BADCamp 2018: Give Your Elected Representative a Piece of Your Mind. Plus, Free Drupal Sessions!

This October, come to our Bay Area Drupal Camp (BADCamp) booth to give your elected representative a piece of your mind. We won’t be holding members of congress captive at the Kalamuna booth (or will we?) but we’ll have plenty of other excitements there to keep you curious. And of course, BADCamp is a celebration of open-source software, so we’ll be giving plenty of Drupal talks. Read on to find out about those and our exciting booth happening.

BADCamp is a time for great Drupal talks, high-fiving friends, and enjoying a few drinks together. We’ll all have Drupal on our minds, but we’ll have the rest of the world on our minds, too. Which is partly why our agency was founded: while we love technology and design, we’ve always regarded it within the context of that “rest of the world.” This is why we help mission-driven organizations. It is also why, at last year’s BADCamp, we nodded to that rest of the world by asking camp attendees what nonprofits they supported and donated our swag budget to those orgs.

@ponies holds up a square of our BADCamp 2017 booth wall noting his donation to PASH.

This year, we want to focus our efforts on three organizations that exemplify what we believe in as a company. To that end, we’re using our BADCamp booth not only to let attendees divert our swag budget to one of three staff-chosen organizations, but also to enable BADCampers to write postcards to their representatives about our three causes.

The three causes we’re focusing on this year are:

1. reproductive health and education
2. civil rights and
3. digital freedom and privacy.

Kalamuna has been concerned with these issues since our beginning six years ago, but it was our current staff that identified these issues to focus on for BADCamp.

So, when you come to our booth, this is what we’d like you to do:

1. Come say hi
2. Decide to address one of three issues our staff is concerned with:
   
   1. reproductive health and education
   2. civil rights or
   3. digital freedom and privacy
3. Find your elected representative from our list, write to them on a free, pre-stamped postcard
4. Pin your postcard to our booth wall for all to see
5. We’ll send $5 of our swag budget to the nonprofit representing the issue you addressed

Our Beneficiary Organizations

We chose to give our swag budget to the three organizations below. We selected these groups by surveying our staff to ask them which nonprofits were their favorites. While we identified about 15 favorite organizations, these are the ones that came up most often:

Planned Parenthood: Reproductive health and education

Planned Parenthood is a trusted health care provider, an informed educator, a passionate advocate, and a global partner helping similar organizations around the world. Planned Parenthood delivers vital reproductive health care, sex education, and information to millions of people worldwide.

The American Civil Liberties Union: Civil rights

For nearly 100 years, the ACLU has been our nation’s guardian of liberty, working in courts, legislatures, and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and the laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country. Whether it’s achieving full equality for LGBT people, establishing new privacy protections for our digital age of widespread government surveillance, ending mass incarceration, or preserving the right to vote or the right to have an abortion, the ACLU takes up the toughest civil liberties cases and issues to defend all people from government abuse and overreach.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation: Digital freedom and privacy

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. EFF works to ensure that rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as our use of technology grows.

We hope you’ll come hang out with us, write a postcard, and help us support the causes that matter to us, and hopefully, to you.

Also, Learn Drupal from Us at BADCamp

We’re excited to be offering six sessions this year. Some of our speakers are Kalamuna-BADCamp vets, and some are new to our agency. We’re excited about the breadth of topics we’ll be addressing. Check out what we’ve got going on:

EMBRACE THE UNKNOWN WITH A UX TOOLKIT

Crispin Bailey, Director of Design & UX

Have you ever had a project go exactly according to plan, without any hiccups or gotchas? More often than not, once a project gets going and the fuzzy warm glow from the kickoff meeting has faded, the reality of project unknowns and assumptions reveals a potentially frightening path ahead - or worse yet, there may be so many unknowns that it seems like there is no clear path ahead. Don’t worry, take a deep breath. This session will go over the many ways in which a project that seems to be in jeopardy can be tamed, and reveal the tools and techniques you can employ to forge ahead with confidence - even if you don’t know exactly where you’re headed.

In this session we’ll cover:

1. Building up your UX Toolkit to tackle any problems that might arise
2. Handling wily stakeholders like an experienced lion-tamer
3. Building up confidence to sail across the Seas of Doubt
4. And other tips and tricks to help you find your way through the Cone of Uncertainty

October 26,  10:15 AM-11:00 AM, Stephens Lounge
 

HOT DOG/NOT HOT DOG: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WITH DRUPAL

Rob Loach, Director of Technology

In a world where everyone has the ability to post anything online, it becomes critical for site owners wanting to maintain their brand reputation to curate what is published. How can content editors keep up with reviews when there's a steady stream of content submissions? Enter the robots.

