What happens when business and tech build together in a large public institution?
At the Europa Web Platform “Play to Impact” Drupal AI Hackathon, more than 75 project managers, business analysts, designers, editors, and developers worked side by side in nine multidisciplinary teams. Their goal was practical: tackle two real challenges—introducing AI support into Drupal editorial workflows and enhancing Drupal Canvas for smarter site building.
Over two intense days on site, teams moved quickly from understanding the problem to sketching, prototyping, and testing ideas. Business perspectives—user needs, value, feasibility—were discussed alongside Drupal architecture, workflows, and implementation constraints. That combination made a difference.
Accessibility, compliance, and human oversight were considered from the beginning, not added at the end. This early alignment helped avoid the usual gap between strategy and delivery. The most important outcome wasn’t just a set of promising prototypes, but a way of working: a collaboration model that reduces friction between profiles and moves ideas forward faster, even in a governance-heavy public-sector environment.
In this session, I’ll share what worked, what we would adjust next time, and how this format can be reused by other Drupal communities—especially in government and large organisations.
Key takeaways:
- Practical steps for aligning business and technical Drupal teams around real challenges
- A lightweight, replicable hackathon format for public-sector environments
- Lessons learned from accelerating innovation without compromising governance or accessibility