The Georgia.gov Content Strategy Team

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Mike and Matt talk with the team that helped implement content strategy on Georgia.gov.

Episode Guests

Greg Dunlap

Greg is the former Director of Strategy at Lullabot.

More about Greg

Marissa Epstein

Senior User Experience Strategist at Lullabot. Marissa loves design research, organization, psychology tidbits, and snooty food.

More about Marissa

Jeff Eaton

Jeff Eaton is a former Senior Digital Strategist for Lullabot.

More about Jeff

Transcript

Matt Kleve:: Hey, everybody. It's the Lullabot podcast Episode 230. I'm Matt Kleve, Senior Developer at Lullabot with co-host to the show, Senior Front-end Dev, Mike Herchel.
Mike Herchel:: Hello.
Matt Kleve:: Hi, Mike.
Mike Herchel:: How's it going?
Matt Kleve:: Georgia's on my mind.
Mike Herchel:: Yes, it is.
Matt Kleve:: Yeah. You know what else on my mind?
Mike Herchel:: Content strategy.
Matt Kleve:: Dude, just like you read it or something.
Mike Herchel:: I know.
Matt Kleve:: Maybe you read the document that we're working off of or something.
Mike Herchel:: Yeah.
Matt Kleve:: Yeah. Georgia.gov content strategy with lots of content and government and interesting requirements and Lullabot, right?
Mike Herchel:: Yeah. We're going pretty deep this episode.
Matt Kleve:: Lullabot is a strategy, design, development company, been in the Drupal space for, I don't know, quite a long time and one of our clients recently was the state of Georgia.
Mike Herchel:: Yeah, and as part of that, we did content strategy for them. What that means? We're going to ask our guests.
Matt Kleve:: Yeah. It's one of those words that means something to somebody but doesn't mean the same thing to everybody I don't think so-
Mike Herchel:: When I think of content strategy I think of our first guest who is a senior digital strategist aka [inaudible 00:01:25]. He is a writer, speaker, and content strategy IA, CMS topics. He often translates between design, editorial, development, and marketing teams. He brings nearly two decades of web development experience to his role as digital strategist at Lullabot and has designed and implemented large-scale web platforms for clients such as Sony, BMG Music, Fast Company, Harvard, WWE, Verizon, MSNBC, and more, and to top that off, he has created the Drupal execute function and has accepted that he going to hell for that.
Mike Herchel:: Welcome, Jeff Eaton.
Jeff Eaton:: Hello. Yeah. That bio was like copied right off of like my LinkedIn I believe so, hi.
Matt Kleve:: Does Drupal execute still exist in Drupal 8?
Jeff Eaton:: Oh, man. I don't know. I've just walk [inaudible 00:02:15]
Greg Dunlap:: It does not. It's gone. Well, it changed to Drupal form submit in Drupal 7.
Matt Kleve:: It just have a better name?
Greg Dunlap:: Yeah, but I don't know if it's still there in Drupal 8.
Jeff Eaton:: I mean, pretty sure that function was created during the Bush administration so I think I should get some sort of a pass.
Matt Kleve:: Which Bush?
Jeff Eaton:: Okay. [inaudible 00:02:39] in the early 90s.
Matt Kleve:: Okay. All right. Awesome. Hey, also with us, we heard his voice. Senior digital strategist at Lullabot, he's been at Lullabot for about 6 years, has nearly 12 years on Drupal.org. He was the Drupal 8 configuration management initiative lead. He is an internationally ranked pinball player with history of coding for pinball machines as well. He ended 2018 39 miles away from achieving gold status on Alaska Airlines because he's been traveling everywhere to clients and meeting with them and talking content strategy, hey, it's Greg Dunlap.
Greg Dunlap:: Hey, what's happening?
Matt Kleve:: You're here talking content strategy.
Greg Dunlap:: You're right I am.
Mike Herchel:: Next up, we have a senior user experience researcher, four years at Lullabot with clients such as the Grammys, Harvard, and Pantheon, a writer and speaker on design and also an amateur game and toy designer, internationally acclaimed designer of the Kraft macaroni and cheese box, the cheesy explosion. Welcome, Marissa Epstein.
Marissa Epstein:: Thank you so much, Mike. I appreciate being very [inaudible 00:03:50] my cheesy accomplishments.
Matt Kleve:: Is that true?
Marissa Epstein:: That is true. If you go into your local Kroger [inaudible 00:04:00] what have you, there are three flavors of beautifully sculpted exploded cheese boxes for you to see.
Matt Kleve:: All right then.
Marissa Epstein:: Well, mom, wouldn't be proud of that.
Male:: I was going to say I guess that's how bacon gets made but how macaroni gets made.
Matt Kleve:: I think the phrase is that's how the sausage gets made.
Male:: Really? I always thought of it as bacon but-
Matt Kleve:: Which is also good with macaroni and cheese.
Marissa Epstein:: Totally.
Matt Kleve:: I'm not sure there's any sausage on their website but there is a lot of different things going on when we're talking about the state of Georgia, so when we go to Georgia.gov there's one website but I understand there are many websites [inaudible 00:04:40]. Just kind of take us through the project from an upper-level. What did we do with them?
Greg Dunlap:: We were initially approached for this project by the state of Georgia and they asked us to go through their RFP project process, which we did, and when we were selected, we went to talk to them and they told us about their setup, which is they currently have, they're a state government so they have a lot of different state agencies that they have sites for and each one of these is currently an individual Drupal 7 installation based on an install profile that they created in-house as part of their last migration because they were previously on Drupal 6, and then, moved to Drupal 7, so they were looking to move all of these sites to Drupal 8.
Greg Dunlap:: They were probably looking to keep them as individual sites where there … I should clarify. They're individual sites but they're sitting in a multi-site installation, so they're individual websites but they're not necessarily individual installations.
Mike Herchel:: How many sites are we talking about?
Greg Dunlap:: There are about 120 state agencies of which 85 are on this platform [crosstalk 00:05:52]. They were looking to move all of these agencies into the new world of Drupal 8. They were interested in being really very forward-thinking about their migration strategy to Drupal 8 and their build up their new platform. One of the things that really appealed to us about this project is that the team at, over at Georgia their digital services team is very focused on being citizen-centric and on focusing on aspects such as accessibility on being mobile-friendly about readability and about making it easy for citizens to find the things that they need.
Greg Dunlap:: One of the things that was going to help them able to do that was going to be making it easier for data, for sites to share data between each other and to make it easier for the individual agencies to create content that would be accessible and readable and findable by users. We went into this with the plan to create a content model and a set of workflows and an editorial process that would allow them to do that and to come up with a plan for how these agencies will be able to share content between each other and out to the rest of the world because the other things that they're talking about is making this information available, for instance, to their call centers, so that their call centers have more up-to-date information and being able to track how that information being available to call centers, for instance.
Greg Dunlap:: Reduces the number of support calls that they get and all of this kind of stuff, so they're really thinking big picture and they're a really good group of people to work with.
Matt Kleve:: Tell me about the contents. I guess the content modeling side of things. When you start with a 100 and however many websites or 80 some on Drupal, they're all different, aren't they?
Greg Dunlap:: Yes.
Matt Kleve:: [inaudible 00:07:54]? Okay. It's not a one-size-fits-all install profile, I'm not sure I've ever seen such a thing. Somebody needs something different, and so, they get something different so I'm sure it's a huge content audit to start. Like is that kind of the kickoff point? What do you have, figured that out?
