Ansible provides tonnes of modules, including those for files, storage, system, networking and even cloud (just like Terraform), called as "tasks" that can be run sequentially (procedural) in "roles" and "playbooks", to do things like installing Web and DB servers (and installing #Drupal). Ansible strives for simplicity, resulting in playbooks that are essentially self-documenting.

Agenda

In this session, we will:
* Explore the principles of infrastructure-as-code and how to operationalize them;
* Introduce Terraform and its providers, resources and backends;
* Introduce Ansible and its tasks, modules and roles;
* Build a full OpenStack cloud infrastructure end-to-end from scratch, including a fully functional up-and-running Aegir installation (for hosting Drupal sites) running on a newly created VM, with a single command.

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/automate-all-things

🎤 Presenters: pmelab

#Behavior-driven development is the art of establishing a common language, improving communication, creating automatable tests and providing living, always-accurate documentation at the same time. Especially in large scale projects with complex workflows and many individual needs, it is an indispensable tool to ensure seamless communication, clear goals, and mutual understanding.

We are going to look deeper into the #Gherkin language and its application to find out that it goes far beyond simple automated acceptance testing. And then we will show how to use the #Cypress module for #Drupal to add some simple automated acceptance testing to your Drupal project or module :)

Session content:
* What is behavior-driven development?
* What’s the relation to Domain-Driven Design?
* Who writes scenarios?
* Do’s and Don’ts for writing good scenarios
* Example implementation in a Drupal project
* Tips on maintaining a testable project
* Comparison to Unit tests and testing strategies

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/behavior-driven-development-drupal-and-cypressio

Starting with Drupal 8, the Migrate API makes it possible to write and execute migrations without having to write PHP code. It is also possible to execute them from the Drupal administration interface if the command line is not available or you prefer not to use it.

This session will explain the Migrate API and many of its concepts like source, process, and destination plugins from a site builder perspective. You will also learn about the migrate ecosystem in Drupal 9 to be aware of what tools are at your disposal. The examples include migrating from CSV and JSON files to populate different field types like taxonomy, date, and address.

Target Audience

People who want to learn the about the workflow and thought process to migrate data into Drupal 9. Site builders will learn how to perform migrations. Project managers will understand the complexity of these tasks for better estimation.

Prerequisites

Although no prior Migrate module knowledge is required, it is expected that attendees have a basic understanding of site building concepts like nodes, content types, and fields. You can have a look at this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02fvLzPSIjc for an overview of the Drupal site building concepts.

If you want a headstart, you can learn more about Drupal's Migrate API at https://understanddrupal.com/31-days-of-migrations

Presenters: Mauricio Dinarte
Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/drupal-9-migrations-non-coders

Now that the whole world has discovered decoupled CMS, the default and most common approach to Decoupled Drupal seems to be a completely independent static HTML+JS UI that uses Drupal only to get JSON data from it. While this is a start, it is throws baby out with the bathwater. It discards all the theming that is readily available from Drupal and leaves the developer with the full responsibility of painting the entire UI by templating HTML out of the JSON data on client. A better, faster (in run-time and developer time), and more efficient approach would be to:

Let Drupal render most of the HTML on server-side. Make it fully cacheable.
Let your client-side JavaScript implement only "personalized" parts of the page
Store the "personalization" data in a third place, such as Firebase, DynamicDB, or self-hosted solution (such as Hasura+Postgres). Drupal can still serve JSON data (using REST, JSON:API, or GraphQL), but it should be same for all/most users, and hence cacheable.
Benefits, depending on your needs, could be many:

Reuse most of the theming Drupal provides. Save development time (and money)
Smaller and simpler client-side apps.
Real-time features of an external personalization engine - such as live chat, live comments, breaking news alerts and push notifications.
In this talk we will review the problem and the proposed solution in more detail, including sample code & demo.

All source code is available here: https://bitbucket.org/spinspire/decouple-different/

The presentation video and several other supporting training videos are at https://youtube.com/spinspire

Presenter: Jitesh Doshi
Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/best-both-worlds-improve-your-decoupled-drupal-external-personalization

Google search results often include snippets that answer key user questions before other #search listings. That means, if you want your site to appear, there are steps you must take to be featured and featured and benefit from additional brand exposure in search results. We tackled this issue from both a strategic and technical perspective.

In this session:
• We will walk you through the key concepts and some tactics for crafting and optimizing a structured data strategy.
• We will also show how we built on this strategy and worked with the MedicalEntity spec from https://schema.org, Google's Structured Data Testing Tool and the #Schema.org Metatag module in #Drupal 8 as part of our ongoing work with a major medical non-profit.
• Specifically, we will showcase how taking this approach can help with areas of your site like resource libraries, including the one that's funded by the Centers for Disease Control for our client.
• We will also discuss the patch we submitted to add support for MedicalEntity objects to the schema_metatag module.

🎤 Presenter(s): RyanMcBurney, natemow
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/boost-your-visibility-google-search-implementing-schema-drupal-8

#Data breaches and abuses of our personal data keep making the news. But what can we do about it? Are you protecting user privacy?

It's been over 2 years since the #GDPR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation) went into effect in Europe, a landmark law that promised to protect and change the way personal data gets used online. But did it have any effect? Especially for those of us in the USA, it may seem like business as usual. Or worse, that privacy is dead.

But you don't have to be a Facebook-sized company to be concerned. Learn about best practices in managing #privacy for your site users, privacy laws, and what resources and Drupal modules can be useful for your websites.

New laws and regulations may not apply to you (yet). But that doesn't mean you can't start doing the right thing. The battle for online privacy is not over and we all can play a role–as site owners, editors, designers, developers, and members of the Drupal community.

Learning Objectives
Recommend what site owners, editors and developers can do to improve their website's privacy experience (PX)
Discuss what's happened in the year since GDPR became law in Europe, and what's coming for online privacy in the USA, including the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Act).
Recap what resources, tools and modules you can start using to protect privacy, for yourself and others

Target Audience
Anyone interested in learning best practices for managing online privacy, for themselves, their clients and their organization
Clients and organizations with European customers (temporary or permanent)
Clients and organizations serving California residents
Users of websites that collect personal information, including contact forms and site analytics
Web developers, editors and site owners who work with personal data

Prerequisites
interest in, or responsibility for, user privacy and personal data

🎤 Presenter(s): citizendan
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/battle-online-privacy

The Veterans Health Administration provides health care to 9 million medical patients, 14 million veterans across through its 1200 facilities, including 150 hospitals and over 1000 community clinics.

This vast scale represents a challenge for creating content for veterans that is reliable, complete, and consistent across the country.

This session explores the content strategy, content design, and content operations in the development of #VA Pittsburgh Health Care System, which served as the pilot for this veterans experience.

It will focus particularly on two content problems in the pilot: health services.

We’ll describe our process for auditing and consolidating over 2,500 health service names and descriptions into a “single source of truth” of 90 health services. We’ll examine the complex governance for these services, which include service descriptions that are national, regional (health system), and local (facility), and how Drupal can serve these content operations at an enterprise scale, including an editorial experience that works for people involved in managing this content

🎤 Presenter(s): kevinjosephwalsh, jane
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/putting-veterans-first-design-pilot-hospital-site-vagov-largest-hospital

Links:
- VA Pittsburgh health care Pilot: www.va.gov/pittsburgh-health-care
- Repo: https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms
- VA.gov CMS Content model (Drupal spec tool, Google Sheets): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vL8rqLqcEVfESnJJK_GWQ7nf3BPe4SSevYYblisBTOI/edit#gid=858986005
- Universal Health Care content model (Airtable): https://airtable.com/universe/expwzLeltE2c1D1V9/health-care-content-model?explore=true

Unit tests are a critical tool for development, ensuring that classes and functions aren't inadvertently broken by new code. While Drupal has moved toward modern PHP conventions and made unit testing more feasible for module developers, it remains difficult in many cases to run tests without bootstrapping Drupal to have access to services like database or translation. The DKAN team created mock-chain to make building mocks for these services and other complex objects much simpler and has reduced the amount of time we spend writing unit tests significantly. In this talk we will write a new test from scratch and demonstrate how to leverage mock-chain.

Presenter: fmizzell

Open Data drives evidence based policy and decisionmaking, supports transparency and accountability, and is the language through which our institutions speak to each other and to the public. And though we’ve come a long way sharing government data with the public, open data programs at all levels of government have found themselves facing new challenges around communication, culture change, process, and resources.

We spoke with data managers across the city, state, and federal level who shared both their aspirations for their data programs and their struggles implementing those ideas, to put together a picture of the government data landscape today. We’ll share our findings about the biggest challenges and opportunities in government data and invite the open source open government community to work together to solve them.

Presenters: Kim DAvidson, susisiman, gujacq

In today's world, data powers everything from the ads you see in your instagram feed to the suggestions on your Netflix subscription. You probably use data to measure how your site is performing, report on your conversions and inform your decision making on what is and is not working. But why stop there? Why not use this same data to power your CMS?

Imagine a platform that seamlessly integrates your analytical data to supercharge your CMS. This new world opens up possibilities to harness the infinite power of data to make decisions for you, automagically (ok not really, but close!).

While most platforms (such as personalization platforms) focus only on the user-facing parts of your website, we will discuss opportunities to enhance both the customer facing and the internal CMS activities.

In this talk, we will discuss:
-Why would I want to integrate data into our CMS?
-What are some things that we could do with this data?
-How you can integrate Google Analytics data into your CMS.
-Short and Long term benefits of doing this.

