About this talk
This talk covers the implementation of open-source government websites, with a focus on the experiences of the speaker's organization in the U.S. and notable examples from around the world. The speaker introduces Provis Gov, a design system utilized for building government sites, and discusses the transition from Drupal's layout builder to the new Canvas feature. They highlight the centralized approach of the Australian federal government using Drupal, along with the success of the Local Gov Drupal initiative in the UK aimed at improving local government digital services. The talk also touches on the need for government organizations to balance complex data management with user-friendly online experiences, particularly noting the roles of AI and improved search functionalities. Through various implementations and collaborations, the speaker emphasizes the potential of open-source solutions to enhance government websites.
Full transcript
to open-source government websites. Um, my name is Annie Koharski. from implement source and today we're going to be talking to you about the various implementations of government websites around the world and uh we are going to talk a little bit about our perspective in the US and what we have created with uh provisg and if we have time we'll uh share a little bit of uh uh
the applications that we're working on and building um we are going to mention two words that you've probably heard for that's canvas and AI. Uh so that's it. So uh the flight flight pl flight flight plan for us is we'll tell you who we are. We really want to know who you are. Uh so we can adjust our presentation a little bit towards um what you're interested
in. Uh we'll tell you why we started this journey. Uh and then we'll talk a little about uh some of the things that we're seeing. A lot of them are new and evolving um uh around the world. So we'll take uh a a high level look at what Australia government is doing. Uh they the Australian federal government has centralized around Drupal and is running all of their
websites uh on Drupal. We have a great movement from UK and Ireland called local gov Drupal and we'll talk a little about that approach and what we've learned from them and how they're approaching it and number of sites that they've launched there. Uh then we'll focus on provice gov and and I promise you we're trying not to make it like a product demo. It's just our uh
perspective on what we have heard from working with state and local government agencies uh cities and counties uh in the last 10 to 15 years and that is our provis design system. So we'll talk to you about the journey of uh Figma to um the Drupal theme. Uh then we are now in the midst of a journey from the uh layout builder to canvas and we'll touch
on that a little bit. Uh the demo that we have that we'll try to show has uh layout builder still it's an old technology sorry uh it's soon to be in canvas and and we have some avail uh some things that are uh coming out very shortly are available now and if we have time um and again trying not to make it a product demo we'll talk
a little bit about um what we've uh done and and inside provis and then we'll touch on the future implementations of applications within government and those would be uh forms in the ticketing system uh which we're uh implementing for Scott County, Iowa. And uh I just happen to know half of you in the room and I know that there is a a representatives from Scott County, Iowa
in the room. He I'm not going to point to him, but he's wearing a red hat. Uh and uh and then uh if you're interested, we don't have to do that. This is another product uh for uh it's an AI search uh chatbot uh yes con conceived in 2024 that is being adopted and uh how that helps counties and cities and what we're learning from the commercial
product in that sense and what we're uh seeing in open source space. So thank you for coming uh and of course we hope to make it a collaborative presentation. So, please um ask questions, raise your hand if you want to come closer so we have a a more um intimate conversation that that that's fine too. So, uh as I mentioned, I'm Andy Garski. Thank you. Thank you.
