Low turn out of college professors

In Ireland, colleges teach more Microsoft products. The staff get trained by proprietary vendors like Microsoft; they get free licenses, etc. And the teachers built a comfortable expertise with what they know... Open source is a big unknown, and they risk not knowing more than their students. I found some teachers very resistant to open source.

Of course the situation in India may be very different!

I'm curious what others think too.

In India, promotion of Drupal started not a long time ago.
Indian professionals work on both open source and other technologies, and percentage on open source technologies was a little and it is increasing gradually.
Similar is the case with Drupal.
Drupal,as open source technology, is being introduced to college students and professors these days, so in a very less time the count will increase hope fully :)

I recently joined g.d.o through by connecting with the Drupal community. As practising engineers, many like me wanted to be engaged into a larger goal of solving real life challenges by collaborating with forums such as this.

There may be multiple reasons for the low turnout of members from other communities into forums. It might be out of sheer lack of awareness of a community's existence, unable to understand how open source can cater to them or probably lack of knowledge of how a particular framework can cater to their needs, so ending up choosing some framework which has caught their attention, even though it may be very expensive. The word 'open source' seems to disconnect the academicians and students, probably for the fact that they have not tasted its advantages yet.

I am part of an organization called the IEEE, that has a network of 400,000 members all over the world [and we are growing :)]. The network is a mix of various genre of members from the student, professional, academic and research community. We wanted to leverage our network, large part which are educationists and students, to enable presence in open source communities. I think this is a good beginning and indeed an opportunity for the Drupal community to cater to this network with content and to enable their presence. Developers, such as those part of this forum can look at mentoring or solving challenges put forth by a community with problem statements which can be showcased to the target group of professors or lecturers. And there is more to this. Developers from the Drupal community can engage themselves understand their needs in an interaction with the academicians network by directly being part of IEEE.

Most importantly developers must understand how it can cater to the needs of various groups. Will it help them in assisting other members to be professionally carved? Will it help them in attaining their personal goals? Typically, a lecturer who is looking forward to become an assistant professor or professor would like to publish papers in an international conference. Can the drupal developers enable them to understand that there is indeed a scope of contributing to the community and also attain this goal, both in one shot?

At the end of the day the question that needs to be addressed as a challenge is, "How can being part of a developer forum and contributing to the platform enable the growth of my career?". There have been many initiatives by the IEEE for all the genres of members and we have been constantly been striving to understand how we can add value to them being part of this network and push their personal growth.

DrupalCampDeccan is one such opportunity initiated by the Drupal forum of South India and the IEEE where the members of various genres can be catered to in a win-win situation. We are really thankful that Drupal developers have come forward to collaborate and enable the propogation of the Drupal framework.

Looking forward to see various community members throng into the Drupal forum and contribute substantially.

Good news!

We have tied-up with certain organizers who have already sent a mailer to a few hundreds colleges here inviting them for a primer program in Drupal. I will let you know how it goes by next week!

Hi Ayush,

I've also been very interested and following this topic for a while now, investigating ways to approach the Academic world.

After looking a little bit more at what our neighbors in Asia were doing, I found the Philippines was a great source of inspiration.

The Drupal Community out there has really been doing a very impressive work and I definitely invite you to join the group or take a closer look at the past events, among some of the most recent:

• Drupal Pilipinas: Intensive hands-on training (June 01, 2013).
• Faculty and IT Staff Administrators Hands-on To Drupal Seminar Training (Bulacan State University in Malolos, Bulacan).
• PHDUG AUF Campus Tour 2013 (Angeles University Foundation).
• PHDUG Global Sprint day (National library of the Philippines IT Data Center).
• Drupal 4D Angeles University Foundation Campus Tour 2013 (Angeles University Foundation).

I think in terms of involvement of students and partnership with universities, these links could perhaps already give you an idea of what/how other communities would be successfully carrying events in this area.

I'm sure you should be able to find other great examples of communities around the world and hope you might perhaps as well get enough inspiration to potentially consider engaging in building up bridges with the Academic world in your local communities.

Looking forward to hearing more on the topic.
Cheers!