Over
the past year, APQC's internal Web technology team has been designing our
next-generation Web presence. I say "presence" because our site is the primary outward-facing
point of contact to our members, and many have come to equate access to our
online Knowledge Base with APQC membership. Based on comprehensive feedback
from our members and customers, we evaluated everything from well-known portal
and content management system (CMS) vendors to this week's "Web 2.0 tool du
jour," ultimately selecting Drupal as the platform best suited to our needs.
For
those unfamiliar with Drupal, it's often categorized as an open source CMS,
although the term "CMS" doesn't do it justice in terms of functionality. Drupal
has a large and rapidly expanding install base, ranging from small, independent
sites to large enterprises such as www.whitehouse.gov and www.fastcompany.com.
From a knowledge management perspective, the most fascinating aspect of Drupal
is the collaborative way in which the platform's programming community handles
innovation. In return for access to more than 5000 contributed modules
centrally organized at www.drupal.org, developers are on the honor system to
contribute any generic modules they write that they feel will benefit the
community as a whole. The community then offers feedback, bug reports, and
feature patches.
In
our interactions with the Drupal developer community, we've observed the
following defining characteristics:
- Purpose--The Drupal community is
singularly focused on improving its core and contributed modules. Because the
community is so large and active, it boasts an impressive array of mature,
tested modules. See a new fancy feature on the site you were just browsing?
Check out the Drupal module list, and chances are that someone's already
contributed a module for that.
- Communication--The developers use cutting-edge
technology to promote effective communication. Most exchanges are focused on
improving code, but there's also "fun stuff" that helps build a sense of
community, including a Drupal song!
- Transparency--Need to know the current state of a bug fix? No problem. Need to know how many fixes need to be made before Drupal 7 is officially released? You can easily look it up, and you can also subscribe to Drupal founder Dries Buytaert's Twitter feed for news and info. To take it one step further, the Drupal security team prides itself on transparently reporting and fixing security issues as they arise.
The open source concept fits well with APQC's nonprofit status and mission to disseminate knowledge. By choosing an open source solution for our next-generation Web site, we hope to further improve the channels through which we collaborate and share with our members.
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APQC IT Director Kelly Bedrich and APQC Executive Director Ron
Webb
will be among the breakout session speakers at APQC's 2010 knowledge management
conference, Driving Business Performance: The New Face of Collaboration. You can learn more about the conference by clicking here.
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