Some example use cases on how data could enhance your everyday experience:
-Search Weighting - Push up results in your on-site search experience.
-Content Performance Indicators - Flag content which is underperforming and act on it.
-Page Health - Identify and correlate changes to content with analytical trends.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this talk you will understand:
-Why a product owner would want to use data to power their CMS
-Common tasks which can be automated with data

Target Audiences
-Product Owners interested in using data to enhance their website
-Marketing professionals who are tired of giving analytics reports to their content team on a daily basis
-Architects looking to understand how to incorporate data into a build
-Anyone who runs, works in, or builds a Drupal website

Pre Reqs
-A basic understanding of the internet and analytics

Presenters: _doyle_, adam.weingarten

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (#EEOC) is responsible for enforcing federal laws that make it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or an employee because of the person's race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.

With more than 10 million unique visitors to EEOC’s website each year, EEOC.gov is a key channel for communicating EEOC’s mission, vision, and disseminating critical information.

Ten-plus years since its last platform update, EEOC.gov recently underwent a complete redesign and re-platform to better serve its constituents by moving to #Drupal 8 on Microsoft #Azure. In this session, you’ll hear from the EEOC.gov build team to learn about how they successfully:
- Migrated over 160,000 pieces of content
- Significantly decreased the time it takes to post updates
- Implemented the latest US Web Design System (#USWDS), improving the site’s #accessibility, Spanish-language delivery, and mobile responsiveness

🎤 Presenter(s): bencoit
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/eeocgov-modernized-experience-performance-drupal-8

Across roles, specialities, and companies job stress is increasing. The daily deluge of emails, Slack messages, and urgent tasks can be overwhelming and it may seem like there’s no solution. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and just want to give up. Believe me, I’ve been there too.

As CTO of Amazee, I work with a team around the world that’s online 24/7. Over the last ten years, I’ve tried a lot of different strategies to deal with the high demand for work and communication required as part of an innovative company. Some have worked wonders, others not at all. While sharing my personal experience, as well as the tips and tricks I’ve found helpful, I hope to start a conversation about how we can find individual solutions for a problem that’s become universal.

A couple of topics that I will cover:
-How to sleep better and fall asleep faster
-Notification overload
-Structuring your day
-Weekly self retrospectives

Learning Objectives

At the end of this session, attendees will
-Have specific strategies to implement to reduce stress
-Know how to make an individual plan that works for them
-Understand the importance of avoiding burn out
-Connect with other attendees facing similar challenges

Target Audience

This session is for

-People feeling overwhelmed by their daily work
-People working in high demand environments
-People who want to share strategies for balancing work

Prerequisites
-Attendees will get the most out of this session by being familiar with having a job ;)

Presenter: Schnitzel

Building and deploying sites using traditional #Drupal approaches require developers with a large amount of crossover knowledge and expertise. Full stack developers are hard to find and training junior developers into this role can take years. Deploying Drupal sites at scale requires system and platform specialists that further extend the required knowledge base for a team to successfully deploy a Drupal project.

There are many reasons why Drupal is still a great tool for government, including security, role based work-flows, and a strong healthy community of developers, just to name a few.

In this talk I will present why the traditional approach to building drupal sites can be improved on by breaking apart your presentation layer from your data layer. As a manager this can have meaningful impacts on the skill sets required on your team and allow everyone to more narrowly focus their skills. I will also make a case why using a decoupled architecture may be considered a best practice approach to building and maintaining government sites going forward.

I will address several of the common concerns, and a few misconceptions, about building and deploying decoupled sites.

- Accessibility
- Development Experience & Tooling
-- Front-end & Back End
-- Docker based workflows
- Hosting & Deployment
- Maintenance & future technical debt
- Team role requirements
- CI, Testing, & Code quality


About Justin: Prior to being a senior developer at Amazee.io focusing on API and systems integration, Justin was a Drupal team manager in NY State developing and maintaining upwards of 50 Drupal projects. Justin has over a decade of Drupal and management experience with a foundation in software and programming.


🎤 Presenter: justinwinter
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/decoupled-cms-architecture-government-best-practice

This session will focus on integrating a custom Drupal sub-theme with the latest version of USWDS. We will cover configuring USWDS settings, Drupal theme settings, and adding custom styling. We will also look at utilizing existing components, and creating custom components. Attendees can expect to learn the basics to integrate the USWDS with the Drupal USWDS Theme.


🎤 Presenter(s): dboeger, brian.seek
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/drupal-uswds-its-time-get-things-started

📅 WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23
🎤 Keynotes by Noel Hidalgo and Joseph Castle
🕒 12 - 1 p.m. ET
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "keynote-wednesday"

🎤 Do the work! (Noel Hidalgo)
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/do-work

🎤 Open Source in the Federal Government: Anecdotes and Evidence (Joseph Castle)
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/open-source-federal-government-anecdotes-and-evidence

Hi, our captioning provider is having some problems integrating the captions at the moment. The keynote captions can be viewed via this link for those who need them until we can fix the integration. Apologies for any inconvenience:
https://us.ai-live.com/CaptionViewer/Viewer/ThirdParty?sessionId=USDRUP2409A&joiningId=800243&accessToken=B012743320BB5399E0530100007FE2DD

📅 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24
🎤 Keynote by Sara Cope: Digging Into User Experience at Any Level
🕒 12 - 1 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/digging-user-experience-any-level
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "keynote-thursday"

📅 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
🎤 Keynote by Harish Rao: What Today’s COVID-19 Crisis Means for Tomorrow’s Digital Infrastructure
🕒 12 - 1 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/what-todays-covid-19-crisis-means-tomorrows-digital-infrastructure
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "keynote-friday"

📅 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24
⬇️ Click "show more" for full schedule

🎤 Empowering Site Owners by Developing Custom Views Plugins (Jim Vomero)
🕒 10 - 10:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/empowering-site-owners-developing-custom-views-plugins
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 Drupal Hosted on Kubernetes (Sunil Taneja)
🕒 11 - 11:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/drupal-hosted-kubernetes
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "devops-performance-security-privacy"

✨ Watch the 12 p.m. keynote by Sara Cope: https://youtu.be/OC-rfml7-KM

🎤 Resilient Leadership in Difficult Times (Dori Kelner)
🕒 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/resilient-leadership-difficult-times
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "community-being-human"

🎤 Successful Projects Start with Great RFPs (Joe Crespo)
🕒 2:30 - 3:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/successful-projects-start-great-rfps
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "project-team-management"

🎤 Understanding Drupal (Mauricio Dinarte)
🕒 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/understanding-drupal
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

🎤 Mentoring Team Members and Promoting Growth (Danielle Sheffler)
🕒 4:30 - 5:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/mentoring-team-members-and-promoting-growth
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "community-being-human"

🎤 Authentic digital inclusion is easier than you think (Andrew Mallis, Crispin Bailey, Matthew Janusauskas, William Reuschel)
🕒 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/authentic-digital-inclusion-easier-you-think
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

📅 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24
⬇️ Click "show more" for full schedule

🎤 Why Metrics? How Metrics? Do I even need them? (Eduardo Madariaga)
🕒 10 - 10:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/why-metrics-how-metrics-do-i-even-need-them
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "content-strategy-analytics"

🎤 8 Tech Questions to Ask Before You Even Think About a New Website (Stephen Tidmore)
🕒 11 - 11:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/8-tech-questions-ask-you-even-think-about-new-website
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

✨ Watch the 12 p.m. keynote by Sara Cope: https://youtu.be/OC-rfml7-KM

🎤 The Question Is Moot! Accessibility and Dataviz Is NOT an Either/Or: How to Design Accessible, Usable Data Visualizations (Kim Locraft, Tim Shaw)
🕒 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/question-moot-accessibility-and-dataviz-not-eitheror-how-design-accessible
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

🎤 Lessons learned re-platforming VA.gov on Drupal in 12 months (Jeff Brauer, Jeff Barnes, Ryan Sibley)
🕒 2:30 - 3:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/lessons-learned-re-platforming-vagov-drupal-12-months
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "content-strategy-analytics"

🎤 My First IDE (Mike Madison)
🕒 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/my-first-ide
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 What can the USA learn from the world on accessibility policy? (Mike Gifford)
🕒 4:30 - 5:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/what-can-usa-learn-world-accessibility-policy
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

🎤 Why You Need Disciplined Agile For Your Projects and Organization (Bill Brantley)
🕒 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/why-you-need-disciplined-agile-your-projects-and-organization
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "project-team-management"

📅 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24
⬇️ Click "show more" for full schedule

🎤 Drag & Drop Content Management For Government Websites (Chris O'Donnell, Aaron Couch)
🕒 10 - 10:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/drag-drop-content-management-government-websites
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

🎤 100% Remote: Tips for Managing a Fully-Distributed Workforce (Monica Flores)
🕒 11 - 11:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/100-remote-tips-managing-fully-distributed-workforce
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "project-team-management"

✨ Watch the 12 p.m. keynote by Sara Cope: https://youtu.be/OC-rfml7-KM

🎤 Real-world example of using the U.S. Web Design System (Dan Mouyard)
🕒 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/real-world-example-using-us-web-design-system
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 Creating Layouts & Landing Pages in Drupal: the Paragraphs vs. Layout Builder Edition (Suzanne Dergacheva)
🕒 2:30 - 3:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/creating-layouts-landing-pages-drupal-paragraphs-vs-layout-builder-edition
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

🎤 Mobile accessibility: testing mobile sites and native apps for accessibility (Gian Wild)
🕒 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/mobile-accessibility-testing-mobile-sites-and-native-apps-accessibility
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