Greg Dunlap:: Yeah. That absolutely was true and one of the first things we did even before we actually finished signing the contracts was we started investigating how we would inventory all of the content on these sites because it was on a scale that we had never really approached before, being typically, we get a Drupal site and our main starting point would be, "Well, let's dump the menu table because that'll give us a inventory of all the URLs and URL patterns that are available for the site."
Greg Dunlap:: We have 85 sites, even just doing that would involve a lot of work to not only just get them all but then to put them together in a way that was meaningful and it would require us getting access to their sites, which often doesn't happen particularly quickly at the beginning of a project as I'm sure we're all aware, so one of the things we decided to do was figure out a way to spider all of the sites and we did that and we got a lot of information out of that very, very quickly, which was really helpful.
Greg Dunlap:: For instance, one of the things that we discovered, which shouldn't have been a shock going in, but was a shock to me was that they actually have more PDF documents on their websites than they do HTML pages order of like 40,000 PDFs to 35,000 HTML pages across all those sites.
Matt Kleve:: Is that because there's a preference from a usability perspective, maybe PDFs are better or what's-
Jeff Eaton:: It's because sin exists in the world.
Matt Kleve:: What you're saying is that the body field exists? Explain.
Jeff Eaton:: For better or worse like the problem of like tons and tons of stuff just existing in PDF form and being put on the web, it's very common especially in government agencies where PDF was the default fallback for many, many years because they were all, like so much of what they, of a government's interaction with people, was forms and paperwork that had always existed in form that could be like handed out and filled out and returned, then taking that to PDFs was like an obvious easy next step, and as the web got better and better ways of doing that, started becoming more doable.
Jeff Eaton:: There's tons of government agencies that just have decades and decades of stuff sitting there that it works in, it works okay. It's a PDF file, they can be downloaded and printed out but like, "Couldn't we do this a better way?" Is a question that you can ask very easily when you've got two or three or four you know pieces of information in PDF form but when you got, say, 20 or 30 or 40 or 50,000 of them it's not the sort of thing that you can really tackle without there being like a really significant strategic like platform-wide, step back and look at the problem, which dovetails into the work that Greg was talking about.
Jeff Eaton:: Stepping back and saying, "How is this stuff being used? What are the patterns here? What's the low-hanging fruit of stuff that we could do differently or better?"
Greg Dunlap:: Yeah, and to be clear, a lot of that is repeatable stuff. For instance, and not insignificant amount of that of those PDFs was, the minutes of regularly scheduled meetings going back for several years and those and it seems like a simple thing but if you take those like say you've got an agency that has 2 or 3 different monthly meetings and you take all of those meeting notes and you go them back 5 or 6 years, and then, multiply that times the 85 agencies and now you've got a significant pile of PDF documents and they're really only in PDF because they had to create notes and the meeting notes were created electronically probably in Word, and then, they had to share them so they just made a PDF because it's not what they know how to do.
Greg Dunlap:: Then, that PDF once they have it, it just gets uploaded to the website because it's the easiest and it's what they know how to do. The process by which this happens is pretty straightforward but being aware of it and what they are and what better options there are available to, not just for the editorial side but for the end-user is figuring out all of that was a big part of what we are trying to do up front.
Matt Kleve:: An early lesson from a content strategy perspective that you took was, "Hey, we need a good way to handle documents and media."
Greg Dunlap:: Yes.
Jeff Eaton:: Because there were a whole mess of them. Figuring out what stuff should stay documents, what stuff should, what stuff needs to stick around, what stuff is legally mandated, what stuff is useful, what stuff is part of the natural flow of a particular agency's work and what they do versus some additional thing that they just have to create because of the way the system was designed in a previous iteration. Figuring out that stuff was helpful.
Jeff Eaton:: I think a lot of the really large scale migrations we've done in the past were for publishing and entertainment organizations that every single piece of content they produce is essentially supposed to be a money-making product to a certain extent. It's either something that people pay for access to or something directly promoting something that people pay for access to, there's very little demand unless something is like actually bad and you want to take it down because it's doing something, because it's hurting you, there's very little demand to call things.
Jeff Eaton:: But it's interesting because the problem that Georgia faced was, it is very different. They're not like trying to sell the state of Georgia to anyone, this is all stuff that's out there to like serve the residents of Georgia and help them get information from the government or interact with the government or whatever and figuring out good ways to assess the stuff that they already had on those criteria and figure out what purpose it's serving.
Jeff Eaton:: Is it needed? Is it not needed? Rather than just planning like a lift and the dump migration of everything that existed. I think that was one of the challenging things because there's a lot of good that, there's a lot you can accomplish with that approach but like Greg was saying at the scale of something like this it's very daunting and you can't do it for every single document but you can at least start building the rules and patterns to follow as individuals go through and check that stuff out.
Jeff Eaton:: It was definitely interesting. I think that's, it's one of the things that we talked about a lot on the project is that this was actually a lot more, a lot closer to building like a technical support website than a marketing website. I think it was really rewarding in that sense because there's, we tend to move around in a couple of different industry verticals with the work that we do are all about and this is one that I think is sometimes less glamorous but super, super meaty from like a content perspective.
Marissa Epstein:: That needs that we saw here we're definitely very interesting. I found this a very unique project, as Eaton is saying because of that. For example, some of the research we did was learning about the most important tasks that citizens for using the site for, so we learned about SNAP benefits and talking about the documents, that those were application forms that really had to be a PDF based on center level of detail and they were changing all the time but you could share from someone that some little error or small bug in the editors uploading experience could ripple out to tens of people that weren't able to get food stamps or baby child support or some of these much larger impact problems that we got to begin to, so it was very interesting to see how these smaller implementation details could really affect a lot of people's lives in a pretty meaningful way.
Jeff Eaton:: Yeah. We were working with the design team that was working in the visual design work for the project. It was definitely interesting because they interviewed like different residents of the state of Georgia to figure out interaction questions about how they use the website, use the various websites and stuff like that and where the questions was like, "So, what does it look like if you fail at a task when you're using the website? What's your next step?" Somebody said to them, "Well, I guess I'd starve to death."
