 So, this is a core conversation about funding Drupal Core. And we have not too many slides, a few things to say, and then we will have discussion. So I also, okay, so what I need is I need to, crap, I forgot to do, I need somebody to make a Google Doc and take notes. So that would not really wants to do that. Wim really wants to, thank you. If you want to, you can make it commentable or editable by everybody and tweet out a link to it with the DrupalCon hashtag, that's okay with me. Especially what I want to make sure is that when people are doing the discussion part and I'm listening to them, then I can really listen to them and I don't have to try and also remember what they're saying. So Wim, that's your important part. So he needs a power cord, it's not good enough. Don't you dare! Don't! Okay, so anyway, so this is a core conversation, we're going to have discussion and we're going to talk about funding Drupal Core. So if that's not what you're here for, you can go pick another session, it's okay to leave. I'm really glad though that we have people who are interested in this topic. So we thought about who would come to a conversation like this and we thought it would be a bunch of different kinds of people. People who want to get paid for contributing to Core might come to this talk. People who have already thought a lot about the core, developing core funding problem in general. So maybe they've thought about it for a few years or they're interested in the topic and they wanted to see if there was anything new. So we thought they might come. We thought people might want to come just to hear either what Alex was talking about or what I was talking about and they really didn't care what we were talking about. They just wanted to come and hear us talk, so that's cool too. And we thought there might also be people here who have already made the decision to direct part of their money to Funding Core. So they might be a shop, agency, an individual or an organization and they are already doing what they are thinking of in their head as Funding Core Development. They might also come to a talk like this. So I'm Kathy Thays. I'm YSCT on Drupal.org and also on Twitter. I review and work on issues in Drupal Core. I really like to work on multilingual issues. I also do mentoring, so I do some IRC mentoring. I do sprint planning, so we should all come on Friday to the big sprint, please. And there's extended sprints on Saturday and Sunday at this really cool place, which is the Burlage and it has really good internet and it's like in a castle. It's really great. And I also mentor, so I help other mentors become mentors and help pull that off on Friday. So that's my involvement in Core and Drupal. Okay, my name is Alex Pot. I'm Alex Pot on Twitter and I'm a Drupal 8 core committer and I'm responsible for also the Drupal 8 configuration management initiative now. Well, I forgot to tell my story. You tell your story now. I'll tell my story first. So we were going to tell our stories about how we had direct experience for funding Drupal Core. So when I started to get involved in Drupal 8 development, I was basically being paid by Cap Gemini. It was my job. I was working on major Drupal sites and I had that itch of like, I don't ever want to use features to do this work again and I want to get involved in Drupal 8 and make sure that no one has to share my pain. And Cap Gemini were generally supportive of me to do that in terms of they paid for me to go to Drupal Cons and they allowed me to get involved in the cues and they didn't really give me time but there was a certain amount of money available to go to events and take part. Then my circumstances changed and I decided that I wanted to spend more time on core and no time working for Cap Gemini. And I was in a very fortunate position because Cap Gemini paid me okay and I don't spend all my money all the time to say okay, I can fund myself to work on core. So I quit my job and then someone told Drees and Drees was like hey, there's someone who's going to spend all their time working on core, maybe they also want to be a committer. And that was fun to be asked to do that and I was like yeah, I'll do that. And at the time I was thinking maybe I'll do 10 hours a week committing and then 10 hours a week on CMI. It became really obvious after starting my role as a committer the needs for Drupal 8 in terms of the work the RWCQ was like I think 5 pages at the time just keeping the churn going through on that required more than my 10 hours that I had kind of thought that I might do on it. So I said okay, that's what I'm going to do and I dropped the CMI thing for a while and my initiative had no momentum for like some of last year. And I was spending my money my savings were running out and I was like okay, I need to solve this and I basically just said that to the community and Jess encouraged me to open up a get-tip account and I was like alright, why not and I opened it up and it started it was like $1, $7 and then suddenly it changed and I was like getting 50, 60, 70, 80 $500 a week and so $500 a week $500 a month was not really enough for me to live on but that was like where it got to at its kind of maximum. And then that wasn't enough money so I kept on trying to raise awareness and a large Drupal user approached me and said hey you know what, we want to help you release Drupal 8 because we're building our whole ecosystem a hundred of sites on Drupal 7 and we're not doing this for the next two years we're doing this for the next 10 years and we want Drupal to survive so we want to fund you. The only condition of that funding is that you can't say who we are because this isn't compact like just giving money to an individual is difficult for us for our accounting systems and everything. And they could also only commit to like a very short term the way it was set up was okay we'll pay you month on month and each month I had to ask for more money and that's kind of stressful living. So eventually I decided I didn't want to live like that anymore and I asked the Drupal community hey does anyone have a job for me and specifically I'd like to work on call and I got some really great offers from loads of great Drupal shops but Chapter 3 came in with like the best offer of like hey we just want you to deliver Drupal 8 beta because they have the same concerns they're like we're delivering great Drupal 7 sites now we've got our immediate future is looking good but we want Drupal 8 out, you know and in order for that to happen we have to invest in it and this is felt like an easy investment to make and so that's why I'm sitting here today not worrying about how I'm going to get paid next month. Yeah, so um so when I got started doing Drupal I volunteered to build websites for organizations that I was volunteering for that didn't have them and so I did that for a few years and then I got to be decently good at it and I wanted to spend more time doing it and I also wanted some money so I freelanced for a summer or a year or so and I didn't like it you had to keep finding the next job and there was a lot of administration involved and invoicing and uh so I didn't really want to do that but at the same time that year when I was doing that I was also becoming much more involved with mentoring and working on core issues and when I had free time I would spend them working on core issues because they were so much fun, I really liked it and any event I could go to I was applying for scholarships at any event and hoping that they would bring me there to help with mentoring or anything and many many places many events did and it was great but I when the next summer came around and I was able to attempt to work full time again I didn't want to get a job doing freelancing I also didn't want to get a job at a Drupal shop because at that point I could only commit to working full time during the summer months and who's going to hire you to just work full time during the summer months and then not work for them the rest of the year, not very many people and I knew that if I had gotten a job at a Drupal shop they would probably my optimistic expectation was that it might be 40 hours a week and I might be lucky and get like a 20% contribution time so I might get 8 hours of contribution time but I would have to be committing to 40 hours a week and I didn't really know if I had that much time and I knew I didn't have that much time during the rest of the year and so I was like I asked a few companies