In Vancouver a few of us did some talking about the various Drupal companies "giving back" to Drupal in some way. Shortly thereafter Zack and I did some thinking about a more formal "rallying cry" type slogan that everyone (including individual consultants, developers, and end users) could get behind.
The following is my DRAFT proposal for a "3% for Drupal". There are still SEVERAL missing pieces to this puzzle:
1) There is not currently a "proper" place to actually donate money.
2) There is no infrastructure in place to determine how the money is used.
Eventually, I would love to see a page that lives at Drupal.org containing much of the following information along with a "donate now" button and several banner/badge images that sites could display (perhaps a simple module that would display this in a block). These badges would link back to the Drupal.org page (drupal.org/3percent ?) containing a nice clean explanation.
That being said, here's what I've got (please excuse the cut and paste from my outliner application):
The Draft
3% to Drupal Campaign
• As the Drupal project is growing, we are realizing that there is a certain amount of overhead to running a large project like this.
• We have several people who dontate 3 to 5 hours a day or more to the project without pay. We are greatful for their effort, but we also realize that we could easily lose these talented individuals any day. We realize that there is only so much time a person can donate before the rent becomes due and they need to head out in search of wages.
• There is also a lot of work in maintaining the infrastructure of Drupal.org itself.
▼ There are also changes to Drupal core and closely related modules that would benefit the entire community, yet would be too far reaching to be sponsored by any individual site.
• Getting CCK, Workflow, Actions, Views, fixed up and into core.
• Another example: Project module is used on very few sites. Yet it is one of the pillars of drupal.org. This module needs to be maintained and improved from time to time, but it is usually difficult to find the resources for this.
• Think of this as our roads and town hall. Until now, we have depended on volunteers to build this infrastructure. But our population has grown to a point where volunteer resources may not be able to keep up with demand.
• Drupal can be better than "good enough". We should have incentives for developers to strive higher and go beyond "working" to "easy to use" and even "beautiful". The benefits will be self perpetuting. As more good work is done and there is a precedence for things like great user interface and design, more people will be inspired to do good work.
▼ So we would like to encourage anyone who is using Drupal to generate a revenue stream to consider budgeting 3% to Drupal.
▼ This 3% could be in the form of currency or time.
• A little over an hour for someone working a 40 hour week.
• One person gives one day each week for a company with 10 employees.
• $30 on a $1000 module.
• $600 on a $20,000 site.
• Build it into your project costs.
• Donated money will be held in an account and given out as grants for this type of work.
• We feel that these incentives will attract more talent to Drupal and ensure that we can keep the talent that we already have.
▼ We also want to encourage people to display one of the "3% to Drupal" banners on their sites with a link to [this page].
• maybe we could create a module that defines a block with a choice of badges to display? sitebadges.module?
▼ Q & A:
▼ Where do I give?
• Go to [this web page] and [do this thing]
• For legal and tax reasons, the money is held by Drupal's non-profit sponsor, XXX.
▼ What gets funded with this money?
• To fund further development of advanced features
• Improvements to Drupal's u.i., design, and usability
• Incentives for innovation and action
• Marketing of Drupal
▼ Who decides where the money goes?
•
▼ How can I apply to receive a grant for Drupal work?
• D.E.P.?
▼ I don't have money to give, but where can I donate my time?
▼ A new forum on Drupal.org: "Projects needing resources"
• Core fixes, patches, review
• Bug reports
• Documentation
• Design/graphics help
• Head up a project
Conclusion
Okay, that's what I've got. Comments are requested.
Is there a group whiteboard/wiki module yet? Maybe we could enable something so that we could all edit this thing.
And I don't want to splinter efforts, but perhaps some of this should eventually spin off into an "infrastructure" or "drupal foundation" group.
Comments
Sure
I wholeheartedly agree with this, and understand it's a draft. But just want to point out that typo3 lost some of its open source glory when beauracratizing and centralizing decisions and information into a foundation-thingy. Still open SOURCE, but not open.
I'm not a lawyer and don't have much knowledge of international business law, but it could probably be stated in the foundation's [insert proper english word for rules (I'm Norwegian)] that a certain percentage of its assets at all times should be donated to drupal projects as decided by a majority through official polls on the drupal.org site. And that should be all the foundation does IMO. The administration of the drupal project has worked fantastic as it is so far. I love real open source.
Also, you mentioned the project-module, and then you suggest to use a plain old forum for the donation of time ? Why not extend the project-module for timetracking (and other donation tracking) like this ? I don't see the need to discuss whether or not to donate time in a forum. There's an announcement taxonomy term for the needs of resources, and somewhere (extended project module) to donate it. Also the polls mentioned above could be an integral part of the project.module (or an extending module) with a poll for each project at all times.
Just my quick 2 cents.
Hey Jeff, I like the idea of
Hey Jeff, I like the idea of having an incentive to push various pieces of the Drupal project forward at a faster speed. I'm just curious, if you were one of the primary contributing Drupal developers, would you be upset that someone else was getting paid to help Drupal while you weren't? Would the funding end up going to the core developers? What would this do to the community?
I haven't been involved with the Drupal community very heavily and I don't know what kind of effects this idea would have which is why I ask. I'm curious to hear your and other's opinions.
Cheers,
Nik
FWIW, I'm not sure I see
FWIW, I'm not sure I see Views as ever truly being part of core. Maybe the query builder part, but I'm no longer comfortable with the idea of Views moving to core.
1) None of the core maintainers are comfortable with something Views' size.