Matt Kleve:: Oh, wow.
Jeff Eaton:: Yeah. Like the stakes can be a lot higher-
Matt Kleve:: That wasn't tongue on cheek, was it? That was-
Jeff Eaton:: Yeah. No. He was deadly serious. It's like, "Oh, well, if this didn't happen or if it was delayed by a week or two, we getting these forms put together, well, for a month I wouldn't have food." It was like that was really sobering in thinking about like we're used to a lot of user experience or content messaging and making something easier to read and move through a site or whatever being about like getting somebody to some piece of information they want, not necessarily thinking about it it's like, "Oh, there's people's survival could be on the line and those are the stakes, not just like making the Google analytics numbers go up."
Matt Kleve:: Yeah.
Mike Herchel:: How do you evaluate a form? Say you have a standard PDF form on one of the 80-something websites and you want to say, "This is form needed." Can I leave the PDF or do I need to make it into some type of online web form? What goes into that process?
Jeff Eaton:: I mean, so because of the time frame that we were looking at and the scale that we were looking at, we didn't really have a chance to like tackle every single one of those individually, but we did work with the Georgia team to figure out like what wasn't good guidelines would be for each of their agencies to begin evaluating that stuff, because the cut, a lot of those kinds of questions aren't just purely like user experience and readability questions, they require a pretty deep understanding of like what the specific issues of, what the specific needs of that government program are or what is the actual scenario in which my user comes in and reads and fills out this form.
Jeff Eaton:: What we did is we went and worked with them through a couple of examples of different processes, different kinds of government programs that are high-priority and went through more of a process, talking through the subject matter experts at a particular agency, figured out what the hitches are, went through what the different paths to all the information are, and then, came up with some proposed ways to improve some of those examples, and then, moving into more of the content modeling and planning and user experience, research stuff, figuring out like what are the tools that would make this easier that could then be used in other, for other programs and other services throughout the different mix of agencies.
Jeff Eaton:: It was like we were doing this inventorying and auditing, and then, also figuring out what a good set of tools would be to simplify and streamline the systems so that they could do this stuff better with a little less overhead, and then, have a little more free bandwidth for everybody inside of each of the agencies to focus on doing what they know the best.
Mike Herchel:: Moving away from documents, so there's something websites right now, is that looking to be consolidated into one or a couple of websites or is that going to grow to encompass like the other departments that are not yet on Drupal or how is that working?
Marissa Epstein:: The latter is the goal. One of the original project goals that we talked about was retaining all the departments and agencies that are currently using Drupal, so it's based on their own organizational structures, the way that they're set up, there are sites within sites for all the different organizations, so it can't be really simplified to websites but more sharing a single platform. We definitely wanted to create something that had a couple extra features and were more usable than what the previous platform offered, which was why a lot of the other sites were not on Drupal, some of them had a Drupal site, and then, left and wanted to use another CMS to better serve their particular needs, so tried to accommodate as many of those sorts of things as we could, while also creating something that worked for most, with a core class of flexibility as well.
Jeff Eaton:: If anyone from an agency in the state of Georgia is listening, no, we promise we are not attempting to consolidate your websites.
Matt Kleve:: Yeah. That's actually, honestly, a sensitive topic too because everyone has their own needs but the Department of Agriculture is not the Attorney General's Office, it's not the Department of Human Services. They all kind of have their own desires and needs for their website, so leading with that-
Jeff Eaton:: But at the same time, there's definitely a benefit to the citizens of Georgia for some amount of consistency in messaging and presentation and knowing that we are, and there is a lot of cross-agency, there's a lot of stuff that crosses agencies like when you get a driver's license, you may need to get a copy of your birth certificate, which means going to another agency or we talked a lot about getting married or getting divorced, stuff that crosses agencies-
Marissa Epstein:: [inaudible 00:22:31]
Jeff Eaton:: Right. Exactly, and so, there is a lot of stuff that crosses these agency lines with some level of consistency across the agencies and finding if the balance there is really important.
Mike Herchel:: Is it up to each one of these agencies to determine their own content types, et cetera?
Jeff Eaton:: No.
Matt Kleve:: How does that work then because we've just said everything's different but it needs to be the same? How many content types do you end up with if you already, if you're starting with dozens of websites that are all kind of different?
Jeff Eaton:: I mean-
Marissa Epstein:: [inaudible 00:23:01]
Jeff Eaton:: Yeah. Part of that was looking at what's already there and that's where the auditing process that Greg talked about was critical because we were looking at what patterns of usage were there. How are different types of stuff being handled on the say environmental protection website versus the Department of Justice, Georgia Department of Justice website? Those kinds of things some of them we could look for patterns that were common across all sites and then we could identify what stuff is really a unique need that can't be made universal very easily.
Jeff Eaton:: The good news is that a lot of content types were definitely shared and that's something that we found a lot. A phrase I think I use way too much is that like human and chimpanzee DNA is something like 97% the same but it's that 3% that really, really does make a big difference, so like a lot of the content types that were there across all of these different agencies could be the same but we had to take care to make sure that like there were specific points of flexibility in them that would allow them to do the different kinds of jobs the different agencies had, and then, there will probably I think a final count when we finish up our side of things and it transition to a little bit more development.
Jeff Eaton:: I think there were maybe half a dozen to a dozen different content types still in the mix that were just agency-specific basically, things that would only really be used by one or two agencies and would be hidden for the other ones, so there's still those edge cases and special cases that are there but the idea was to, hopefully, have like 90% of the content on any given agency site be those universal shared content types that there wouldn't have to be lots of customization for.
Marissa Epstein:: Just to clarify something that you said there, we did have the ability to simplify it a little bit and as part of that solution so here, we have a much larger set of content types but if you don't need a recipe content type, we can find that for a majority of agencies or allow you to [inaudible 00:25:27] that you're more often to use or even more granularly, this might open up a can of worms but you can get into permissions as far as what users can and can't use to really simplify what each agencies options are, to what they actually need.