to hire me and they said no they wouldn't hire me just to work on core but they would hire me to like do client work and I was like well that means I'd have to give up working on core so I had to pick between getting a job doing client work or and not doing any core work at all because it just didn't fit into my life or I could try and get a job working on core and so I stuck with that and I asked a bunch of people and Compress paid me for many months and then Chepers paid me from Hungary and Breakthrough Technology in Chicago and those were small short they were shorter term things they were like well we can pay you for a while and we can pay you for 15 hours a week but I was ecstatic and then I was at nice camp and I gave a talk and Dan from Black Mesh came up and talked to me and he said I think you're going to want to talk to me and I said yes thank god and so he showed me this job posting for Drupal Community Liaison and I read it and I was like that's me I want that job that's my job the job is to go to Drupal events and do what I do at Drupal events so I can plan sprints I can go to sprints I can sit in the hallway and talk to people and when I'm not in events and I'm at home I can work on core issues and occasionally we have a check-in meeting and there's a blog every now and then so in between there before I got hired at Black Mesh I also had a Get Tip account and every now and then between the sponsorships that I did have I would have no sponsorship money coming in at all and so the only money that I was getting in was $20 a week from Get Tip so I also did that so why do we have this core conversation and why this topic because we feel like we want Drupal 8 to succeed and we feel like Drupal in general work on Drupal core needs reliable resources and that's needed both on the release and on the content side in terms of being able to direct resources to what's really important to be working on right now to make progress happen and it's also important that to have a reliable source on the side of the people who are doing the work so it's I think it's pretty common sometimes people will work on core when they can and when they can is when they run out of money and then they have to get the next like gig and really hard for them because they have to stop working on core when they'd really rather be doing that in order to go find money because they're never sure if they're going to have enough so they have to get a job and it's also very hard on the people who are trying to plan things and focus the work because they can say our goal is to have this done in two months but they don't know what is going to be available those two months week to week are they going to get 20 hours from this person or two they have no idea so it's really hard and having a reliable resources is going to make developing Drupal more sustainable also we have a problem with there's lots of jobs around managing Drupal core that people don't want to do issue triage complex issue patch review which takes days they aren't where people have fun innovating the new features and so we have this problem where we've got some great ideas that get implemented and then the rest of the system has to be converted and we struggle to find people to manage the issue queue so that people know what to work on and how to work on it we've seen that a lot in the initiative some of the initiatives have been exceptionally well run they've had people who have built teams and they've managed their issues and people have been working on them one by one by one it's gone great other initiatives they've done the initial conversions and then it's been difficult to herd all the contributors together to actually get the job done to get it finished we struggle to have people who complete and finish the jobs and one of the reasons that is fun there's a drudgery to making sure that every single part of core conforms to the new API and that means that we have to look at why that is why aren't people just picking up those tasks and one of the reasons they're not picking up their tasks is because one of the natural resources that we rely on in Drupal up to now has been people's goodwill and goodwill to do annoying tasks is pretty thankless so that's why this is important to talk about the other thing is that Drupal has changed it's not the same size it's huge no one can know the whole of core anymore so things take longer so they require more resources so just basing the resource for development based upon goodwill and the intrinsic value of just doing good it's important that we continue to value that but we have to realize that we've outgrown that model that's not going to solely support Drupal development going forward and it doesn't now so if it doesn't now and we have things already happening we have get to it me being paid by chapter 3 and then we have to discuss how we're going to do it because people are just making up their own minds so that leads us to our next slide which is about the current funding strategies that people are employing so if you're a contributor and you're like I want to get paid to work on core what are your options we've heard from Kathy about the way that she did it at Compress she reached out to individual companies they give me some money for working on core and there's a loose contract open-ended contract signed up there's not a lot of job security for Kathy there they can end it when they like and it's good because there's new resources coming into core but it's not that secure and stable there's also now a trend for short-term topical contracts that are limited in scope a great example has been Acre has done a lot of this they've targeted key features like CMI and completing the routing system and they've put their money where their mouth is and they've funded myself and Sasha to work to complete which has been great another strategy that we're seeing more and more of to examples here again companies are now hiring core contributors on start and this is a great thing Acre now the Octo team exists it's big is it like the equivalent of six full-time people a lot of people there's myself working for chapter three and there's Kathy employed by Blackmash I heard of a couple of other people who are starting to explore that there's the opportunity to try doing consistent cloud-source funding get to Gratipay which almost worked for me if I didn't live in London didn't have a family it might have worked for a lot longer it's also been pretty good I think for Patrick he gets a consistent bit coming in from there we've had people try using kickstarter-ish techniques there's the Drupal fundus which managed to raise thousands of dollars for Drupal late rules it's a big success another way in which people are kind of paid to work on the core that we have here at the moment is the percentage time that they're given by companies and the number of companies give people 20% time and one of the problems with that is that we really don't know how many people are contributing by that method we don't know how effective or unaffective that's being one of the prime ways that people have contributed to a funding core is by funding themselves so they charge more for their work or they value their time so that they don't sell all their time to their company or to the contracts they're working on Jennifer Hodgson uses the proceeds of her contracting to do all the fantastic work that she does and then there are the indirect ways that the core gets funded there's event sponsorship there's the Drupal con scholarships there's the DA partners which build out the testing infrastructure which core relies on so that's the kind of current scene but I think that we have concerns around this scene so like for example with scholarships if you're a core developer and you want to go to an event in the week working on core you don't know whether or not you can go until you hear back from the scholarship so it's hard for the team to plan whether or not you're going to be there it's hard for you to plan your life to allow that to happen and so some of these things are not solving that reliable bit well some are solving the reliable bit anyway the problems so one of the things is that I believe that the community has many different types of concerns about the way the core is currently funded and they come from all sides of the problem I think that if we look at in Drupal's history there's generally a distrust of any centralizing force within the Drupal community we hear like