interactiondesign ixda

I joined the Drupal community 3 years ago and it has been instrumental in helping me to stay up to date with the latest web trends / developments. Since about 1 year, I've been using Drupal to teach my web engineering students interaction design and information architecture in a practical, hands-on way, by building prototypes with Drupal.

In my opinion, the best kept secret about Drupal is that its power is not so much the technology - a web content management framework. The power lies in the community. Unfortunately, there is still somewhat a divide between designers and developers.

Drupallers, take note of the Interaction Design community (IxDA)! If you haven't already.

I joined the ixda mailing list 3 years ago and it has contributed immensely to my personal growth as an interaction design practitioner. The in-depth design discussions in this community are a true treasure trove.

However, even with 10'000 members, I consider it still somewhat one of the internet's "best kept secrets". IMHO, the current website doesn't succeed well in representing the power of this community. Just recently, IxDA announced plans to re-launch the ixda.org website using Drupal. See Dries Buytaert's blog post about it.

There has been some talk recently at ixda about "open source user experience" and collaborating with the open source movement and learning from each other. I think this is a fantastic opportunity just waiting to happen!