Paying for the Plumbing: Group Purpose

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It's easy to make a living using Drupal. It's far more difficult to make a living building Drupal. At present the community relies largely on volunteer time, a few generous companies that have the ability to subsidize people's time, or the rare case where one organization is willing to foot the bill for the first copy cost. But increasingly, we all depend on "tools to build tools", such as Fields, Views, Drupal core enhancements, and other frameworks or API's that make our work point-and-click. How do individuals and organizations make the building of Drupal's plumbing sustainable?

This group looks to consolidate some of these ideas and discussions in one place, providing a venue for people to discuss creative funding solutions or business models that can add sustainability and a source of income for individuals contributing back to Drupal, whether that's through work on Core, contributing modules or themes, or building new frameworks for other developers to use in their own development.

Comments

I'de really like to see some

dgtlmoon's picture

I'de really like to see some responsibility from several larger Drupal companies that are making good money (including Acquia) to setup some "Issue Bounties", where people can pickup a set amount of cash for fixing bugs and not for implementing new features

this is a problem that plagues every large opensource project.

Change the name and refocus this group?

gusaus's picture

This group has been dormant, even though the need for such a group is much greater than when it launched. With the recent launch of https://www.drupal.org/project/funding, here are my suggestions for getting this group back on track.

1) Change the name of this group to SustainDrupal
2) Review, update and incorporate elements of this Snowball charter into SustainDrupal

  • People who would like to support an idea but cannot do it all themselves do not have a way to move forward.
  • Potential collaborators do not have clarity on what proposals exist, who has committed to working on them, and the specification of what is proposed to be done. This lack of clarity can lead to duplication of effort, and consequent underresourcing of efforts.
  • Potential supporters do not have a good way of understanding the level of technical vetting a proposal has.
  • Potential supporters do not always have a transparent view of the risks to a proposal's success.
  • Many good developers are using Free Software, not contributing to Free Software, even though they would prefer to work directly on projects benefiting the community.

3) Create #sustaindrupal channel in Drupal Slack
4) Identify roles and find some folks interested in contributing to this type of initiative
5) Create an Open Collective as a tool to sustain the SustainDrupal initiative

Does anyone else have some thoughts on this approach or need for this type of working group?

Gus Austin