 Alright, since it's 1.03, I'm going to go ahead and get this started. This is paid contribution, past, present, and future. This is a core conversation. It's a very, it's a mostly participatory session. I'm not going to call on anyone, but you are welcome to participate. We will have a Google Doc open where you can post your questions and thoughts. And there's also a microphone, so you can ask our panelists directly questions. And this is the link to the Google Doc. It's bit.ly forward slash paid dash contribution dash notes b-i-t dot l-y slash paid dash contribution dash notes. And I encourage you to also take notes within the doc itself. We will synthesize the comments later, hopefully we can share it with the rest of the community. So to get us started, I'm going to read part of the session description just to get our thoughts on the topic. So for most of Drupal's history, there have been occasional opportunities to get paid by some contributors to core. But in the last couple of years, we have seen significant growth in the number of individuals working on core as their primary job. And the number of companies employing those individuals. We also now have the Drupal Association providing grants for some of the critical work on core. And it has enabled some improvements that would have been nearly impossible to accomplish otherwise. But it also brings concerns about fairness, power imbalances, and volunteer morale, motivation, and other topics. My name is Alina McKenzie on Drupal.org. I am Alimac, and that is my Twitter handle right there. I'm a system administrator and web developer based in Chicago. And I've been working with Drupal for about four years and involved with the community for about two. Our panelists are Kalpana Ghol. My name is Kalpana Ghol. I'm K. Ghol on Drupal.org. I'm from Washington, D.C., work for Forum One as a developer. I started contributing to core in April 2013. So since then, I have been contributing. And we're very happy to have with us Aroni Kantis from Druid. I want to extend my thanks for being one of the sponsors of the mentor. Thank you, dinner. Thank you. You're welcome. Yes, so I'm a co-founder of Druid. In addition to being a developer, I'm kind of responsible for the brand and the marketing, which in our case mostly means community marketing. And now also includes paying for a few developers to actually contribute to core and all the other things. And finally, we have Kathy Faze. Hi, I'm Kathy. I'm Yastiti on Drupal.org. And I guess I've been contributing to course for a few years now. And I get paid to do it. I have a little interesting history about how I got paid, but right now it's my full-time job. Thank you. So I have a couple of notes about some of the history of paid contribution. First of all, this is not a recent concept, although it has sort of exploded in the last couple of years. We have been as early as around the time of Drupal 4.5. There had been some paid contribution going on. There is not a single model of either paid or unpaid contribution. We have several. In no particular order, we have some full-time employees who are paid to work on core. We also have employees of companies that provide a regular portion of their time to work on Drupal to contribute to Drupal. Or they have regular intervals at which they can contribute and be paid for it. We have folks who are full-time employees and work on Drupal in between projects whenever there is available time. But this kind of contribution is not regular. There have been several instances in which Drupal contributors have crowdfunded their own funds for contribution through services like GetTip. Right now it's Gratipay or Drupal Fundus. Some contribution is done through short-term or longer-term contracts. But these are finite, compensated type of payments. And finally, we have some contribution that is funded through indirect payments such as scholarships, grants, and that pay for some or all expenses but are not directly paying salary or contract or anything like that. So, let's talk about paid contribution. Once again, we have Google Doc where you can post your questions, make notes, and I'm going to start off the questions with a question to all the panelists about how they are currently paid or unpaid with what's the model that they're working within. So currently I'm not paid to work on Drupal Core. I started working on Drupal 8. I have zero contribution for Drupal 7 and I got motivated because I wanted to learn Drupal 8. My company encouraged me in the beginning to go to the sprints and work on Core. But we do have to survive. Companies do have bills to pay. So currently not paid to work on Core but I do contribution in my own personal times. Yeah, so I'm also not paid to contribute but I'm kind of on the other side of the deal. I have some contributions but they come from the projects I work on. But yeah, we are investing in contributing to Core. We are right now two developers who are not working full-time for Core but are especially now before Drupal Con because we tried to get Drupal 8 to release. Contributing a significant amount of time towards Drupal Core. You probably know Lowry by now. He has been really visible in Drupal Con and maybe Bart, Fenster or Xano also. Those are the guys who are mostly contributing to Core from us. The other guys also, we are now I think in place nine in the contributors list which is pretty good because we are kind of small companies still. Which is created by Lowry. Yes, that's true. Thanks. So can you speak a little bit to the model of paid contribution that they are working under? Are they full-time contributing or? When Bart started in last spring or summer, he