By jaskegreen on

In gathering information for my action research project, I would like to know from those of you who are using Drupal in your oganization or with a group of people have been successful in creating a culture of collaboration. Specifically, how has the use of Drupal encouraged the change and what steps did you take prior to implimentation to ensure a healthy transition?

For the record, I am looking at using Drupal for an Intranet for my school district. Believe it or not, it can be hard to get teachers to use technology.

Comments

Max Bell’s picture

Max Bell commented

jaskegreen:

First, I need to qualify my position. I'm in the process of migrating my users to Drupal (I'm waiting for my hosting service to upgrade our version of PHP). I've also been on-line for more than fifteen years, and I know of what I speak.

The stumbling block isn't the technology. It's getting people to write. For someone merely writing a blog, there's no issue; they don't have to rely on anyone else for content. For any kind of a group environment, the most important consideration is whether or not you're interested in being it's primary contributor/user. You're lucky in the sense that you're starting with a semi-captive audience to begin with; chances are, one or two people want to start writing right now, this very second, they just don't have a place to do it. When you identify them, cherish them, because they'll make or break the effort. But be prepared to "prime the pump" yourself, regardless of what system you end up using.

I'm moving from phpNuke to Drupal because of the level and flexibility of organization involved and that so much of it is designed around it. In dealing with systems where a lot of content is generated by large numbers of people, the first casualty is relevance. When the whole site is available on a single web page, it's not much of a problem, but when you're dealing with a link on a message board that refers to a web log entry that refers to an article someone linked to, people start losing interest rapidly.

In particular, I'd think that a well-organized collection of RSS newsfeeds would be of particular interest to your users, since it'd put most of the world's news-services at thier fingertips, making research infinately simpler. My own site is an attempt to be a kind of mock news-magazine, intended for a high school to college aged audience, and what drew me to Drupal in the first place was that I wanted a way to interest my writers in tracking down interesting source material without having to go crawling all over the net to find it. In turn, being able to syndicate content from my site may even draw in a few new users and ultimately I won't sweat the process of link one-upmanship quite so much.

I just love going out of my way to avoid stealing links from metafilter and then finding out someone else posted them just the same. *Shrug* At least I can put it down to legitimate coincidence.

For anyone looking at using a CMS, my best advice is to set up a prototype (I just install foxserve on my win32 box and then install the CMS from there), get a feel for it, and then migrate THAT to your server. There are a lot of chores, like setting up your taxonomy, deciding which modules to use, etc. that are simply much simpler if you either pre-configure them beforehand or at least have a firm grasp of how they work and a plan for setting them up before you go live with a final product. I've spent a few pleasant evenings tinkering with this myself, and am still turning up stuff I want to have ready when our hosting service finally gets that copy of php installed...