BADCamp Drupal Higher Education Summit - Stories of rapid adaption and the challenges of standardization at scale

Attending the Higher Education Summit at the 2014 Bay Area Drupal Camp was a great experience. We work with several higher education institutions and are acutely aware of the very specific challenges these organizations face. The summit improved our understanding of the issues and helped them coalesce around a few key overarching concerns: standardization, adaption and scalability.

The summit got off to a great start before even starting because of the theme selected: “Storytellers and Geeks United for Higher Ed”. A clear indication of the importance of not solving just technological issues but solving communication issues with the help of technology. Everyone was in agreement that web people and communication people need to get together to figure out how to best tell their university’s story.

The opening panel session was the perfect illustration of the theme as it brought together technologists and communications partners (with the roles often blending into each other) from the universities of Arizona State, University of California, Davis and University of California, San Francisco. The big news for all was Arizona State’s bold move to enforce (albeit with a light touch) standardization from the top down. Arizona State has embarked on a very ambitious project aiming to provide a complete set of tools for departments to build their websites that spans not just the actual web page but hosting, analytics, sophisticated email and CRM systems (institution-wide Salesforce instance). All this will ultimately enable them to realize their vision of personalizing the experience for every user of the University. While it is still early days everyone seemed very excited about what AS is attempting to do and we are eagerly awaiting news about lessons learned.

A session by John Bickar of Stanford Web Services was inspiring and provided a great roadmap for any university about how to drive adoption of Drupal within the institution and support the needs of the community by providing both infrastructure and Drupal development tools in the form of pre-baked solutions and templates. As John indicated the forthcoming challenges for them will be those of success. They are seeing great adoption of their hosting solution and web development tools and need to ensure that they will be able to scale.

Finally, I found the discussions around development processes, estimation and the use of agile particularly interesting. It is clear that where such processes have been put in place it has yielded positive results. At a break-out session on the subject everyone agreed that while agile provides a great set of principles it is equally important that to adapt the practices to the specific needs of an organization. In other words don’t be afraid to try a few different things and see what works for you, but start getting a process in place!

Overall, it looks like the future of Drupal in Higher Education is brighter than ever. The problems are those of improving communication and dealing with the success that widespread adoption brings. Helping to standardize around common practices in how Drupal is deployed and how individual departments adapt so that they can meet both wider University needs as well as their specific requirements will be key. This will allow the University as a whole and groups within it to each tell the best version of their story.

Many thanks to everyone that worked hard to make this summit possible and we look forward to attending next year!