Unconsortium: the Next Phase of Drupal Collaboration in Higher Education

Click here to watch Unconsortium: the Next Phase of Drupal Collaboration in Higher Education.

There is a growing Drupal movement in Higher Education: Drupal has moved from experimental technology of evangelists to a core technology adopted by whole universities.

NEWS FLASH: our use cases are not unique!

For the last year and a half, a small band of Higher Ed professionals from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Penn State, and Stanford have joined forces to build a Community of Practice around Features-based development, specifically for Higher Ed. It is time for us to share what we have been up to!

Using Drupal to build applications and websites that support courses, academic profiles, event calendars, CRM integration, research groups is now common practice. Right now there are hundreds of technologists working in isolation across academia rebuilding the same functionality. Our initiative is about building on the community that already exists and leveraging our collective domain expertise in research, teaching and administration in Higher Ed.

Features-based Development! FTW!

The Features module is about encoding use-cases, but we are all building the same Features again and again. This new initiative is about:

  1. sharing Features with each other
  2. building a professional network of Drupalists in higher education.

By bringing together the best of everyone's work we will create a pool of resources that benefit the entire academy, and demonstrate the power of open source collaboration.

This talk is for everybody, not just developers. Sure, we will talk about modules, overriding them, Feature Servers, etc. but more important than all that is the fact that this Community of Practice will empower site builders, not just developers, and link together Drupalists across academia.

Schedule info
Status: 
Accepted
Time slot: 
Tuesday, May 21 - 02:00pm-03:00pm
Room: 
Hall A1 - Acquia
Session Info
Track: 
Government, Nonprofit, and Education
Experience level: 
Beginner

Comments

Very important topic for higher ed Drupal community! Thank you, Brian, Zack and Shawn, for putting this session together.

Great topic. Would love to see this session approved.

I agree with the above comments. Creating a community (and sharing resources) among Higher Ed Drupal users would be a great thing. I hope to see this session in Portland.

Sessions like this bolster Drupal's continued growth and success in Higher Education big time. The community need to hear the Drupal innovators in Higher Ed sharing best practices. Two thumbs up for this session - looking forward to it.

This Presentation is a MUST. University sites have unique approaches and unique challenges... also they love Drupal. I found Denver's EDU BOF one of the best I attended and look forward to attending this session.

Looking forward to seeing more and more for collaboration between academia!

Babson will be there, we look forward to sharing how far things have progressed since Denver!

Hey James, glad you'll be there! I'm interested to hear more about what you guys have been up to with your Google integration. Stanford is moving more and more toward Google integration as well. Did you guys get some kind of BAA or other solution for the accessibility issue?

Great topic. Looking forward to attending this session!

super good topic, i look forward to attending.

These fellows know their onions, this will be good.

Been excited about this since Denver. Really hope to see this session

I'd love to hear more about the developments going on to unite higher education's efforts around drupal!

Sounds like a cool session. +1 !

Eric

Good session, need more sessions on Drupal in Education

Absolute must-have! The need for collaboration in Higher Education borders on being 'urgent'. So yes, huge and valuable topic - bring it Drupalcon!

Sounds fantastic! I'd love to see this.

Yes, please have this. This is a great opportunity for us in Higher Ed and anyone interested in higher ed. Many thanks.

Great session proposal....need more sessions on Drupal usage in Education

Hey Nick, thanks for the vote of confidence! Will you be coming to Portland? We're gonna start talking about aggregating Feature Servers, and NC State is on my list!
Cheers,
Zach

Yep -- i'll be there... arriving some time on Monday and then leaving late on Friday. So, definitely time to meet up and discuss moving forward. I'm still working with Drupal 6 for my service at NCSU, but plan on getting everything over to Drupal 7 by the end of the year at the very worst.

If you know the speakers, you know these are the guys that should be speaking on this topic.

Great topic. looking forward to hearing this and possibly be involved.

As someone who works with universities and has been involved at the periphery of this conversation, excited to hear what you guys are are going to cook up.

This is going on my list of must attend. Our company works with higher ed. and the more tools we have the better! =-D