Author: Anne Johnson
The N.C. Department of Information Technology's Digital Solutions team recently received a State Government Experience Award for its accessible, secure and user-friendly Digital Commons platform, which supports NC.gov, the state’s one-stop portal for services, and more than 70 other websites for state agencies, boards and commissions.
Digital Services Manager Yelena Talanker and Applications Systems Manager Mac Clark were honored at the Center for Digital Government’s GovX Summit on Sept. 19 and spoke on a roundtable with other recipients of the Government Experience Awards on Sept. 21. The awards recognize state, city and county governments that make it easier for residents to do business with their government.
“With citizen and employee expectations continually evolving, government agencies are leveraging new technologies and processes to drive innovation through their digital experiences,” said Dustin Haisler, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer for the Center for Digital Government. “The leading government experiences have retained a human-centric approach to service delivery, incorporating digital equity, accessibility and inclusion into all of their experiences.”
The Digital Solutions team is always developing ways to deliver services, resources and information more efficiently and effectively to North Carolinians through the Drupal-based Digital Commons, which has been developed and supported in-house since 2016. The platform services about 100 million web requests per week.
This popular open-source content management system enables state government agencies to deliver services, resources and information to key audiences in a more streamlined, consistent manner. The platform offers the ability to scale so any government entity in need of a content management-driven web presence can leverage it.
Measured by the total number of webpages, the platform serves as vital asset in the state of North Carolina’s web presence, and hundreds of state employees log into it daily to communicate with North Carolinians about government services and initiatives as part of their primary job responsibilities.
The platform’s design is grounded in an accessibility-first mindset, which means that implementation is not production ready until it works for everyone in the state. In addition to strict compliance with accessibility guidelines, the portal dynamically loads only what is needed to render a page. This design assists users visiting the portal on mobile devices with limited data plans.