Sarah's slides are available here.
The speaker was Sarah Allen (ultrasaurus), a returning Presidential Innovation Fellow (PIF) who was at the Smithsonian Institution. Sarah covered a lot about her experiences as a PIF generally, but also had one big point about the technology/government divide:
In her view, a large majority of government web projects are fundamentally CMS systems with a few customizations specific to the project. When she got to DC, she didn't want to use PHP, but -- precisely because Ruby doesn't have any well-supported, "clear winner" CMSs -- she couldn't justify rebuilding a lot of the functionality that Wordpress or Drupal give you out-of-the-box.
While there are a bunch of Ruby CMSs ( https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/content_management_systems ) there's nothing at the point of being a clear winner with a strong community providing lots of support.
The fundamental question Sarah posed was: why doesn't Ruby have this? (Ed. note: I think this equally applies to the other in-vogue web languages like Python and Javascript, so it really crosses community boundaries.) Here's a sample of the answers from the crowd:
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The Ruby community focuses on optimizing developer happiness (most new users are already developers); on the other hand, Wordpress in particular was a gateway to programming for largely non-developers. So in Wordpress/Drupal you have communities that care a lot more about non-developer users and deployers.
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Deployment has traditionally been an issue (LAMP stacks are common, cheap, and "dumb"/easy); Heroku's advent has made Ruby deployment easier, but this is pretty recent. (Ed. note: It can also be harder for government to contract with cloud service providers, since a low monthly credit card charge is so far removed from the normal big procurement processes.)
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Ruby (and Rails in particular) gives you an easy set of tools to build something (MVC/CRUD) while CMSs give you the thing itself, with plug-ins that can be installed by less-technical users pretty easily.
All in all, I think this is a valuable question that technologists working in the civic space should proactively consider. In particular, if there were a "Wordpress for Ruby" (or Python, or Javascript) then it would potentially resolve a lot of the sustainability challenges, given that Wordpress is in a place I'd consider "too big to become defunct."