Jeff Walpole is a featured speaker in the Nonprofit, Government & Education track this year at DrupalCon Denver. Sessions in this track are focused on ways to best leverage Drupal to achieve greater community impact. Sessions featured in the Nonprofit line-up will cover fundraising, community building, organizing and data management and the numerous ways Drupal is being used to achieve success in these areas. Read more about the session tracks at DrupalCon Denver

Please share a little about yourself and your background.

I am the CEO of Phase2 Technology, which is headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia just outside Washington, DC. I am originally from Boston, went to college in New Orleans at Tulane University, and got my MBA in Washington, DC, where I have remained for most of my professional life. Before co-founding Phase2 in 2001, I worked for a web application development company during the "dot com" heydays of the late '90s and before that at a large systems integration firm. I actually just turned 40 in October and my birthday coincided with the 10 year anniversary of Phase2. I was recently reflecting that I have literally spent 1/4 of my life running this company and Drupal has been a very big part of that the last 5 years. I am now serving on the Board of the Drupal Association.

How did you first get started with Drupal? [And when / what version of Drupal]

At Phase2, we've always used/supported open source, but initially we did all custom development work - mostly around Java. Around 2003, we started experimenting with open source CMSs and we tried a great many of options before we found Drupal. When we found Drupal, our developers discovered a CMS framework that worked for our needs and our desire to develop/customize around it. We have been doing Drupal work since early 2006 (version 4.7), and have been fully dedicated to Drupal as our CMS of choice since about 2007.

You are a Featured Speaker at DrupalCon Denver to talk about using Drupal as a collaboration tool for Nonprofit and Public Sectors. What makes Drupal good for this purpose?

We’ve always done a lot of work in the nonprofit sector, and we’re now doing about 40% of our work with government. We’ve seen Drupal grow and change to accommodate the needs in these sectors beautifully. It is a natural fit for the public sector because it provides exactly the right tools for transparency and collaboration, without compromising performance or flexibility. There is a major movement underway in government to cast off old proprietary technology and bad user experiences in favor of a more collaborative online dialogue with citizens. Drupal has proven to be really great at combining things like collaborative user experiences, data integration, accessibility, performance, and security in a way that’s the right fit for those goals.

Phase2 maintains the OpenPublic distribution, which is described as an open-source content management system based on Drupal and tailored to the needs of Government. How is OpenPublic different from core Drupal?

We debuted OpenPublic on Drupal 7 at DrupalCon Chicago, developed originally from work we had done for various government projects including the White House and House of Representatives. Like OpenPublish, it uses Drupal 7 core and expands upon core Drupal with modules, Features, views, themes and other packaged components.

The goal was to provide a version of Drupal that was perfectly suited to the needs and use cases we saw in our government work. Mainly that includes special needs for accessibility, security, workflow, languages and usability. Rather than repeating hundreds of hours of build time for each project, we packaged our experiences with meeting those needs into OpenPublic. It gives us the framework for creating highly secure and extensible platforms for public sector sites.  

The work is ongoing and is being supported by several high profile public sector site builds as well as community contribution time from our team and others. This year, we’ve added an accessibility expert to our team, which has helped in our ability to prepare and test OpenPublic for Federal accessibility guidelines (Section 508). Currently, we are working on ensuring the distribution meets stringent Federal government security standards and guidelines to support compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). These aspects of the distribution definitely go far beyond what Drupal core is able to provide and assure for sites for the public sector.

Who is using OpenPublic?

We’re watching Drupal become the gold standard for the public sector, not only at the federal level with recently launched sites like Energy.gov, FCC.gov and Ready.gov (FEMA), but also with major state initiatives, as we’ve seen with the State of Georgia’s move from Vignette to OpenPublic which is a 65 site, state wide conversion. We have seen OpenPublic at use for cities, states, foreign government sites and NGO’s alike.

What’s really exciting for us is that it is being used not just by Phase2. We've seen many members of the community build amazing sites for their clients with OpenPublic, including FirmStep, the Case Foundation, NGP Van, and Blen Corp. We have started a gallery on the OpenPublic website, OpenPublicapp.com to show many of these off. 

Phase2 also maintains the OpenPublish Drupal distribution for online publishers. What unique features does it offer?

OpenPublish is now almost 3 years old. It debuted for DrupalCon DC in 2009. It was designed originally on Drupal 6 as a very full featured distribution for online publishers. However, we have recently re-tooled and rebuilt the distribution on Drupal 7 to be a lighter and more flexible tool for a variety of media needs. Specifically it focuses on ingesting and managing content, media handling, workflow, content curation, content layout and monetization.

One of the early and most notable features of OpenPublish we have retained is integration with the OpenCalais module that provides semantic auto-tagging of content through the Calais API. This allows OpenPublish sites to receive enhanced meta-tagging of content including entity recognition, geo-coding and access to linked data. We also provided RDFa in Drupal 6 before it was available as part of Drupal 7 core. We feel that improved tagging and support for semantic standards are a key differentiator for publishers competing for content placement on the web.