was contributing full-time. Now he's doing part-part. Lowry is contributing three days a week right now I think, at least until Drupal Con. Lowry got generous offer from Drupal Association to pay for some time before Drupal Con to contribute on some initiative. But we kind of took over that. So we offered to pay for the time but we were also paying for him before that. I see. So basically a mixed model of different... That's right. Yes. Kathy? Sure. What was the question? Tell us about the model of paid contribution that you are participating in. So about a year and a half ago I started working at BlackMesh and the job offer was full-time to be Drupal Community Liaison. And then my work is probably split up into thirds on average. Probably like a third going to events and working there as part of sprints or mentoring. And then another third might be contributing on issues directly from home. And then another third is sprint planning, other kinds of things that help with the mentoring program. And then somewhere in there I also write blogs and do other internal stuff. Before that I was getting very small, regular sponsorship about 15 hours a week from a variety of companies. Initially it's Compress from Germany and then Chepers in Hungary and also BreakTech in Chicago over the... Like each one at a time over the years. Thank you. So I'm going to go into the doc right now and ask you some questions from the audience. The first one is about crowdfunded solutions for funding core contribution, which is Drupal 8 Accelerate and GitTip. Are these solutions sustainable? Well, I would say the GitTip grant-a-pay model is not sustainable. It's not discoverable and it doesn't have a very good experience for the people who are giving money because they have to know the individuals they want to give the money to instead of the general initiatives they would like to do. And typically the people who have the money are not intimately involved knowing individual people. So that was an interesting experiment, but I would not recommend it going forward. Right, grant-a-pay, yeah. Because they had several crises, one was maybe too political, but the other crisis was actually their banking provider or their credit card provider changed and they needed to change. It actually made it impossible to give money to a team. It's currently impossible to give money to a team, but the change now is you can only give money to a team. So these grant-a-pay links that for instance Davina has can't get money anymore. It needs to be a part of a team and maybe it's your fault or someone's fault whoever created the Drupal Core team didn't create another one. So there's no Drupal Core team anymore. Then once Alex Pot who was part of the team changed his funding and he got hired and some things changed there. The amount of money that was coming into the team was not significant to impact any of the people on the team. And so the investment in doing fundraising, promotion, maintenance of it didn't pay off. So it's absolutely my fault, but a strategic decision. It's not worth investing in that. And it didn't particularly work out very well in general. I look at all these things from the marketing perspective and if you want companies to give you money, of course everyone wants to contribute. We want to be nice to the community because the community gives lots of things to us, but still we need to think about the visibility. And I have not seen giving straight money to some, like, not anonymous, but like these kinds of sponsorships, it's not very good marketing-wise. I don't feel like we get visibility from those kinds of things. I prefer to get a little bit more creative when contributing something to the community. So it involves money every time, but that's why we do things like sponsor the mentor dinners and core sprints and stuff like this. We feel like we get more out of it with the same amount of money. It's the same thing with these regular sponsorships in TripleCon, for example. We feel like we get more visibility when we get speakers, when we contribute to the core, and stuff like that. So when people think that it's... Many companies think that it's wasted money to put developers at work on core, but like I said, pretty much everyone knows Lauri right now and pretty much everyone here knows our company, at least the logo they have seen or something. That's all part of the marketing we put. They are not accidents. We go to the parties and have fun and stuff like that. It's all part of the marketing strategy we have. When you say everybody knows Lauri and knows that he works for Druid, I wonder who everybody is because I suspect that might be other developers. I think one of the big advantages for companies, for paying part of their team to do a contribution, is it puts that company in front of the people that they will eventually want to hire, but not necessarily in front of customers who will give them projects. I'm wondering if you think that's accurate. No, I don't think it's accurate. Sorry. Yeah, this is the normal mantra. When you come to Drupalcon, you only have developers there, there's no customers. That's just one of the things. When we formed our company, we had the same principles that probably all the companies have. When you ask, what do you think? If you would be a customer ordering a project from a Drupal agency, what would be the things you respect in that company? What would be one of the things you look for? Usually the answer is quality, flexibility, which we call actuality in our company, and maybe involvement in the open source project because it brings skill in the house. Now, when you actually form the company and start