Pantheon's EDU Platform, Acquia's Content Hub, and academic web development

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Ed Carlevale's picture

I'm putting together two workshops to introduce Pantheon's EDU Platform to Boston-area universities and college, and wanted to ask if there was someone available to lead a workshop on Acquia's Content Hub? Both platforms speak to a need I'm encountering over and over in academic web development: how to deal with the growing volume and variety of academic content. We need new networks and tools, and introducing these is a slow-going task, hence this series of workshops to move the work forward.

What's exciting about Pantheon's EDU platform is that it makes it possible to manage a fleet of websites at the level of configuration. That is going to be a game changer. It solves two of the biggest problems we face: 1) outsourced site development that delivers a stand-alone website to a single department, school, or center; and 2) the lack of in-house staff that can maintain a single site, let alone a fleet of sites. I try to lay out how this will work in this schematic.

For awhile, I thought Harvard's Open Scholar was going to be the solution that academia needs. It certainly will be for Harvard, but I don't see it as a viable option elsewhere. Brilliant as it is in making it possible to spit up new sites for all sorts of purposes, offering the best user experience I've found on any website, nonetheless, from a code point of view Open Scholar is a glacier of accumulated ideas that will overwhelm all efforts at maintainability. Spaces? Boxes? These are ideas that take us back to the exciting days of Development Seed, yet those and so many other ideas live on in the Open Scholar code. Like MIT's own Drupal Cloud offering, Harvard's Open Scholar is essentially decoupled from the Drupal ecosystem  of contrib modules and community engagement. And when you look at, say, Stanford's extraordinary GitHub repositories, you have a vivid understanding of why that engagement is fundamental to long-term maintainability.

Nonetheless, for Harvard itself, Open Scholar does something that every other university will struggle to catch up to: makes it possible for faculty, staff, students, departments, centers and schools to quickly set up a new site. That is the explosive growth waiting to happen in academic development, and it's only waiting on universities coming up with a better way of delivering websites.

But all this really is just about figuring out a better way to do what universities are already doing: building websites that show a calendar, some news, and a list of people. What interests me are the things that can done once these basic tasks are handled more efficiently. MIT recently delivered a Climate Change report announcing a new Climate Change Initiative. I became a developer because of climate change. It is the driving force of everything I've tried to do as a developer at MIT, because improving the conversation is the fundamental first step toward making progress in the face of climate change. If you look at MIT's climate change website, you can't help but notice how often the word "conversation" appears without actually resulting in any conversation. When I worked for Nobel Laureate Mario Molina's Air Pollution in Megacities program, the program had millions in funding to bring together stakeholders and experts from government, business, science, medicine, city planners, and citizen groups to collectively agree on what is presently known about air pollution. And five years of discussion, they organized their first field study to collect data. That isn't what they were asked to do but it is what scientists, even someone as brilliant as Mario Molina, do. MIT thrives on the model of funding > research > report. They are peerless at this. But communicating that work, and getting involved in the messy work of discussion, is what needs to happen now.

There's one last piece to add to this story and that has to do with Drupal. Not Drupal per se but Drupal as an Open Source platform. What I've learned about Open Source over the last seven years of being involved in Boston's Drupal community is that you have to give in equal measure to what you hope to receive. You can't go it alone. Your work depends on communication and collaboration and some rough sort of consensus. And what's true for open source is all the more true for the progress we need with climate change.

A bit of a soapbox there but you can skip all that and just come to the workshops! Details on the MIT Drupal Group website.

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