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Mar 12 2020
Mar 12

Category 1: Web development

Government organizations want to modernize and build web applications that make it easier for constituents to access services and information. Vendors in this category might work on improving the functionality of search.mass.gov, creating benefits calculators using React, adding new React components to the Commonwealth’s design system, making changes to existing static sites, or building interactive data stories.

Category 2: Drupal

Mass.gov, the official website of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a Drupal 8 site that links hundreds of thousands of weekly visitors to key information, services, and other transactional applications. You’ll develop modules to enhance and stabilize the site; build out major new features; and iterate on content types so that content authors can more easily create innovative, constituent-centered services.

Category 3: Data architecture and engineering

State organizations need access to large amounts of data that’s been prepared and cleaned for decision-makers and analysts. You’ll take in data from web APIs and government organizations, move and transform it to meet agency requirements using technology such as Airflow and SQL, and store and manage it in PostgreSQL databases. Your work will be integral in helping agencies access and use data in their decision making.

Category 4: Data analytics

Increasingly, Commonwealth agencies are using data to inform their decisions and processes. You’ll analyze data with languages such as Python and R, visualize it for stakeholders in business intelligence tools like Tableau, and present your findings in reports for both technical and non-technical audiences. You’ll also contribute to the state’s use of web analytics to improve online applications and develop new performance metrics.

Category 5: Design, research, and content strategy

Government services can be complex, but we have a vision for making access to those services as easy as possible. Bidders for this category may work with partner agencies to envision improvements to digital services using journey mapping, user research, and design prototyping; reshape complex information architecture; help transform technical language into clear-public facing content, and translate constituent feedback into new and improved website and service designs.

Category 6: Operations

You’ll monitor the system health for our existing digital tools to maintain uptime and minimize time-to-recovery. Your DevOps work will also create automated tests and alerts so that technical interventions can happen before issues disrupt constituents and agencies. You’ll also provide expert site reliability engineering advice for keeping sites maintainable and building new infrastructure. Examples of applications you’ll work on include Mass.gov, search.mass.gov, our analytics dashboarding platform, and our logging tool.

Apr 04 2019
Apr 04
Julia GutierrezMassachusetts Digital ServicePublished in

4 min read

Apr 4, 2019

DrupalCon2019 is heading to Seattle this year and there’s no shortage of exciting sessions and great networking events on this year’s schedule. We can’t wait to hear from some of the experts out in the Drupalverse next week, and we wanted to share with you a few of the sessions we’re most excited about.

Adam is looking forward to:

Government Summit on Monday, April 8th

“I’m looking forward to hearing what other digital offices are doing to improve constituents’ interactions with government so that we can bring some of their insights to the work our agencies are doing. I’m also excited to present on some of the civic tech projects we have been doing at MassGovDigital so that we can get feedback and new ideas from our peers.”

Bryan is looking forward to:

1. Introduction to Decoupled Drupal with Gatsby and React

Time: Wednesday, April 10th from 1:45 pm to 2:15 pm

Room: 6B | Level 6

“We’re using Gatsby and React today on to power Search.mass.gov and the state’s budget website, and Drupal for Mass.gov. Can’t wait to learn about Decoupled Drupal with Gatsby. I wonder if this could be the right recipe to help us make the leap!”

2. Why Will JSON API go into Core?

Time: Wednesday, April 10th from 2:30 pm to 3:00 pm

Room: 612 | Level 6

“Making data available in machine-readable formats via web services is critical to open data and to publish-once / single-source-of-truth editorial workflows. I’m grateful to Wim Leers and Mateu Aguilo Bosch for their important thought leadership and contributions in this space, and eager to learn how Mass.gov can best maximize our use of JSON API moving forward.”

I (Julia) am looking forward to:

1. Personalizing the Teach for America applicant journey

Time: Wednesday, April 10th from 1:00 pm to 1:30 pm

Room: 607 | Level 6

“I am really interested in learning from Teach for America on how they implemented personalization and integrated across applications to bring applicants a consistent look, feel, and experience when applying for a Teach for America position. We have created Mayflower, Massachusetts government’s design system, and we want to learn what a single sign-on for different government services might look like and how we might use personalization to improve the experience constituents have when interacting with Massachusetts government digitally. ”

2. Devsigners and Unicorns

Time: Wednesday, April 10th from 4:00 pm to 4:30 pm

Room: 612 | Level 6

“I’m hoping to hear if Chris Strahl has any ‘best-practices’ and ways for project managers to leverage the unique multi-skill abilities that Devsigners and unicorns possess while continuing to encourage a balanced workload for their team. This balancing act could lead towards better development and design products for Massachusetts constituents and I’d love to make that happen with his advice!”