I'm Andy Garski. I'm president founder of Pratsource. Uh I um I used to be a developer, but I read more contracts these days. about Brian. >> Cool. Hi, I'm Brian. Um, jeez, like I could just talk to you. Um, I'm Brian. I'm from I'm here actually as Amazio, but I also have a I'm a partner in a business in the UK called DGXC where we mostly use
Drupal um in in a business context. It's kind of a data storage layer. Um, so we've got products that are focused on the event industry and a few other things. We're now getting into the obviously into the AI space. um where I've been working and chatting with Provis for the Andy for a for a little while is actually looking at what they're going to talk about which
is local Drupal and Provis has a has a particular US perspective local Drupal has got a particular UK perspective and kind of I'm interested in the over like kind of how those two things overlay for each other. So yeah um obviously my the reason I'm here is the hosting side of things. So, um, we've been doing a lot of work together, uh, bringing Amazio's hosting, uh, and
and private AI services to the US market. >> And may I mention the the, uh, distribution agreement for Canada and, >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. >> Touch on that a little bit. >> Yeah. So, um, a little while back, we've been doing, my company's been doing a lot of, um, RFB responses in both Canada and the UK. um and local Drupal works well in the
UK, but it's very um it's it's obviously a lot of people are doing it and I thought provice brings an interesting thing. So I reached out to Andy and said, "Hey, you know, any any anything speaking against us doing some some distribution stuff there. We won't play in the US with your product. Can we play with your product in the UK and Canada?" Um and have a
broad agreement on that. So yeah, so we're starting to do a bit of RP responses and stuff like that with Canada and the UK and a little bit Ireland, but you know, I don't know the Irish uh the Irish drip community that well. I lived in the UK for a little while. >> Cool. Hi everyone, I'm Son Wangle. Uh I oversee the products and security for the
Project Source. So the products that we we'll be talking about provice helpless system. So it has all been initiated inside uh promise source how we designed it how the road map is and all that stuff that's the the technical point of view that I lead and manage our super awesome technical team at source >> here >> thanks so uh I recognize some of you in the room
um can you maybe tell me are you guys working for Drupal agencies hosting companies Okay. Other business. >> Great. Wonderful. Uh so our thesis for uh doing this and I think a lot of um I I believe most Drupal agencies are going to move that way. Um or a lot uh a lot of obviously not all of the business but a lot of the business is going
to go uh product based. That's my perspective on what is happening with AI. Um and we've seen this prior to really explosion of AI and and what we have seen is um government organizations have complex data models. They have complex needs. They have uh they do have standard set of information they put out but they have they serve a lot of different uh levels of constituencies. They
have a lot of services that they offer and they have a lot of information about the services they provide. They obviously have um rules and regulations and ways and and and and deep processes on how certain things that must be done. Uh a lot of form processing um they uh they need to maintain control uh not only about brand but content. So, uh, AI generated content doesn't
generally fly that well unless it's for, uh, like event marketing. Um, and the organizational, uh, website or the presentation, uh, goes beyond, um, just the website as I've mentioned. Um, and we thought that open source provides a lot of value uh, in that space. There is a lot of uh, uh, features that are usable. there's a lot of features that are built for government. Um, and we
think that Drupal can satisfy a lot of those things. Um, in the space that we see there is open source. So there is uh WordPress and Drupal. Drupal plays very strongly in the government uh space that there are a number of competitors not um in terms of the CMS space. So there's Granicus and there's Civic Plus. They have a very strong presence and they have a very
uh big suite of products around different needs that government uh needs and there's a lot of integration that is required for what we call the flagship or main website for those different products whether it's GIS uh systems or um agenda management um and and other things but uh we believe that Drupal has the ability to to integrate with those systems. It has a great content model as
I mentioned and uh and it's it's had a really nice drag and drop system. It was lagging a little bit behind uh some of the commercial and maybe other open source CMSs, but now at Canvas uh it's really accelerated. Um and we think it it it we obviously have a perspective that it's the best um solution for that space and that's confirmed by the number of governments
around the world that are adopting that and uh part of presentation here is that if you are in government um or have you considering it uh you know reach uh take a look around there's a lot of stuff happening in in in the United States and there's also a lot of stuff that we can learn from from other smart people that are implementing similar solving similar problems
around So, uh we mentioned that we're going to take a look at three different um solutions for this. Uh the first one is from Australia that's by Morph. Um and um unfortunately for us, we haven't had a chance to dive under the hood as much as we'd like to. Uh they did just release this convivo for of uh implementation on the template marketplace. So you can download
it um and give it a try right now on the marketplace. Um the uh I'm going to take a look briefly at the demo version of So um the the implementation of this um you you can so are you guys ever familiar with the market the template marketplace? Yep. Okay. So you can get it from marketplace. Um they I I just take a look at the components.