to sell, you forget all these things. All these companies keep forgetting those principles they had when they stopped forming the company, like being a good citizen in the company, delivering quality instead of quantity and stuff like that. And this is the same thing, like an agileity is one thing they always forget. Okay, we want to do agile, but we are now in hurry, so let's implement our own scrum, like what we call crouching, agile, hidden waterfall or something. So you start to mess up with all these principles you have because you do not actually believe that your customers respect those. And we tried really hard not to forget this and just try to go with all these principles and go with the community marketing. We have not done any business to business marketing so far. We are now starting a little bit, but we have grown in three years from five people to 30 people just by doing these things we do. We contribute, we are active in the community, we sponsor these things and somehow the word goes to the customers. We don't call the customers, they call us right now and it has been always like that. So yes, the developers are here, but they talk to people. It's not just recruitment thing. It's of course we love to get to hire people who contribute to Quaran who are really skilled at triple, but they talk to customers also. That is how it goes. The word just goes around and companies start to know that we actually deliver quality that they work for. I have a follow-up question for Rani. So what made you decide that you want to encourage your developer to contribute to Quaran? I see that you listed the list of benefits you see by allowing Lorry to contribute to Quaran and lots of people know who Lorry is and who Lorry works for. But what made you decide to do that? That was one of the things we decided when we formed the company to work like this and now we are actually getting some, we are growing steadily and we now have some money to actually give back like that. It's not only like if you look at Lorry's triple skills, triple eight skills one year ago and now when he has been contributing, it's not just marketing. We get like kick-ass developers by letting them actually be in this community and learn from the other guys. That's why we are now really skilled company with triple eight and we have already released many triple eight sites since the first beta properly. So what I hear is correct that not only companies get benefited by contributing their developer time but developers also get benefited by polishing their skills and working closely with the core developers and learning all the skills. Absolutely and also they of course get motivation because they like to work with the core and now they get to do it. So there's lots of benefits. So for you, billing time was not an issue that Lorry is contributing to core and you have clients project waiting for Lorry to finish and so that was not a concern. Well it is always a concern but you have to put that money in to get something out. You cannot just put all the developers working on or all the guys in your company or people in your company to work on the client projects and then expect to continue that until the... You have to put money in the marketing and this is marketing for us and education and stuff like that. Sorry? It's an investment, yes. Thank you. So that kind of leads us into another question. Sponsorship is another way that companies contribute and should companies be motivated to do more paid contribution or more sponsorship and if so which one do you prefer? I don't really see the difference in those. They are all sponsoring the community. Like I said earlier, the return on investment in these sponsorships is not that great for us at least. You get the logo on some web page and that's it. We get a lot more from all these shadow sponsorships. But of course I encourage you to have the sponsorships and these events need money. That's definitely... But you maybe need to focus on how the companies actually get return from the sponsorships. We are sponsoring lots of events and I like it but that's not enough. You have to do more than just put money in and wait for the investment to return. You have to do some field work also but sponsoring is important because that keeps these events alive. Triple camps live with the money the companies give them. Tickets are not usually the main source of income. So it's really important but just try to get everything out of it. It's not just send money and then stay home. You have to go to the event and actually buy something but if you don't go there and actually take it then you won't get much with the sponsorship. The logo is not that big of a deal. Kathy or Kalpana, would you like to comment on the sponsorship versus paid contribution or paying developers to contribute? Which is the preferred for the companies that you work for? Well, I suspect we don't want to have only one or the other and which one is better for your company probably depends on your company's strategies. I think they both encourage the health of the project in different ways. So paying a contributor is direct and you can see your effects on this particular person and see what they work on. Sponsoring on the other hand is more diluted or spread out and more indirect. So like for example here at Drupalcon we have sprint days on Saturday, Sunday and Monday and then we have sprint days on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and if we didn't have companies sponsoring Drupalcon we couldn't do that and we would have six less days of hundreds of people sprinting if we didn't have enough sponsorships. So even if you took that amount