Jeff Eaton:: One of the funny things that we found was that, and this is where I think Marissa might have some interesting stuff to say too because we spent a lot of time not just on what the content types were but on what they were named, how they were explained, and how we presented them to the people who would be doing like the creating and editing and managing day in and day out because we found that like even if there's a great concept that you have in terms of like how a Drupal site works or CMS and publishing system works, and it's not using the language or the terminology or the framing that the members of a particular, the staff of a particular agency is used to, it doesn't get used and they just start making pages.
Mike Herchel:: Boy, that was, it's almost like that's an important part of work. Marissa, how [crosstalk 00:26:36]
Marissa Epstein:: Yeah. First, I just want to echo that was so mind-blowing for me. We did a lot of different research on this project and one of the first was just discussing with editors how they use the site and why and we found that there were a lot of content types that they were actually asking for. "I wish I could do this. I wish I had that." It was there but they didn't see it or they didn't know how to use it or for some reason weren't using them, and so, in these discussions we found that there was one site page type that was always getting used because they knew, editors had familiarity with that and didn't even know what the other things were.
Marissa Epstein:: They might look right past the title that's exactly the right page but just had no idea, so-
Matt Kleve:: If you have a handler-
Marissa Epstein:: Exactly. Not everything is a [inaudible 00:27:29] so it was, that was something that made me a little nuts at first to say, "But you can." But, of course, that wasn't the problem to solve with one person it was how can we make this concept accessible for everybody.
Marissa Epstein:: Let's see. We started with, I'm very glossy with going through the content types we had and finding the groups that we could consolidate because part of it was that there just were so many that it got very, very granular and confusing, so then, we have the task of naming those groups and what were the phrases people might recognize, and so, the way we went about testing that, we had a couple different methods and one of them was simply a survey.
Marissa Epstein:: We would ask editors, it's very easy because you can create it asynchronously, fire it off as email, there's no scheduling or any things with very lean research tactics. We would just ask things that we knew were regular used cases for editors. "If you want to add an article to the site, which one of these would you use? Try to list the content type." It actually [inaudible 00:28:33] in their admin interface.
Marissa Epstein:: A lot of them are very obvious but you find very quickly we did, I think three rounds of surveys initially and very, very clearly in the first round, we thought, "Okay, these three phrases nobody guess." But everything else makes sense, and hone in and iterate from there, and some of them we just needed their perspective to understand, follow up. One of our favorites was trying to combine a number of-
Marissa Epstein:: Yeah. We have a lot of feelings about the language. There were blog posts and articles and this source of news content that weren't official news releases that needed some ephemeral name, and so, we had proposed updates and that did not work but we didn't understand why, and so, after talking with editors, they said, "Update what?" The light bulb went on, "Oops." They thought it was a verb, you could update something as an option not that it was even a content type that fit that category.
Marissa Epstein:: In situations like that sometimes it was just easy as saying, "What do you call it?" Then, pulling out the patterns of, we spoke to a dozen people today and they, Ken said, "It's a post, not an update." That was a pretty, or this is definitely news. We got a lot of very clear feedback from them.
Marissa Epstein:: Then, the last thing we went through that was a little more hands-on, when we met in person, we gave them a couple scenarios again of very specific to that department, maybe some content we've already interviewed them about that we knew that they create and have them walk us through how they do it now and how do they create that now, and then, how do they think that they would in our system, so what language made the most sense, anything like that [inaudible 00:30:24] really tear apart together, so we all agreed when it was, long before it was going into the Drupal system.
Matt Kleve:: I have a question for you. You have multiple departments, some of them might have different terminologies. How does that work? Is there any training that goes along with this or something?
Greg Dunlap:: Did you put all the names for things into a hat and you shake it and you pull it out and that's the winner?
Matt Kleve:: No. You've talked about naming things being the knife fights that happen in conference rooms, I mean that's-
Greg Dunlap:: Well, that and what goes in the rotator.
Matt Kleve:: Yeah. That's true.
Marissa Epstein:: [inaudible 00:30:59] say that. Yeah. It is tricky because there's a lot of training required and some of it is them going in person to a class and understanding what everything's for but, of course, we have to design for the reality that isn't always going to happen or someone starts new and they miss an orientation, so we built a lot of suggestions into the admin panels as well, so one of the fun things I got to do was create an icon system to try to visually describe a content type, and we also came up with little blurbs.
Marissa Epstein:: For examples, if you're looking … This is a bad example because we ultimately made this a content type because so many people looked for it but in trying to consolidate tons of news options, we had listed an example of all the different sorts of things the category could be, so this, if you're looking for a press release up here or a campaign, is a very specific type of thing but it doesn't have a content type so here is where you would add that, being very descriptive so that they could figure it out when they were logged in.
Mike Herchel:: Interesting.
Matt Kleve:: We're talking with the Georgia.gov team from Lullabot. The folks that were behind the content strategy and research that is going into the Georgia project going on. We'll talk about what actually goes into one of these projects and how long stuff takes. Coming up, right after this.
Male:: Whether you're learning how to build sites with Drupal or diving into the code, there are community-powered camps, summits, sprints and trainings happening all over the world. Find all of these and more at Drupal.com and, of course, if you want to boost your Drupal chops from the comfort of your own home, point your browser to Drupalize.me and stuff your brain full of carefully crafted videos and tutorials.
Matt Kleve:: Welcome back. We're talking content strategy with the content strategy Georgia.gov team here at Lullabot, and so, something that I've been interested in as I've been hearing everybody talk is just how long did this take and kind of what's the breakdown of the amount of work?
Greg Dunlap:: I think we spent a total of four months on the project. We ended up going out there five times in that four months for various things. I was on the project full-time, Jeff and Marisa were on the project half time, so I ended up acting as sort of the PM and Project Lead, and then, Jeff took on a lot of the content modeling and modeling research and designing the content types in the fields and all of that stuff, and Marissa ended up being really, really helpful for us. Anytime we needed some research done, in particular, but also anytime we needed anything drawn for any reason whatsoever because we're engineers, we don't do that.
Greg Dunlap:: But that was that, and then, I also did a lot of stuff in terms of like I spent a lot of time doing that content inventory and audit stuff that we talked about early on and a lot of time [inaudible 00:34:16], user interface, and editorial workflow stuff, interfacing with the stakeholders at Georgia but also the stakeholders from our design contractor, who are a separate group, and doing a lot of the stuff that was necessary in between all of the things that …
Greg Dunlap:: For instance, one of the things I spent a lot of time thinking about was how are we going to quit pages together, like they need a lot of sites, you end up talking about what's our best paradigm for creating landing pages, and I spend a lot of time looking and doing researching around that.