🎤 Using Post Update Scripts to Deploy Content Across Environments (Jason Glisson, Matt Calvert)
🕒 4:30 - 5:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/using-post-update-scripts-deploy-content-across-environments
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 Dealing with unprecedented scale during Covid-19 (Sean Hamlin)
🕒 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/dealing-unprecedented-scale-during-covid-19
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "devops-performance-security-privacy"

📅 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24
⬇️ Click "show more" for full schedule

🎤 Content Models: The Design Tool You Never Considered (Courtney Clark, Julia Bradshaw)
🕒 10 - 10:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/content-models-design-tool-you-never-considered
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

🎤 The future of Drupal MultiSites (Michael Schmid)
🕒 11 - 11:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/future-drupal-multisites
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

✨ Watch the 12 p.m. keynote by Sara Cope: https://youtu.be/OC-rfml7-KM

🎤 Platforms, Platforms, Multisites, and Platforms (John Doyle, Adam Weingarten)
🕒 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/platforms-platforms-multisites-and-platforms
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "devops-performance-security-privacy"

🎤 Smithsonian + Google - Open source web components for visualizing and interacting with 3D objects (Vincent Rossi, Ha Pham, Jamie Cope, Emmett Lalish)
🕒 2:30 - 3:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/smithsonian-google-open-source-web-components-visualizing-and-interacting-3d
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 Let’s Talk about the "A" Word: Tips for Helping Reluctant Teams and Organizations to Embrace Agile (Mike Knight)
🕒 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/lets-talk-about-word-tips-helping-reluctant-teams-and-organizations-embrace
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "project-team-management"

🎤 Building Sites from the User’s Perspective via Effective Content (Karl Kaufmann)
🕒 4:30 - 5:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/building-sites-users-perspective-effective-content
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "content-strategy-analytics"

🎤 Granicus meeting and asset importer (using Drupal + Feeds) (Jen Lampton)
🕒 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/granicus-meeting-and-asset-importer-using-drupal-feeds
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

You're in it. Development has begun. You're building out content types, sorting out view modes. But wait. You have a LOT of questions for your designer. Do we really need these two components that are nearly identical? From where does this component pull data? Is this populated manually or dynamically? Why wasn't this all documented earlier?!

During this talk, I’ll show how designers can help their developers sooner. It starts with a robust content model, plus components and content view modes definition. And how developers can get clarity in the design phase, way before getting to code.

During this session, you’ll learn:
* How a content model can be a tool for developers and designers;
* How to define content view modes in a content model;
* How to collaborate with the full team earlier on in the process for fewer unknowns and better outcomes.

By the end, you’ll have a new method to achieve more efficiency in your development process; reduce friction in the design to development handoff; and speak the same language among the full team.

Presenter: courtneyclark

Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/courtneyclark/content-models-the-design-tool-you-never-knew-you-needed

By combining design systems with Layout Builder and Drupal features such as blocks we can deliver a "Wix" like drag and drop experience to site builders tasked with managing Drupal 8/9 websites.

In this session attendees will learn:
* How to integrate design systems with Drupal
* How to combine component libraries with Drupal Blocks and Layout Builder
* How to use Emulsify to manage your component library for the website
* How to leverage prebuilt built components on other websites
* How this approach builds on Drupal's inherent flexibility

Non-technical attendees will learn how this approach increases agility while decreasing costs by enabling reuse of previously completed work.

Presenters: chrisodva, acouch

Views is an indispensable tool for Drupal site builders - allowing them to create complex queries and displays without writing a single line of code. But too often developers like myself avoid these interfaces. We feel constrained by the GUI and want to reinvent the wheel for the sake of efficiency, performance, and extensibility; or we hit edge cases that Core simply can not handle.

This session will explore creating custom Views Plugins to add functionality and custom logic to the Views interface. We will discuss common reasons a site may need features beyond out-of-the-box functionality and we will look at real-life examples of Views Plugins. Topics include:

* Introducing how Views builds, executes, and renders queries and displays.
* Exploring business cases for using Views Plugins vs altering data by hooks.
* Adding custom Fields, Filters, Arguments, Sorts and Joins beyond what is offered by default with Views.
* Reviewing example code and practical use cases for modifying Views queries.

View Plugins can allow developers to keep their code organized, abstracted, and highly functional. We can package custom code into the standard Views interface. Most importantly, these plugins empower site-builders to create applications that use the standard Drupal workflows and interfaces.

This session is for anyone who is comfortable (or willing to try) writing code in a custom module. Advance knowledge of Drupal or databases is not required to get started.

Presenter: nJim

Metrics has become one of the most popular terms when talking about team introspection, especially in the software industry. So much so that a new term "Vanity metrics" has appeared to refer to metrics that stand for... well nothing really!

In this session, we'll go over what they are supposed to be and how to use them. In particular, ways of tailoring them for Drupal to make sure your development makes it on time! Drupal is a fast development & slow tailoring kind of process and you can quickly get sidetracked to thinking that you will make it: only to end up with weeks of Bug Fixing and months of O&M. Is there a better way

Presenters: eduardomadariaga

IDEs are an incredibly powerful tool. They are also an incredibly complex and intimidating tool if you've never used one (or are new to them). However as you tread more into #Drupal 8 and 9, an #IDE is a critical tool that will drastically impact your ability to write functional code. The difference in code quality / functionality / usability written in an IDE vs. code written in a text editor (e.g. Sublime) or terminal (e.g. VIM) is obvious and on more than one occasion I have "fixed" broken code that someone else wrote just by opening it in a Drupal project in my IDE and reading things that the original developer's "other tool" didn't show!

Topics Covered:
IDE basics for Drupal
Using an IDE with other tools (such as Git, Composer, etc.)
Setting up and using a #Debugger
Standardizing your project team's approach to development

Audience:
Anyone who is interested in learning about development in an IDE! A basic understanding of PHP and YAML files would be helpful (but not required).

🎤 Presenter(s): mikemadison
🔗 Session details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/my-first-ide

Monica will share practical knowledge on how to manage #remote teams based on the experience of the 100% distributed team at Lullabot. COVID-19 has dramatically changed how most companies work and teams collaborate. Project manager and certified #ScrumMaster Monica Flores will give managers some much-needed tips on how they can support their remote employees while keeping projects on track.

Lullabot is a design, development, and strategy agency that supports Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, higher education, and publishers. Teams work across 9 time zones using tools like scheduled meetings, #Slack, #Paper, #Google, #Jira, and #Zoom. We’ll discuss fundamental ways to practice compassion, respect boundaries, and foster psychological safety based on lessons learned in the field.


🎤 Presenter: monicadear

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/100-remote-tips-managing-fully-distributed-workforce

Do you feel distracted by a suite of automated tools, pages of report data, and feedback on work that was designed and developed weeks and weeks ago? If your antidote is achieving #WCAG 2.1 AA conformance, you may be leaving more people behind than you think.

Accessibility and digital inclusion can be easier.

Authentic digital inclusion means ensuring that every end user can actually use a digital asset as designed and intended. Let’s start there.

In this presentation, representatives from the American Foundation for the Blind and Kalamuna will discuss how organizations can benefit from usability-centric development policies and processes. Strategic, agile approaches will demonstrate how a spirit of digital accessibility can be achieved.

Attendees will learn:

Why usability is the most important component in an organization’s accessibility approach
How to get started incorporating usability in the development and design process
What are the most important workflows to focus on for usability
Why policies and processes are so critical to ensuring digital inclusion
How to create knowledge transfer in your development and design teams to create and sustain authentic digital inclusion

Plus, a demonstration of usability testing in action!
=============
This will be lively and generous exchange between the consulting practice of a national nonprofit for the blind, and an agency responsible for creating open source government websites and ecosystems.

The material we present will make sense and create relief for those responsible for the accessibility of their institution’s platforms.

Our demonstration of a usability test will drive home the importance of usability testing, but more than anything else, it will help attendees conceptualize how they will advance their institution’s approach and effectiveness for actually becoming authentically digitally inclusive.

Kalamuna
Kalamuna is an Oakland+Toronto-based agency that designs and develops institutional websites that solve complex challenges, simplify and improve user experience, and tell better stories.
https://www.kalamuna.com

American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)
American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) is a national organization with nearly a century of experience in setting standards and achieving milestones to improve the quality of life for people with vision loss. AFB Consulting offers a variety of services that address tactical, strategic, and programmatic needs to help organizations reshape their culture to promote disability inclusion.
https://www.afb.org/about-afb/what-we-do/afb-consulting

🎤 Presenter(s): Andrew_Mallis, crispinbailey, Consulting@AFB.org, wreuschel

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/authentic-digital-inclusion-easier-you-think

Drupal is an extremely flexible system. To achieve this, various layers of abstractions were built into it. A lot of concepts were created to explain these abstractions. Unfortunately, they are not always intuitive. This session aims to explain the basic building blocks for assembling a Drupal site and how they relate to each other. Many examples will be presented to help you understand Drupal and why it is so powerful.

Learning objectives:

What is a node?
What is a content type?
What are fields and why are they useful?
What is a block and what can I do with it?
What is a view?
How are users and permissions managed?
How does the taxonomy system work?
How can I create the navigation of my website?


🎤 Presenter: dinarcon
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/understanding-drupal

Drupal MultiSites are great, at least they initially sound great:
Managing hundreds or even thousands of Drupal sites from one single repository, with the capability to upgrade all sites at once to new Core or Module versions sounds like a security and management heaven.

