The Gradual Drying up of the Drupal Drops??

I'm just a newbie to the whole Drupal thing (about 6 or so months and have never attended a DrupalCon). While I have been pretty happy working with Drupal (with the code and modules that let you get up and running so quickly), I haven't really had such a warm fuzzy feeling within Drupal.org. It feels a bit like a disjointed bureaucracy, cold and anonymous at times.

Maybe one way to keep that feeling is through smaller communities within or outside of Drupal.org where people can communicate and participate collectively. In terms of education, I still feel like "we" could do more to improve an educationally-focused distro....

This was my first DrupalCon as well, but one step in the exhibit hall and I could quickly see all the vendors that were there. I think it's good to see so many companies finding ways to make money using Drupal; this will ensure the ongoing success of Drupal.

And you're right, this definitely leaves us in Higher Ed in an interesting position as we can't always leverage these non-free services. This is where I believe markwk has hit it on the head: we in Higher Ed can continue to contribute back to each other in the form of distros, code patches, training/discussions, etc. I know that after DruaplCon, us at Oregon State are looking forward to participating more in the Higher Ed Drupal community. :)

jmerandy I think you make a valid observation, but I don't believe that the increased presence of commercial services at DrupalCon means that the platform is any less thriving of a community than it was a year ago. I think what you're seeing is the increased commercialization of the Con and not the product. That's one of the reasons I think we spent an entire afternoon instead of just an hour in our EduBof session and also one of the reasons that Dries and others were discussing the increased need for smaller localized or specialized communities—whether they be online like g.d.o or IRL like DrupalCamps.

In just a few years, DrupalCon has gone from a small set of focused discussions to a $1MM full commercial endeavor, and while the Drupal Association has done an amazing job at scaling to be able to manage that need, the conversations do not scale as well and still need to happen on a smaller scale. I pushed people to use http://groups.drupal.org/higher-education and http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-education at our EduBof to really bring the conversation down here, instead of just keeping things for our yearly-meetups. These forums have been relatively sparse, and with the 40+ people that were at the BoF and the hundreds of other members here, we should be able to keep a good conversation going, whether it's on g.d.o, twitter, facebook, or something else.

Finally, until dries, webchick, merlin, quicksketch, and the 100's of other core contributors stop showing up to cons, offering themselves freely on IRC, d.o, and generally being awesome and available to everyone and anyone, I refuse to believe that Drupal is headed in the wrong direction.

I hope that's not too crazy-sounding, but I really believe that the community is still there, it's just sometimes (especially at the Con) being obscured by the $$$.

I think it's all good for Drupal. More commercial use and more investment in Drupal means more reason for young developers to learn drupal. Those new folks are as important to the future of the community and the platform as the old guard is.

I agree with your concerns about corporate / monetizing influences in the drupal community. I felt this as soon as Acquia launched and it's always a concern of mine that we (as a community) don't move towards a Joomla model. That said, I think there are a lot of exciting platforms out there, especially for educators. No, there is no 1-size-fits-all platform for Education, and there never will be. My university of 100k+ users/students is never going to have the same scalable solution that a k-12 school does. It's just not going to happen, yet we're trying to serve the same goal: education and reducing overhead with an open source product.

So, for exciting platforms at least... while Drupal ED isn't maintained anymore, there are a number of platforms built off of Drupal to help serve education. I know that Eduglu is walking the line between open and monetizing platform but it is very impressive, even in its early days. I won't try to toot my own horn too much but the next version of ELMS is due out by the end of the month with a ton of improvements. The ELMS project at Penn State also has two other educationally focused distributions in the pipe-line.

Sorry I wasn't at Drupalcon Chi-town (or on here much) to share the optimism but at least from my perspective, things are extremely bright. ELMS adoption at PSU is rapidly advancing and as Drupal spreads at PSU, that means more users, which means more site builders, which means more developers. Currently I'm much of a 1-man show when it comes to ELMS development but there's an excellent chance of that number growing as time progresses. As elms grows, so grows drupal distributions and modules and themes in education.

I also wouldn't worry much about monetizing influence over ELMS, everything we do is to serve our instructional designers, instructors and students.

My experience (being around a long time, and also being an active agent in developing Drupal as a business) is that the local Camps offer the best of what the smaller conferences offered.

