Governments around the world are pressing to be more innovative in their use of technology, to be more open to the public, and to do even more with reduced budgets. And as more and more information is being delivered through the Internet, there are increasing calls to have that information be secure, accessible, and readily available.

There is a lot of information to maintain on a Government site. Whether it is internal (intranet) or external (internet), the policies, standards and content can be very difficult to maintain.

In Europe, the United States, New Zealand and Canada government departments and agencies are running high profile sites on Drupal, an open source content management system that offers a highly modular framework for building web applications. Because the source code is freely available and supported by a huge global development community, Drupal is allowing governments to slash development times by eliminating the lengthy RFP process and by rapidly assembling web applications from a vast collection of available modules.

Drupal is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) that can:
- maintain English *and* French content, with workflow;
- fulfill CLF 2.0 compliance with available templates;
- manage workflow, upgrades and extensions;
- be totally administered on the back-end through an advanced admin panel;
- be customised through templates, modules and PHP code;
- provide full statistics and analytics integration.

The presentation on August19th will be an opportunity to learn more about this popular, flexible and scalable CMS; to learn about the accessibility initiatives for Drupal 7; and to see the new Common Look and Feel 2 (CLF 2) theme for Drupal that's now available for federal departments.

You are invited to join colleagues in the Federal Government who are also using Drupal and see their implementations, discuss opportunities for collaboration.