Unfortunately anybody that ever has ran any decent amount of Drupal MultiSites knows, that this heaven can turn into hell fast:

* If one single site has a problem and needs a code rollback, all sites need to be rolled back as well
* If the upgrade is quite big an involves a database upgrade, all sites need to run this database upgrade. With multiple hundreds of sites, this can generate a huge resource burden on the database, sometimes causing outages
* Installing a module for one site might it available for all sites
* There is no simple way to have development environments for a single Drupal MultiSites
* Local development is very hard and cumbersome

In this talk I will present an alternative to Drupal MultiSites and our experience with it:

With modern container systems we have the capability to create so called "Base-Images" of containers: Allowing a centralized team to control which Drupal Core Version and Module is installed, while still giving developers of the individual sites the flexibility of adding modules and themes without interfering with other sites.

This talk will cover:
* What are Base Images for MultiSites and how are they used
* How Base Images allow for less downtime deployments and individual site rollbacks if needed
* How each individual sites can have development environments that are independent of the whole MultiSite installation
* How Local Development suddenly is a breeze

None of this is just a technical idea or proof of concept, today hundreds of websites (Governments and Enterprises) use this Base Image system and I'm gonna share their experiences with the Base Image Systems as well.

Presenters: Schnitzel

Open source is free... so why does it cost me so much to keep my websites running? Why am I spending so much time updating my websites and not enough time using them? How do I consolidate my various websites across technologies and vendors into a single streamlined platform?

Imagine a world where you could manage your updates once and apply them to all of your web properties. A world where you could develop a new crazy awesome feature and immediately utilize it across all of your existing web properties.

In this session we are going to dive into the platform conversation and provide you with the answers to the following questions:

*What is a platform?
* Do I need a platform?
* How do I determine if building a platform is right for my organization?
* Where can I host my platform?
* How do I manage my platform (and does my hosting solution impact this)?
* What are the benefits (and considerations) of using a platform?

Target Audiences:

* Site owners looking to increase the efficiency of the digital ecosystem
* Architects looking to reduce the complexity of running/supporting multiple websites
* IT teams looking to follow the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle

Learning Objectives:

When you walk away from this session you should understand:

* If you should consider a platform for your organization.
* Approaches for building a platform.
* Where you can host your platform and how that impacts management.
* Benefits I can achieve by using a platform.

Slide Deck: https://www.slideshare.net/secret/rZJwU27Jxknb4m

Presenters: _doyle_, adam.weingarten

The year 2020 came in with a bang. Our plans were put on hold, our lives were changed. We all ended up with zoom fatigue trying to satisfy our human need for social contact and social change.

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 open ourselves up and 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 skills 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.

We will include time for a short practice and discussion led by a certified mindfulness teacher and facilitator.

🎤 Presenter: dmkelner

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/resilient-leadership-difficult-times

🎤 Presenter: wabranty

Disciplined Agile (DA) is the most comprehensive agile and lean body of knowledge in existence. It can be a toolkit to help you to choose your way of working (WoW) for your projects, programs, and organization. DA is a toolkit of processes you and your team mix-and-match to build a unique workflow for your organization’s specific needs.

In this session, I will explain the lean and agile concepts behind DA, how to use the DA processes to build your workflow, and how DA can transform your organization. Go beyond the agile and lean practices of other project frameworks like Scrum. Learn how DA can supercharge your projects and your enterprise.

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/why-you-need-disciplined-agile-your-projects-and-organization

For years there’s been a lot of ink spilled about how the RFP process is broken, particularly when it comes to technology projects. This session isn’t going to litigate various viewpoints on that front, because RFPs are not going anywhere anytime soon — especially when it comes to government projects.

Ignore the naysayers! Your RFP can be brilliant!

I’m a former project manager and recovering developer, and now that I read and respond to RFPs for a living, I have a pretty good sense of what your partners are looking for and what you need to know from them in order to help you select a great fit for your project.

This session will discuss:

* When being prescriptive is necessary and when it can hurt your project
* How you can use initial goal-setting and audience work to frame your project
* How aligning your stakeholders before the RFP pays dividends throughout the project
* Why it’s important to include in your RFP the project constraints — like timeline and budget
* How to get apples-to-apples comparisons from the proposals you receive
* What you need to know from your potential partners

Presenters: jeff.brauer, jeffrey barnes, ryansibley

What attendees will gain:

From this session, attendees will walk away with a set of key learnings and guidance for shipping value to customers of the government even at the highest visibility, largest scale products.They will bring back to their organization the learnings from a real Government MVP delivery, and a product-centric approach to the content model that led to success at VA.

In the session, we will highlight how the VA.gov CMS project represented state-of-the art product development, how we addressed the tension between established web-patterns (built with the U.S. Web Design System) and a content-first design, PIV single sign-on, and a decoupled architecture.

We’ll also share our lessons learned for questions such as:

* How do I avoid boiling the ocean to deliver real value to my customers in the first year?
* Will the entire site (and all my stakeholders) need to migrate to Drupal at once?
* How do I build a content model that can launch quickly but is flexible enough for my entire site?
* What about the actual users of our platform - the editors? Where do their needs rank?
* What does iteration of a content model look like?

The VA.gov Case Study:
Drupal, Drupal GovCon, Baltimore DrupalCamp, drupal4gov, GovDrupal
A small team assembled by the US Digital Service, in partnership with the VA, set out on an ambitious mission to stand up a custom Drupal CMS for the Department’s flagship website, VA.gov. The team created the de-coupled infrastructure and developed the content model while migrating the highest priority content from the existing static site, while simultaneously re-imagining, re-designing, and re-writing, VA’s largest digital presence - the Medical Center sites. The team delivered major portions of VA.gov including the homepage and primary Veteran-facing content hubs in staggered releases over the first 12 months, and launched the new VA Medical Center site after 15 months. There were some stressful times, many exciting moments, and a lot of lessons learned.

Presenters: jeff.brauer, jeffrey barnes, ryansibley

🎤 Presenter: Danielle_Sheffler

Many times, team members feel like they can't mentor others unless they are a manager or a team lead. However, mentoring allows for growth of both senior team members and junior team members.

Mentors and mentees help each other see how the other can improve, mentors can help generate ideas, and mentors can provide the right balance of encouragement and "tough love." Both parties feeling empowered can benefit the cohesion of a team and generate new processes and ideas to help support a team and the business as a whole.

In this session, we'll discuss:
* Why is mentoring others important?
* What does each party get out of the mentoring relationship?
* How do you find a mentor and make sure it is the right fit?
* What are some good qualities of a mentor?
* What are some sample topics you can discuss during mentoring sessions?
* How do you put what you learn from your mentoring sessions into practice?

🎤 Presenter(s): stidmore-mc

It’s happened to you: You’re putting together requirements for a new website, but when it comes to your existing technology, you don’t know what you don’t know. Do your third-party software platforms integrate with each other? How much content needs to be migrated? Where does your DNS live? You need to gain a clear picture of your current technology so that you can move forward with your new website as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Based on over 20 years of experience building websites, we’ll explore the most common tech issues we see when beginning a new web project. You’ll gain valuable knowledge around processes like content migration, CMS requirements, single sign-on, and everything in between. You’ll understand what questions to ask your internal team before involving an outside agency or getting too far along in the process. We’ll walk through some real-world examples of how to evaluate what you’re working with and what tools you’ll need to meet your organizational goals.

By the end of this session, you should be able to:

* Ask the right questions upfront to make the entire website process more efficient
* Work with internal IT teams to get an accurate lay of the land
* Evaluate existing tools—and craft accurate requests for work
* Use tech to reach your goals

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/8-tech-questions-ask-you-even-think-about-new-website

🎤 Presenter(s): suniltaneja

Run #Drupal and other workloads such as SOLR, Elastic, Redis or Memcache in #Kubernetes. In-depth analysis of which services are much more suited for Kubernetes.

This session will focus on concepts and real-world use-case scenarios to move your Drupal installation away from traditional Virtual machines to a scalable and cost-effective Kubernetes environment.

* What are the basic concepts of kubernetes and what makes it so compelling for a multi-workload hosted environment.
* Does it make sense to host everything in Kubernetes? which are better suited for Kubernetes as opposed to managed services from a cloud provider. Key concepts will be presented to make these decisions.
* How does it make it easier to manage, deploy and be more secure in a Kubernetes hosted environment. Concepts for Rolling updates, rollbacks and version management will be explained. Tools like Kubectl, HELM and others will be introduced.
* A complete turnkey solution with all the components will be shown in an existing Kubernetes hosted environment. The solution will show variations needed for installations in Azure, and considerations to all the major Kubernetes providers, such as Google (GKE), Amazon (EKS) or Microsoft (AKS).

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/drupal-hosted-kubernetes

Canada, the European Union and the United Kingdom have all developed legislation on web #accessibility since the #Section508 Refresh process was enacted in 2017. It is most likely that enforcement will likely continue to be done through lawsuits in the USA, but what can be learned from other jurisdictions that might help individual departments.

This session will highlight some of the different approaches that are being tried by government around the world to keep up with the challenge of digital inclusion.

🎤 Presenter: mgifford

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/what-can-usa-learn-world-accessibility-policy

Two requirements that come up constantly on projects are “How do we make it easier for non-technical users to update our website?” And “How can we give content editors more flexibility?"

At the same time, responsive design, content portability, and accessibility concerns are increasingly important. Now more than ever, we need to make sure that by adding flexibility, we’re not sacrificing semantic markup and data.

In this session, I'll show the differences between how Paragraphs and Layout Builder solve these problems, and give suggestions about which to use to solve different use cases. I'll draw on usability studies comparing the two platforms, and draw from this blog post comparing the two options (https://evolvingweb.ca/blog/designing-flexible-content-model-drupal-layout-builder-paragraphs). I'll also talk about alternatives like Acquia Cohesion and Gutenberg and how they fit into the ecosystem.

