[WebPub] An Open Scholar Users Group

[Edmund Carlevale]

Dear Web-Pubbers,

After yesterday’s conversation with other web-pubbers from MIT and Harvard at my Open Scholar presentation, I feel even more strongly that Open Scholar is brilliant, needed, and the best option in web publishing. I still can’t get over the fact that MIT is a few miles from Harvard, I’ve been going to meetups and camps and cons regularly since 2008, and have myself been trying to build my own academic Drupal distribution — and it was only on Saturday that I really looked at Open Scholar closely. Leaving apart the complicated idea of Open Scholar as a distribution, the functionality and ideas in Open Scholar are simply the best I’ve seen, not only in Drupal but in any platform. And is likely to remain the best for years to come, Drupal 8 or no Drupal 8. So I can’t help but feel something has gone wrong in how the Drupal community communicates its work, at least within the Boston area.

I’m starting an Open Scholar Users Group, a monthly, day-time meetup for developers and site builders and users at area universities and college. Details to be posted soon, with input and suggestions very welcome.

The approach I myself will be taking to Open Scholar is more modest than a university-wide deployment. I think even a single instance running a single site would be valuable. Even though a single instance could run hundreds of sites, that feels too overwhelming to me. I think a department or large research center would yield tremendous benefits by running just a handful of instances, each configured to serve complementary functions (faculty profiles, conference sites, research groups, etc). At any rate, that’s the approach I’ll be taking. And Pantheon’s hosting is also ideal for that kind of development.

This morning I set up a couple of sites on Pantheon for OS newcomers at MIT who want to test OS for their departments and centers, and I handed off User 1 access to them. I’ve also posted five screenshots to walk newcomers through the initial site setup <http://drupalgroup.mit.edu/os-mit/documents-graphics>. I’ll continue to post more of those, but one of the best things about Open Scholar is how effortless it is to learn and work with, once you get the hang of it. 

An incredible amount of work has gone into Open Scholar (kudos and thanks!), and I think a lot still needs to be done. But after 23 years at MIT and 7 years as a Drupal developer, I’m dead certain that Open Scholar will dominate academic web publishing, and will make a major contribution in many areas in doing so.

Cheers,

Ed Carlevale

MIT Drupal Group <http://drupalgroup.mit.edu/>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/webpub/attachments/20151006/95c56206/attachment.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 1844 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/webpub/attachments/20151006/95c56206/attachment.bin