issues around like well Acrea wants this for core why are they pushing it in or are these specific people or individuals pushing their ideas into core and we value our consensus and we distrust this idea that there might be funds influencing core direction there's also a lot of perceived conflicts of interest between an employer and what's best for Drupal we've seen issues explode over well that's what this company wants and individuals feel that they have to defend what the company wants or or not and they have to make a choice an ethical choice and as Drupal said in his keynote it's a public good and so we need to start to think about how we allow people to contribute to that public good in ways that allows them to do it in the best way and if they're having a conflict between themselves and the employer and they're being directed to put that in it's hard it's tough so another concern that the community has is that paying core developers would perhaps increase the amount that those people produce and so that would grow in comparison to the amount that independent or hobbyist kind of people maybe drown out their opinions also I think people are worried that if you start paying some people those other people who still want to contribute may not because they're like why am I not getting paid why am I going to do this for free if it's if other people are so so there's that concern out there too yeah so basically what Kathy's getting at there is that there's a concern that the external expected rewards I'm being paid for something given this for that are going to diminish the intrinsic value that we have at the moment intrinsic motivation for contributing to open source and so we risk the relationships between ourselves like the community is an important thing and cohesion is important and this change between the motivations for contributing to core risk our cohesion and we need the only way of addressing that now is to talk about it because we already have extrinsic motivations to contribute to core for some of us so we can't shut it down we're not going to stop companies from taking the opinion that they want to invest in core and it's great but maybe there needs to be a way that we can ensure that the hobbyists and the voluntary efforts are valued and we allow we have a way for people to have the resources to work on core so another problem with the current funding ways that are out there right now is that if you're an individual with money that you would like to donate it's very hard for you to know where to give it so if you want to give it to a particular person you have to know enough to know which person would be a good value to give it to that's hard for people with money they're not in internal like they don't know everybody that can be difficult so it's also hard to know where to do it because there's no central place to give it to we tried to make a central place when we made the GTIP core team and so it kind of is a central place but the problem it has is that it's not officially supported by the community so it doesn't get the kind of in the front in your face thing that something on Drupal.org would get it's also it's kind of successful and kind of not so when we started the team because we kind of got hired at the same time and we were getting our own money from GTIP when we got hired we redirected it into the team so automatically it had some money going in and we talked about it and other people were giving money and we were getting like $350 a week like right from the beginning we built up this big balance because you can only take out like $1 at first and then you double every time and so we burned through that and now we're just paying out what we get in which is more than $1000 a month which is like amazing but it's not enough money to make a big difference in those people's lives that they could still like stop working and totally devote you know like 10 hours a week or 30 hours a week I mean we're giving them $32 a week depending upon where you live that could be an hour of work or three or a half an hour right it's not in order to know whether or not the get tip thing would be successful I think we would need like $5000 a week and we're only getting $350 only and we're not fundraisers oh yeah it just sits there on the internet and we're like I wonder if money will come in because we suck at fundraising that's not what we do like if we were fundraisers we would go get a job doing fundraising but we're not right we work on core that's our job so that's a problem with get tip also another problem with get tip is that it's just a team and the team can withdraw money it's not actually solving the problem of like a sustainable droop or like anyone that we have like general rules around how can someone claim from get tip but it doesn't allow for like the assessment of priorities and the focusing on the jobs that people aren't doing that they don't like to do because I think that's one of the key things that we need to resource is the bits that block us from progress and that's not always like patch contribution in fact it rarely is but there's another thing about about funding people that Kathy wants to mention I do want to mention that right so because one of the ways that things get funded right now is people have other jobs which they get paid for and then they have free time which they work on core and the problem with that is it means the many people who work on core have jobs and free time and that doesn't align with having a very diverse community and people working on the problem it's not it's not racially diverse gender diverse and certainly not socio economical right like there's all kinds of reasons behind that and ashtradin has written a really good research reference blog post on what it does when the only people not the only but when many people who work on a project can because they can you lose a bunch of diversity that you could get okay so solutions so what we need is we need official recognition of all types of contribution because right now we count core commit credits and the way that we give core commit credits is almost always if you have changed a patch in some way and we don't count reviews we don't count issue triage we don't count summary updates or testing or there's all different kinds of contribution we don't count them so we need dribble.org recognition for the people that do those and also the agencies and the end users that sponsor those things so sponsoring changing a patch right is not enough we need to also do the other things in order to get this kind of velocity and sustainable development that we want um that's recognition we're not separate than that we need a central independent organization um whose goal is to ensure the future success of the dribble project um and who can fund the work that is decided to be important so that it's an official initiative or a directive that Dries decides so they would be a central organization people know where to put the money but they're able to direct but they don't decide what code needs to get done some other entity decides Dries decides the project lead um we need to be careful that um when we ask people to support the project that we might be asking somebody who's already giving a ton of resources that are to the project so maybe what we're asking is um in terms of giving and like putting the money into the funding thing is that people maybe reallocate their funding so they look at what they're currently spending and say you know what maybe instead of doing that maybe we should give to this central location that is going to have these people that are going to be working on the things that are really important to get done right now another important point about having a central body that does this is that we need to be protected by everyone by individuals by all the agencies and by the end users it shouldn't be in competition or um or vying for business or vying for like attention or even directing or it's about it's about the fact that we need to have a place for people to say hey that's where if I want to fund Drupal Core if I want to care about where Drupal is if I want to make it sustainable here's my place to put some money rather than at the moment there's no where for people to go there really is no and there's lots of little efforts like you know Kathy's my experiments with GetTip the GetTip team and like tweeting out and amazing things have happened through all the different avenues but we do it once