🎤 Presenter: pixelite
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/creating-layouts-landing-pages-drupal-paragraphs-vs-layout-builder-edition

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: gianwild
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/mobile-accessibility-testing-mobile-sites-and-native-apps-accessibility

I would like to do a quick show-and-tell of a neat feature we're using on about 5 government sites I help maintain. This is a tool I built for #Drupal 7 using the feeds importer and a handful of additional modules. We are currently in the process of upgrading it to Drupal 9.

The #Granicus meeting importer pulls in information about upcoming meetings including date, time, location, agenda, packets, and other information like whether the session is open or closed. After the meeting has concluded, the importer will update the meeting with the minutes, and add a link to the video recording.

Because the Drupal tool uses standard #Feeds importers, it's fairly simple to adjust as needed for any given site.


* There's one HUGE caveat to using this tool: Granicus does NOT provide a feed suitable for pulling in this information. It will also be necessary to hire a developer to leverage TWO different Granicus APIs (both undocumented, and unmaintained) to generate a feed containing all the data needed to run this program.


🎤 Presenter: jenlampton
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/granicus-meeting-and-asset-importer-using-drupal-feeds

The EPA started using the U.S. Web Design System in 2016 to guide the look and feel of EPA.gov. During the migration to Drupal 8, we rebuilt the theme from scratch. One major goal was to make it easier to keep up with the latest changes to USWDS.

Learn how we incorporated the latest version of USWDS into our process:

Integrate with a Drupal 8 theme
Leverage USWDS theme settings and Sass mixins
Use Pattern Lab to show and document components


We also created an open-source Drupal 8 theme that you can use as a starting point. https://github.com/forumone/gesso-uswds


🎤 Presenter: dcmouyard
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/real-world-example-using-us-web-design-system

This session will discuss two open source web components for visualizing and interacting with 3D objects, Google's model-viewer and the Smithsonian Institution's Voyager, and how the Smithsonian leverages these technologies along with Drupal and open-access content to create engaging learning experiences.

Presenters: rossiv, sharkbaitdc, gjcope, elalish

This session focuses on how we rolled out large amounts of content using a #Drupal post update script. This method was used for several tools on Farmers.gov, most recently The Disaster Assistance Tool. A post update script can build pages, create paragraph types or blocks, and can fill in the content. After running the post update script, all pages will be up and running with properly placed blocks and paragraph types filled with content significantly cutting down on the time needed to launch tools, features, and large content elements. This method is particularly useful in rolling out the same content across environments when you don’t have the manpower or time to recreate content repeatedly.

Presentation by Matt Calvert & Jason Glisson with an introduction by Ashley Miller of USDA.

Synopsis:

Setting up pages, blocks, paragraphs, and content on various environments can often times be a pain. If you deploy from your local environment, to a development environment, a QA environment, a client facing staging environment, and then a production environment, valuable time can be spent creating the same content over and over again. And if the pages you are rolling out include creating a large number of new paragraphs and blocks as well as placing them in a content type, the process can become monotonous and drag on for hours.

Configuration files can help with some of this process such as creating content types, paragraph types, or block types. However, filling in the content, embedded blocks or reference types can sometimes cause issues or simply not work properly with configuration. Properly placing block types, view blocks, module produced blocks and paragraph reference may not even be an option in configuration at times.

Enter Drupal's Update Script. With an update script, entire tools and large sections of a website can be rolled out flawlessly with all content in place and ready to go in a matter of seconds. The days of copying and pasting content from environment to environment are behind you! Simply run drush updb, and your update script will create your content, place blocks, create paragraphs and embed them, upload images, create views, etc. The possibilities are nearly endless.


USDA's Farmers.Gov initiative has used update scripts to roll out very large interactive tools with high volumes of blocks and paragraphs that would take hours on end to setup manually. By spending the time on an update script, we've cut down on setup time across our environments and reduced production launch time to just seconds.


🎤 Presenter(s): tk421jag, ashleyfmiller, MattC
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/using-post-update-scripts-deploy-content-across-environments

Covid-19 for some sites has meant a massive surge in traffic. Some of the health related sites that we look after at amazee.io have experienced a 80x traffic increase over the last couple months.

This talk is about dealing with this scale of traffic, and what things you can do to help here.

Some of the things that will be discussed:

Horizontal scaling and getting this sized this the best
Database sizing and tuning
Redis tuning and gotchas
Minimising origin hits
CDN tuning
Building a culture of continuous improvement
The talk is aimed at anyone with performance in mind, from developers to devops, to sysadmins.

Presenter: Sean Hamlin
Slides: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/sites/default/files/session/slides/2020-09/Drupal%20GovCon%20-%20Dealing%20with%20unprecedented%20scale%20during%20Covid-19.pdf
Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/dealing-unprecedented-scale-during-covid-19

📅 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
⬇️ Click "show more" for full schedule

🎤 Planning your Drupal QA: how to tackle a Monster? (Eduardo Madariaga)
🕒 10 - 10:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/planning-your-drupal-qa-how-tackle-monster
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "project-team-management"

🎤 Automate all the things (Colan Schwartz, Christopher Gervais)
🕒 11 - 11:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/automate-all-things
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "devops-performance-security-privacy"

✨ Watch the 12 p.m. keynote by Andrew Sinkson: https://youtu.be/n4MM0SLzqDM

🎤 Self-Help Tips to Better Manage Your Drupal Site (Shani Felder)
🕒 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/self-help-tips-better-manage-your-drupal-site
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "community-being-human"

🎤 Battle for Online Privacy (Dan Moriarty)
🕒 2:30 - 3:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/battle-online-privacy
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "devops-performance-security-privacy"

🎤 Component-Driven Theming with Storybook (Aaron Couch, Evan Willhite, Brian Lewis)
🕒 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/component-driven-theming-storybook
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 Correctly Nest Entities and Build Healthy Multilingual Relationships (Aimee Hannaford)
🕒 4:30 - 5:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/correctly-nest-entities-and-build-healthy-multilingual-relationships
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

🎤 Nothing about us without us: Engaging stakeholders on RaleighNC.gov (Joe Crespo, Sally Shaughnessy, James Alberque, Pete Weber)
🕒 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/nothing-about-us-without-us-engaging-stakeholders-raleighncgov
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

📅 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
⬇️ Click "show more" for full schedule

🎤 Benefits and pitfalls of integrating Drupal into a decoupled, static site build process for VA.gov (Elijah Lynn, Robbie Holmes)
🕒 10 - 10:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/benefits-and-pitfalls-integrating-drupal-decoupled-static-site-build-process
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 Behavior-Driven Development with Drupal and Cypress.io (Philipp Melab)
🕒 11 - 11:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/behavior-driven-development-drupal-and-cypressio
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

✨ Watch the 12 p.m. keynote by Andrew Sinkson: https://youtu.be/n4MM0SLzqDM

🎤 Putting veterans first in the design of a pilot hospital site on VA.gov, the largest hospital system in the US (Kevin Walsh, Jodi Leo)
🕒 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/putting-veterans-first-design-pilot-hospital-site-vagov-largest-hospital
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "content-strategy-analytics"

🎤 Drupal & USWDS: It’s Time to Get Things Started (Dustin Boeger, Brian Seek)
🕒 2:30 - 3:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/drupal-uswds-its-time-get-things-started
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

🎤 Automated Accessibility Testing: Using Pa11y and Continuous Integration (Mike Madison)
🕒 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/automated-accessibility-testing-using-pa11y-and-continuous-integration
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

🎤 Taking Maximum Advantage of Drupal Core's Composer Template (Michael Anello)
🕒 4:30 - 5:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/taking-maximum-advantage-drupal-cores-composer-template
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 best of both worlds: improve your Decoupled Drupal with external personalization (in Firebase) (Jitesh Doshi)
🕒 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/best-both-worlds-improve-your-decoupled-drupal-external-personalization
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

📅 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
⬇️ Click "show more" for full schedule

🎤 Cleaning Up Your (Data) Mess: Lessons from Dozens of Analytics Audits How Not to Create a Huge Mess (Emily Patterson)
🕒 10 - 10:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/cleaning-your-data-mess-lessons-dozens-analytics-audits-how-not-create-huge
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "content-strategy-analytics"

🎤 EEOC.gov – Modernized Experience & Performance on Drupal 8 (Ben Coit)
🕒 11 - 11:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/eeocgov-modernized-experience-performance-drupal-8
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

✨ Watch the 12 p.m. keynote by Andrew Sinkson: https://youtu.be/n4MM0SLzqDM

🎤 Enabling the Change-Makers: Redesigning Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs Website (Suzanne Dergacheva, John Cloys)
🕒 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/enabling-change-makers-redesigning-princetons-school-public-and-international
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

🎤 mock-chain: a library for easier unit testing in Drupal (and beyond!) (Dan Feder, Gerardo Gonzalez)
🕒 2:30 - 3:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/mock-chain-library-easier-unit-testing-drupal-and-beyond
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 The State of the Union('s Data) (Kim Davidson, Susana Siman, Stephen Tsai, Jacqueline Gu)
🕒 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/state-unions-data
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "community-being-human"

🎤 Supercharge your CMS - Powered by Data (John Doyle, Adam Weingarten)
🕒 4:30 - 5:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/supercharge-your-cms-powered-data
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "content-strategy-analytics"

🎤 Relationship Advice: How to get more from your technology partner (Gena Dellett)
🕒 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/relationship-advice-how-get-more-your-technology-partner
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "project-team-management"

