Two months ago, our Web Technology and Google Analytics professor, Samuel Solís, began working for the European Commission, and we took the opportunity to speak with him and learn about his experience working for an international organization of this magnitude. He tells us about it in the following interview.
How did you come to work for the European Commission?
A former university classmate (and fellow veteran of the Spanish Drupal Association) who works for Everis posted that they were looking for seniors with extensive experience in Drupal and fluency in English to work on European Commission projects. The main change was that this time they were accepting remote workers.
I was looking for new challenges I could take on from Cáceres. We began talking and eventually reached a mutually beneficial agreement.
What are you doing in terms of digital?
Well, I don't even know exactly! The CE employs more than 3,500 people, and serves many more, so it's too big to cover. The closest I can tell is guatemala mobile database that there are more than 150 web portals from different departments and organizations built with a Drupal 7 distribution, and we're migrating everything to the new, purpose-built Drupal 8 distribution.
Both the Drupal 7 distribution (called Next Europa) and the Drupal 8 distribution (called Open Europa) are free software, so they can be downloaded, used, and versioned without problems by any person or organization.
What can Drupal contribute to an organization as vast as the European Commission?
As I mentioned, there are many websites within the European Commission, each with specific requirements specific to the site and at the same time with common elements such as the ability to connect with European Commission users through a Single Sign On system. Most of these portals are managed by non-developers, so providing them with a powerful and flexible CMS is necessary to give them as much independence as possible.
Drupal is the ideal software because it's easy to use for editors and powerful and well-structured for developers. Furthermore, as it's open source software, it can be used free of charge, as well as modified, extended, and monitored in all important aspects, including security.
What is your department?
There are 37 directorates-general within the European Commission, and my current role is the Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT). Within DIGIT, which is quite large, my current team is the DMT (Data Migration Tools), the tool we're developing, which is part of the D1 (Data Services) department.
As you can see, the tangle of departments, subdepartments, groups, subgroups, and the like is quite confusing. With so many people working and so many tasks to complete, teams are divided into manageable sizes (generally 4 to 10 people) and projects are broken down into manageable sizes for a team.