and then we don't create a reasonable pathway and the central agency right then can afford to hire people who are really good at fundraising so let's see if this works so um we thought about the people who might attend this talk and we have kind of this uh the recognition is just really important and the central agency that's trusted and that has skilled staff to do fundraising right like that's important um but we thought like people who come here like what kind of things can you do so some of the things that we talked about were maybe you came here because you're hoping to get paid to work on core right so we would say one of the things that you can do is have your contributions be visible so that people know that you're doing this great thing uh decide what it is that you want what kind of job you want what you want to get paid to do and then ask everybody to do it um um for people who have come here because you've already been thinking about the core funding problem you know for a while and you find it of interest uh maybe one of the things that you could do would be to continue the discussion like here like let's talk about it to talk to us later to blog about it to find somebody else's blog and make a comment on it to lobby with your knowledge and historical uh perspective on the problem to lobby to make it happen so talk to the da and tell them how important it is that we have this central trusted place for people to put money um for people who are already uh for other kinds of people who are here who might already be like totally funding like you're maxed out like you have your business and you've got your plan and you're already like sponsoring events and you're paying people and you're hosting sprints like you already feel like you're exhausted you can't get any more money uh give any more money away would be to think about how you're doing it and consider if you had this central spot would that be would that cause more progress in releasing triple things and working on triple core maybe it would be more efficient um and if so please talk to the da and tell them you would like to give them money but you would like to give them money to fund core development so just as an aside this isn't an entirely impossible impossible thing i know the bitcoin foundation basically prints money but they pay their court meter for example other communities are working out ways of funding themselves so we should be looking to do something similar so you can disagree with us or have your own independent thoughts so say who you are so my name is Eric stilstra sutra son um and i'm missing one um important subject in discussion until now is that why would parties start to pay money directly to people or in funds whatever what is what's in them what's in it for them and to start answering the question i am in a position where i'm considering to raise funds to be paid to work on core or whichever Drupal code or other activities so i have the same question and i did walk around at the booth with a few parties i know and i've been asking them that question and the most important answer there is exposure and in their answer the proposal by Dries in his keynote resonates to be exposed that how they contribute to the community um that's one that's the most important argument i've heard about exposure for the company as contributor to the community yeah Dries has written this really great blog post about um what he does with the octo team and how um he has them write blog posts and do webcasts and they have analytics on that and they can track the effect that that has for them in terms of marketing returns um so that's definitely something and i know like when i've done it it's um especially for compress um it was really important to them that i blog in english uh because they didn't have anybody to blog in english and they really wanted to be on Drupal planet um and so that was like one of the things that we talked about that was very beneficial for them um i think um some companies like i think black mesh i mean you can say for yourself but i think one of the things is that they get like 60 percent of their business from Drupal right so if if Drupal continues to exist and and grows and adoption grows and Drupal 8 comes out like that's going to be good business for them right so making that happen is good uh also there's like i think sometimes when humans hear a message over and over and over again they begin to believe it and so when we say and when Dries says it's important for businesses to hire people to work on core and he says it over and over again i think businesses are like maybe it's important that we do this and then they do it right like it's not enough to say these things once so i think like anyway for years right we've been saying like sustainable and we need these resources and i think people are starting to listen um i think also companies do the same thing that individuals do in scratching their own itch so if you have a business model which requires a certain feature to be in core it makes sense that you would hire somebody to help make that happen and we have like checks and balances in our review processes and our consensus building that makes sure that when those things get in they don't hurt other things like it's not giving an advantage but there's nothing wrong with funding something that gives you an advantage that also gives other people an advantage like it's called making it better so so i think companies will do it for that reason too i don't know if if you have any other things to add or if somebody like actually wants to be like we fund people here's why what can you say it in the microphone please i'm steve currie from codenigma and uh oh yeah is that better yeah i'm steve from codenigma and we we let all our team work on Drupal one day a month so that amounts to about 14 14 person days a month and we do it for the pragmatic reasons is why we would do it as a company well it's because we get better staff because the staff want to do it so we attract better people uh why we would kind of do it in the context of Drupal is we're getting seriously concerned as a company about Drupal 8 because this is so slow that it becomes a real business risk people who are thinking can we rely on this as a platform if they take that long to release it the thing that's wrong with our model is that are just giving a small amount of time isn't enough yes small amount of time to many people doesn't get stuff i used to think that was a good idea and i don't think that's a good idea anymore because you just you go ahead explain why it's not about it it's not good because people's time gets eaten into so it comes under pressure nobody can code one day a month and then go away for a month that just never works uh we couldn't stop people doing it because we'd be taking you know what effectively is a right of employment for them away and they wouldn't be happy about that but they wouldn't completely see the need to have focused resources doing stuff one thing that i thought though that i don't know was slightly missing in the slides is some sense of the size of the problem because if i was project managing it i want to know how many people are needed to get this sorting thing launched on a reasonable time scale not just when Dries thinks it's ready that's not how i'd manage a client project so why would i manage a software project that way so when we talk about recognizing many kinds of contribution one thing we don't recognize and value is project management it's all about the code so clearly we have a need for that i think something that the one day a week does still buy you even though it may be not the most effective use like as in terms of a company like one day a week one day a month for 20 people is 20 days a month so you could spend it out like that or it could be 20 days a month to one person but what you do get when you do the one day a month for many people is you get many people who actually get better at their job because you have 20 people who are doing something on Drupal.org and they are getting reviewed by other people who are helping them become better developers so it's not only attracting better developers because they're the ones who want jobs that have that perk but you're also getting like free training like you're paying them to work but you're not paying the person who's training them so you're paying one half of that so you still get that it's just I think in terms of velocity of project in terms