In terms of the Higher Ed space in particular, a lot of Universities have developed very robust communities of developers and users just within their own bounds. I know that's the case at a number of bay-area institutions. The technology remains accessible as ever (getting better all the time), and while the community is definitely evolving as things professionalize, I think this growth is largely positive.

National conferences aren't going to be the same as Boston or Sunnyvale, but you don't have to go national to get some of the best of the Drupal community.

No question about it -- Drupal is definitely gaining momentum in higher ed. Last June, while I was still with Duke University, I was one half of a joint presentation on CMS implementations at the Educause Southeast Regional conference. At the end, there were at least three times as many questions about Drupal, than about the proprietary CMS my co-presenter discussed (go Team Drupal!).

And I think higher ed interest in Drupal has increased even more just within the last couple months. On the uwebd listserv, there's been a few different discussions lately about it (beyond those "What's your favorite CMS?" shootouts).

So I agree that we should relate to vendors of Drupal products and services as partners, rather than adversaries. I'm guessing many of us in this group are developers, and as developers we have a strong "do it yourself" ethic. But in talking to folks at other institutions who use a CMS other than Drupal, their reasoning is usually: a) We don't have strong enough resources in house for Drupal; and/or b) Drupal is too confusing; we don't even know where to start.

And that's one thing some of the commercial CMS's do well -- particularly those that market themselves specifically to higher ed: they're good at hand-holding and providing support to clients who are not very technical (or at least, making the clients feel like they are being supported). So I think it's actually a good thing that there are companies who can potentially help these types of university clients use Drupal, and fill in the gaps where in-house resources are lacking.

If you want to get more people in Higher Ed fired up about Drupal (as they should be!), then maybe we can channel our energies into discipline-specific venues, like Educause? Smaller regional conferences? The sooner Drupal distros --made by us-- kill all of that proprietary crap out there the better!

I'd love to get an educationally focused camp at penn state. Hoping that as Drupal grows in popularity in the coming year that we can push for one. Totally agree with the last part though -- "kill all of that proprietary crap out there". I'd add in closed and dated systems as well (as great as PHPBB is in the modern era ;) ).

So as someone who works for a Drupal Shop that partners with a lot of Universities I'm very interested with where this conversation is going in regards to a distro. We're going to be launching a multi-site implementation for Portland State University in the next month or so. It's built on D7 and relies heavily on features, context, and install profiles. We'd love to take some of that work and contribute it back to a distribution.

We're interesting in connecting with other like-minded people/EDUs to learn what your main points about Drupal are and how we can contribute back to this specific sub-community. I'm interested in how we can start a more focused conversation on what a generic education distro could look like.

One thing I've been inspired by lately is the work that Jeff Eaton, Boris Mann, and RickVug are doing over here: http://groups.drupal.org/snowman They are working on an install profile for Drupal 8 and I think we could possibly borrow some of their process for collaboration (http://groups.drupal.org/node/134069).

What do people think? Should we start a new thread for people interested in an Edu Distro and what the primary persona and use cases are?

PS I'm quite familiar with OpenScholar and EduGlu are but I'm not too familiar with OpenAcademy - is this available online somewhere?

It's exciting to see all of these development and discussion threads pulling together some. When I first started toying with Drupal about 6 or so months ago, I was somewhat surprised how inactive the education community seemed on Drupal.org. Since I live and work in China, I don't really have much access to Drupal ideas outside of the digital realm. It's good to hear different voices and share new ideas.

In spite of different goals and use cases (which I agree should be pushed in localized ways), there are obvious benefits for us to all be working on Drupal. One suggestion I might push for is that edu distro projects develop around a common architecture like Context + Spaces + Features. It is difficult to imagine a totally plug-and-play approach (we can dream, I suppose), but I think Features allows pretty easy implementation and adaption of different functions.

Q: One question for various project is how "shareable" and "reusable" are the feature/functions you are building?

zchandler has a great list of big use cases. I wonder if these could be broken into a combination of (1.) targeted install profiles and (2.) adaptable features. If possible, it would be interesting to have something like an "Educational Feature Server" Approach where these could be shared, discussed, adapted and improved collectively.

Good stuff.... :)

Say what you will about China, there's certainly a group out here, headed up by long-time contributor skyredwang. The Shanghai Drupal Happy Hour is tomorrow night as a matter of fact. If you're in the neighborhood... http://groups.drupal.org/node/131724