Eureka

Click "Read more" for my pitch from last summer for MATC to teach a Drupal class, something we started doing in August 2008. You never know in the IT business, but events seem to have confirmed the analysis. The first thing anyone should do who really wants to know what makes Drupal tick is to view principal Dries Buytaert's video from DrupalCom last March (2009) in Washington, DC. When I saw this video, I happened to be reading Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, an epic novel about self-regulating communities with themes strikingly reminiscent of those Dries' touched on.

-- Mike Bertrand

One of the most difficult tasks for IT organizations and professionals is looking ahead intelligently to determine technologies that will be stable, effective, and inexpensive over time. Scalability is also important, the ability of the technology to adapt well to ever larger tasks and data sets. Often overlooked is the salience of broad recognition and acceptance, because this translates into software tools, books, extended support systems through the Internet, and ultimately a pool of knowledgeable workers ready to implement the technology as part of their professional skill set. The existence of a ready block of workers can itself become a material factor as rank-and-file software professionals familiarize themselves with a technology on their own time and begin to recommend it in their organizations and those organizations find it relatively easy to find workers with these skills. That is exactly what happened with Java in the late 1990s, Sun Microsystems having the foresight to provide the technology free to all, and this effect has gained momentum with the Open Source movement.

We take it for granted that every serious organization today is moving towards the Internet. There are a number of reasons for this movement, including near-universal familiarity with browsers, the ability to centralize software and data store but simultaneously distribute access worldwide at the flip of a switch, and the increasing sophistication of Ajax-enabled web apps to the point of approaching desktop apps in features and usability.

Most organizations do not have IT as their central focus, but are consumers of IT services, so the difficulty of choosing wisely is compounded. A vocational college has the luxury of being able to investigate promising new areas in a timely manner and do controlled experiments to probe technical viability and gauge interest. This means learning the new technology after it has ripened to a certain point, participating in its community, and offering classes in it.

I propose that Drupal is a promising new candidate. It is Open Source, therefore free and productive of a growing worldwide community interested in developing both Drupal itself and applications in it. A great deal can be done in Drupal by configuration only, no programming required. More sophisticated customization requires PHP programming, however, and even novice Drupal users are teased from the get that programming is required for any advanced use.

As of this date (July 20, 2008), the search term Drupal turns up 25,300,00 hits in Google, which shows extensive interest if nothing else, a matter of importance in its own right as detailed above (compare to 11,000,000 for Ruby on Rails, a somewhat analogous technology showing great promise a couple years ago, but which has seemed to plateau). The entry point for the community is drupal.org, perusal of which gives an idea of the immense resources available to every Drupal administrator and programmer -- advice, documentation, add-on modules, self-help forums, and so on. Drupal was originated by Dries Buytaert around 2000 when he was a student at the University of Antwerp. Business Week recently identified Dries as one of the most promising young technology entrepreneurs of 2008. His site is also of interest, particularly the pages showing Drupal adopters, including universities (Cornell, NYU, Harvard, Columbia, the Wendt Engineering Library at UW-Madison, and others), news and entertainment organizations and individuals ( the Onion, New York Observer, Air America Radio, Metallica), governments (Belgium), and businesses (Adobe, FedEx, Nike, Yahoo, AOL). Madison Area Technical College is in the process of moving the external website to Drupal.

This video (25 minutes) from Paul Albert at Cornell University gives a terrific overview of why colleges and libraries in particular find it advantageous to adopt Drupal, and mentions many who have:

Drupal is an Open Source web-based Content Management System (CMS), programmable in PHP. It is akin to a community-oriented blogging system, with full authentication and personalization, customizable in every way. That doesn't do it justice however, since the central problem Drupal addresses is the storage, tracking, administration, and presentation of large interrelated document sets on the web, at the same time enabling user content creation and graded administration, as the reference to blogging suggests. Administering and automating such tasks is a pivotal challenge today for every organization seeking a web presence, including of course businesses, but also online communities of every type, non-profit groups, and even political campaigns (CivicSpace is a Drupal spin-off of the latter type, and Open Source means such efforts can fork technically and organizationally and begin a life of their own).

Our Drupal course will take up every aspect of installing, customizing, administering, and programming Drupal, with an emphasis on the last point (writing modules in PHP). Being Open Source, students can download and use Drupal for free on their own equipment and will want to do that. There will be little or no software expense for the school, our contribution centering on guidance, encouragement, and instruction. Such initiatives are a central part of MATC's mission according to top school leaders (quote from the Wisconsin State Journal, Nov 25, 2007):

They [students] come here to get hands-on skills and they come here to get the cutting-edge version of those hands-on skills," said Terrance Webb, MATC's associate vice president for learner success. Our (information technology) people, for example, will have a new set of offerings almost every semester, but certainly every year. That's more difficult to do in a university because they have set degree programs.

We have a chance to get ahead of the curve here. Open Source has turned a corner, increasingly entertained and adopted by large organizations as an alternative to costly commercial solutions. The Open Source movement dovetails nicely with academic traditions and practices: free exchange of software, ideas, and documents in a communitarian spirit. People can hardly wait to share their ideas, uninhibited by organizational constraints favoring proprietary thinking and trade secrets. The Open Source and web aspects of Drupal reflect modern approaches all computer technologists today need to understand and be familiar with. This will be one of few if not the only semester long course on the subject in the country.

The Open Source phenomenon is itself a source of interest and draws an increasing following, paralleling as it does some broad trends in social networking technology (think Facebook or mybarackobama.com, for that matter, where sub-communities are provided the means and encouraged to organize themselves through a website).

With Open Source, anyone whatsoever can download the software and start to experiment with it, including both rank amateurs and sophisticated web developers in their off hours. The former prepare themselves for professional work, the latter evangelize and promote the technology within their organizations. We will attract both and many in between (as we do with other courses), developing a fusion curriculum addressing a wide range of aptitude and experience. The experienced professionals will collaborate in curriculum development, bringing their organizational and technical experience to the table. In other words, the course itself will be developed in an Open Source spirit, the idea of leveraging community knowledge and experience infusing course development. The Internet Developer Certificate's 595+ members will provide recruits for the first wave, themselves spreading the word to coworkers and friends to build the course.

-- July 20, 2008