Week 13: Drupal Class

The Beginning Drupal class on November 20 went well. We had about 25 attendees, and aside from the fact that the Internet connection was a little problematic in our classroom, there were no major snafus. I'm now moving on to the second class, which is officially on the calender for Dec. 4th. There are a number of people from the first class who have already signed on for the second one. With the first class under my belt, planning the next one should be less work. I'm actually rather enjoying the process, especially the feeling that I'm helping facilitate a community around campus. The interest is out there; all that's needed is a little organization to get things off the ground, and people seem genuinely grateful for the opportunity to get training.

Last week I also made progress on the Portal Community Interface template. After messing around with Drupal all semester, I realized I'd finally gotten to the point that I feel like I know what I'm doing when I use it. I'm hardly an expert, but I don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to do basic things anymore, which is satisfying. I still have more work to do on the CPI template, but I think I should have a good working draft by the end of next week.

Week 12: Event Coordination

Last weekend I was at the Midwest Archives Conference symposium on digital preservation in Lawrence, KS, which means I once again have two weeks worth of blogging to catch up on. And once again, it was a busy two weeks. Before leaving town on Thursday the 6th, I was scrambling to get ready for our consultant's visit the following week. This involved finding available space on campus to hold two public presentations, one on Tuesday evening and another on Wednesday morning; sending out last minute emails to advertise the events; getting information for a press release; and having a conference call with David (the consultant from CTC).

It was a little crazy, but everything turned out fine. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the Tuesday presentation on building digital communities because I had class, but I heard it was well-attended. On Wednesday morning, we had a two-hour consulting session to talk about the Community Information Portal, which I thought went really well. Then came the second presentation, which was about Drupal modules and drew an even bigger crowd than the previous night's. All in all, I thought the visit was a success.

I couldn't rest on my laurels though, because I still had the Nov. 20 Drupal class to finish coordinating. This took up a good deal of my time last week. Almost 30 people are expected to attend, and I've been fielding emails from them. Cliff and Matt Arant will be leading the class, and we had a meeting on Thursday to plan the course. Since the first class is covering basic Drupal skills, we also decided to follow up with a second, more advanced class on site building in December. This will be taught by Daniel Walls, a student in the Engineering Department. So now I've begun planning that as well, and will simultaneously need to organize the 2-day training workshop we're planning for December or January.

Somewhere in there I also need to work on the Portal Community Interface (not to be confused with the Community Information Portal), but that's a topic for another post. Hopefully I will have some progress to report on that next time.

Week 10: A List

The last couple of weeks have been pretty busy, therefore I'm going to make things easier by briefly listing what I've been up to:

• didn't go to DrupalCamp in Chicago (too much other work to do that weekend);
  
• scheduled a pre-training Drupal basics class in the Information Arcade for Nov. 20;
• found some potential volunteers (grad students in the Engineering dept.) to teach the class with Cliff;
• spoke more with Chicago Technology Cooperative about having them come to Iowa City to conduct the 2-day training in early-mid December (still working on the logistics);
• also discussed having one of the CTC people come to the WiderNet office to consult on the CIP project, tentatively scheduled for Nov. 10 or 11 but yet to be finalized;
• posted an ad on www.rentacoder.com for someone to develop the CIP site-builder interface, also sent CTC specifications for the interface and got a REALLY high price quote (I'll be talking with Cliff and them about it more next week);
• was contacted by someone with an organization similar to CTC called Net2Community, who is working on a somewhat similar project, and scheduled a call with him for next week to discuss potential collaboration;
• started a new people directory template in Drupal;
• did a fresh Drupal installation so the database can be copied and used for future templates;
• worked on installing and using some new modules.

Next week I'll be meeting with Tom Burns and Cliff to hopefully finalize the 2-day training. There is still much to be done before the end of the semester, and I'm getting a little worried about having a CIP prototype ready to show Intel in December or January. I'm at the point in the project right now where I have no idea how everything is going to get pulled together, and I feel like there's only so much I can do by myself. I'm hoping that everything will magically fall into place during the next month and a half, in the meantime I'll just keep plugging away...