Posted by fmizzell on October 7, 2014 at 3:31pm
It is hard to answer this question without a clear set of hypotheses of current issues that could/can affect the sustainability and relevance of Drupal in the future of the web, but I think that those interested in small scale Drupal (SSD) probably have some of these hypotheses in their head already and see SSD as the solution. I would love to hear those perspectives.
Comments
SSD for Drupal sustainability and future relevance
To me it's simple: The Virtual Enterprise Network models exactly how the Drupal community currently works - an interdependent network of mostly small businesses. It provides proven methods and techniques to show how to be an enterprise but made up of many smaller organisations so as to work on larger projects, fund research, etc.
We don't currently have great communication between businesses - drupal.org is how we build drupal but once it's on the business side there are very few conversations on marketing, sales, etc. mostly due to the up-till-recent lack of investment in drupal.org (I believe g.d.o. will be upgraded soon). There are a few larger companies with partner networks to support the sales of their products, along with agencies who are not Drupal-knowledgeable but sell well, however I believe because we do not have a supportive network around this they currently cause issues - many of my freelancer/contractor friends have issues finding good work, generally having to rescue projects once it's too late.
Networked Enterprises means we can focus on the work we love and are good at, and hopefully with enough scale we can make it super-simple for people to be able to choose the work they want to do from a constantly updating list of issues and provide 24/7 development and support based on best practices to clients of all sizes around the world, with local representatives to provide local support where needed.
ATEOTD I don't believe top-down organisations can fully support bottom-up communities, I believe we need BOTH, and we are currently a little too top-down heavy and we need to work together as a community to show we can deliver projects commercially as a community.
Years ago people went to work because that was where the machinery was, and that's why there are factories. We can and do work from anywhere now and we need to build a new set of institutions in order to support our growth - but we don't just copy from the past, we add the new too - so joining together to share the creation of marketing material for example is one thing we can do. Create a platform which is easy to use for more business-type people can collaborate - hopefully g.d.o. new one will help but we see so much repetition in the CXO meetups it's annoying, and that's because unlike the Drupal code, we don't encode the business side of things much... yet. There's 35 councils in the UK on Drupal - bet they're all got 35 different implementations...
A bit of a rant of an answer but HTH a little to understand my position a little more - how about everyone else?
The Eco-System
The Drupal eco-system is composed of many parts. We have the code/product. We have the users of the product. We have the community of contributors/volunteers that support the product and the users, and we also have the businesses that also provides support to users, and to the code while trying to make a profit.
I have been reading some of the posts under SSD trying to figure out exactly what its purpose and goals are, to have a better idea of how this relates to the sustainability of Drupal, but so far, the initiative seems to be focus around networks of small businesses, that leverage their connections to do enterprise level work.
I think this idea is great, but I fail to see how it relates to sustainability clearly.
Empowering small business could, most likely, mean growth for those individual businesses, but that might not be equal to an increase in Drupal talent, or contribution.
Many people fear that Drupal is going too enterprise, and if that is true and the case, an initiative like this could be the solution to keep small businesses relevant, but that means sustainability only at the business level, even though in our eco-system (or any other) all of the pieces have to be sustainable for it to survive.
I am sure my limited understanding of SSD is causing me to miss all sorts of interesting connections to sustainability, so I would love to hear from those that have a clearer picture of why we need SSD in relation to sustainability.
Sustainability
Dries mentions commons goes from community -> business -> government in terms of sustainability. Government in terms of internet we don't have at the moment (in terms of an "internet government" - sure, dns etc. but not worldwide law) so we either leave it up to someone else to dictate how it goes or we start to co-organise between ourselves. Did you see this one?
https://prague2013.drupal.org/keynote/lisa-welchman
IMHO if companies have 200 people 'selling Drupal' yet we cannot sustain core we have issues, so we need to create institutions which support the scalability and growth of the project in terms of funds too, so why not have an 'agency' made up of community which not only helps people connect to do larger, more profitable projects, but also helps people collaborate on products, and helps bring them in work individually too. So it's more of creating a framework for freedom to happen, with multiple beneficial outputs - i.e. helping bridge the gap between open source production and open source supply in a commercial world where deadlines etc. are.
Or we could leave it up to a few larger companies, but I think we are all one big community - but yet very small still - co-operating is the way forward, don't think 700,000 strong companies way forward.
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SMEs
...and every Drupal shop comes under the SME definition right now - we are still small minnows in the software world! Lots of proprietary stuff to replace out there - hotel systems, POS, etc. - VEN provides scale, otherwise it'll be like old business (corps) trying to do new biz rules by using open source, that's not the point, we're reverse engineering the enterprise at the moment ;)
Lisa Welchman nailed it
Lisa Welchman nailed it in her keynote at last year's DrupalCon Prague - if we don't as a community make the rules then others will make the rules for us. We don't make the rules because we are too nice and don't like telling people what to do, but this means others end up making the rules which we then have to abide by. We still have the opportunity here to turn things round, we just need to be more organised!
Watch if you have or haven't seen it, it's an awesome talk:
https://prague2013.drupal.org/keynote/lisa-welchman