Matt Kleve:: What did you come up with, Gregg? That's kind of a different world these days. Anybody can make nodes with the write fields on them but assembling those nodes into coherent things are more complex. How is that done these days?
Greg Dunlap:: We actually ended up using the Drupal 8 Layout Manager.
Matt Kleve:: What? Cool.
Greg Dunlap:: Yeah. We-
Mike Herchel:: Web builder is awesome. Yeah.
Greg Dunlap:: Yeah. I initially evaluated it and was, I'll be honest, not too impressed with it because there's a lot of usability issues with it that need to be addressed but the Georgia team was really, really sold on the ability to have this visual way to create drag and drop landing pages, and so, I went through a list of usability improvements that I thought the layout manager would need and put it to the development team and talk to Tim [inaudible 00:35:53] and some other people on the layout manager team, and they all said none of this stuff would be rocket science. It was stuff like a way to limit and reorganized the list of blocks that you're presented with when you choose one to place because, by default, it just gives you every block in the entire system.
Greg Dunlap:: We would like the ability to have section specific options so that like if you add a section to a layout, you can choose options for the entire section like a background color [inaudible 00:36:23]. It was a lot of improvements that we needed on stuff like that and they're all getting done and I'm assuming they're all get contributed back to [inaudible 00:36:33] finished so that's going to be great. Then, we also created a bunch of microcontent types.
Matt Kleve:: What's a microcontent type?
Greg Dunlap:: Well, for us, I think we've been defining microcontent as pieces of structured content that are assembled together to create a greater whole or that are used to accentuate a piece of core content like an article or a news release.
Matt Kleve:: It's still a node, right? We're not making custom entities?
Greg Dunlap:: In this case, we did I think make them all actual content types. Yes. In the past, I've done them, we've done them as entities or a lot of people use paragraphs for stuff like that. I think that they ended up, and we worked on the implementation side of this. We just said, "Here's how we want it to work," and let the dev team, who is also a separate project decide how, what they thought the best implementation way would be.
Greg Dunlap:: I think they ended up going with actual content types because it was going to be easier on them and they would get all of, since we're using layout builder, we would [inaudible 00:37:38] block integration out of it, and easy interaction with all the other pieces of the system and stuff like that.
Matt Kleve:: Full disclosure, I'm on that team so-
Greg Dunlap:: Oh, that's right.
Matt Kleve:: I was giving leading questions. Yeah. It's essentially a piece of content that doesn't necessarily stand on its own is my understanding.
Greg Dunlap:: Yeah.
Matt Kleve:: It exists because other content needs the information.
Jeff Eaton:: Sorry. In some cases, it's also micro-content because we know it's going to be reused all over the place and will be used as a supporting element across all different kinds of nodes but like as a general rule, we tend to think of something as microcontent if like there would never really be a dedicated URL for it the public would visit. It's like you would never come and look at the little promo card for a particular upcoming event as a standalone piece of content, you would just want to go to that event.
Jeff Eaton:: Yeah. It's sort of a malleable term but we find that lots of sites accumulate those things. On some Drupal sites, they end up getting turned into paragraph types. Sometimes if somebody's just doing stuff with layout builder, each piece of microcontent, there's basically a custom block but it varies widely. I think one of the challenges that we find is that dealing with it like as a pure plutonic content modeling exercise, it's easy to say, "Oh, this is microcontent."
Jeff Eaton:: But then thinking about what the editorial experience is going to be and how to make it actually usable and approachable for the, all these people from the agencies that we were talking to and Marissa was playing the … Wow. I just blanked. What's the name of the person who organizes a circus? The ringmaster. Yes. Marissa was the, you know, the PM for a circus. Marissa was playing ringmaster to [crosstalk 00:39:35] these different conversations with these, the agency editors but like if we had just said, "Eh, whatever. It's all my microcontent, let us sort out."
Jeff Eaton:: I think the challenge is that it would have been very easy too for that to turn into sometimes they would have to make blocks, sometimes they would have to go and create a node, and then, add an entity reference field. Other times they would use paragraphs and a lot of sites I think, especially ones that have grown over time and accumulated requirements that got solved as they progressed, there's certain needs that were like depending on where in the site you need to create the same thing conceptually, there may be three or four different ways to do that, and that's a lot of like conceptual overhead for editors to maintain.
Jeff Eaton:: A lot of what we were doing was not just trying to come up with the perfect paper content model, but also like dialoguing with the dev team and the folks on the Georgia team side about what the different pros and cons were of going in different directions to bring more consistency to that and as Greg was talking about discussing with Tim [inaudible 00:40:55] the rest of the layout builder team, what kind of UX tweaks could be made so that we could bring some more consistency to that?
Jeff Eaton:: Not necessarily, yeah. I think that was one of the interesting things, so all of us trying to negotiate the boundaries between the content strategy team doing its work in planning out the model and the game plan, and how old content would be [inaudible 00:41:15] to new content, stuff like that, and we weren't the development team but it's silly to not have those kinds of conversations because there's a lot of really important information that the development team both needs to know because of what we've been digging into on the strategy side and that we need to know because the development team is the one that's best, they're most aware of the pros and cons of different implementation paths and what the trade-offs will be and all of those things have a significant impact on the final editorial experience, which makes or breaks most content on a real website.
Greg Dunlap:: One of the things to keep in mind is that we have a really wide disparate base of users for these sites. We got 85 agency sites and they spread the [inaudible 00:42:04]. Some of the agencies are 10 people, some of them are hundreds of people, some of them have full-time content editors, some of them have a person who answers the phones and enters content when it comes in. It's like the technical skill and attention needed to be given to these editorial decisions was all over the place, and so, we've really needed stuff that was very consistent in terms of how it gets entered in very simple and intuitive because we all know that a CMS that's hard to use is a CMS that people don't use.
Greg Dunlap:: Obviously, we want people to want to use their CMS's, so this that we spend a lot of time in, was research with those users. We've spent a great deal of time talking to representatives from the agencies about their needs and how they use their site and what they want and what pains them about the current site and what pains them about entering content or managing media or why they do things.
Greg Dunlap:: We spend a lot of time asking people why, not just, "Oh, it's painful to upload a document." "But can you show us what you're doing when you upload the document? Well, why did you go edit this way? Why did you need to upload a document? Why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that?" Really getting into their mindsets because a lot of people will say, "Oh, this is hard or I wish it could do this."
