Small Scale Drupal, IMO, is the opportunity to continue to do what I love doing and the freedom to do it when I want and for whom I want. In order for it to be a success and grow community and code in a sustainable way it will need contributions in terms of both time, effort, and funds. Like the LSD project, we will need to organise, market, sell, and invest in issues to do with Drupal code where we agree improvement is needed according to our needs as freelancers/contractors/small/medium enterprises. We will need to discuss whether paid membership is the way forward and how such a process would work world-wide in a fair manner.
I have been championing collaborative community business models since attending Ken Thompson's 'Virtual Networked Enterprises' presentation in 2009. I had not long moved down to Brighton where there are literally hundreds of digital agencies and thousands of freelancers but still found it hard to find Drupal work before projects were in the danger state. To me there was, and still is, a disconnect between Drupal talent and the demand for that talent - not everyone wants your lovely job offer kthxbai ;)
Sure, there are larger organisations and partner networks, but no organisation representing the community's businesses as a whole in an active, commercial way who can also get involved in delivering projects. When I saw Ken Thompson's VEN model I realised this mirrored our community and he'd already written the model and proved IRL via organisations such as NASA (also a Drupal user!) that VENs work. Having previously worked on larger projects, the ability to do this whilst retaining my freedom as a freelancer is most attractive. I will post separately about the VEN structure - not saying it's the 'answer' but certainly something to consider as helps map out roles and responsibilities in order for lots of small fish to come together and act like a big fish.
I have spent the last five years attending many Drupal CXO and other community events both here in the EU and in the States and the story is the same across the board wherever I go. People want to connect more, want to join in more, and need an easy space to do so. I took this "to the top" and spent a year as one of Drupal's first "At Large" Directors of the Drupal Association. I realised quickly though that at the time the DA was not the space for this kind of project and a ground-up community solution would be more agile, faster and resilient.
Last year I set up a separate space online to build a co-operative, however after an initial flurry of interest, follow-up was hard to achieve with - like Drupal itself - the small amount of people who contributed to the process at the time. I will go through the list of those who joined up and pointing them in this direction to the SSD group as I've realised the *.d.o system is where it needs to be to attract people and grow - we have many CXO events but do not 'encode' our discussions into the *.d.o framework so progress is slower and often CXO events are repetitive in terms of discussions and outcomes simply because we do not use the same system as the software itself is built upon as much as we could/need to IMHO. If we decide a private/paid for system is required we can build that along with keeping this for those who may for whatever reason not be able to afford membership but still want to be involved. As Dries talked about in his Amsterdam keynote, the benefits way of reciprocating contribution is a good way forward as opposed to other forms such as taxation, etc.
I believe Small Scale Drupal can provide a Framework for Freedom to happen within for the business side of things where Drupal does so well at the same for the code.
"We've created a wonderful modular software solution, now we need to create the modular business model on top of it"
is the quote most people have said resonates with them on this subject.
What does Small Scale Drupal mean for you and your business?