I think the uh SDC's um are pretty uh useful to take a look at. So they've um implemented a number of uh components and of course these components as you download this implementation um you can pull them in and implement it in any of your um systems and uh Australia by uh order from the Australian government has uh centralized all their implementations around Drupal right Brian? Yeah,
they so so GCMS is an interesting is an interesting thing. Um the department of finance quite a few years ago now. There was actually an iteration before Amazio. Um they they had a bunch of websites obviously finance department um and they decided instead of just sorting their own department out they would come up with a what they call an all of government solution um in Australia. Obviously
with 40 50 million people it's it's a little bit easier to do than country the size of the US. Um so that they came up with centralized approach. So basically gov CMS um is a is a department of financed driven initiative that any department uh local or local state and federal in Australia can re can reach out to the department department of finance and say hey we
want a website and then from that point you can choose one or one or the other. So you can go there what they call their pass solution which is kind of sorry their SAS solution which is kind of click and point and it's got a government uh approved theme layer and it's it's really you get a login you build your site or you can go to pass
route which is more custom where something like what like would run where you get a you get a git repository you ask them to stand it up with standards in it and then you can you can really deploy um to anything and Amazio runs that uh runs that that that hosting infrastructure along with a bunch of really smart uh agencies in Australia. Morph being one of them,
Selsa Digital. I'm sure a lot of people have heard of Salsa. They're doing some cool stuff as well. Um so yeah, this this came out of Morph's uh side of things. So they can they can run this on top of uh pre-approved Australian government uh hosting infrastructure. Um so again, you can uh take a look at it at at the uh Drupal marketplace and get a feel
for it. uh give it a try and they've given um all those SDC's um out there and and their perspective on implementing Drupal and and you we're certainly looking at that now and and we're trying to learn from it and um bring it back to our customers and and all the uh government agencies so that it's an easier um implementation and more power for less uh buck.
Um next is local gov. Brian uh you're pretty familiar with this. You want to take this one? >> Yeah. Um so the these points the versus points is kind of comparing local go Drupal's approach with with progress um and comes out of some of my research and things that we were I'm trying to you know position the two products. I think the first thing to say about
local Drupal is um in in the UK it's important to sort of understand the history of digital digital stuff in I'm just looking about this here 2011 the government decided to go in a in a somewhat new direction. They decided revolution, not evolution, which maybe sounds a little counterintuitive because normally evolution is a good way for things to to emerge. They they decided we're going to go
digital first. We're going to do a proper thinking around the digital experience of citizens. Um and so out of that emerged what they call the UK government digital services. Interestingly on the ground there there's kind of mixed feelings for people about whether they like the experience or not. Um tends to be two camps. Personally, I find it quite cool that any government site that you go to,
as I said, I run a business in the UK, you know, you're on a government site. You feel you feel that the the you know where to click. You know where the what the menu kind of know what to expect. The spacing feels familiar. The fonts feel familiar. The you know, the the logo placement feels familiar. And that's across a really wide range of services. You know,
everything from their HMRC, which is their revenue commission, kind of like your IRS, um through to, you know, through to the healthare system. all of these things they have a familiar feeling. So keeping that in mind um local Drupal is sort of a grandchild of that actually. Um a bunch of Drupal developers were building out websites for local governments, local councils, um local communities in general and
and we're realizing kind of what you you know same story as provice. We're doing the same thing over and over and over again. And so like if we've got this governmentdriven design system, shouldn't we be trying to bring that into the more local local development experience? And they've been pretty successful actually. Um I think in a you know in in a country the size of the the
UK where there is a lot of government coordination I think it's easier. Um I think getting you know 50 states to talk to each other and agree is probably never going to happen. And so provis makes a lot of sense for for for the US environment for the UK. Um I think they they've done a great job. So just jumping around here. So a couple different things.
Um the the community basically built something and realized there was value in it and approached the approached a bunch of councils. It was two councils to start with, but it's gotten much bigger now. um and basically said, "Hey, let's pull our resources." Like, we're doing a bunch of design and and and user research. Let's actually do this across the two counties instead of one. And they're quite
close to each other, so you know, they're kind of overlapping. So, that made a lot of sense. And they kind of proved the model there and got more and more and more councils interested in like actually we want to be part of this. So, they eventually formed a a public benefit company, I think, is what you might call it here. Um it's called the open digital uh
cooperative and this ODC is basically a councilled um not for-p profofit organization that the councils actually pull financial resources in that in in that entity and that entity will do different initiatives. So they have, you know, public uh public board meetings and decisions on what they're going to spend time, money, and energy and effort on. And the agreement is no matter which agencies, no matter which agencies,
as in digital agencies or developers are working on things, it all goes into a common kind of a common pool. So a little bit like the Drupal.org, it's got a very like Drupal Drupal feeling to it. Um, and so if you look into the way that they approach their design systems and their design philosophy, it's really like you can really feel the the the government design feeling
inside all of it. Um, so I think you've got a couple of um you got a couple of >> I'm not mistaken. >> Yeah, I do. >> Got an example there. Right. >> So if you Yeah. So if you start with Yeah, that one. Uh, sorry, that one. So Cumberland's a beautiful part of the world. if you ever get a chance to travel there. If you haven't,
go check it out. I have no shares in the in Cumberland Tourism Department, but it's stunning. If you look at that services menu, like just yeah, just kind of keep that in your in your mind for a second. So, this is a local county website. Now, if you jump to the HMRC website and you hit the menu button there, that's just a very high level example. You
can see there's a consistency in the way that that navigation works and that's really across almost every UK government thing. So what local government Drupal is trying to do is bring that same consistent feeling to the local citizen experience which is extremely you know kind of grassroots. Um yeah and these are a list of all the sites. So they're doing an they're really doing an incredible job.