Greg Dunlap:: But understanding the why of what they're trying to do when they encounter those problems can open up a whole new world of solutions and possibilities and we really value ourselves, in fact, really digging into that why and understanding it, and that was actually another large portion of the work that we did.
Matt Kleve:: Marissa, when you're playing the ringmaster and you're considering the design for all these users that, were there any other particular challenges other than there just being a bunch with so many different things? Does Drupal play a role in some of these challenges or any thoughts?
Marissa Epstein:: Definitely. As Greg said, it was definitely a challenge accommodating a variety of different editors where some of them really wanted to be power user, some of them have very limited experience or time, and so, it was challenging to meet all those needs as well, but I would say there was a lot that we were adding, whether it was new that we just didn't know how it was going to be received.
Marissa Epstein:: There was definitely some extra care that we had to take. I was thinking of this as you talked about how do you define the microcontent type. Well, we had the editors essentially explain it in their workflow and we figured out where it fit for them, but we added things like a call to action microcontent type that was very new but we looked at their sites doing audits, seeing what patterns were breaking, what things seemed to be needed, and then, asked them to really go through their whole process of why do you do it now this way, and it took a little more resources than maybe I had anticipated.
Marissa Epstein:: I thought it would be a little more straightforward but it was just so varried with so many different context but everybody had a different way to solve the same problem or similar problems but they weren't exactly the same, so coming up to something there was challenging. Also, just communicating all of the ideas that we had. We spent a lot of time proposing things and going through and I would say that was fairly challenging because we all are familiar with some level of what the technical implementation might be like or how we're envisioning this to be.
Marissa Epstein:: I'm picturing the wireframes layout in my head while we're talking but, of course, everyone else isn't doing that, so it's definitely hard to figure out some of the new pieces. I would say that would be one way that Drupal solved the problem was simple and familiarity with it, simple [inaudible 00:46:11] like how can I say this? Hesitant to try a new thing, hesitant to use it, encouraging them to be more engaged with it. There's only so much that we can do now because, of course, we're not going to be there when they're building the site, so being able to have that be lasting and all those guys be more clear.
Marissa Epstein:: Training, in general, all of that walkthrough is definitely a complicated process. Well, as you can see I had a couple of challenges that you asked. Yeah.
Matt Kleve:: One thing that I see here is that there is this requirement for sharing content between all of these sites.
Greg Dunlap:: Yeah.
Mike Herchel:: I would like to know what a used, like a standard used cases for that. That was mentioned earlier and I was kind of thinking about that.
Marissa Epstein:: A lot of folks, a lot of the residents of Georgia struggled with even knowing where to go, so they needed to get to a particular department to solve a problem but maybe they've moved or they're just not very involved with the government departments. I know a lot more about them now than I did before, and so, they will often start with Georgica.gov or with the Google search of Georgia blank, and so, being able to have some sort of central hub to answer a lot of their questions was really crucial, especially someone that has a lot of overlapping, different topics of interest or something like health [inaudible 00:47:36] or driver services.
Marissa Epstein:: Actually, crosses over multiple departments, so trying to solve those problems can be met with a lot of different inconsistent experiences unless we have the content sharing consistently between agencies and especially to the main Georgia.gov site, so we were able to reuse a lot of the agency content there to, at least, tease or bring up a topic or use it as a path find, or wayfinding sort of tool to getting them to the page they actually were looking for, but they just have no idea what it was called.
Jeff Eaton:: One of the things that we also ran into was that there was a lot of interest in, when basically a topic needed to be discussed on multiple different sites on multiple different agencies. For example, if you're applying for a hunting license and you need proof of residency and there's a different agency the handles proof of residency than the one that issues the hunting license. I made that up right on the fly so-
Matt Kleve:: That's probably true, right?
Jeff Eaton:: Yeah. It's those kinds of cross-agency interactions that are usually where a lot of this complication comes up. Oftentimes-
Marissa Epstein:: Open a small business and I think you need to speak to six department [crosstalk 00:48:59]-
Jeff Eaton:: Right. But like the idea is that a lot of these different agencies would say, have a lot of the same information but they would rewrite it or they would write it differently or one agency would write something up in a context that made sense just for their agency but then the state of Georgia website would want to have a broader cross-agency explanation of the issue that was useful for people who just arrived at Georgia.com and we're looking for … Sorry. Georgia.gov and we're looking for an overview, so they would end up rewriting that.
Jeff Eaton:: A lot of this kind of stuff their, the whole goal that Georgia, the Georgia team came into it was we want to be able to share this stuff rather than rewriting it over and over, we want to be able to have it written once and broadcast it out, and it turns out with 85 sites and different people working on them, that's a very [inaudible 00:50:00] challenge, not just because of the technical stuff. That's actually fairly straightforward especially with Drupal 8.
Jeff Eaton:: There's a lot of basic provisions in there and like the JSON API module and stuff like that for setting up like a content publishing hub system, in a fairly straightforward fashion. Now, the problem is the actual workflow and governance questions that are coming out of that like when can something be shared? Can it be shared before it's published? Does it automatically get shared out to everyone? Do editors on one site pick and choose what things get shared, and then, others can subscribe to them?
Jeff Eaton:: What if editors on one, what if somebody from one agency writes something, somebody from another agency wants to reuse it but needs to make some changes to it so that it can be used on their site as well, like how do you sort that stuff out, and like those kinds of organizational and people challenges end up being the real issue there. Some of that stuff, you can iron out and you can settle eventually, but with Georgia, what we discovered was that some of the differences in how things were talked about from agency to agency were really legitimate and important and meaningful.
Jeff Eaton:: Like talking about proof of where you live or residency for obtaining a particular license versus becoming versus adopting someone. There are different aspects of that that are important and different levels of rigor that might be involved and treating it as the same piece of content isn't really appropriate, so what we ended up doing is going through all the different stuff that they had and breaking it down into a couple of different categories of different like types of content types.
Jeff Eaton:: There was stuff that we knew was totally fact-based, like it was just data, things like phone numbers, addresses, the fact that a particular department of a particular agency exists and can be contacted at this number and has this email address and this website, those kinds of things we knew that they wouldn't really change or differ depending on what site it appeared on, so they could always be shared and we could rely on like totally shared content being used with those data and fact content types, keeping them in sync so that like the phone number for a particular government agency would never be out of date, just because it had been put on a page in one website and never got updated when the actual department changed their number on their own website.