Google Cloud Vision API provides image labelling, face, logo, and explicit content detection through Machine Learning. This takes the burden off of your content curators, frees them from their role as authoritarian gatekeepers, and allows you to focus on the business value and strategic goals.

In this session, you'll learn how to:

• Get set up with Google Cloud Vision API
• Configure Google Cloud Vision API with Drupal through the Drupal module
• Automatically add metadata to uploaded media
• Enable explicit content detection on image fields

October 27, 10:15 AM-11:00 AM in Pauley East
 

SOLUTIONS FOR COMPLEXITY: INTER-AGENCY COLLABORATION IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT

Andrew Mallis, CEO, Kalamuna with Michael Enslow, Director of Delivery, Exygy

Are you a stakeholder? Do you work for an agency as a designer, engineer, or product manager? Are you a citizen wondering how your government’s website can serve you better?

Exygy & Kalamuna are focused on solving health and civic challenges for communities around the globe. We believe resilient communities are ones that thrive when they have strong social systems and resources to support families and individuals in their day-to-day lives.

In order to make these types of services more efficient and accessible, three design agencies partnered to work with a complex team of government agency stakeholders spanning 3 departments to help 16 programs from 9 locations serve over 250,000 people. Our goal was to migrate from a deprecated system to Drupal. This took roughly 5,000 human hours over 14 months!

The San Francisco Human Services Agency (HSA) is a lifeline for 23% of San Franciscans, serving over quarter million unique persons seeking food assistance, health care, elder care, job training, daycare, and other essential social services. With more than 30,000 monthly unique visits to sfhsa.org, the strategy had to accommodate multilingual users, be accessible on all devices, and accomodate the technical ability of content authors using the CMS. To provide a Drupal solution for this diverse community, we employed a design practice deeply rooted in user and stakeholder empathy.

The new sfhsa.org  launched in late 2017, as an ambitious new Drupal website designed and engineered by Exygy and Kalamuna. We’ll walk you through this project and share with you our successes and failures along the way. We’ll draw from our extensive experience in the civic and education tech sectors, grounded in our mission-driven work ethic. Once we’re done, you will…

• Learn how to confidently negotiate a joint bidding process with a partner agency
• Learn our technique for navigating a complex stakeholder map
• Understand how to align methodologies between partners and stakeholders
• Manage change requests with confidence
• Understand the benefits of leveraging reusable web components for building your CMS using the/Lego concept and pattern libraries

October 26, 4:45 PM-5:30 PM in Tilden

PROTECT THIS DRUPAL HOUSE: HOW TO RUN AND RESPOND TO A SECURITY AUDIT

Alice Freda, Support Manager

If you work on Drupal sites that include forms, varied user profiles, paywalls, eCommerce features, integrations or API codes stored in the database, you’re particularly concerned with security—and could benefit from a security audit. But what is it and how do you run one? And what do you do once you’ve performed your security audit? Whether you’re building a site and want to adhere to Drupal security best practices or are working with an already-existing site and need to secure it, this session is for you.

You’ll get a security checklist as well as some tried-and-tested ways to respond to your findings. Some topics we’ll cover:

• Core and contrib module updates: Why they’re important and how to keep on top of them
• Making the most out of tools that come bundled into Drupal: eg. how to respond to notices on the Site Status report page
• Drupal configurations: User management, permissions, password management
• Modules that can help protect your site as well as flag existing issues
• Ways to restrict Administrative access and access to other configuration information
• Beyond Drupal: Securing at the server level

October 26, 2:30 PM-3:15 PM, in Toll
 

USING MACHINE LEARNING TO AUGMENT YOUR CONTENT

Angelo Porretta, Senior Architect

This session is about giving a practical example of how the CMS and Drupal community can put machine learning into practice by using a Drupal module, the taxonomy system, and Google's Natural Language Processing API. We will begin with an overview of what natural language processing is and some natural language processing concepts, including:

• Sentiment analysis
• Entity analysis
• Topic segmentation
• Language identification

Several different natural language processing API alternatives will be compared and contrasted to help the audience choose for themselves what would be best for their needs. These alternatives include:

We will then explore practical use cases through analyzing and automatically categorizing news articles using Drupal's taxonomy system and combining those categories with sentiment in order to make a recommendation system for a hypothetical news audience.

October 27, 1:30 PM-2:15 PM, Toll