On October 18, the Raincity Studios development team took their carefully prepared introduction to Drupal across half of Shanghai to Jiao Tong University's Minhang campus in the southwest corner of the city, hoping to stir up a fresh open source breeze at this century-old university.
Much of the credit for this event goes to the support and help of the Jiao Tong Open Source Association. The Shanghai Jiao Tong University Open Source Association is a student club that works to improve students' programming skills, promote Linux and Linux distributions and OpenSolaris, promote open source software, and organize the development of open source projects.
The talk was scheduled to start at 1 pm, but because of problems with equipment and the classroom it finally got under way around 2 pm, after some back and forth. About a dozen students from the Jiao Tong Open Source Association attended, all of them boys. Are women in the development and programming world really that rare?
The main speaker was once again engineer Wang Haoyu (Makara), a developer at Raincity Studios' Shanghai office, who will be familiar to anyone who has come to our events before. He mainly gave the students a conceptual introduction to what Drupal is, how Drupal works and some example Drupal sites, with plenty of demonstrations of concrete Drupal editing along the way.
Outline of the talk: click to download
After Makara's overview of Drupal's features and model, the students should have had a basic understanding of Drupal. Building on that, Yao Weizhen (Mike), another developer at Raincity Studios, demonstrated hands-on how to build a personal site with Drupal 6. He focused on installing modules, configuring the blog and forum, and uploading images; once these are installed and set up, a simple personal site starts to take shape.
[Video originally embedded here.]
Out of interest, some students had already installed Drupal but had run into problems during installation or configuration. In the Q&A session, our engineers, together with Jack from 17LAMP, who also came to the event, answered their questions; we hope the students got the answers they were looking for. Most importantly, we hope a talk like this gave the students who wanted to learn about and try Drupal something real to take away, and helped more students in IT learn about open source and about Drupal.
After our Drupal talk, Jack gave a short talk about 17LAMP. Jack has always been enthusiastic about open source activities and has helped promote and organize many open source events. This Drupal campus visit only happened thanks to Jack bringing everyone together. In the coming weeks, 17LAMP will organize an event called "Campus Girls' LINUX Afternoon Tea", aimed at attracting more women to IT technical events like these. I also believe there must be plenty of skilled women programmers around us, and I hope to see more and more of them at these events!
Finally, thanks once again to the teachers and students of the Jiao Tong Open Source Association for giving us this opportunity to promote Drupal and for providing the venue and equipment. We also hope to see more students interested in open source and Drupal at our future Drupal events.