2) I'm not comfortable with losing commit access to my code.
too bad there's no
too bad there's no OmniOutliner plugin for Drupal :p
Jeff, I like the direction
Jeff, I like the direction of your proposal, but i am very curious to hear what the core developers think of this for the same reason as Nik states.
Perhaps Burning Man can be an example. Burning Man Foudnation (i think) has money that it grants to Burners with really awesome plans for BM camps or installations. I don't know who makes the funding decisions....
Koumbit has done work on decisions.module and I am working with them to try to extend this module for a client. it could be used to solicit votes on proposals or DEPs.
Perhaps core maintainers who dedicate a certain amount of time a month to drupal would receive a stipend out of the 3% funds, they could choose to avail themselves of this stipend, or not.
The big tensions (i think) is going to be that some organization will have to spring up to decide what to do with the 3% funds that are collected.
http://www.CivicActions.com
http://www.GregoryHeller.com
http://GregoryHeller.com
So...
...are there organizations that DON'T give 3% in terms of time spent on Drupal stuff? I know that Bryght's contribution is likely significantly north of 3% in terms of time, never mind direct monetary sponsorship of events.
I think direct user contribution increasing might be a more interesting route. The Gallery project (yes, it now runs on Drupal) has a "donate to Gallery" button visible only to admin users as part of the interface. Back when I hosted my own pictures, my wife ended up donating to the project through that link, because she was so happy with how the site ran.
So...what about display such a donation link banner for user #1?
managing funds
What about an infrastructure for bounties and reverse bounties. More often than not, people will offer funds to developers that they know/trust, which will tend to be those who are active. At first thought it seems democratic.
So, hypothetically, if I go to someone's profile I can see:
.
The advantage is no "organisation" is required to decide what to do with the funds. Perhaps some 3rd-party mechanism may be necessary for the exchange of money.
Unfortunately, any payments for core work will make drupal look like a closed-shop since people will wonder how they would get a piece of the action when they can't work directly on core themselves. That would be the perception IMO.
Unfortunately, any payments
Anyone can work on core. The patch system is the accepted way of applying patches against core.
We've talked about creating a consultant directory, potentially here on the groups site. AFAIK, that sits with Gregory Heller (the CivicActions guys were the ones with the initial concept). Bounties, donations, etc. could all be done through that system as well.
Curious
I'm curious if we're going on a tangent, this is a really neat idea; however, is it directly related to the marketing of Drupal? Or is it related to the marketing and creation of a 3% contribution from businesses back to Drupal?
Donations
Don't know if you already recognized Donorge.org established by Casper Planken for which already exists a Drupal module Donations. At least Boris knows it.
In my opinion, Casper's idea is revolutionary and very well realized. And it accompanies with your draft: Whoever wants something to be developed should have the ability to contribute by donating/paying. The most interesting part in Donorge is, that several donations for one development project are possible and there is a kind of security for donors - donations are not transferred until the development is complete.
One possible solution would be to automatically setup a Donorge project for any Drupal module hosted at Drupal.org. This setup includes (at least!) the 3% which are transferred to the Drupal core developers - or - foundation.
How the donations to the Drupal core team are distributed among the members is the only question which I would rather ask some Drupal core developers/maintainers.
Daniel F. Kudwien
unleashed mind
Daniel F. Kudwien
netzstrategen
This is a great topic to explore, but
I agree with the sentiment expressed above that perhaps this is a topic not for what is ostensibly a marketing group.
May I humbly suggest creating a new group for this, to explore ways to help improve the viability of ongoing Drupal development? Count me as interested.
Laura
pingVision, LLC
PINGV | Strategy • Design • Drupal Development
Short term
The strutural problems you mention -- nowhere to donate two/no way to decide how it's used -- are going to be a substantial roadblock to any forman solution more or less forever. The question of how collective funds are allocated is never easily answered.
In the mean time, rather than worry about setting targets for fiscal contributions that don't have any destination, why not popularize, dare I say market, the idea of being good contributors to Drupal to the growing universe of drupal professionals and companies?
I think all the things you listed are great ideas. We just need to keep repeating them and showing how they make sense for the professional community.
https://pantheon.io | http://www.chapterthree.com | https://www.outlandishjosh.com
great ideas
Hi JJef,
There's a discussion about introducing a paid advertising programme across on Drupal.org and I suggested something similar to the 3% campaign.
I'm just wondering what was the stumbling block with the 3% campaign..i.e. what were the reasons it didn't take off when it was suggested last year?
Kieran (Amazon) has asked for a formal proposal to be submitted and I was just wondering if there was a particular reason the 3% thing didn't come to fruition.
cheers
Dub
Before its time?
At the time that this was posted, the Drupal Association did not exist. So that was a BIG stumbling block. Now that the Association is in place, I think that the idea could hold up. One thing to note is that drupal.org has always been very conservative about commerce-related promotion. There is STILL no DONATE BUTTON on the home page, much less EVERY PAGE of the site. IMO, this is an absolute necessity. Then it just becomes a matter of honing this 3% concept, writing it up, and placing it on Drupal.org -- probably in the handbook -- along with graphics for companies to place on their site.
Perhaps we should try to gear this one back up again.
-= Jeff Robbins | Lullabot | Drupalize.me =-
Working on it
Created a spotlight banner for drupal frontpage and a proposal for a site-wide donate link in the header:
http://drupal.org/node/148447
In the meantime a "donate now" link has been added to the user menu.
slightly different angle
Laura just blogged about our nascent 5% for drupal campaign which is for paid work, not straight donations (though certainly pingVision has made straight donations as well).
Anyway, I just wanted to post this here to say that without a doubt the idea is alive and kicking.
--
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