Building Social Web Applications with Drupal

Proposed by Nicholas Wang

Course Description

Open Hippel is an open source project I started back in April, 2010. It's basically a Social Web App that allows anyone to form groups around their interests. It'll have tools to help people make decisions as a group, set criteria and milestones, and also have personal profile and history so people with skills can be connected with people needed those skills.

So far, TEDxTokyo Innovators Hub and K. International School are two of our biggest supporters, and Keio University had made it an official school project, which means students can be credited for working on it!

My plan is to open the development of this Open Hippel platform up as a course. We'll have hands on development classes, (we need some Drupal gurus from Acquia to help out on this!) The course work will be documented and with the help of Keio students, translated into Japanese. By the end of the course, the whole "book" will be available online under CC license.

In learning, it is far better to have a project that is real and has impact on the real world! Just like Stanford's project on Extreme Affordability products, students are far more engaged when they're working on real world projects. I think Open Hippel can similarly be that engaging project at P2PU.

Additional Information

Further email thread available in Google Spreadsheet - John Britton, Heather James cc'd.

Questions? Suggestions? Praise?