📅 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
⬇️ Click "show more" for full schedule

🎤 Architecting Effective Data Dashboards (Karl Kaufmann)
🕒 10 - 10:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/architecting-effective-data-dashboards
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

🎤 Decoupled CMS Architecture in Government as a Best Practice (Justin Winter)
🕒 11 - 11:45 a.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/decoupled-cms-architecture-government-best-practice
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "project-team-management"

✨ Watch the 12 p.m. keynote by Andrew Sinkson: https://youtu.be/n4MM0SLzqDM

🎤 Recurring Events Module (Owen Bush)
🕒 1:30 - 2:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/recurring-events-module
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "coding-and-dev"

🎤 My best (and worst) strategies for dealing with high-demand work (Michael Schmid)
🕒 2:30 - 3:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/my-best-and-worst-strategies-dealing-high-demand-work
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "community-being-human"

🎤 Drupal 9 migrations for non-coders (Mauricio Dinarte)
🕒 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/drupal-9-migrations-non-coders
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "site-building-using-drupal"

🎤 Improving Federal Agency User Experience - Scaling MVPs as a Marathon, not a Sprint (Jason Glisson, Ashley Miller, Iva Hutson)
🕒 4:30 - 5:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/improving-federal-agency-user-experience-scaling-mvps-marathon-not-sprint
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "design-ux-accessibility"

🎤 Boost Your Visibility in Google Search: Implementing Schema in Drupal 8 (Ryan McBurney, Nate Mow)
🕒 5:30 - 6:15 p.m. ET
🔗 https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/boost-your-visibility-google-search-implementing-schema-drupal-8
💬 Discuss on the GovCon2020 Slack channel "content-strategy-analytics"

After four years of auditing (and fixing) clients’ disorganized Google #Analytics set-ups, convoluted Google Tag Manager implementation and other web #data messes, I’ve learned a lot about how NOT to set up your organization’s #website data. This presentation contains the top four common mistakes I see – and what I recommend to fix these issues.

We often think about what to track (Button clicks! Form submissions!) and how to analyze the resulting data. But this presentation takes a step back and asks: “do I have the data I need?” and “can actually trust the information I’m getting?” Here are the top things you will learn from this talk:
- How to plan for a new site: Launching a new website? Here’s what to think about ahead of time – so you can get reliable data on day one. Tips to decide if you need a new analytics account or Tag Manager container.
- Um, is my data even correct? Practical tips for troubleshooting your Google Analytics events and goals. Make sure what you think you are tracking is actually what you are tracking
- How to keep it simple and scalable: Tips for setting up your analytics accounts so it’s manageable by your team -- and can grow with your organization.
- Permissions, permissions, permissions: Don’t get in a situation where you need to chase down former employees for access to your own website data. How to set up your accounts, so you don’t ever have permissions issues.

🎤 Presenter: Emily Patterson
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/cleaning-your-data-mess-lessons-dozens-analytics-audits-how-not-create-huge

#Drupal allows for fast pace development of very complex systems: a #QA nightmare. How will you be able to sleep at night? Plan Ahead! Don’t let it become a monster in the first place and you’ll realize it was a lovely kitty all along.

In this session, we'll discuss tactics of how to approach your QA infrastructure to provide support and help you create a Test Plan and/or Test Strategy for your project. We'll also cover example scenarios and how one should react to them.


🎤 Presenter: eduardomadariaga

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/planning-your-drupal-qa-how-tackle-monster

What do the books Essentialism (McKeown), The Year of Less (Flanders), and Girl, Stop Apologizing (Hollis) have in common? What about The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Kondo) or The Total Money Makeover (Ramsey)? They’re all books read by those, like me, in pursuit of a more meaningful, less stressful, and even better way of life. They promise clean homes and clear minds, but what if the principles of these books don’t just apply to managing our mental health or cluttered closets? They might apply to how we work, and more specifically, how we work with Drupal.

In this session we’re going to explore how some of the practical advice in popular self-help books can help us better perform our tasks in creating and managing Drupal websites. We’ll discover:

Why keeping the essential tasks at the forefront of your Drupal project is a must
Why decluttering your content enhances the morale and productivity of your team
Why focusing on one thing at a time is more efficient than focusing on all things at a time
How to let go of what you’ve always done, or what you’ve always used, for the better

All experience levels welcome.


🎤 Presenter: sfelder

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/self-help-tips-better-manage-your-drupal-site

The key to delivering an impactful new website is listening.

There is a popular slogan right now, “nothing about us without us,” that asserts that no policy or product should be decided on without representation from the end user group(s). No truer words were spoken.

A serious risk of not listening to your users’ needs is building the wrong thing. This results in poor adoption, lack of support from the community, and inadequate content maintenance, and worse – the dreaded backlash of bad PR.

The needs of the City of Raleigh’s constituents and city staffers are far-reaching, as expansive and diverse as their audience set. Aten and the City of Raleigh team planned and engaged stakeholders throughout the course of the year-long website project to first listen, then validate decisions and ultimately design and develop what users need and want. Feedback before launch was promising. The listening has continued post-launch and is positive as well. The efforts to engage various user groups has paid off!

Together we established audience groups and priorities, and then proceeded with an exhaustive effort to engage front-end users and back-end content editors. We:

Facilitated surveys to gain an understanding of aspirations and concerns
Hosted focus groups to listen to build empathy for the different users
Organized card sorting activities to inform information architecture
Held a staff-wide town hall to gain alignment on the road forward
Conducted collaborative, strategy-driven workshops to generate ideas and build a shared vocabulary for design
Road-showed the new site to citizens, business leaders, city council and the mayor as a preview before the official launch
Provided documentation and training to content editors and city staffers ensuring they can provide consistent and accurate content moving forward

This session will discuss how we:
- Established and prioritized audience groups
- Developed a project roadmap with isolated milestones to engage stakeholders
- Chose the methods to engage stakeholders
- Synthesized stakeholder feedback to create an elegant and joyful experience
- Prioritized the feedback prior to launch

Your teams will walk away with an understanding of why it’s critical to make decisions informed by user needs and ensure your users are heard. We will provide tips on Strategic listening exercises you can use in your next project.


🎤 Presenter(s): jcrespo, sallyann716, jalberque, peteweber

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/nothing-about-us-without-us-engaging-stakeholders-raleighncgov

Accessibility is a critical component of any modern website (and double so for government sites). This session is all about building a safety net for your site / platform to ensure that you do not regress the accessibility of your site as you continue to make improvements, fix bugs, develop new features, and apply updates.

Topics Covered:
How to integrate Pa11y into your Drupal project
How to execute Pa11y tests during continuous integration
How Drupal configuration and custom development impacts accessibility
How to provide default content for accessibility testing
What sorts of things cannot be automated

Presenter: Mike Madison
Slides: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/sites/default/files/session/slides/2020-09/2020%20-%20DGC%20Pa11y.pdf
Session Details:
https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/automated-accessibility-testing-using-pa11y-and-continuous-integration

In this session we will discuss a bit about why and how we implemented the VA.gov CMS (Drupal 8) as a backend Content API to feed a decoupled, Metalsmith static HTML build and deployment system for the frontend.

We will also reveal some notable challenges that we faced in implementing this piece of the overall architecture of which some were expected and some which weren’t. We’ll discuss how we overcame these challenges, including discussion of tradeoffs that our solutions entailed. Finally, we will share some lessons learned and guidance for other teams who may be considering implementing a decoupled, static HTML frontend + Drupal CMS at other agencies.

Speakers:
Robbie Holmes (RobbieTheGeek) - United States Digital Service (at time of project)
Elijah Lynn (Elijah Lynn) - Agile Six Applications

Slides: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/sites/default/files/session/slides/2020-09/Benefits%20and%20pitfalls%20of%20integrating%20Drupal%20into%20a%20decoupled%2C%20static%20site%20build%20process%20for%20VA.gov_.pdf
Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/benefits-and-pitfalls-integrating-drupal-decoupled-static-site-build-process

As component-based #design principles evolve, the actual implementation in #Drupal can be performed in many ways. Most, if not all, component-based site building approaches rely on Entity Relationships. Adding multilingual support that is Correct and Predictable can be a challenge to configure. In this session, we'll surface best practices of #Multilingual configuration with entity relationships.

Oh, but how many types of entity relationships are there? It shouldn't be that hard, right? Paragraphs, Layout Builder, referenced nodes, custom entities, media entities, taxonomy terms. The list goes on.

And did you want to nest those entities? How many blocks can include other blocks that include Paragraphs that include taxonomy terms and Media Entities? Hmm... does this sound familiar? Perhaps a highly configurable component?

And how many permutations of "multilingual" can there be? Well, there is #translation vs. #localization. Each requiring Drupal's CMS and page display to be configured for Correct and Predictable Display. Even for those complex nested entities.

We'll cover:
Common multilingual use-cases and configuration approach with nesting
Considerations with leading component-based site-building architectures
Tools that exist in the community, and those that may need to be developed!

Learning Objectives
At the end of this session, attendees will be able to:
Understand the challenges of multilingual and entity relationships
Identify use-cases that they may leverage on their sites
Make good decisions architecting their multilingual site-building strategy
And more!

Target Audience
This session is geared for seasoned site-builders, themers, or developers that need to provide multilingual component-based solutions to their clients.

Although beginners can find some value, we are going to cover a lot of topics and terms, assuming the audience will understand them.