Melissa is looking forward to:

1. DevOps: Why, How, and What

Time: Wednesday, April 10th from 1:45 pm to 2:15 pm

Room: 602–604 | Level 6

“Rob Bayliss and Kelly Albrecht will use a survey they released as well as some other important approaches to elaborate on why DevOps is so crucial to technological strategy. I took the survey back in November of 2018, and I want to see what those results from the survey. This presentation will help me identify if any changes should be made in our process to better serve constituents from these results.”

2. Advanced Automated Visual Testing

Time: Thursday, April 11th from 2:30 pm to 3:00 pm

Room: 608 | Level 6

“In this session Shweta Sharma will speak to what visual testings tools are currently out there and a comparison of the tools. I am excited to gain more insight into the automated visual testing in faster and quicker releases so we can identify any gotchas and improve our releases for Mass.gov users.

P.S. Watch a presentation I gave at this year’s NerdSummit in Boston, and stay tuned for a blog post on some automation tools we used at MassGovDigital coming out soon!”

We hope to see old friends and make new ones at DrupalCon2019, so be sure to say hi to Bryan, Adam, Melissa, Lisa, Moshe, or me when you see us. We will be at booth 321 (across from the VIP lounge) on Thursday giving interviews and chatting about technology in Massachusetts, we hope you’ll stop by!

Interested in a career in civic tech? Find job openings at Digital Services.
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Oct 10 2018
Oct 10

Authors are eager to learn, and a content-focused community is forming. But there’s still work to do.

Julia GutierrezMassachusetts Digital ServicePublished in

6 min read

Oct 10, 2018
Video showing highlights of speakers, presenters, and attendees interacting at ConCon 2018.

When you spend most of your time focused on how to serve constituents on digital channels, it can be good to simply get some face time with peers. It’s an interesting paradox of the work we do alongside our partners at organizations across the state. Getting in a room and discussing content strategy is always productive.

That was one of the main reasons behind organizing the first ever Massachusetts Content Conference (ConCon). More than 100 attendees from 35 organizations came together for a day of learning and networking at District Hall in Boston. There were 15 sessions on everything from how to use Mayflower — the Commonwealth’s design system — to what it takes to create an awesome service.

Graphic showing more than 100 attendees from 50 organizations attended 15 sessions from 14 presenters at ConCon 2018.

ConCon is and will always be about our authors, and we’re encouraged by the feedback we’ve received from them so far. Of the attendees who responded to a survey, 93% said they learned about new tools or techniques to help them create better content. More so, 96% said they would return to the next ConCon. The average grade attendees gave to the first ever ConCon on a scale of 1 to 10 — with 1 being the worst and 10 the best — was 8.3.

Our authors were engaged and ready to share their experiences, which made for an educational environment, for their peers as well as our own team at Digital Services. In fact, it was an eye opening experience, and we took a lot away from the event. Here are some of our team’s reflections on what they learned about our authors and our content needs moving forward.

“The way we show feedback and scores per page is great but it doesn’t help authors prioritize their efforts to get the biggest gain for their constituents. We’re working hard to increase visibility of this data in Drupal.”

— Joe Galluccio

Katie Rahhal, Content Strategist
“I learned we’re moving in the right direction with our analysis and Mass.gov feedback tools. In the breakout sessions, I heard over and over that our content authors really like the ones we have and they want more. More ways to review their feedback, more tools to improve their content quality, and they’re open to learning new ways to improve their content.”

Christine Bath, Designer
“It was so interesting and helpful to see how our authors use and respond to user feedback on Mass.gov. It gives us a lot of ideas for how we can make it easier to get user feedback to our authors in more actionable ways. We want to make it easy to share constituent feedback within agencies to power changes on Mass.gov.”

Embedded tweet from @MassGovDigital highlighting a lesson on good design practices from ConCon 2018.