of getting Drupal released then now you're talking well maybe that's not a benefit of that but it's not without benefit it's just maybe doesn't benefit the velocity of the project it's still good for the project still good the other problem with with one like with four hours a week or something like that is I think it can be frustrating for the people who are doing that their company might expect them to they have to spend a couple hours like figuring out which issues of theirs are already closed what status they're in, they come back to it then they figure out what needs to be done they have like an hour left to do it they run into some kind of trouble they're almost ready to do it and now the day is over and they don't even post anything and not posting things is just not good so I don't know maybe they expect it but maybe they would kind of be okay with not doing it so you could ask them like is anybody like would they rather do this or something else maybe they voluntarily give it up and then somebody else could have two days a month if somebody else didn't take their day a month when we give people just a little bit of time to do something and we know they're going to be frustrated by this it's almost effective because we're pressuring them to do it on their own time so there are people who are very happy with one day a month because they're also doing one day a week but it only works for them because they're doing it on their own time in addition Larry so two notes first I said at the beginning of the whiskey initiative coming up on three and a half years ago now give me five people ten hours a week I can do anything give me 50 people one hour a week I can do diddly squat the last three and a half years have proven that they've been completely true to the people who have a huge chunk of time lots of people crowdsourcing things works for a very small number of issues and even then a small number of people doing most of the work that's just the reality do you have any sense for how those small number of people are affording to do this time like do you know them personally are they doing it for work or what makes them available to do that it varies it's been different people at different times right now to be honest the core whiskey team is me and Daniel Verner and Daniel is part of every team because Daniel is crazy and he's getting 50% time from his employer so he's getting a big chunk of time and he's doing his own time as well as I understand it so that's the at this point that is the core whiskey team is just the two of us how long does somebody have to be involved 50% of their time with an initiative like whiskey in order for you to find it effective because certainly like a week isn't long enough right do you need them for 4 weeks how long do you need them I have to think about that to give you a number I'm confident on my knee jerk thought is give me a month of time at a time sure but I'd have to actually look at that how long does it take to get a non-trivial sized issue through could be anywhere from a week to 6 months so the person working on it need them for either a week to 6 months and I wish I could predict that in advance which is going to be that would make my life a lot easier the other point I wanted to note just for those that are concerned about company influence some stats on the Linux kernel from the Linux foundation posted last year so reasonably recent the Linux kernel has kernel 3.10 had 1,392 contributors footnote that means we're nearly twice as many people however of them 13% are listed as no company 10% are Red Hat 9% are Intel about 4% are Texas Instruments and it's just all corporate after that 13% is not from a company that's funding it does that mean those people work for no company or does that mean they have no company funding their work because that's different right because 10% of people could work for Red Hat but are those 10% getting their work funded by Red Hat because that's what I mean that's the difference between somebody who has a full time job for Red Hat and a free time contributes to the Linux project that's different than their job at Red Hat being contribute to the Linux project the article I'm looking at here says the Linux foundation lists the top companies that contribute to the Linux kernel so they're implying it's paid time I do know that Red Hat Red Hat and IBM and Seuss have numerous people on staff whose day job is go work on the Linux kernel including several of the major maintainers from Linux himself and one of the keys for every very large open source project is they all have a lot of different companies backing it there's an article I'm referencing later in my talk that Sam can probably talk about too of the really large open source projects of which Drupal is one all of them have a pluralistic backing from a number of different companies with a non-profit in the middle so there's different companies funding different people all together it's not one company one company funding a project doesn't scale thank you I have worked on Core for a long time but there's only been a hand for a couple of occasions where people have said can we give you money to work on some core patches but on the other hand I'm fortunate that my day jobs have involved projects that have resulted in working on core patches as side effect so for example when Drupal 7 was in alpha I switched job to examiner.com who were building on the Drupal 7 alpha and for the first month or something I think I worked exclusively on Drupal 7 performance issues whatever I thought was a problem and after that was like all different things and some of it was like a client work and about lots of core patches because there were lots of bugs and they needed fixing for that site to get launched and it launched before Drupal 7 did as well so they were like an early adopter who were willing to fund fixing things they didn't want to build on Drupal 6 they wanted to build on Drupal 7 because they wanted things that were in it because they needed to serve a lot of traffic and I didn't want to be worrying about upgrade parts for years and years and years and at the same time Drupal Gardens were doing the same thing before Octo but a lot of core contributions came from some of the people who now work for Octo who originally were working on Drupal Gardens before Drupal 7 came out and sometimes we find the same issues and work on the same things and if your company is thinking about how can you get Drupal 8 out faster one thing you can do if you have a project with long time scales is start thinking about how feasible it is to build it with Drupal 8 you can't launch a site now but if you build the site the right way you can start early development on a site and within a month or within 2 or 3 4 months depends on how confident you are and what happens and then you should be able to keep it going but you need to be confident that you can do that but it is an option for people and it's not saying fix all these core things it's saying use it really early and you're going to have overhead because of that but that overhead that you have that extra cost of dealing with all the bugs is one going to get out faster and two you don't have to deal with Drupal 7 issues that you've been dealing with for 3 or 4 years so it's just another way if you can do that Thank you I'm Nathaniel Cajpo watch this My name is Nathaniel Wiener so there are several points so first about Whiskey and the focus there I think the problem is that we work in asynchrone ways but you work in what ways we work asynchrone not synchrone not synchronous asynchronous asynchronous sorry so basically someone in the US wrote a comment someone in Europe writes another comment then it's like a day or two between the only thing I think we can solve that is by getting people together to work on certain features the same is with if you want to have fixed certain features then you should pay people to work on that certain features but at the same time you need to scale horizontally to like getting the review problem done at the same time because there's a huge review problem literally thousands of issues which don't get reviewed then need to be re-wrote and then they are basically dead this is like the worst experience for the new contributor they post a patch at a Rubicon then it doesn't get reviewed and then they are gone basically so we need both people which work on dedicated things like dedicated features or just getting the release out but also