of money and maybe a few companies paid ten developers their time that would be the equivalent of to like do direct contribution it's a different kind of thing. It enables for example right now some people to work on criticals but it also opens up the future contributors that we're going to have a year, two years from now and so I think we would be in very serious trouble if we didn't have those sponsorships also. So I think they're both really important but for different reasons. Okay so to not get angry letters from Drupal Association what I meant was that sponsoring is really important but it gives you the tools. When you sponsor you get the tools which you then use for marketing and stuff like that but if you leave those tools unused all you get is the logo on the web page. So if your company has like lots of money then maybe it's not problem for you but we need to get everything out of our sense we put in and that's why we don't want to left anything unused. So you get the tools by giving money then you need to use the tools actually. From my perspective my biggest concern is that the sponsorship and Ronnie already mentioned that before that sponsorship gives exposure to the companies if they sponsor Drupal Cons and Drupal Cams or sprints that all make it happen because of the sponsorship. Marketplace is a step towards recognizing contribution. I think if we can provide more recognition for the companies that they encourage their developers to contribute more to the core I think that will be a step towards like encouraging more companies to devote their developer time to work on core. So Mike Myers, VP of developer relations for Acquia we sponsor more events than any other organization in the ecosystem and I think that the challenge from a business standpoint you know a lot of what you're saying resonates with me more organizations would sponsor events if we could find ways to provide tangible business value. So when a camp approaches me and says I'd really like you to sponsor my event it's right now the question is do you want a small medium or large logo on our website? My answer is I don't really care about the size of my logo on your website. Do you want a booth? No, I don't want a booth because the people I send to the camp don't want to stand around a booth. They want to go to sessions. So I feel like we need to change the sponsorship packages to match the needs and the interests of the businesses and the people with the money and then if we're willing to do that I think that we'll find more businesses willing to sponsor at a significantly higher level which would I think meet the needs of the community but we really need to kind of rethink our approach to sponsorship and events as a community. Please use the mic. So what would you want? Do you want to sponsor and then get a meeting with some CEO? I'll speak on behalf of a lot of the partners and clients as well as my own needs. I think that every organization I talk to needs to find talent. They want to grow their teams. Having a booth is not a great way to do that. Random people come up to me I don't know who they are something that we do here at Drupalcon we could replicate at a camp level for example is give people that are seeking job opportunities the opportunity to indicate that when they register for a camp and then as a sponsor at a particular level you could say send them a list of those people and that way before I show up at a camp I have a list of potential candidates I can look them up on LinkedIn I can contact them directly and say hey of the 30 people that are looking for jobs at this camp I might actually walk away with a great candidate. A simple idea Well actually in Drupalcon Montpellier in France last year there was a job speed dating thing so probably the communication I would like to bring this back to contribution and pay contribution because we kind of veered off into the weeds a little bit So the next question I would like to ask the panel is we spoke about the D8 Accelerate fund which has helped to pay for expenses and time of contributors to work on critical issues Do you think that the DA should have a sort of a permanent crowdfunding platform where the community members could raise the funds for contribution? Well there is a lot of power these days in this crowdfunding things but I don't know if those are for the companies maybe for the individual like individuals are now giving 20 euros a year or something to have these bats from Drupal association in their Drupal Harker profile or something This is the why not but it's not for the companies from my point of view actually maybe contribute something from my own pocket but when I have to think about to return and invest for the company no I don't think that's very interesting model for us so yes keep doing it but don't expect it to have the same audience as this sponsorship deals So can I say that is that why it took us so long seven months to raise only $250,000 because companies didn't see the value of just donating money to D8 accelerated fund? Well that's obvious right if companies see value in that they will put money in it if there is no money then the companies didn't see why they should invest in it $250,000 or $125,000? It was $250,000 I think Right so I'm a little iffy on that myself but I think there were four companies that they established a guarantee they would total up to $125,000 and then matching another $125,000 raised so the total amount of money was $250,000 Some companies gave significant chunks and other parts of it came from small individual contributions from community members Yeah We exactly Yeah we started with a commitment of $125,000 at the