The Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance is the most exciting project I've ever had the fortune to work on. It was a mediated event in which I used Drupal to gather alumni memories and run a quiz show via SMS and display photography both on the small iPhone screen and on some giant screens via Flash.

A Bombshell Drops

In February 2008, Jim Ferolo dropped the bomb on Matt Forcum, Harry Williams, Brett Noe and myself that we would be using our respective areas of expertise to produce the gala kickoff for the Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance. Since I was teaching a section of MM 491 on Multimedia for Mobile Devices, my students and I were tasked with building interactive portions so that our donors could interact by sending in memories, voting in a quiz show and sending in their photos. (We would later nix the photo / MMS capability.)

Drupal as a Platform 

I ended up spearheading the creation of a Drupal system that was used solely as a platform. It brokered communication between SMS messages coming in from guests cell phones, messages and votes coming in from a custom iPhone web app, photos being shot at the event and being sent in via iPhoto, and back out to Flash applications that would display photos, quiz show votes, memories and an iPhone web application that displayed photos from the event.

Experience the Event 

The best way to experience this project is to read the series of blog posts I've written in a special section on cascadingStyle.

The two videos below also show a rehearsal for the announcement of a $30 million+ gift from Caterpillar and some snapshots of the memories and quiz show portions of the night.