have like people which basically just to reviews for example because that's like a long-term investment in the future because as we know if there's someone motivated then they will continue to continue so that's going along with like recognizing things that were not like reviews and also funding people to do it and coordinating and working in a team and getting multiple people to focus on something which is really important to get done right now yeah those are really good points thank you Hi I'm Josef Dasio so I've been working on the DEA Rules Initiative which was kind of are you here to correct Alex when he said how successful it was and you're going to be like well yeah we can put that into perspective so an investment of like 300 hours at least to coordinate the project so we did 300 hours of marketing and coordination and we have raised 18,000 euros so far half of that is the crowdfunding and half of that is corporate funding and to complete rules we need 1,000 hours of work so we kind of right now raised a third of the amount of money that we need by spending a third of the amount of time that we need it's not very successful actually but it's a good experience I mean we're all learning and I really appreciate it the whole stuff doing it so I would really love to see an organization support me in doing that because I think we're good at explaining what we want to do we just need to get better on fundraising so you did have quite good promotional materials I thought do you feel like you didn't have the promotion channels if you had been promoted directly by the DA or directly on Drupal.org do you feel like you kind of had it going on you had the right team you had trusted people you had endorsements by people who were experts that people could believe in when they said if you give money to these people they're going to do a good job so you had all these things and you had great promotional materials I got my ruler the other day thank you so what did you feel was missing was it being on Drupal.org okay well there's two things Drupal 8 is far away and people do not care and then there's the communication channel so we basically crowdfunding is mainly by friends so we kind of end up shuffling money around in circles while we cannot target the big tail or the big I would say I would like to target the big tail of site builders or like 200,000 installations is quite a big number so there must be money somewhere and also the big company so these I would like to be able to target but there's no way to target them I can see in WordPress they put advertisements on the modules this is mainly maybe something that we do not like to have so and to finish this up I feel like we should focus on when we have this kind of conversations we should try to start quicker and try to find solutions somewhere or at least explain where we can find those solutions because so today we had a lot of introduction of why we need this and I'm very much yes we need this so I feel like we have too little time to come up with the conclusion we need to be better at the process of defining what is the conclusion of this conversation thank you this is Jis I have some more some more thoughts I think a good starting point maybe for us is also to define what success looks like here because in my mind getting $500 a week and get tipped is not even close to success and if you think about all the work that we have I would argue we need dozens and dozens of full-time core contributors we are not talking about getting to one or two or three we already have six or seven full-time but we need to not just double not just triple we need to grow that number by at least ten-fold in my mind to reach even a minimum viable definition of success so if you are thinking about these numbers we are now talking about raising $100 million or maybe not $100 million but let's say $20 million a year or something there is no way in hell that we are going to be able to raise that amount of money through a centralized organization and we have tried actually Michael Myers here is one of the things we are trying and have been trying for three or four years is something called large-scale Drupal where we have raised money from I think we have over 50 members or something today we are not even close to these numbers I mean we can even afford to hire one full-time developer despite all the efforts so the idea of a centralized body that raises money is awesome but it is also not really realistic in my mind in terms of what is achievable we may be able to get to a couple of developers in the next year through I don't know LSD is not necessarily independent in all of these things but we try to sell these things to organizations and they all want something in return Do you think you are hampered by the fact that it is incorporated into Aquia would it help to be independent from Aquia? Yeah, it actually makes it easier for them because a lot of the organizations they cannot just donate money it's not easy for them it's actually easier if they have an existing relationship with an organization it's just from a legal and procurement point of view they have master agreements in place and it's very easy once there is such an agreement to wire money these are tactical advantages are there other key reasons just to give you an idea we have probably close to 200 salespeople and they are all trying to sell LSD really? yeah and it's like they are all trying to sell large scale Drupal they are all trying to sell large scale Drupal and what we pitched them is this vision like you can put money in a pool and we are going to hire people and we are going to tackle some problems that you guys share this is exactly what we would try to do we are not interested in that so anyway I don't want to burst a bubble here it's worth trying for others I wouldn't be against that but it's very hard to do it it requires salespeople legal work and so I don't want to jeopardize my care but I think Linux and Dell and IBM are great examples from the Linux community and they are each investing each of these organizations they are investing like probably 10 million dollars in kernel development here so they have large numbers of people actually not just one or two and so that actually got me thinking like who are these organizations in Drupal who is the IBM who is the Dell in the Drupal community that's willing to say I'm going to hire 10 people and have them contribute to Drupal core or just Drupal and they don't exist except maybe for an Acquia but that's the only example that I can think of today and so that's actually how we came up with this notion of large scale Drupal maybe it's not one or two or three large companies but maybe there is hundreds of companies that are willing to give 100,000 dollars 50,000 dollars instead of 10 million dollars each and the reality right now is they're not willing to in my mind that doesn't mean large scale Drupal won't succeed it is growing but it's very slow and it's not a solution that will happen fast it's 8,000 dollars there's multiple tiers but I think the lowest tier is 8,000 which in our case is called an associate membership and it's not even a donation they actually get some things in return they organize meetups we give them networking benefits and knowledge as well we will share white papers with them so they can actually get value because otherwise it's very hard to get approval to do these things internally so we have to kind of wrap it up almost as something that they can buy something educational so they can actually get it past their legal and finance teams so I personally think that there's a lot of things we can do and I would like them in my keynote to think we know what companies want in return for contributing to Drupal we just have to be comfortable with this credit system and advertising on D2DO in my mind anyway and it's not to say the likes aren't great I think we should also integrate them better in D2DO but I don't think we can really solve the problem personally I agree, I think that we need a variety of solutions and it's them all together but the one issue that we're facing is that we don't have not everyone has access to LSD there's many other end users out there and we have a load of agencies and we have no differentiation between the agencies that are actually national and you're choosing between five or six agencies to deliver sites to you you don't know which ones to choose based upon how good they are for the sustainability of the product