Thursday I flew up to Michigan to see a group of Medill School of Journalism (Northwestern University) students make their final Media Management class presentation.
Each year, Rich Gordon's class undertakes an innovation project, usually in partnership with a media company. This year they did two projects -- one with a Morris newspaper, the other with Yahoo.
The newspaper plan they showed us was very well thought out. It included a print component and an online component, the latter making extensive use of Drupal including social networking, blogging, directory publishing, ranking/rating and recommendation systems. The students didn't actually build the site, but rather designed and specified it based on a careful examination of Drupal's capabilities. They were enthusiastic about Drupal's suitability.
Medill has previous experience with earlier versions of Drupal. In 2004, a class built an experimental citizen-media site called GoSkokie. At that point working with Drupal was something of a struggle, from what I gather from conversations with the professors.
This year it was different.
In the Yahoo project they examined and analyzed the opportunities for local group (clubs, organizations, informal) support, beginning with Yahoo's own toolkit -- which they quickly found frustrating. Their final presentation to Yahoo earlier this week, in Evanston was Drupal-based.
I should point out that in the Morris case the Drupal dependency was pre-determined -- it was one of the ground rules I laid down for our engagement. While we have a significant engineering staff, they're running at about a 120% workload and the best chance of getting innovation into a market comes from smart use of existing tools. The class did a great job of thinking outside the box while coloring inside the lines. Everything they proposed can be executed.
The Yahoo decision is what surprised me. I'm looking forward to getting a copy of that presentation so I can see the details.
One other point: The Morris engagement was built around the principles of the NewspaperNext innovation process. It began with literally hundreds of interviews with consumers and businesspeople under the guidance of some senior Morris executives and a couple of University of Missouri grad students who had been interning at Morris, designing a "jobs to be done" data-gathering process, and it included extensive analysis of economic data to identify potential targets of opportunity within the local business community.
Technology is just a tool, and it's important that purposes and plans be carefully crafted before tools get loaded into the process. I think the enthusiasm about using Drupal to execute the plan is a tribute to Drupal's flexibility.