Prerequisites
Attendees will get the most out of this session by being familiar with:
Site-building principals
Content entities and their creation
Component-based design principles and implementation in Drupal
Understanding of entity relationships, how to create them, and how Drupal renders them
Basic understanding of multilingual configurations (come along for the ride if there is no previous experience)

🎤 Presenter: aimeerae
📌 Supporting documents: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/sites/default/files/session/slides/2020-09/SpatialPath%20-%20Drupal4Gov%20-%202020-09-25%20-%20Nesting%20Multilingual%20Entities%20in%20Drupal%208.pdf
Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/correctly-nest-entities-and-build-healthy-multilingual-relationships
🔗 Session details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/correctly-nest-entities-and-build-healthy-multilingual-relationships

Component-driven theming is gaining popularity in the Drupal and in the greater front-end development worlds. Taking a component based approach offers greater consistency, flexibility, re-usability and velocity for front-end development.

This session explores component-driven theming using the Emulsify Design System. Emulsify combines a starter library of Drupal-ready components with Storybook as well as some other useful tools.

This session is for developers and will walk through building a project using the new Emulsify - from building components in Storybook to connecting them in your Drupal templates.

We will cover building a feature from the foundation of atomic design all the way to a page layout. We will address common questions and issues that arise during component-driven development as well as show examples of how Storybook and its add-ons can help increase your project stability from accessibility to testing to demos.

Presenters: Aaron Couch, Evan Willhite & Brian Lewis

The Recurring Events module is a Drupal 8 and 9 plug-and-play recurring events and registration system designed to be site agnostic and extensible.

The module allows site editors to create and manage events that recur in a variety of ways - including consecutively, daily, weekly, monthly, and custom recurrence configurations. An event series comprises of multiple event instances, each of which inherits data from the series, but can also be managed and viewed independently from the series itself, this offers great flexibility when it comes to modifying event instance dates and times or removing them altogether.

In this presentation you will hear about the current offerings in the Drupal core and contrib space, the unique features built in to the Recurring Events module, and the module's current state and releases.

🎤 Presenter: @OwenBush

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/recurring-events-module

Dashboards and #data displays—features often presented with the “wow factor” in mind—can be deficient in providing end users with critical information. To effectively serve as an information resource—proper architecture is critical, and requires a ground-up approach. I’ll show you how—through discovery and co-creation with users, accounting for cognition and #accessibility, as well as selecting and refining effective #visualization types to tell an accurate data story.

In this session, you’ll learn:
* Discovery techniques for finding out what your users need, not just what they say
* Case studies on dashboards—and how you can apply them to your challenges
* Properly aligning users’ data needs with effective visualization types
* Refining these discoveries through iteration—with an eye on accessibility and #cognition

This session is geared toward anyone interested in helping users better understand their data story through improved dashboard and visualization experiences.

🎤 Presenter: karolus
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/architecting-effective-data-dashboards

🎤 Presenters: tk421jag, ashleyfmiller, ihutson

This session will investigate how MetroStar’s Lean/Agile approach has enabled the iterative development of a popular USDA web tool that matches farmers with potential disaster assistance programs. More specifically, we will discuss how we went from a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) to a more mature Vue.js app in Drupal, and how we used user analytics to engage our customer in the process.

As part of the vision for Farmers.gov, the Secretary of USDA, Sonny Perdue wanted to create the most customer-centric public website for US farmers to learn about available programs, financial assistance, and self-services. Based on that guidance, we have created numerous user-friendly tools and resources meant to aid farmers and simplify their complex environment.

Some examples of the tools we've created include navigating numerous types of loan program, understanding the process of hiring temporary foreign agricultural workers, and applying for disaster assistance programs that meet their needs.

In this talk, we will walk you through a case study of how we were able to iterate on one of our tools while navigating organizational logistics and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) release train priorities. Today, we will dive into how we partnered with our development team to gain buy-in from the product owner and numerous stakeholders by making evidence-based arguments why the minimum viable product (MVP) should be scaled and enhanced.

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/improving-federal-agency-user-experience-scaling-mvps-marathon-not-sprint

🎤 Presenters: ultimike

If you're looking to build a modern Drupal 8 or 9 site, then you're probably going to want to use the Drupal core Composer "recommended-project" template. Debuting with Drupal 8.8, this modern, (officially) community-supported Composer template gets your project off on the right foot.

This session will both deconstruct and provide examples, tips, and tricks for making the most of the drupal/recommended-project template. We will compare and contrast it with the "Drupal Composer / Drupal Project" template, and introduce some additional dependencies to help manage your project's codebase effectively.


🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/taking-maximum-advantage-drupal-cores-composer-template

🎤 Presenters: colan, ergonlogic, lamech

Ever heard of #infrastructure-as-code? The idea is basically to use tools like #Terraform and #Ansible to manage the composition and operation of your cloud systems. This allows infrastructure to be treated just like any other software system. The code can be committed into Git which allows auditability, and reproducibility. It can therefore be tested and integrated into full continuous delivery processes.

Terraform for infrastructure:
Terraform makes it easy to provision and manage any cloud, infrastructure, or service (such as VMs, load balancers or object storage) with easy-to-read declarative configuration files. Entire infrastructures are fully reproducible, and can be set up or torn down with single commands.

It's also very easy to mix and match cloud IaaS providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP, or those running OpenStack.

Ansible for configuration:
Ansible provides tonnes of modules, including those for files, storage, system, networking and even cloud (just like Terraform), called as "tasks" that can be run sequentially (procedural) in "roles" and "playbooks", to do things like installing Web and DB servers (and installing #Drupal). Ansible strives for simplicity, resulting in playbooks that are essentially self-documenting.

Agenda

In this session, we will:
* Explore the principles of infrastructure-as-code and how to operationalize them;
* Introduce Terraform and its providers, resources and backends;
* Introduce Ansible and its tasks, modules and roles;
* Build a full OpenStack cloud infrastructure end-to-end from scratch, including a fully functional up-and-running Aegir installation (for hosting Drupal sites) running on a newly created VM, with a single command.

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/automate-all-things

🎤 Presenters: pmelab

#Behavior-driven development is the art of establishing a common language, improving communication, creating automatable tests and providing living, always-accurate documentation at the same time. Especially in large scale projects with complex workflows and many individual needs, it is an indispensable tool to ensure seamless communication, clear goals, and mutual understanding.

We are going to look deeper into the #Gherkin language and its application to find out that it goes far beyond simple automated acceptance testing. And then we will show how to use the #Cypress module for #Drupal to add some simple automated acceptance testing to your Drupal project or module :)

Session content:
* What is behavior-driven development?
* What’s the relation to Domain-Driven Design?
* Who writes scenarios?
* Do’s and Don’ts for writing good scenarios
* Example implementation in a Drupal project
* Tips on maintaining a testable project
* Comparison to Unit tests and testing strategies

🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/behavior-driven-development-drupal-and-cypressio

Starting with Drupal 8, the Migrate API makes it possible to write and execute migrations without having to write PHP code. It is also possible to execute them from the Drupal administration interface if the command line is not available or you prefer not to use it.

This session will explain the Migrate API and many of its concepts like source, process, and destination plugins from a site builder perspective. You will also learn about the migrate ecosystem in Drupal 9 to be aware of what tools are at your disposal. The examples include migrating from CSV and JSON files to populate different field types like taxonomy, date, and address.

Target Audience

People who want to learn the about the workflow and thought process to migrate data into Drupal 9. Site builders will learn how to perform migrations. Project managers will understand the complexity of these tasks for better estimation.

Prerequisites

Although no prior Migrate module knowledge is required, it is expected that attendees have a basic understanding of site building concepts like nodes, content types, and fields. You can have a look at this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02fvLzPSIjc for an overview of the Drupal site building concepts.

If you want a headstart, you can learn more about Drupal's Migrate API at https://understanddrupal.com/31-days-of-migrations

Presenters: Mauricio Dinarte
Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/drupal-9-migrations-non-coders

Now that the whole world has discovered decoupled CMS, the default and most common approach to Decoupled Drupal seems to be a completely independent static HTML+JS UI that uses Drupal only to get JSON data from it. While this is a start, it is throws baby out with the bathwater. It discards all the theming that is readily available from Drupal and leaves the developer with the full responsibility of painting the entire UI by templating HTML out of the JSON data on client. A better, faster (in run-time and developer time), and more efficient approach would be to:

Let Drupal render most of the HTML on server-side. Make it fully cacheable.
Let your client-side JavaScript implement only "personalized" parts of the page
Store the "personalization" data in a third place, such as Firebase, DynamicDB, or self-hosted solution (such as Hasura+Postgres). Drupal can still serve JSON data (using REST, JSON:API, or GraphQL), but it should be same for all/most users, and hence cacheable.
Benefits, depending on your needs, could be many:

Reuse most of the theming Drupal provides. Save development time (and money)
Smaller and simpler client-side apps.
Real-time features of an external personalization engine - such as live chat, live comments, breaking news alerts and push notifications.
In this talk we will review the problem and the proposed solution in more detail, including sample code & demo.

All source code is available here: https://bitbucket.org/spinspire/decouple-different/

The presentation video and several other supporting training videos are at https://youtube.com/spinspire

Presenter: Jitesh Doshi
Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/best-both-worlds-improve-your-decoupled-drupal-external-personalization

Google search results often include snippets that answer key user questions before other #search listings. That means, if you want your site to appear, there are steps you must take to be featured and featured and benefit from additional brand exposure in search results. We tackled this issue from both a strategic and technical perspective.

