[Osia-members] Australian Gov Drupal

Andrew Boag andrew.boag at catalyst-au.net
Mon Oct 6 15:21:38 EST 2014


My thoughts on this (I was away last week on leave).

Aimee, I hadn't considered things the way you outline them. Some 
interesting points and I hope that any repercussions are minor compared 
to this generally good news for the Drupal community in AU.

Stepping sideways somewhat from these arguments, my hat does come off to 
Previous Next in creating aGov in the first place. From chats with Kim, 
I understand they were doing a lot of govt tenders (pitching Drupal) and 
they realised there was a broad base of functional deliverables that 
were going to be required. And out came aGov.

They wrote it and pushed it out to the community for everyone to use and 
hopefully contribute to. This is what we are supposed to be doing in the 
open source community, right?

On 30/09/14 14:42, aimee at aimeemaree.com wrote:
> Ryan,
>
> I entered comment on it and I understand the below, it does not mean 
> as someone who has ran Government web/infra projects that I think it 
> is a good outcome and I see it falling short in various areas.
>
> Anyways as I stipulated it is more of a look at what we have become, 
> and does it help us innovate... self reflection but the Australian 
> Government needs so much of that at the moment... ;)
>
>
> On 2014-09-29 23:37, Ryan Cross wrote:
>> Its probably worth noting that
>>
>> 1) this doesn’t prevent government agencies to use other cms’s.
>> (it does make it much easier to use/choose Drupal though)
>>
>> 2) aGov is not the only distribution available on the new platform.
>> You should be able to use plain-ole’ Drupal if you’d like
>>
>> 3) The agreement is with Acquia, not PreviousNext and it only covers
>> the support & delivery of the hosted platform. It doesn’t lock them
>> into any single provider for design/development/etc. I would imagine
>> that in the same vein as using alternative CMS’s, alternative drupal
>> hosting could also be used but it might be a harder argument to make.
>>
>> For further reading & reference, you might want to see some of the
>> initial public feedback on this
>> http://www.finance.gov.au/blog/2014/05/07/seeking-industry-comment-on-govcms-draft-statement-of-requirements/ 
>>
>> [3]
>>
>> Ryan Cross
>> ryan at crossfunctional.net
>> http://crossfunctional.net [4]
>> O: (02) 800 800 99
>>
>> On 30 September 2014 14:11, Bob Birchall <bob at calyx.net.au> wrote:
>>
>>> The key to understanding this seems to be the last sentence on this
>>> page: http://agov.com.au/about [1]
>>>
>>> My impression is that this is a commercial provider getting into a
>>> specific market with a product based on an open source project.
>>> Others are free to get out there with competing offers. Ensuring
>>> software is readily upgradable and there is no vendor lock-in might
>>> be attributes of a competing product someone may design.
>>>
>>> In the end, the ultimate test is customer satisfaction.
>>>
>>> Bob Birchall
>>> _CALYX_
>>>
>>> On 30/09/14 13:07, Aimee Maree wrote:
>>>
>>> It concerns me to think that the government would standardise on a
>>> distribution of Drupal... as a CMS aficionado it concerns me that
>>> one solution would be chosen and other open source CMS which might
>>> be a lot better then other matches are not looked into. Also the
>>> concern is updates because it is a proprietary flavour of Drupal it
>>> means upgrades like Drupal8 etc will be dependent upon previous next
>>> getting the distro and custom modules upgraded etc... We fought for
>>> years to get Open Source as an acceptable choice and looked at in
>>> tenders and now it seems this objective has gone too far the other
>>> way aka removing choice and selection again.
>>>
>>> On 30 Sep 2014, at 1:02 pm, Daniel J Jitnah
>>> <djitnah at greenwareit.com.au> wrote:
>>>
>>> Might be of interest to many who have not seen it before!
>>>
>>> http://agov.com.au/about [1]
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>> Daniel.
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Osia-members mailing list
>>> Osia-members at osia.com.au
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>>>
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>>
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>>
>>
>>
>> Links:
>> ------
>> [1] http://agov.com.au/about
>> [2] http://www.osia.com.au/mailman/listinfo/osia-members
>> [3]
>> http://www.finance.gov.au/blog/2014/05/07/seeking-industry-comment-on-govcms-draft-statement-of-requirements/ 
>>
>> [4] http://crossfunctional.net
>>
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