Hello all,
The Startup Weekend franchise has branched out into the education technology space and created "Startup Weekend Education". These are rapid 54-hour events - concept on Friday night and pitch the demo on Sunday night. There is a good mix of enthusiastic folks to team up with - teachers, biz devs, marketing and designers (plus loads of fellow techs).
I attended the first pilot event two months ago. It was really exciting to see so many 100+ people hyped about education technology. The events were mentored by leading technologists from the start-up space including those from Facebook and Google. A few venture capital firms were also present and some had follow up conversations about continuing projects pitched that weekend.
My team had a concept of a donation site managed by classrooms, basically a DonorsChoose-like site kids can use to fund their own projects. I pushed Drupal for the project as it allowed for a very quick construction of a functioning pilot web site (http://www.givedub.com/) (truth be told - if we didn't fiddle with Ruby on Rails for half of the event, we would have been a lot further...). It proved itself well here and Drupal will be a killer rapid pilot framework for future events.
If you have an idea for an ed tech app or would like to help support others, please consider signing up and participating. Folks who can build stuff are in high demand, Drupalists can really rock this.
Startup Weekend Education in Seattle - Sept 30 - Oct 2 - http://seattleedu.startupweekend.org/
Startup Weekend Education in San Fran – Oct 14 – 16 - http://sfedu.startupweekend.org/
Startup Weekend Education in DC - Oct 21-23 - Washington DC - http://dcedu.startupweekend.org/
Comments
That's great you represented
That's great you represented Drupal this event. I've been to a couple Startup Weekends, including the inaugural one in Taipei a month or so back. Definitely tends toward RoR dev, but Drupal I think has a place too. Good luck and, as they say in SW, don't be afraid to pivot!
Whoops .. this notification
Whoops .. this notification got caught by a filter! I'm seeing the same, lots of RoR development and it's mostly (shockingly) that devs haven't heard of Drupal. I watched developers try to learn RoR (not something that can happen in 4 hours) and watched them realize that the pilot wouldn't be ready. Introduced Drupal and it really took off!
This isn't to say RoR or Drupal is better/worse. I do think at these hackfests, folks can get solutions up quickly with Drupal solutions and lead to fast validation, then scaled up to RoR and custom fit solutions.
(however, I think I'm just preaching to the choir here .... :-)