Young Writers Project

youngwritersproject.org is a modest nonprofit site that is confined to teen users in Vermont and part of New Hampshire. The site has been amazingly successful in building community, in efficiently taking in thousands of submissions and in setting up various systems to provide young writers with feedback.

This site has been a work in progress both on the part of the Web site creator -- the director of Young Writers Project who is a writer/editor by trade and not a trained Web designer -- and the students who are amazingly committed to exchanging ideas, sharing their writing and trying new things.

There are a total of about 60,000 students in our overall target market; in a scant 16 months we've had about 2,100 sign up and use the site. We are getting about 500 visits a day, 100 to 150 new pieces of writing a day and we've had over 17,000 comments since October, 2007.

What is most interesting is how the students have improved their writing by using this site. We publish best work in five daily newspapers, on radio and on stage. We've published over 1,000 students' work so far in 16 months. We've seen an improvement in the quality of the writing submitted and the quality of the work posted on the blogs.

We are also using Drupal for closed, Web-based Online Writing Centers. In those sites, again, students are writing more and better and are creating community. We are doing surveys of student performance and attitudes. The simple explanation for all this is students like the medium, find the Drupal installations pretty intuitive and they love getting feedback from peers and professionals. We are taking a solitary, scary practice -- writing -- and making it more social, more friendly, more fun. As one student told a local school board recently in a presentation about one of our sites: "I used to hate to write. Now I love it."

The biggest problem, of course, has been time and knowledge. I feel that if I knew much more about php and Drupal and Web design, we could move much faster than we are in adapting to student ideas and habits. As it is, we move incredibly fast in developing new things but there is much, much more to be done.

And, of course, we sometimes move too fast. We've done some things on the site that we probably shouldn't have and we've used a few modules that we wish we hadn't. We now have created a clone site where we pound away and work out kinks.

What has been the best part of this is that, for the most part, the Drupal community has been incredibly giving and helpful in our effort. Our mission is pretty clear -- to help students learn to write and create an audience for their voices -- and most people in Drupal World really appreciate what we're trying to do and that has been great.

And, of course, I've been bowled over -- ever since I was told about Drupal in early 2006 by a woman in New Zealand who happened upon our former stodgy html site -- by the work and effort so many people are putting into the Drupal project.

A couple of things to note: We started out using Bluehost and found that its server could not take the traffic, nor the load of an active Drupal site. (We had one project in which we received 20,000 visitors in three weeks and that forced the Bluehost server to send us to the corner for numerous, five-minute times out.) We are now using MediaTemple; their gs was not enough but their various dv products have been great.

Rather than get into a list of modules that we've used, it might be most instructive to let you know that for our audience, these are the functions that they most appreciate: Recent content blocks, who's online, notifications and subscriptions (though this module has been dicey and has caused us problems on one site -- we can't wait for the completed fix); they like to see who's on and what's being written. They love the forums and polls. They comment like there's no tomorrow and often have to police themselves to stay on point. They love avatars.
Interestingly, and we've found this in other ways as well, the kids aren't as technologically savvy as we'd expected (perhaps this is because we live in a rural state which still has a lot of dial-up service) and so the less-intuitive methods within Drupal of uploading photos and audio has held up the participation in that part of the site. (Also an example of how our lack of knowledge has also hindered the effort.)
They also appreciate the safety of the site, safety being defined as a respectful tone. They tend to take care of this themselves, but it is greatly aided by Drupal which allows us to manually check and activate new users, block access to profiles, block robots (much improvement there) and quickly moderate comments and nodes if need be (only one minor incident.)
We tried organic groups with the main site but ran into compatibility issues. Fact is it would be great to be able to have both closed groups, invitation groups and open groups, but this seemed to be difficult.
Organic groups in smaller, newer installations works great but only for "closed groups."

Where we'd like to head is to incorporate both audio and live writing in areas where we can bring in professional writers...We'd love to have groups with varying levels of access...and we are looking hard at multi-site configurations.

Our next step is this --we are raising additional money to pay for professional guidance on rebuilds that will allow us scalable growth. We have learned this -- the idea AND the software work. And we are ever so thankful to have found Drupal. No lie.

I'm not sure this has been technically helpful to those few who are reading this, but conceptually what we have found is that Drupal works; it has amazing community support and it has modules and add-ons that really open up the ability to create community.

geoff gevalt