In this session:
• We will walk you through the key concepts and some tactics for crafting and optimizing a structured data strategy.
• We will also show how we built on this strategy and worked with the MedicalEntity spec from https://schema.org, Google's Structured Data Testing Tool and the #Schema.org Metatag module in #Drupal 8 as part of our ongoing work with a major medical non-profit.
• Specifically, we will showcase how taking this approach can help with areas of your site like resource libraries, including the one that's funded by the Centers for Disease Control for our client.
• We will also discuss the patch we submitted to add support for MedicalEntity objects to the schema_metatag module.

🎤 Presenter(s): RyanMcBurney, natemow
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/boost-your-visibility-google-search-implementing-schema-drupal-8

#Data breaches and abuses of our personal data keep making the news. But what can we do about it? Are you protecting user privacy?

It's been over 2 years since the #GDPR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation) went into effect in Europe, a landmark law that promised to protect and change the way personal data gets used online. But did it have any effect? Especially for those of us in the USA, it may seem like business as usual. Or worse, that privacy is dead.

But you don't have to be a Facebook-sized company to be concerned. Learn about best practices in managing #privacy for your site users, privacy laws, and what resources and Drupal modules can be useful for your websites.

New laws and regulations may not apply to you (yet). But that doesn't mean you can't start doing the right thing. The battle for online privacy is not over and we all can play a role–as site owners, editors, designers, developers, and members of the Drupal community.

Learning Objectives
Recommend what site owners, editors and developers can do to improve their website's privacy experience (PX)
Discuss what's happened in the year since GDPR became law in Europe, and what's coming for online privacy in the USA, including the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Act).
Recap what resources, tools and modules you can start using to protect privacy, for yourself and others

Target Audience
Anyone interested in learning best practices for managing online privacy, for themselves, their clients and their organization
Clients and organizations with European customers (temporary or permanent)
Clients and organizations serving California residents
Users of websites that collect personal information, including contact forms and site analytics
Web developers, editors and site owners who work with personal data

Prerequisites
interest in, or responsibility for, user privacy and personal data

🎤 Presenter(s): citizendan
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/battle-online-privacy

The Veterans Health Administration provides health care to 9 million medical patients, 14 million veterans across through its 1200 facilities, including 150 hospitals and over 1000 community clinics.

This vast scale represents a challenge for creating content for veterans that is reliable, complete, and consistent across the country.

This session explores the content strategy, content design, and content operations in the development of #VA Pittsburgh Health Care System, which served as the pilot for this veterans experience.

It will focus particularly on two content problems in the pilot: health services.

We’ll describe our process for auditing and consolidating over 2,500 health service names and descriptions into a “single source of truth” of 90 health services. We’ll examine the complex governance for these services, which include service descriptions that are national, regional (health system), and local (facility), and how Drupal can serve these content operations at an enterprise scale, including an editorial experience that works for people involved in managing this content

🎤 Presenter(s): kevinjosephwalsh, jane
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/putting-veterans-first-design-pilot-hospital-site-vagov-largest-hospital

Links:
- VA Pittsburgh health care Pilot: www.va.gov/pittsburgh-health-care
- Repo: https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms
- VA.gov CMS Content model (Drupal spec tool, Google Sheets): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vL8rqLqcEVfESnJJK_GWQ7nf3BPe4SSevYYblisBTOI/edit#gid=858986005
- Universal Health Care content model (Airtable): https://airtable.com/universe/expwzLeltE2c1D1V9/health-care-content-model?explore=true

Unit tests are a critical tool for development, ensuring that classes and functions aren't inadvertently broken by new code. While Drupal has moved toward modern PHP conventions and made unit testing more feasible for module developers, it remains difficult in many cases to run tests without bootstrapping Drupal to have access to services like database or translation. The DKAN team created mock-chain to make building mocks for these services and other complex objects much simpler and has reduced the amount of time we spend writing unit tests significantly. In this talk we will write a new test from scratch and demonstrate how to leverage mock-chain.

Presenter: fmizzell

Open Data drives evidence based policy and decisionmaking, supports transparency and accountability, and is the language through which our institutions speak to each other and to the public. And though we’ve come a long way sharing government data with the public, open data programs at all levels of government have found themselves facing new challenges around communication, culture change, process, and resources.

We spoke with data managers across the city, state, and federal level who shared both their aspirations for their data programs and their struggles implementing those ideas, to put together a picture of the government data landscape today. We’ll share our findings about the biggest challenges and opportunities in government data and invite the open source open government community to work together to solve them.

Presenters: Kim DAvidson, susisiman, gujacq

In today's world, data powers everything from the ads you see in your instagram feed to the suggestions on your Netflix subscription. You probably use data to measure how your site is performing, report on your conversions and inform your decision making on what is and is not working. But why stop there? Why not use this same data to power your CMS?

Imagine a platform that seamlessly integrates your analytical data to supercharge your CMS. This new world opens up possibilities to harness the infinite power of data to make decisions for you, automagically (ok not really, but close!).

While most platforms (such as personalization platforms) focus only on the user-facing parts of your website, we will discuss opportunities to enhance both the customer facing and the internal CMS activities.

In this talk, we will discuss:
-Why would I want to integrate data into our CMS?
-What are some things that we could do with this data?
-How you can integrate Google Analytics data into your CMS.
-Short and Long term benefits of doing this.

Some example use cases on how data could enhance your everyday experience:
-Search Weighting - Push up results in your on-site search experience.
-Content Performance Indicators - Flag content which is underperforming and act on it.
-Page Health - Identify and correlate changes to content with analytical trends.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this talk you will understand:
-Why a product owner would want to use data to power their CMS
-Common tasks which can be automated with data

Target Audiences
-Product Owners interested in using data to enhance their website
-Marketing professionals who are tired of giving analytics reports to their content team on a daily basis
-Architects looking to understand how to incorporate data into a build
-Anyone who runs, works in, or builds a Drupal website

Pre Reqs
-A basic understanding of the internet and analytics

Presenters: _doyle_, adam.weingarten

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (#EEOC) is responsible for enforcing federal laws that make it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or an employee because of the person's race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.

With more than 10 million unique visitors to EEOC’s website each year, EEOC.gov is a key channel for communicating EEOC’s mission, vision, and disseminating critical information.

Ten-plus years since its last platform update, EEOC.gov recently underwent a complete redesign and re-platform to better serve its constituents by moving to #Drupal 8 on Microsoft #Azure. In this session, you’ll hear from the EEOC.gov build team to learn about how they successfully:
- Migrated over 160,000 pieces of content
- Significantly decreased the time it takes to post updates
- Implemented the latest US Web Design System (#USWDS), improving the site’s #accessibility, Spanish-language delivery, and mobile responsiveness

🎤 Presenter(s): bencoit
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/eeocgov-modernized-experience-performance-drupal-8

Across roles, specialities, and companies job stress is increasing. The daily deluge of emails, Slack messages, and urgent tasks can be overwhelming and it may seem like there’s no solution. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and just want to give up. Believe me, I’ve been there too.

As CTO of Amazee, I work with a team around the world that’s online 24/7. Over the last ten years, I’ve tried a lot of different strategies to deal with the high demand for work and communication required as part of an innovative company. Some have worked wonders, others not at all. While sharing my personal experience, as well as the tips and tricks I’ve found helpful, I hope to start a conversation about how we can find individual solutions for a problem that’s become universal.

A couple of topics that I will cover:
-How to sleep better and fall asleep faster
-Notification overload
-Structuring your day
-Weekly self retrospectives

Learning Objectives

At the end of this session, attendees will
-Have specific strategies to implement to reduce stress
-Know how to make an individual plan that works for them
-Understand the importance of avoiding burn out
-Connect with other attendees facing similar challenges

Target Audience

This session is for

-People feeling overwhelmed by their daily work
-People working in high demand environments
-People who want to share strategies for balancing work

Prerequisites
-Attendees will get the most out of this session by being familiar with having a job ;)

Presenter: Schnitzel

Building and deploying sites using traditional #Drupal approaches require developers with a large amount of crossover knowledge and expertise. Full stack developers are hard to find and training junior developers into this role can take years. Deploying Drupal sites at scale requires system and platform specialists that further extend the required knowledge base for a team to successfully deploy a Drupal project.

There are many reasons why Drupal is still a great tool for government, including security, role based work-flows, and a strong healthy community of developers, just to name a few.

In this talk I will present why the traditional approach to building drupal sites can be improved on by breaking apart your presentation layer from your data layer. As a manager this can have meaningful impacts on the skill sets required on your team and allow everyone to more narrowly focus their skills. I will also make a case why using a decoupled architecture may be considered a best practice approach to building and maintaining government sites going forward.

I will address several of the common concerns, and a few misconceptions, about building and deploying decoupled sites.

- Accessibility
- Development Experience & Tooling
-- Front-end & Back End
-- Docker based workflows
- Hosting & Deployment
- Maintenance & future technical debt
- Team role requirements
- CI, Testing, & Code quality


About Justin: Prior to being a senior developer at Amazee.io focusing on API and systems integration, Justin was a Drupal team manager in NY State developing and maintaining upwards of 50 Drupal projects. Justin has over a decade of Drupal and management experience with a foundation in software and programming.


🎤 Presenter: justinwinter
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/decoupled-cms-architecture-government-best-practice

This session will focus on integrating a custom Drupal sub-theme with the latest version of USWDS. We will cover configuring USWDS settings, Drupal theme settings, and adding custom styling. We will also look at utilizing existing components, and creating custom components. Attendees can expect to learn the basics to integrate the USWDS with the Drupal USWDS Theme.


🎤 Presenter(s): dboeger, brian.seek
🔗 Session Details: https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2020/program/sessions/drupal-uswds-its-time-get-things-started