Drupal GovCon is almost here, and we couldn’t be more excited! This awesome conference brings together people from all over the country who use, develop, design, and support the Drupal platform with a focus in government. We’ll be there November 1st and November 2nd and can’t wait to see you there! We’d also like to invite you to our insightful speaker sessions. Check them out here!

Forum One Speaker Sessions

Crafting a Culture of Inclusiveness: Prioritizing Accessibility in Your Organization
Time: Wednesday, November 1st, 11:15 am to 12:00 pm
Speaker(s): Dan Mouyard, Technical Architect

You’ve learned the importance of accessibility and are ready to implement best practices at your organization, but you’re only one person. This talk hopes to answer the following questions:

• How do you make headway on achieving your goals without burning yourself out?
• How do you get buy-in from upper management to make accessibility a priority?
• What tools, resources, and processes are available to help educate others in your organization about accessibility?
• How can you integrate accessibility into all practices at your organization?
• What are the different ways to organize accessibility leadership within your organization?

How to Tackle Content Migration with Ease
Time: Wednesday, November 1st, 1:15 pm to 2:00 pm
Speaker(s): Jeanette Stair, Government Services Project Director, and Heather Burke, Project Director

Of the many tasks you will tackle in the course of launching a new website, one of the most important ones is content migration: the process of populating your new website with the content that is going to tell your story. Once the website is built—the scaffolding, structure, and design—your content is what brings it to life.

As you start adding up all the pages and posts and images and assets on your website, all of a sudden it may no longer seem so simple a task.

In this session, we’ll discuss the following:

• Guiding principles and tips to help you feel empowered and organized as you head into this pivotal process.
• Building your content team: who needs to be involved, how decisions are made
• The biggest challenges you’re likely to face and may not yet have considered

Participants will walk away with tangible next steps and feel confident about what questions to ask and how to plan for a future content migration.

Maintaining Your Site’s Accessibility Well After Launch
Time: Wednesday, November 1st, 2:15 pm to 3:00 pm
Speaker(s): Jeanette Stair, Government Services Project Director

You’ve just rebuilt your site and made sure your functionality and content are accessible and 508-compliant. Now that you’re shifting to day-to-day operations, how do you make sure you maintain that level of accessibility as you make content and development updates? And, how can you make the site even better for your audiences once user data starts to roll in?

In this session, we’ll identify:

• The most common challenges for content contributors
• How to maintain an effective accessibility governance plan that doesn’t just sit there
• Strategies for monitoring and regular audits that really work
• Long-term considerations that you can plan for today

Be ready to ask questions and share your challenges and successes.

Design Sprints: Designing, Prototyping, and Testing the New IRA Incentive Hub in 5 Days
Time: Wednesday, November 1st, 3:15 pm to 4:00 pm
Speaker(s): Beth Watson, Strategy Lead

Energy Star (https://www.energystar.gov/) is well-positioned to help American households capitalize on IRA tax credits and rebates for energy-efficient upgrades. Since its website receives significant traffic (approx. 30,000 hits/day), it was important to the Energy Star digital products team to take a design-thinking approach with the zip-code based Incentive Hub.

Using the Google Venture Labs (http://www.gv.com/sprint/) sprint process—which is most commonly used in the private sector, but less so in government— a cross-functional team conducted a 5-day (remote) Design Sprint to coalesce information, ideate solutions, make decisions, and prototype designs and content for user testing.

Join this session to learn:

• How the team implemented the Google Venture Labs approach to a government platform
• What worked, what didn’t and how the high-fidelity prototype fared with usability testing
• When to utilize a Design Sprint and other intensive collaboration techniques

Participants will walk away from the session with a good understanding of what a design sprint is and what is needed to conduct one, as well as tangible insights and inspiration from a real-life example.

Putting CX at the Center of a DMV Website Redesign
Time: Thursday, November 2nd, 2:15 pm to 3:00 pm
Speaker(s): Kerry Greer, Solutions Architect and Bridget Veerhoff, Program Director

With ever-evolving customer experience (CX) expectations, the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) stands out as a significant point of interaction for a large portion of the population. As the Commonwealth of Virginia looked to redesign their DMV website, a focus on a strong CX is what ultimately spelled success. They also chose Drupal 9 to bring these user experience and design concepts to life.

In this session, we’ll discuss:

• Taking CX feedback to heart when doing a redesign
• Developing extensive customer-centric designs that champion mobile and accessibility
• Building technical content models and paragraph styles that bring designs to life in an easy-to-maintain content management system
• Ensuring that your website continues to prioritizes CX through development and once launched through prioritization, data analytics, and optimization

Participants will walk away from this sessions with tangible CX insights to apply to their own government websites, as well as the building blocks to approach a similar redesign.