Joe Galluccio, Product Manager
“I learned how important it is for our authors to get performance data integrated into the Drupal authoring experience. The way we show feedback and scores per page is great but it doesn’t help authors prioritize their efforts to get the biggest gain for their constituents. We’re working hard to increase visibility of this data in Drupal.”

Bryan Hirsch, Deputy Chief Digital Officer
“Having Dana Chisnell, co-founder of the Center for Civic Design, present her work on mapping and improving the journey of American voters was the perfect lesson at the perfect time. The page-level analytics dashboards are a good foundation we want to build on. In the next year, we’re going to research, test, and build Mass.gov journey analytics dashboards. We’re also spending this year working with partner organizations on mapping end-to-end user journeys for different services. Dana’s experience on how to map a journey, identify challenges, and then improve the process was relevant to everyone in the room. It was eye-opening, enlightening, and exciting. There are a lot of opportunities to improve the lives of our constituents.”

Want to know how we created our page-level data dashboards? Read Custom dashboards: Surfacing data where Mass.gov authors need it

Embedded tweet from @epubpupil highlighting her positive thoughts on Dana Chisnell’s keynote presentation on mapping and improving the journey of American voters.

“It’s great to see there’s a Mayflower community forming among stakeholders in different roles across state government. ”

— Minghua Sun

Sienna Svob, Developer and Data Analyst
“We need to work harder to build a Mayflower community that will support the diversity of print, web, and applications across the Commonwealth. Agencies are willing and excited to use Mayflower and we need to harness this and involve them more to make it a better product.”

Minghua Sun, Mayflower Product Owner
“I’m super excited to see that so many of the content authors came to the Mayflower breakout session. They were not only interested in using the Mayflower Design System to create a single face of government but also raised constructive questions and were willing to collaborate on making it better! After the conference we followed up with more information and invited them to the Mayflower public Slack channel. It’s great to see there’s a Mayflower community forming among stakeholders in different roles across state government. ”

Sam Mathius, Digital Communications Strategist
“It was great to see how many of our authors rely on digital newsletters to connect with constituents, which came up during a breakout session on the topic. Most of them feel like they need some help integrating them into their overall content strategy, and they were particularly excited about using tools and software to help them collect better data. In fact, attendees from some organizations mentioned how they’ve used newsletter data to uncover seasonal trends that help them inform the rest of their content strategy. I think that use case got the analytics gears turning for a lot of folks, which is exciting.”

“I’d like to see us create more opportunities for authors to get together in informal sessions. They’re such a diverse group, but they share a desire to get it right.”

— Fiona Molloy

Shannon Desmond, Content Strategist
“I learned that the Mass.gov authors are energetic about the new content types that have been implemented over the past 8 months and are even more eager to learn about the new enhancements to the content management system (CMS) that continue to roll out. Furthermore, as a lifelong Massachusetts resident and a dedicated member of the Mass.gov team, it was enlightening to see how passionate the authors are about translating government language and regulations for constituents in a way that can be easily and quickly understood by the constituents of the State.”

Fiona Molloy, Content Strategist
“Talking to people who came to ConCon and sitting in on various sessions, it really struck me how eager our content authors are to learn — whether from us here at Digital Services or from each other. I’d like to see us create more opportunities for authors to get together in informal sessions. They’re such a diverse group, but they share a desire to get it right and that’s really encouraging as we work together to build a better Mass.gov.”

Embedded tweet from @MassGovDigital highlighting a session from ConCon 2018 in which content authors offered tips for using authoring tools on Mass.gov.

Adam Cogbill, Content Strategist
“I was reminded that one of the biggest challenges that government content authors face is communicating lots of complex information. We need to make sure we understand our audience’s relationships to our content, both through data about their online behavior and through user testing.”

Greg Derosiers, Content Strategist
“I learned we need to do a better job of offering help and support. There were a number of authors in attendance that didn’t know about readily-available resources that we had assumed people just weren’t interested in. We need to re-evaluate how we’re marketing these services and make sure everyone knows what’s available.”

Embedded tweet from @MassGovDigital highlighting the start of ConCon 2018.

Thinking about hosting your own content conference? Reach out to us! We’d love to share lessons and collaborate with others in the civic tech community.

About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web