you're using and so I've spoken to one of the clients of LSD and they're like well LSD kind of fits what we want to do but what we'd really like to do is we'd really like to know that the agencies that we're using to build our products and them by looking after Drupal I agree that we need to make that much more transparent on the other that's key Hi, I'm Ryan Wheel I run a small shop in Montreal I contribute in many ways by showing up to events and I've been grateful to receive some benefit from some organizations to attend events in the past so that's been really good I have to say that the keynote was really welcome to hear a lot of that discussion and thought that went into possible solutions so just a little background of how I operate as a small agency with the people I work with we sort of look at this type of stuff as career development and it's really difficult to do because you know when you return home and you do have client work you kind of get pulled offline very easily and there's like issues I know that I'm tagged on that and have just kind of abandoned because they've grown stale and like I've been busy with other things and other people have taken it on and the project's been beyond that so these are issues that we face small companies that try to contribute so I just wanted to add a few points of like possible solutions that maybe haven't been discussed some of them I've discussed in private with a few of you and one of those I guess requires some background and it kind of goes back to Larry's point the Linux Foundation actually has part of their mandate to fund Linux and some of the other core developers as well they have actually since the open SSL bugs were revealed they have since made an initiative that's been announced publicly to fund developers for core infrastructure and I think that's something that should be considered in this context that like if we really want to push stuff forward we shouldn't be just looking to a company but like we should be saying like who's actually able to collect money now and redistribute that money so like for example like we have the DA tasked with like doing infrastructure for dupal.org and marketing but we don't do things like well there's serious gaps in this component of the system like and one of the solutions I've proposed in the past in discussions is like could we have something like akin to like a scholarship where somebody could apply to say work for six months or a year or two years on like a fixed term so that they don't need to be hunting down contracts during that time they know that their money is secure for a while and they can focus their work and report into an entity that is able to distribute some of that money an entity that people who like myself as a small business owner know that I can give them money under eight thousand dollars and I can know that that's going to go to a particular initiative or perhaps a particular person although I don't know if I would want to go that far I think I would rather say like I know that I would like to see improvement in the multilingual system for example so I would like to say here's a donation that should go toward multilingual do with it what you will like I don't have time to manage this stuff myself and I can't keep up with every issue but other people are looking at that so maybe they can like look at it from that perspective I know it's not currently part of the DA's mandate but I know they're an organization that we all know and trust and that people do give their money to now I just question if maybe if we could spend some of the marketing money elsewhere or like make it so that you know people can know that there's a development fund somewhere that they can trust My name is Sipran and I'm from Pakistan I work for previous NEXT as a remote developer my core time is not sponsored by them and I only work for them for paid work so my point here my point of view here is that we don't have a lot of big Drupal shops with you know 1000 or you know 100 150 1000 like that much manpower we don't have any company which have 1000 employees 1500 employees so in his Prague keynote he mentioned that we want IBM or Dell like companies for Pakistan so for that we need giants like that in our community in our shops we need that kind of shops but I can't see them around other than aquia so yes he's right aquia has a sales team big sales team that's why we everywhere in the community saw that but the main reason for this is that everyone you or Alex we all are working for small Drupal shops I think for 150 not more than 500 people so that's the main problem we have to make masses embrace the Drupal as a product like do you have any like imagine what that looks like in your head does it look like how many people does cap Gemini have working on Drupal worldwide I think it's like 120,000 people yeah I don't know how we count things like that does it mean like converting a company that has an existing business and like already like 150,000 employees to start doing Drupal like I don't know I think what happened in Linux with IBM and Dell and others is they had their own operating systems and they said oh instead of building our own we're going to switch to Linux and so what I mean by that is they were not selling services like they basically made a very strategic decision they like threw out like a multi-billion dollar business line and replaced it with Linux and so the question is not can we convert Gemini or other large services businesses I think personally but like is there a large organization that would adopt something like Drupal and put at the core of their business to fundamentally change how they work and what they do so Adobe ditched the CQ5 provision thank you hi I'm Joseph and I started Drupal fund two years ago and I just wanted to give you a few ideas of why actually I was thinking about Drupal fund and why we created it when we talk about funding can I agree with Drift that we need millions of dollars every year and I also agreed that we need to have several ways of several sources from which we raised money like LSD and everything else but I think that one big opportunity is within the community one thing which got me passionate about thinking even about Drupal fund and then creating was that when we look at the numbers which are on Drupal.org website there are like 1,015,000 people registered on the website 3% of them are actually developers who have at least one commit and when we talk about 1% of that of the whole pool of people registered it's 10,000 people and if they would dedicate or donate maybe 1% of their salary to Drupal it would be around 3 to 5 million US dollars every year and that is enough money to hire I don't know 70 full-time Drupal developers so maybe one way to figure out it is to try to kind of ignite the change in our shift in thinking of people within the community from only taking Drupal and using it for my own profit for my company profit for my customer profit to actually contribute financially and raise funds and give back something which we received so in order to convince those people to do that you have to have access to talk to them and maybe there are some marketing campaigns which we can do within our community itself maybe you can learn a lot from organizations which are successful on websites like Kickstarter who are doing crowdfunding and not only crowdfunding but maybe if we have somebody who is working on marketing part of fundraising it would be easier I don't know thank you I'm apparently not very tall are we already 15 minutes over? ok so Michael Myers I'll try and be really quick first of all this is awesome conversation this is a very complex topic and I feel like we are trying to pin broad solutions to it we are trying to pin websites there is no single solution to this absolutely there is no single solution a lot of different constituents and needs and I think for me at least it helps to kind of break it down so different solutions may be beneficial to different problems for example we want to raise money for core development which something like LSD may be helpful for and alone is not the answer we want to I loved how the way trees contextualize the innovation and the role of hobbyist or contributor on the edge of Drupal we want to make sure we are creating a community that has tremendous innovation and no barriers for them it's really important that as we start to think about things like funding and paying people to work on things we also think