Building a Higher Education Drupal Community

UCSF has begun moving towards Drupal as a Campus wide CMS via a grassroots movement. We've pioneered an "all carrot" approach to community building by subsidizing Drupal hosting from Central IT and created a community managed UCSF Drupal User Group within UCSF. We've moved over 100 sites into a shared environment, and have over 35 developers working in that environment. UCSF is beginning to leverage this community for the benefits of it's members by created a common UCSF stack, a UCSF method of dealing with common university problems (people data, authentication, etc), and a stakeholder group that can help secure ongoing university support of this community.

Stanford has been working with Drupal for many years and has developed it's own internal Drupal community. As that community matures it has become a helpful source of expertise and experience in how to manage the growth of a community.

Both Stanford and UCSF have begun to reach out to our peers at other universities in Northern California in order to leverage out ability to solve common university problems, to foster collaboration between the campuses, and to increase the usefulness of Drupal to students, staff, researchers and educators at our institutions.

This presentation will cover general community building techniques, common roadblocks, and some methods of solving those roadblocks with an emphasis on issues in the higher education environment.

Schedule info
Status: 
Proposed
Session Info
Speaker(s): 
Track: 
Government, Nonprofit, and Education
Experience level: 
Beginner

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