DrupalCon Portland 2013: UNCONSORTIUM: THE NEXT PHASE OF DRUPAL COLLABORATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Channel: Drupal Association
Date: 21/05/2013

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:

sharing Features with each other
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.