Jeff Eaton:: That kind of stuff could be solved using fairly straightforward content sharing, but the other stuff like the, how do you apply for X and it's actually a different answer for depending on the situation or depending on what agency you're working with, that kind of stuff, we ended up deciding with them that pure content sharing like publish and subscribe model where a node gets cloned from one site to another was actually going to be less useful than a linking system that would allow an editor to say, "I'm writing this piece of content but it's actually based on another piece of content somewhere else. Just let me know if that one changes so that I can be notified of that and I can be warned that I need to check it out."
Jeff Eaton:: Because what we found was that the real issue wasn't that they were just so tired of rewriting content, they were actually happy to get a chance to rewrite it the first time, it was that they had to then take on the burden of manually checking whenever they remembered to make sure it hadn't fallen out of sync, and that was the real danger for them that they wanted to put it in their own words, and so, that it made sense to their agency's needs but they needed some better way to be notified proactively that the document that they had written it against or the document that it referenced had changed, so solving that problem actually made content "sharing" a lot simpler.
Matt Kleve:: We talked a little bit about the importance of the content that these websites are providing and what that means to the residents of Georgia, are there any, is there anything else that is different working with a government client like this? It's kind of out of the ordinary from a lot of the things that Lullabot does. We've done a lot of projects in the entertainment, the sports, the technology-
Greg Dunlap:: At no point where we ever asked to fit another ad slot in.
Matt Kleve:: Yeah. That's honestly a really good point.
Jeff Eaton:: Oh, it really is. Yeah. We didn't have to juggle 18 different JavaScript libraries to manage 18 different ad and tracking platforms was definitely a plus.
Mike Herchel:: Hallelujah.
Greg Dunlap:: The thing is that the type of governance that we had to deal with here was much different than what we deal with in other places. I mean, in some ways it was the same and in some ways it's different. Eaton has coined this term archipelago sites for sites that like are distributed across a bunch of different sites but having overarching like organization like a government agency or a university or something, and even in the media companies, we involved that. We've done a lot of work for NBC Universal, obviously, but and there's a lot of commonalities [inaudible 00:55:42]
Greg Dunlap:: But there's a lot of differences too but the level of independence that the agencies had at Georgia I think was much higher than we usually encounter on these kinds of sites, and their ability to decide whether or not they even wanted to be on the platform changes the equations a lot. They wanted to, there's a lot of benefit for having all of the agencies on a common platform especially a common platform that's been designed with accessibility and [inaudible 00:56:15] because it means that your information is available for a much greater percentage of your citizenry.
Greg Dunlap:: We talked with them during the sales process about how important we think mobile friendliness is because a lot of people, especially people who aren't particularly loaded or have a lot of resources, the phone is the only reason, their phone is the only way that they can access the Internet and a lot of times it's not a good phone even, and so, that becomes an accessibility issue in its own right, and so, having a standard platform with all of these benefits built into it, the more agencies you can get onto that platform the better for the citizenry, in general, and that's a good thing.
Greg Dunlap:: But on the other hand, we really had to be careful to make sure that we were doing things that we're going to solve the agency's needs too because if we start to do that's going to involve them filling out 50 different fields every time they want to create a page for something or that's going to involved like jumping, like for each of those 50 fields jumping out to 3 pieces of linked content and it's like everything had to be very streamlined and easy because we didn't want to give anyone a reason not to be on the platform.
Greg Dunlap:: Met with them, one of our stakeholder, Kendra [inaudible 00:57:42] told us that one of their biggest problems is that in terms of their interactions with the agencies, all they have is carrots, they don't have any sticks. All they can do is offer them benefits but they don't have any way to tell the agencies it's our way or the highway, and that was a real challenge for us because it really meant we had to focus on the ways to make the right things as easy as humanly possible and the wrong things as hard as humanly possible in a way that would benefit the agencies and their editorial teams in order to get the benefits out to the citizenry of Georgia.
Greg Dunlap:: I thought that was, and to me, that was really the core of most of the challenges of the project for us.
Mike Herchel:: Greg, if I wanted to hear you talk more about that, in particular, what, is there any way that that could happen?
Greg Dunlap:: Interestingly, enough, I will be presenting at [inaudible 00:58:38] next year in April in Minneapolis on this very topic in a talk that is coincidentally enough called, "All carrot no stick." If you'd like to hear more about how we address the challenges of governance on this project and others like it, you can hear more about it there.
Mike Herchel:: But what if wanted to hear more about the content inventory side of things?
Greg Dunlap:: Well, I did to talk about that at Drupal GovCon last year, which you can go see which is called, "The Content Strategy Toolkit," and I will be presenting an updated version of that talk at DrupalCon also in April in Seattle.
Mike Herchel:: What a coincidence.
Greg Dunlap:: What if I want some macaroni?
Jeff Eaton:: I think then, you would go talk to Marissa.
Matt Kleve:: Marissa, do you have any thoughts or anything that might have been different for you designing for users on the government side?
Marissa Epstein:: Well, the design team over at IDO were really coming up with the styling of the design aspect of the site, so most of what I was helping within the design were really testing the content model, laying out what we had designed and the wireframe, so to some extent, that relationship with content strategy was a little different but I think as everyone has already said we were solving for much more important needs and on much more limited resources, so if you imagine someone with a very strong need using a very weak phone, we definitely had to consider usability accessibility so much more even in the simplicity of …
Marissa Epstein:: Oh, reading level. That was another example of something that you might not think about, the difficulties that it could present but in such a varied group. It's very possible that you don't even understand your Medicare benefits even if you can get to that page, so it wasn't that it was necessarily a new challenge but everything was [inaudible 01:00:46] because we had very high motivation to solve those problems.
Mike Herchel:: Here's a question for you. The development is going on right now, but the content strategy, you're talking about designing, it that kind of allow for the data input, did you do some type of wireframes or anything for the input forms on how that is going to look?
