Today I am announcing an effort to start to knit colleges are universities together (in Drupal at least) as part of the Drupal in EDU Consortium.  It’s an idea I’ve talked about and heard talked about for a long time but I’ve grown tired of talk.  It’s time for action and after an email conversation with a few other colleges I think we’re starting to chart a course forward.  We all face similar problems when it comes to Drupal and a lot of times it’s about knowing who to ask to get something done.  This is especially true in education where a lot of us are solving the same problems or needing to learn which modules to download to get going.

The idea isn’t to silo information either in our universities and colleges or in a governing body but to spread information as organically as possible.  By mirroring the drupal community at large we can propagate information vital to the building of our platforms and websites more easily.  This website now has a few conventions that it will try to follow and I hope that others will follow suit.  Here’s the idea:

• Start drupal.{youruniversity}.edu or something similar
• make a feed off that or another site for the tag drupal and publicize it
• aggregate in from other known education sites so that all our posts mash up in a list on each other’s sites
• Use groups. drupal.org higher education and education groups in order to get additional word out about the work we’re doing
• Host code from your institution either internal to help your staff collaborate or external to help everyone
• Get a feature server going (http://drupal.org/project/fserver) to make it easier to maintain and share these features / mini modules we’re all building.  I’m hoping to add this functionality into this site when the next version of ELMS comes out.

If you’d like to participate more actively in this community you can comment here, g. d. o. or email me about helping out with user groups.  We also have an IRC channel that you can access by clicking chat at the top or going to #drupal-edu on IRC.

I posted about this to some groups on g. d. o. here – http://groups. drupal.org/node/165144