Seeking clients and mentors for pro-bono student drupal projects Jan-April

I’m a Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. From January-April, I’ll be teaching a project-based course where student teams work on behalf of non-profit/non-governmental organizations. Each team of four master’s degree students will design, build, document, and hand off a web-based content/community management system.

Right now, I’m trying to line up clients for these student teams, and experienced mentors.

Client organizations will not pay any fees, but may need to spend more time interacting with the students than they might with professional consultants offering similar services. Mentors, who will typically be professional consultants, will not be paid any fees, but will experience the joy of mentoring talented students, the possibility of recruiting future employees, and a chance to see their own efforts on a pro bono project amplified by the student team.

Neither clients nor mentors need to be local to Ann Arbor, MI, though proximity is a plus. If you might like to serve as a mentor, or you have an idea for a client, I’d love to hear from you. I’d especially like to hear from potential mentors who have a client project in mind, perhaps a really cool project that just didn’t have enough funding to pay your full rates.

Here’s what we’re looking for in a client project:
--An organization with a mission that will motivate students: arts promotion, political advocacy, civic dialogue, social service, economic development, etc.
--A project idea that includes some elements of communications with and among users, in addition to content provision.
--A project that is of appropriate scope to be delivered in the time span of the course (four months). It could be just one component that is a milestone toward a larger vision, but should be a separable piece.
--Willingness to interact with student team during requirements analysis phase in January and provide feedback on prototypes every couple of weeks during February-March.
--Content/community managers ready to be trained and take over the running of the site in March-April.
--For non-local organizations, it would be highly desirable if the organization can pay for the students to travel to visit at least once, in January to do requirements analysis and/or at the end of February to spend Spring Break week on site doing development. We realize, however, that this may not always be possible.

For project mentors, we’re basically looking for experienced drupal consultants. A mentor will review a series of deliverables and offer sage advice about how to interact with the client and how to make best use of available social and technical resources in the drupal community.

More details of the course, targeted to the potential students, can be found at http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/courses/winter07/SI631/

More details about me at my webpage, http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick