Seeking Professional Drupal Mentors

Hi again folks, I teach 12th grade students at High Tech High Chula Vista. We are a project-based charter school and a couple years ago this group (San Diego Drupal Group, that is) helped my students test the beta version of their Drupal Carpool Website (read about that project here: http://www.hightechhigh.org/unboxed/issue10/open_source_software/).

I’m doing another Drupal project with students this spring. We are creating a Digital Media Empire using Drupal (most likely the Open Publish distribution). My goal is for students to act as journalists and publish and edit professional quality articles and photographs.

I’d love to get some professional mentors involved who are willing to offer some help to students as they develop the site and begin publishing. Specifically, our needs include:

SEO/Marketing -- I really could use someone to talk with my students about SEO & Marketing at a somewhat basic level. My students really have no concept that sites appear on Google results pages for specific reasons and I’d love for them to gain some understanding of that in order to help market our site.
Drupal expertise -- in our project, a group of students will be site administrators and will want to create features such as Daily Poll Questions. Additionally, when we go live, we could use assistance porting from our development environment to the actual site.
Leadership -- students will work in teams and we’ll have 9 editors who will need to inspire and motivate peers, facilitate meetings, develop and execute plans, and hopefully face all sorts of leadership challenges. Any professional guidance/mentoring in this area would be much appreciated.

If you are interested in talking more, please feel free to contact me at tmcnamara@hightechhigh.org or reply right here.

Best and Happy New Year, -Tim