Greg Dunlap:: On a limited basis but that was one of the things where, given the time constraints that the content strategy team was on. It's one of those the way, I think the universal gas law, gas expands to fill the container. It's [crosstalk 01:01:28] and there was a ton of stuff that this project needed sorted out and we were able to give some rough guidelines on what we thought would be good ways to approach certain kinds of problems across, that we saw happening across a bunch of content types, which is why we spend a lot of our energy on how to streamline and bring a little more consistency to like laying out ad hoc pages and stuff like that, but we definitely just, we didn't have the same amount of time to go and do detailed wireframing for every editorial page.
Greg Dunlap:: I think we always feel a little lucky with using Drupal to do that because out of box, it's not terrible, but, and customizing it is even fairly easy, but it's definitely one of those things that usually requires an iteration because often times a lot of the simplest changes are only really obvious when you get somebody in front of the actual working site and they try to use it and they say, "Oh, man. It's really annoying that this field is above this one," or something like that.
Marissa Epstein:: Most of the wireframes that we did get to do, I considered more of a proof of concept, so they're testing the content model to see if it would work for existing content types, and so, it was more of an ephemeral artifact for the client to see and for us to discuss and possibly go back and make some changes, but to your question, there were a couple of fun things we got to do with wiring the interface within Drupal.
Marissa Epstein:: I worked on the WYSIWYG and it's just little things, little changes as far as how it should be displayed, the width, which buttons should appear and playing around with some of those icons and that kind of thing, but there were a couple recommendations we made there, and then, the other, we already mentioned was the add a new content page, so making that very clear and can you have it work for you, in a particular way.
Marissa Epstein:: There were a couple little display UI things that I'd like to geek out about like if you prefer a list or that's very lean or do you want to see much more visually and lower explanation as the type because you're newer or do you start a couple of things that cause them to pin as [inaudible 01:03:52] up to the top, so that you don't even need to look at the big scary list of all the things because you know that your permission allows you for certain things or your job title specifies that you update one particular piece of content, et cetera.
Matt Kleve:: One final question for everyone starting with you, Marissa. What's the primary lesson that you learned on this project?
Marissa Epstein:: Well, it's kind of cheating but I have so much more respect and admiration for the content works that Lullabot does and that our strategists, Jeff Eaton, and Greg Dunlap do. It's not one lesson that I learned … Well, I was going to curse. I learned a lot about content work [crosstalk 01:04:42]
Marissa Epstein:: [inaudible 01:04:44] of stuff. Thank you. Thank you, Kleve. Yeah, so it's not a particular lesson but as far as just the simple ways to actually execute the things that we wanted to do. There was a lot of ideas that we have that I haven't really gotten to go through the best ways of auditing or what to do when we find the pattern that's broken and those sorts of things so, yeah. It's hard to pin down because I learned so much from the team.
Mike Herchel:: All right, we're going to [inaudible 01:05:14], Greg.
Greg Dunlap:: It's hilarious because I was going to say that the biggest thing that I learned was how valuable Marissa could be to our team.
Marissa Epstein:: Guys.
Greg Dunlap:: When we first put this project together, we added a [inaudible 01:05:37] I'm not going to say as an afterthought but I think we weren't sure exactly how that person was going to get used, and the amount of value that Marissa brought to this project was incalculable. Like the ability to start, when we'd sit down, and one of the things that I've struggled with in this work is that a lot of times the best way to describe something is very visual and I'm an engineer by trade, my tendency in meetings or in descriptions is to write words or to talk, and Marissa was always bringing us back to, like she, we would be talking and she would say, "Here, I drew this."
Greg Dunlap:: Or here's some wireframes that I threw together for some possibilities we could do this." That stuff just always was just like the thing that we needed in that moment, and then, also to see and watch and learn from the research process because I had never really been involved in that side before, and understanding the level of value that that research could bring to the project, and a lot of the times it wasn't necessarily big learns, a lot of times it was just like Marissa was saying like we realized that we had just named a content type something dumb or just like the stuff that gives the polish to the system that will eliminate like that 10% of friction that everybody struggles with all the time.
Greg Dunlap:: I think we're to the point now where we would be hard-pressed to suggest a major strategy engagement without that role being filled ever because we suddenly realized how much we were missing.
Marissa Epstein:: Well, thanks. I was going to say I couldn't help but sketch constantly after Jeff Eaton gave me a bunch of laminated sheets to use as sort of a whiteboard-
Matt Kleve:: Nice.
Marissa Epstein:: … so that was [inaudible 01:07:28]
Jeff Eaton:: I'm a dedicated whiteboard pusher. The first whiteboard is free.
Matt Kleve:: Jeff [crosstalk 01:07:37]
Mike Herchel:: [inaudible 01:07:37] in the back alley behind Drupal [inaudible 01:07:39], "You need some whiteboards?"
Matt Kleve:: Jeff, any lessons learned from you?
Jeff Eaton:: Oh, boy. Very similar. I'll cheat and say that like cross-disciplinary communication and coordination is so critical on a project like this because on the design side and on the development side and on the research side and on me like content inventory and analysis and strategy side, everybody's coming up with like real actual insights into what the situation is and what the beads are and what the current state of affairs is and it's so easy for those pockets of understanding to never mix.
Jeff Eaton:: For those things to never be shared, and it's very easy to say like, "Oh, we'll make sure that you get a copy of our write-up," or something like that but there's just no substitute for regular ongoing like collaboration between those different disciplines just because we're all coming at it from different angles and bringing different stuff to the table, and it helps everybody when there are those kinds of fresh perspectives coming in and I mean even knowing that going in, it was still something that, when we didn't do it, it always came back to bite us and we did do what we were always startled by how useful it was so it's just, it's one of those Evergreen things to keep coming back to make sure that you don't just have different stakeholders in there but different disciplines and different skill sets there too.
Matt Kleve:: Right on. Maybe next podcast, Mike, we won't have such a love fest.
Mike Herchel:: Maybe some more, definitely more cursing.
Matt Kleve:: Yeah.
Marissa Epstein:: We'll bring the drama.
Matt Kleve:: Well, thank you. Thank you very much and Georgia.gov coming to a website near you at some point.
Greg Dunlap:: It will be peachy.
Jeff Eaton:: Who invited [inaudible 01:09:56] to this call?
Matt Kleve:: Do you have a November mustache, Eaton?
Jeff Eaton:: No. I have an incredibly lazy dude beard.
Matt Kleve:: Nice.
Jeff Eaton:: I don't believe in seasonal beards. I just believe in like the ebb and flow of the beard like the tide.
Mike Herchel:: It's going to be with [Van 01:10:29] Eaton.
Jeff Eaton:: Yes. Yes.

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Matt Kleve

Matt Kleve has been a Drupal developer since 2007. His previous work in the media inspires him to create lean, easy-to-use workflow processes.

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Mike Herchel

Mike is a former senior front-end developer at Lullabot, a lead of the Drupal 9 core "Olivero" theme initiative, and an organizer for Florida DrupalCamp.

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