[Air-L] CMS for cross-dept/university project?

[Chris Werry]

Hi,

Was hoping someone on the list might be able to offer some advice on CMS
choice.

We have a common book program on campus. The writing program and some
departments teach the same book in order to foster conversation and 
community. There is
interest in expanding this so 4 or 5 other universities/colleges in the 
area also participate.

Folks on our campus want to set up a CMS to help make this happen. I'm
trying to help with some of the planning. They want a CMS that can be 
used to coordinate events
and speakers, upload shared teaching resources, and perhaps leverage 
some social media
tools to build community. But nobody involved has much technical expertise,
and...I'm not sure they really know what they want to do with the site.

Early on I showed them some drupal sites, but some of our partners weren't
too familiar with this, and at that point we didn't have any tech people 
to help with drupal. So the
conversation turned to Wordpress...I showed them more model sites, 
including CUNY's Academic
Commons, which they really liked. But of course a group of developers 
put a lot of effort
into this. So it would be no simple feat to attempt something similar.

We now have one developer, and as it turns out she's most familiar with
drupal - although she can also build Wordpress sites.

So my question is, does anyone have any recommendations? Perhaps some model
sites or distributions of drupal? (Has anyone tried openscholar - I 
suspect it may
be too focused on building individual faculty sites). Or a Wordpress 
site that fits the
bill?

One final thought. The folks running this do have some money, so if you've
been involved in a customization of drupal or Wordpress which could be 
reworked and re-themed
by our developer, they might be willing to pay for 'consulting' etc.

I'm interested in this main because I'd like to see such platforms created
for our writing program, in order to support some of the work we do across
departments and with outside groups.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Chris