They've got I think what is it 63 67 >> 72. Oh it's not okay. I think there's probably an inconsistency there because I think it's a 60. Um I mean they are the the the the one thing when I spoke to the the one of the project leads he was saying the thing that drove them to do this was every 3 to 5 years 390 odd counties
in the in the UK are redesigning their websites and it makes no sense for all of them to be spending £100,000 or $50,000 I guess independently. It makes absolutely no sense and I think so I think they've done a really good job. Yeah. So I'll give you the give you the mic back. um and to talk about provice as you know kind of a diff different approach
to the same the same problem I guess. >> Yeah, thanks Brian. Do we want to pause and questions on on this? Um yeah, so kind of the the typical um uh drive as to why we did this uh saw a lot of very similar um requirements. the need to improve digital services um do more with less um the budgets you know vary quite a bit and uh
one interesting thing that we've learned uh working in this space for many years is that uh a lot of the proprietary system um vendors will take a look at the size of the city or the size of the county um and if there aren't specific um requirements in their RFP that their systems doesn't match they'll they'll uh price it bas based on the size. Um the the
the need for um the search is actually one of the big things that comes out and we'll talk touch on that a little bit later because there's so many uh different services as I mentioned. So, we analyzed over 100 RFPs and took took a look at um what the highest rated painoint and request were and the two that came up was navigation and search. Um so, a
lot of services, a lot of uh um a lot of content out there. Um and as we were looking at this uh we saw just like in local councils maybe not as organized as um we have you know we have big diversity and sizes and geographic u areas and points of view and philosophies but uh in terms of presenting the information uh there are patterns that started
emerging right so there's different things uh components now uh that websites needed and you know that was obviously uh really brought home by Elementor. Um but uh we also saw the same need and um so as we're implementing um different cities and different counties, we kept on seeing that there is a uh there is a pattern of uh needs and they over overlapped. So yes, not every
city is the same, not every county is the same. there are different philosophies of what we need to put forth and they're addressing the needs of the local community in a little bit different ways but there is um a lot of overlap and there's a lot of uh similar design patterns that we have seen that's where we started creating these components that when we put in front
and we started customizing them we found uh that we're able to meet and compete with the commercial vendors that have more customers at that price point and they're able to deliver really powerful uh experience uh for them and and we also feel very strongly that there needs to be at least two van diagrams in every presentation. Um so thank you for that. So the idea is flexible
content model fits industry needs usable components. Um, Jupo is great at content modeling, so we're able to really explore that um quite a bit as we get into the requirements. And and um Josh, did you already talk about your did your did you do a presentation on >> specifically on translation? >> Okay. Um, so we just happen to know Josh does a very good job at at
uh a specific function within Drupal within a specific area of the website and there's a lot of content modeling there but that there's also a lot of content modeling um in in different sections of the site, different departments, different needs uh Drupal's greater workflows and and this is a little bit outdated because the things that are happening with AI right now are just really um accelerating things
but for government for we need to have a review specific specific you know important functions or important pieces of information that workflow um exists and it's great uh a lot of the complaints that we have seen in the past this has been addressed now um and I'll talk touch a little bit about on that is that we didn't have uh you know a few years ago we
really didn't have a great uh way to build uh landing pages uh we uh the content editors did have a little bit of a fear of working with uh Drupal that problem is solved. First it was solved with uh layout builder and now it's solved with canvas and canvas is really really powerful. It's great. Um and so we obviously came to the conclusion that Drupal can do
both and we started working on creating uh provice and making it a reusable product for governments. And so some of the things that we did obviously uh components that was an idea that we really embraced. And um so the the other uh thing that we did is we tried to take um and I I think you guys as Jupalistas understand this, right? So components can be configured
in many many different ways. And we really took that uh that concept to town and just went ran um ran with it. And so at one point uh we had enough components and they were configurable. They were so configurable that we actually had a very serious conversation within our company and that is where should we design? Should we design in Figma or should we design inside of
a prototype when we present these things to our customers and and what allowed us to do that are two things. We had a master design system in Figma that we've programmed. We spent a lot of time programming a lot of variables that were exportable to the Drupal theme. So we didn't really need uh to spend a lot of time if any in theming because those variables would
were exportable. So um we were able to have um a landing page that had complete different colors uh obviously uh fonts, corners, corner styles, spacing, everything at all controlled within variables. Export that and that Drupal site looks the same as as the design system at Figma. Same thing with uh different components. They they were able to be configured many many different ways. Um and then you know