about how we are going to fund making it easier for people to contribute in general because we don't want any barriers for people who want to work on something that they want to work on it's super important a lot of different needs and motivations here and I think we need to try and map solutions to the different needs and motivations and there will be a lot of different solutions for each of those problems and I think one of the things that pains me right now is that I think it tip is an important part of the solution but I see it being that people who are already giving tremendous amounts of the project through their volunteer time are also the ones that we are then looking for to contribute to that get tip so we need to expand there is too much recycling of money way too much it's not good we don't have a marketing department we are not tapping people who aren't already giving it's not successful it's not that it couldn't be it just isn't at the same time I would also caution comparisons or direct comparisons to things like Linux Linux is a very different product than Drupal people build major product lines and drive billions of dollars in revenue on top of Linux Drupal is something that people see more as a cost center and there are a few companies like Acquia that are building products and services on top of it so it's a very different piece of software solving a very different problem and it's in a very different point in its life cycle and if you look at the early days of Linux they received tremendous amounts of injections of capital from a single organization or a small number of organizations and if you look at things like Mozilla they first got money from AOL to get off the ground then Google so again we are in a very different position in our life cycle and we are a very different type of software and we can't just look at these projects and say they did this and it worked for us because even if it will we may not be in the same point in our life cycle I'd love to see more conversation and ideas about this I think one of the challenges that I have is that there isn't a tremendous amount of data available we have no idea how much of the contributions that we are getting are funded there's no way to tell this is what the company is contributing we have so many passionate individuals that on top of a very challenging work schedule find the time with their families and lives to contribute above that and I can't even measure it within our own company sometimes who's paying for what and one comes out of volunteer time I think in order for us to arrive at better solutions to these problems I think we need to do a lot of research and understanding we need to look at a lot of other open source projects and learn what's worked for them 100 points in their life cycle and I think that we need to position ourselves as Dree suggested in his keynote to be able to evaluate our own position better and until that we're kind of somewhat blindly trying things to see what works I like blindly trying things I like the let's give it a go and let's iterate that was one of the messages that came out of that let's not be afraid let's just go and see what happens I wholeheartedly agree with that and that's our only option in the short term but I'd like to see us be more data driven in our execution because I meant let's just try ways of getting data let's not worry about getting the data perfectly let's just start trying to get data so that's definitely something I really think like especially somebody else asked they weren't really clear on what we were suggesting so we tried to make an overview of some things that are going on right now and I think the whole that we see is the independent central organization that is going through Drupal.org and the DA that has skilled marketing people that are funded through the revenue that they bring in through that so the fundraising people need to bring in enough money to pay themselves and to pay other things and I think we don't have that right now that's missing from our ecosystem of fundraising things because I don't count LSD as meeting that criteria I think we should have LSD like don't get me wrong because LSD has like but you're not independent of Aquian I operate completely independent from Aquian in this sense and I'm a member and partner in different programs being independent of Aquian that's a marketing problem that we're trying to correct but Aquia does not direct what large-scale Drupal does my members and partners direct what we do where we invest the money that they give me it's hard because it's hard to distinguish Aquia from Dries so Aquia doesn't direct well now you're talking about something else I'm telling you that so anyway we should talk about this more but my understanding is that LSD does many great things right like I've gotten to know you a lot better since you've gotten involved with bringing in way more people to the sprints the extended sprints and getting companies that would never send their employees never pay for them to come never send them here like you've been successful at getting them here and that's really great but I guess I didn't know whether or not LSD brought in the money that paid for Octo I wish we were bringing in money to pay for Octo so you're not so that's what I mean I think we need an LSD-like thing that is not attached to Aquia that is separate from that I'm telling you that that's impossible to use it won't bring in enough money look I've talked to say like the lawyers behind the Linux foundation and they said hey you're never going to be successful unless you're independent if you want to raise the kind of money that you want to raise and then I go to my members my partners and I say hey if I were to make this independent of Aquia would you be able to contribute more money that's not their problem that's why they're going to you it's the other people that aren't going to you that would go to an independent organization I'm not saying that we don't need an independent organization good we agree and that we don't need multiple solutions to this problem but you're never going to raise the kind of money you want from enterprises through the Drupal Association because these organizations in fact they're telling me that they want to give me more money so that I can funnel some of that to the Drupal Association because they themselves can't give money to the Drupal Association see now that's the kind of things that I think we should really talk about like you have got this really great perspective and access to these people but I think we also don't want to lose sight that you don't have access to some people who won't even talk to you correct so we need to find out like what they need and we need to find the knowledge that you have and figure out like what we can do I am focused on a piece of the puzzle a good one representing a specific constituency in the community and Drupal serves many constituencies and we need different solutions to have a thriving ecosystem see I knew we totally agree the last thing I want to say Alex you brought up partners so LSD just launched a partner program and just today I met with a company called Drupal Time Core Developer and so over the next year we are going to be bringing around a 25-30 partner organizations and in order to join the program they have to make a minimum commitment of 20% time and we are trying to get 50 or more from these larger organizations we already have 4 that have committed a minimum of 20% time wait the organizations that are becoming partners are committing to 20% time of their developers and giving them 20% of their time to work under the direction of large scale Drupal members and partners so be careful how you market that I don't know that we need we have more needs that are broader than developers you mean contributors sorry that's a poor way of phrasing in fact we talked today about project management and some of the things you brought up it's not a development problem it's a resource and funding problem so that's meaningfully underway but as I said this is an ecosystem and we need a lot of different solutions and we need more data and more information and we need to know what are your pain points and what is it that they like about what you give so that other people can learn from that you guys are completely amazing I can't believe you stayed for that thank you we have many dinners and sprints and things to happen so we can keep talking about this thanks you guys