Drupal UAL web development cop

Drupal UAL: a new open source web development community of practice at UAL

We recently submitted a bid to the UAL Communities of Practice fund as part of the DIAL, process.arts, ALTO UK and SCORE projects to develop a Drupal UAL open source web development community of practice. We're really pleased to announce the panel agreed to provide funding towards the development of this community.

Outline project plan:

This project aims to encourage and develop a new open support network for UAL staff and students to explore, experiment and share ideas and knowledge of using and developing Drupal web environments and projects.  Drupal  (http://drupal.org/ ) is an free and open source content management system which allows users to develop and create free web sites by adapting its free code and software.  Drupal  is an industry standard software used by many individuals, groups, companies, charities and governments including whitehouse.gov mtv.co.uk and data.gov.uk.  Drupal.org has a large community of users and developers, with over 648,000 user accounts and over 10,000 developer accounts Wikipedia [accessed Feb 1st 2012].

Various UAL individuals and departments are developing drupal and open source projects these include, http://commonplace.arts.ac.uk/  developed by CLTAD and student developers;  http://process.arts.ac.uk/  early development by CLTAD and continued development by in-house drupal staff and student developer  and in house developed course websites such as CSMs Architecture: Spaces and Objects http://www.baaso.org.uk/ . There is also interest regarding ‘Technology trends for consideration’ Geoffrey Makstutis  (course director CSM) and Patrick Roberts (course director CSM);  potential open source drupal integration with the new Moodle VLE   and staff interest in open source at UAL. There is currently no support or links between current and new UAL drupal development projects or any UAL formal drupal presence or link with the wider drupal London, UK and national and communities.  The project aims and objective align closely with UAL’s Strategy 2010-15: Communities of Practice, people and communication priorities.

Project outline and aims:

• Bring together the individuals at UAL staff and students who are working with drupal, meet and plan project approach below:  
• Employ two artstemps drupal/web developers to help champion and support the development of UALs in house drupal community. (30 hours of support £408 artstemps)
• In collaboration with interested drupal project staff/developers and student developers we aim to hold 6 hackdays ( 3 hour dropin, software collaboration, discussion and experiment). The hackdays will be held in each college and will provide a drop-in service. An introduction to drupal: for those who would like to learn about drupal and UAL drupal projects and to discuss projects and code development and join the online community.  
• Create and develop an open online UAL drupal network using process.arts groups http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/what-are-project-groups . The online network will promote the hackdays and support dialogue and resources development before and after hackdays. The outputs (Drupal introduction resources, summary of debates and new and future software development ideas and collaborations) the findings of the hackdays will be published in this space.

Contact: Chris Follows - c.follows@arts.ac.uk