at that point well should we do it in Drupal or Figma? So, that debate still exists. Um, but the nice thing about what we've done is we're able to take the front-end devs basically um out of most of the time out of the equation, accelerate development process um and to get get the customer to buy in. of course if there um requirements or branding guidelines that um
our design system didn't quite meet that we were able to basically build it in and expand the capabilities of uh Provis. uh, here is actually I Yeah. So, here's an example of what a typical um county would look like. And then our Whoops. And here's so here's like the pro the Figma uh design system that we we then just be able to export different colors and uh
get that running on a Drupal site within like an hour. So out of the box uh the content model is fairly simple uh but at the same time fairly powerful. Um the form the forms are really um very valuable. What we see a lot is the a form center where we are able to direct forms for different departments and they route to uh different um int input
intake um departments or people responsible for that or teams that are responsible for that. Our competitors call commercial competitors call that um the form center. Uh it's really you know Drupal does that better um uh than I of course in my opinion but It's really powerful there. Uh alerts, articles, pages, um events, locations, person, very important uh for the council or for the mayor. Very important to
have that page look very very good. Um uh of course FAQs. So uh and then we add on very easily as needed uh per uh implementation. The Provis component library is growing. uh it started out as a pretty uh simple but complex implementations uh for such um and it continues to grow and there is another evolution in what we're doing. So moving away from layout builder and
to canvas um I'm going just mention two things that the uh what we thought were pretty neat um things. So if I am this is a back end of a of provis. It's you know typical Drupal site. Um so if I go to my back end we have the dashboard module where you can have your uh control center. We pop in analytics. Um so I can see
what's going on. And um a lot of times the during our our product demos what we did is um we would add a landing page. Okay. We'll be nice about your >> Sorry, >> we'll be nice about your type. >> You know, that's how you know that I'm not an AI agent by typos and misspellings. Um and what we do uh is uh when we build these
uh sites and um when we deliver them to customer what we have is you know you typically able to uh import a block or add a block and you know that can be composed you we start off with single direction components but then you can build them together and so you're able to pull in and import a landing page and then we have a library of of
typically used landing pages that are nicely designed to have similar content content uh or or uh the layout that we've pre-built for our customers and there's a a a rich uh library um of those and then you can go in and start u modifying it. Now this is already um almost out of date. We'll see how quickly our customers are going to be moving away from landing
pages to canvas because now our new our implementations implementations now are being built in canvas and we just uh so we we provis gov is like what we call our opinionated government implementation um in Drupal provisg uh we have uh we worked with Drupal association to create the provis edu very similar similar um functionality for um for our implementation was uh for community colleges but we basically
had to take and export all of our components to uh work with canvas and we have the canvas version working so that brings an interesting so you can you can download that and play with that on the uh we think that there's going to be an interesting so so the new implementations are even going to be better. They're going to work smoother and there's going to be
more power as uh Canvas develops and all the tools that you saw in a keynote are going to be implemented there. The challenge here and it's a a bit of a tangent to our presentation is that the migration of the paragraph many landing pages in paragraphs and many page landing pages in um layout builder to canvas if if um organizations choose to do that is going to
be an interesting challenge hopefully um um easily solved. That's something that we're working on right now as well. So we're going to have migration uh scripts to migrate from those landing those landing migrate those layout landing pages into canvas layout pages. so that's a little bit of a demo there. yeah so uh marketplace.drup.org a lot of uh there there's several uh government themes uh available there and
I'm going to stop for questions. We actually covered the things that we wanted to cover. Um we can dive a little bit deeper into some of the things that we're working on further that we see again um often that sometimes make it into the web um website requirements, sometimes don't. um you know maybe Mitch can make give us you know some insight into why they do and
why they don't but we are uh making that as an option so some of the thing some of the things that we're doing working on now is improved search so we have a product for that again not trying to uh uh sell that but I think that's going to be very important right because the the the user journeys are changing very rapidly for higher ed for government
the same thing um you know a lot of Our customers thought that people would go to their homepage and try to look for services. The reality is they use Google to try to find a service they're looking for. And I think that's moving away from Google to well Google Gemini or Perplexity or or Chad GPT to get that information and then at the final step end up
after they figure out what's going on to land at that page. And so we're trying to bring some of the controlled uh search summaries and chat to uh our customers sites. And then some of the other things that we're working on is the the help desk build the help desk within Drupal. And Sono, you might you have a you have a quick demo to show on that.
