U of T Drupal Users Group

It's been my experience that U of T, with its highly distributed nature, tends to follow a lead-by-example approach to change and innovation. There tend to be three drivers:

• Direction from senior IT leadership (which, btw, has taken a sharp upturn in recent years with the appointment of a CIO and the establishment of ITS)
• Someone gets it right somewhere in the university and everyone else follows that best practice, thus establishing a norm
• Enough players pick a path and we all eventually end up walking the same direction

In this case, I see the possibility of leveraging the last two items and maybe even getting endorsement from the first. A good first step is to get all the Drupalists together so we know who we are and can start helping each other on current projects. The next would be to create a community that others can join when they have a requirement or project that could leverage Drupal. After that we engage the larger community by contributing, which in the case of Drupal is quite easy since there's already a huge groundswell of collaboration through both local and global means.

So why does an old Microsoft crone like me care? Well, I've embraced Drupal for a number of projects (including this site) and have concluded that this product and the community that embraced it works. Drupal has a future in enterprise and represents a bright alternative to expensive and convoluted commercial solutions. Having spent years in a love/hate relationship with SharePoint, I know of what I speak.

That said, Dentistry is betting on Drupal for its entire web services infrastructure and we are in the process of building it right now. Acquia is being courted as a partner because they are the frontrunner in enterprise implementation of Drupal and, hell, Dries owns the company. It works to Dentistry's selfish benefit to get others in the university on board so we can help each other. In other words, I'm happy to help drive a direction and demonstrate a working solution, which will hopefully shape a more structured future for CMS development in the university.

So what does that mean in concrete actions:

• Build our local community using the TKF forums as a home base
• Organize meetups, either specific to U of T or joined with DUG TO, to share case studies, discuss and solve challenges on current projects and generally help each other build better solutions
• Leverage the university name and scope to bring in outside experts to help us learn and grow
• Contribute to the broader Drupal community so the world is better for us having been in the game

(OK, so that last bit isn't exactly concrete, but everyone needs a dream.)