(This post gives an overview of a new initiative by the Pune Drupal Community to increase Drupal awareness amongst Pune college students. It was originally posted on drupal.org by Dipen Chaudhary and is reposted here for wider dissemination.)

Overview

In the last pune drupal user meetup ( 26th dec, 09) we all agreed to the need of more drupal awareness as a whole and one of the ways we discussed was to tap the interest early at the student level. To this effect project code named drupalkar (having both hindi and marathi connotations) was planned in which seasoned drupal developers will donate 1 hr to a student gathering in a college to spread drupal joy/way of web development. Approach here is simple, in that 1 hr drupal developer would demo how a website can be made from scratch in 1 hour in form a interactive demo and giving out more ideas and possibilities at the end of the demo. The same would be followed in many colleges with different developers donating time with different demo’s (or maybe same, if one works out to be exceptionally good to catch attention)

Approach

Approach to reach out to students is simple, show something they can make in an hour rather than a speech/talk on why drupal, how drupal? as the talks get incoherent ( its upto the drupal developer conducting the demo session to open up for Q/A which I strongly recommend) and over the time ineffective. We would pickup models from internet and show students how to make that site in drupal and how easy web development is with drupal.

Pilot

To pilot the drupalkar project we decided to pick 5 colleges (list pending and hopefully will be sorted in comments) and 5 drupal volunteers, after which we will map colleges to drupal volunteers and let the individual drupal developer run the show, with some syncing among developers over whats being demo’ed, what was the response etc. As the events would be linear we can adapt and evolve from the feedback of the initial events.

Drupal Volunteers (Drupalkar’s)

• Dipen Chaudhary
• Rajeev Karajgikar
• Parsad Shirgaonkar
• Nikhil Kale
• Abhishek Nagar

Colleges

• PICT (TBC)
• COEP (TBC)
• Wadia College (TBC)
• Narangkar (not sure of the name; TBC)
• Symbiosis ( Abhishek to confirm)

College Coordinators

• Arun Nair
• Amit Karpe
• Vipul (PICT contact)

Timeline

Tentative timeline for the pilot to be executed is 5-6 weeks, which might be adapted and updated on this page for clarification.

Notes

Drupalkar currently is only for pune and maybe taken over to new cities in India by drupal evangelists else where. I am cross posting this to India group for feedback on the approach etc.

Any comments, feedback on the approach or volunteering is important for success of drupalkar, most importantly we need students and organizers to patch colleges in for the drupalkar pilot.

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