Any questions before I leave you with that? >> Thanks, Randy. Okay, thanks Andy. So yeah, so this is another product other than AI search which is of course super popular. Um the help desk system, we all have touched help desk system in our lives like whether it's uh writing a contact us form on your local government website or in your workplace like using Jira that's the most
common one. So everybody has touched it. So we have been trying to get the help system work better for you within the tools that you can all right yeah so within the tools that you're already using. So usually for any help desk system you have to go and train your team whoever is handling it you have to train your team to get inside the help desk system
tell them how to reassign the ticket how to update the status how to reply through it and all that stuff. So you have to always go inside the portal of the help desk system and then go through it to update all of the stuff or go through the system. So we are just rethinking the help desk to use the tools that you're already using and just make
sure you stick to it. So it's it's basically the context switching that we are trying to get away from like if you're already on your system working on a website checking your emails everything you're already working on in just to in order to handle your help desk and the tickets you have to again switch to your portal help desk portal log in just do your work there
and come back to your system. So that's the context switching that we're trying to avoid. Um so um if you are again if you're running a Drupal website you have likely looked into something that fits natively into your ecosystem for your help desk as well. Uh the big question here is what exactly we built and why is it different than others. Uh so I'll get straight to
it. So we built a help desk system that lives inside your inbox. So you'll just use your emails for your help desk management. So that's that's the main key area. Uh we haven't seen that before in any of the other help system. So that we want you to target that like stay in your inbox. You know how the inbox works whether it's Outlook, Gmail, whichever you're on.
We just use that email system and get your help desk inside it. So that's what we are targeting here. So how how it works? Here's the journey. They're just the three-step that I'm just going to walk you guys through. The user submits a form on whether it's a local government or on your um uh anywhere you're trying to get the information from. So this is uh basically
we're I'm I'm just going to walk you through our system which is actually live on the Scott County uh website. They were generous enough to help us use this for demo. So um just the user scenario is the end user constituent he goes into the local government website hits the contact us form uh adds all the information which department it needs to submit it to what is
the question and if he has any request like anything um that's bothering him he can just submit the form that's the first step he goes to your website fills out the contact form and that's it that's the only website interaction you will get to once he hits the submit form confirm that entire query lands into your inbox that inbox it gets uh if you are if you
are the county employee so that's that's how I'm just going to use that as a reference so if you are an county employee you will get the question and the entire email into your inbox plus the end user who has actually submitted it it he will also get a receipt in his inbox as well so that's again the email conversation has already started so they gets an
email they just hit reply reply to it and the end user gets a reply on in his inbox. The back end lifting everything that's happening like updating the status or just tracking the ticket status all the conversation logging into the system maintaining the entire thread if it goes back and forth multiple times as well. It is all tracking it's been all tracked within the Drupal system and
all that back uh heavy lifting is already done within the system by our helpless system. So it's just that whenever for your job for whether you are a website admin or an end user it only ends whenever you submit the form the rest everything going back and forth it just happens inside the emails everything tracking to towards uh till the end of the closing the ticket um
so why this matters so think about if you are this if you are the one who's actually maintaining the help system so for your support team, if you're thinking about them, they're already managing their entire stuff throughout emails. You're always in your emails throughout the day. You know exactly what is going on, what is coming out, everything. You're always checking it. So asking them to switch between
the portal for the helpless portal, learn new things, how that dashboard works, how that uh configuration needs to work out. You can just make sure that everything is already inside the email. So there is no context switching at all. So that takes care of it. um on itself. So we we we personally believe that the best tool is the one that people are already using it and