With online news, publishing to multiple devices is now essential, not only for readership, but also for monetization. That was key to our strategy in re-building the distribution, and we looked to Jake Strawn and Development Geeks, who helped us incorporate the Omega base theme for OpenPublish, so that OpenPublish sites can now handle responsive design, out of the box. Additionally, we now focus a lot on monetization, advertising and content curation for OpenPublish, which have unique value to publishers. And then, knowing that online news spans everything from local newspapers to multi-site conglomerates, we re-built OpenPublish with the Apps module integrated, so that different news sites can turn on whichever functionality they need, depending on their needs. That helps us keep the distribution itself really light, and still gives developers a powerful framework for whatever newsroom or workflow they are building for.

Who is using OpenPublish?

It's across the board in the media and publishing sector. OpenPublish was one of the very first distributions to be widely marketed to and used by organizations outside the Drupal community so it has a very diverse user base that spans its Drupal 6 and now Drupal 7 versions. Phase2 has led implementations for Al Jazeera, The Associated Press, PBS NewsHour, Thomson Reuters, The Washington Examiner, The Nation, The New Republic, BassMaster.com and TakePart.com. 

It's been about 8 months since Phase 2 acquired the Open Atrium and Managing News distributions from Development Seed. What are your plans for these platforms?

We have had the privilege of working with Development Seed on several projects over the years and we rely heavily upon the components they innovated for complex Drupal sites such as Features, Context, Spaces and Boxes. We see the products they created with Open Atrium and Managing News as being truly unique in that they are full featured products ready to download/use as well as extend. That creates real opportunities to introduce Drupal to new audiences, but it also requires work to support stand-alone products. 2011 was about getting a better understanding of how people were actually using the products, learning what people need and want, and developing a community of contributors. Our releases have focused on changes that ensured greater security and stability and fixing issues in the underlying modules and the distribution itself.

In 2012, we’re excited to focus on greater usability for Open Atrium as a premiere open source project management tool. That said, we know that not everyone uses Atrium for project management – it’s also used for intranets, web portals, and other collaboration tools. That’s the very reason that Development Seed built Features – to make functionality easier to export and share. To realize that vision fully, we’re also focusing in 2012 on making Features easier to find, share, customize and use. The Atrium community has built an incredibly powerful product here, and our main goal is to help the community continue to make it better.

Our experience with Managing News goes back further than 2011, as it shares common roots with our Tattler distribution. The challenge with Managing News and Tattler is scaling – they’re both powered by Feeds, which has limitations in how much content it can ingest and process. We’re currently focused on the solution for that limitation, which may include options outside of Drupal. Fixing how feeds are processed is first, second, and third on our priority list – making changes to the rest of these distributions isn’t useful until we solve this key limitation. We anticipate the potential for combining the functionality of Tattler and Managing News – the topic monitoring in Tattler is quite complimentary to the feed monitoring capability in Managing News. But we’ll wait to decide that for sure until we fix the feeds problem.

Can you talk a little about your Open App Standard Initiative, especially in regards to its impacts on the nonprofit and public sectors?

The point of apps is to put a “wrapper” of usability around existing Drupal functionality. Apps takes existing Drupal modules, and adds configuration and bundles it as a simple one-click install, update functionality and clean un-install. We built it because we wanted to keep the distributions lightweight and performant – allowing site builders to pick and choose their functionality, installing and using what they need, and keeping out what they don’t. That is why we created it, but an app is really for the end user, typically a non-technical user of a Drupal site such as the site administrator, or sometimes a less-technical site builder.

After we had released the apps module on Drupal.org, it soon became obvious that people were interested in some sort of an appstore model that would do all of this for many different scenarios including the purchasing of additional functionality through a commerce model. However, we did not want to subvert the open source module system of Drupal. We built apps to work with Drupal modules, not outside of them. But upon building the Apps module, many companies and community members started discussing the challenges around it. “Is there a way for apps to be interoperable between distributions?” and “how do we make sure that apps serve, rather than undermine, contributions in the Drupal community?” These were top questions in people’s minds. People liked the idea of “pluggable functionality” that comes with apps, but they’re concerned for the potential repercussions in the community of introducing a new type of “project” in Drupal.

We decided the best way to address all of this was to involve the community in its direction so we could achieve a standard that would answer everyone’s questions and give us all a way to build apps that is both good for our distributions and healthy for the Drupal community.

So far, we’ve gathered the community members who were using apps and involved in the discussions, including SubHub, Level Ten, Linnovate, and Acquia, and co-authored a standard that we think addresses the needs out there. We published the standard to Groups.Drupal.org to get community feedback, and it is currently undergoing review and feedback here. The result has been mixed so far but this is truly a community-collaborated module now. Several teams are getting together in January for a sprint on the Apps and Appserver module, and the standard continues to grow in community involvement.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

This is a time of incredible growth for the Drupal community, and I think one of the most amazing things I've witnessed over the past year is how across the board, long-time contributors to the Drupal community have continued to step up to the plate and move us all forward. Also, Drupal is gaining favor with a very diverse base of larger organizations – which is where we feel the real growth occurs. With a microeconomic business climate that has incredible labor shortages for Drupal talent and ever-increasing client opportunities despite the general economic conditions, it's awesome to see both Drupal adoption and the community grow at such a pace. We are proud to be a part of it.