GovDataHosting · Federal Cloud & Compliance
Last week, GovDataHosting headed to the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland as a sponsor of Drupal GovCon 2026, where we spent a few days making connections and talking shop with the Drupal community.
What is Drupal GovCon?
Drupal GovCon brings together Drupal designers and developers who use the platform to support government organizations through dedicated sessions and events. It's been called the heartbeat of the DC Drupal community, and every year people show up for three days to learn, improve, and innovate together. This time around, the University of Maryland hosted the event at the Stamp Student Union from Tuesday, August 11th through Thursday, August 13th, and the conference stayed free to attend, so it drew a wide mix of government IT staff, agency stakeholders, and open-source contributors from around the region.
The three days were full of sessions, training, and networking — Tuesday was dedicated to training, then Wednesday and Thursday moved into the main conference sessions. Attendees planned their schedules through the event's Sessionize app.
What Was on the Program
Tuesday's training day covered a lot of ground. One workshop dug into running many small Drupal sites off a single codebase using site templates and recipes. Another looked at using AI coding tools like Claude Code in module development without letting them quietly pile up technical debt. There was also a hands-on session on building dashboards that actually get used, a workshop on who owns content taxonomy and definitions inside an agency, and a full-day introduction to the Drupal AI module for things like content summarization and translation.
The Wednesday and Thursday sessions kept that same practical tone. A few that stood out:
Anatomy of an Agentic Harness — Damien House of 109.studio built the same small Drupal task three different ways — in Drupal AI, LangChain, and CrewAI — to compare how each framework handles review, memory, and failure recovery once a human has to actually sign off on the result.
Surviving the Swarm: Bot and Crawler Protection for Drupal Sites — Rich Lawson of Evolving Web talked through what happens when aggressive AI crawlers and scrapers start eating up a site's resources, and which contributed modules and defenses have actually held up under that kind of traffic.
Navigating the Digital Realm — Matthew Elefant of Inclusive Web ran an interactive "Guess That Site" exercise that let attendees navigate real websites the way a screen reader user would, to make the accessibility gap concrete rather than theoretical.
The Approval Seat: Weighing AI Trade-offs Under a Move-Fast Mandate — Aparna Darisipudi's session focused on the person who has to approve AI-enabled work without necessarily having built it themselves, and what questions actually help with that decision.
Humanizing AEO/GEO — Oomph's J. Hogue and Julie Elman covered how accessible, well-structured content holds up as more search traffic shifts toward AI agents and AI-powered search.
High-Fidelity Site Consolidation with Drupal AI — Christian Burk and Jonathan Bourland of CivicActions walked through a Drupal AI-assisted approach for consolidating old government sites into structured content types, instead of dumping everything into one big HTML field.
Between the AI governance questions, the accessibility work, and the migration and infrastructure sessions, it was a program that matched the kind of thing GovDataHosting deals with day to day.
Why We Sponsored
Drupal has been a go-to platform for government websites for a long time — it's flexible, secure, and has a real community behind it. That's what made Drupal GovCon a good fit for us.
GovDataHosting is the FedRAMP High authorized managed cloud hosting brand of IT-CNP, Inc., and our work centers on the same problems that come up throughout this program: standing up compliant infrastructure, managing the ATO lifecycle, and keeping mission-critical sites running on hardened, well-monitored environments — whether that's our own GovDataHosting IaaS or a managed AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud environment.
Sponsoring gave us a chance to talk to the people actually building and running these sites — developers, agency IT leads, and the broader DC-area Drupal community who care as much about compliance and uptime as they do about clean code.
Good to Be There
We had a good time meeting people at our table over the three days, and plenty of conversations about FedRAMP, ATOs, and what it really takes to run a Drupal site securely in a government cloud environment.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by, and to the Drupal4Gov team for putting on another solid event.
Learn More
Event details: drupalgovcon.org
Want to talk FedRAMP High, ATOs, or managed cloud for your agency? Reach out to the GovDataHosting team at 800-967-1004.