they're used to it. So that's the one that email that we're targeting as our help desk system as everything is within it. Um so that's that's usually uh that's that's a gist of it basically how it works um and why that matters. So we have couple of things those are in pipeline again AI is everywhere. Everybody's adding AI to each and every module and each and every
stuff that they're working on right now. So a couple of things that we are adding um whenever any end user are trying to submit the form before even they try and submit it hit the submit button whenever they type their question we will search through the website and show them the available answers like if that question is already been answered. So we'll search through it and we'll
display that summary and we'll ask them to just look at that and if that is already answered they can just stop right there. Their question is answered they don't need to submit a ticket and that is halfway done. So that's the first thing that we are it's in pipeline uh we are working on. And then the second thing is uh whenever the email is submitted or whenever
the form is submitted and email gets to the uh the admin the website admin they will get an pre-populated message or pre-populated response related to that question that they received. So basically they just have to approve it and see if that's the related that is the actual response that they want to send and they don't have to go back to their website search through it and see
what the answer that I have to provide to the con to the end user to the question that they've answered. So we'll just have the response ready for the end user the website admin to review and then that will be already provided for for the review of uh the department user to send it. Um, that's Yeah. So, let's get to the demo. Any questions here? >> I
like All right. So this is uh this is a system where our ticketing system is live. So I'll fill in some additional information while someone's checking this out. Um yeah so not only the the one the idea is that it goes through the emails we do have a admin center built into where we're reporting on how long these queries are uh open so that a manager can
of the department can take a look and make sure that the constituent uh questions are being answered. There is a nagging function that will go ahead and uh nag the person that's assigned to that ticket to respond. There is a transfer of ownership uh functionality. So it's a full uh functioning uh piece and like I someone mentioned that uh we're basically going to try to insert um
AI pre and post uh question submitt so that uh that will reduce the workload on department um employees that are this that are assigned that particular you know assigned to work the phone or the queue of uh requests. >> Thanks Andy. Yeah. So this is the form active on the contact us form for the local government. So uh we do have the list of departments here which
are again the list of departments are coming from the Drupal taxonomy if you are aware of the overall Drupal structure and we're not using the user and roles because there are multiple departments and we do not want to overload it. So it's this is kind of standalone stays away from the Drupal roles and Drupal users. Um so the taxonomy is used for um adding the departments as
well as associating emails email addresses per department. So this is where you choose it you add >> okay so yeah I'll just go through that. So this is just the web form that you're submitting. I'm just going to go show you how the tickets dashboard looks like. So this is all internally tracked. As soon as a user adds submits the form uh it gets tracked in the
here in the dashboard. The status whether it's closed, it's new, responded, everything is here. Um the details of all the emails are there as well. Just adding in all the tracking system like the status changed, if it's changed, assignment changed, everything will be tracked into the system as well. And what you finally see as an email the uh uh so where's the demo slide? So uh the
good again another thing that was a requirement that the county side did not want it to show any of their email addresses to the end user. So we always make sure that it's the only common email address shows up whether it's going back or forth. So that's been uh respected as well. So email address the data privacy is definitely the foremost concern. So we have handled that.
So everything is inside the Drupal how the dashboard looks and how everything is tracked. So you just have to use emails for back and forth but everything is tracked in system for the auditing purpose as well. >> All right. Thank you. >> Yeah, we're um out of time so thanks for um dropping in and um it's a exciting time uh for these distributions. I think it's going
to help local governments in the United States and all over the world. Uh the things that we're contributing back to the community is we're going to have the basic version of uh specific departmental uh websites that we have uh had requirements for or have built that we're going to uh put on the marketplace template um the template marketplace. It's hard for me not to call them distributions.
Um, and so, uh, we'll be able to, uh, take a look, download, take a play with our components, and, uh, some of these other advanced things are in the works. And, um, yeah, thank you very much for coming and checking us