beginning and the idea was that each dollar that was donated by individuals and companies would be matched by the anchor companies who made the initial investment in the program I believe that half of that initial $125,000 came from the DA's DA's pocket to begin with and then the anchor companies donated the other $62,000 to bring that up to $125,000 Yes I think that's right I think that there are some parts of the Drewblade Accelerate that met the needs of businesses that we do want to keep around that were successful but there's more changes that we need to do when we were in the funding right before this one of the points that Alex mentioned quite well was that funding is a skill and with specific techniques that are based on research and getting good results informed by numbers and strategies and there are several things that we can improve on that was not done in this first centralized attempt by an official organization so as a first stab I think Drewblade Accelerate was done by the Drupal Association on Drupal.org was pretty good success and I think with some fundraising skills to improve that we can do even better the parts of it that I think met needs of big companies was they could easily find the place to donate it was on Drupal.org they did not have to identify the blocking issues the important areas that were lacking talent they did not need to then find the talent and pay them so they could just give money to a place that was very central, easy to find and then that place would distribute the money so that part of the model I think worked really well and we should keep that around well gee if they paid $250,000 for seven months of work like I want to go work and treat it I don't think it's quite equivalent there were the Drupal Accelerate helped many individuals work on core that would not have been able to otherwise and would have had to take client project more than just one or two people many people I've wondered for some time when we're trying to do funding we always go to companies to do funding and I think about let it begin with me what can I do as an individual I have contributed to core in the past and I do core through my paid job now but I've made a decision in my life I have a lot of client work that pays very well please don't I have a lot of paperwork that keeps me very busy and to take the time away from that to do core work I have to take a salary cut or charge more well I do charge more, we charge a lot and I like the money that I make so the decision that I have made personally in my life is to try to fund other core developers that was around, I decided I'd give a half hour of paid time a week to get to and when we did D8 accelerated decided to donate one day's pay to D8 accelerate I've thrown this idea out for other folks and it doesn't seem to resonate I'm just stating it again here I'd like to try to encourage the community of people that are like me I've been in the community for ten years I've known in the community for the work I've done and this is the way I contribute to D8 and there's got to be more people like me that could contribute in that way so the question I proposed in here was a tithing type of system where we had a badge I don't know how to make this something that's enticing but I really believe that this is part of my professional duty to contribute back just like being a Drupal Association member as part of my professional duty if I want to benefit from these things it's something I have to do for some people and they give a significant percentage of what they have that's a big impact on them and for other entities they could give the same amount it would be a much smaller percentage and it's hard to balance what kind of recognition you give people I think it all comes to like sorry the problem with all this community contribution stuff is that it's really hard to measure the return on invest it's hard to get the numbers how much I put this much money in how much do I get back and when is this money actually coming from that so you just have to trust your instincts on this and that's so in terms of D8 Accelerate though I think it's pretty one so hopeful measure is how much sooner you get Drupal 8 like that's literally the measure like we can all sit around and wait for it to be done in another two years when we're out of business or if being in business soon is important to you your return on investment is that you give money and you get to have Drupal sooner sure but that assumes that we cannot sell Drupal 7 anymore we have Drupal this is not the first Drupal we get but I agree we also are really eager to get to Drupal 8 and like I told we already have Drupal 8 sites and we really like Drupal 8 so that is one of the reasons we really try to contribute but of course one thing is that when Drupal 8 releases so that everyone wants to buy it we are already ahead of our competition because we have contributed we know how that system works in my opinion I think that DA should have started D8 Accelerate Fund sooner when I used to contribute I used to encourage my co-workers to why don't you contribute to core and because we are all benefiting from Drupal and more you contribute you get more opportunity to learn and grow but nobody was interested and they used to ask me oh how your core work is going how is it coming along and sooner like slowly slowly they started like not bothering at all so when I mentioned about Drupal 8 Accelerate Fund that if you don't contribute to core you can contribute this way like you can donate money and it will help us release Drupal 8 faster but I think at one point it's very hard and sad to say that it lost momentum in some for some of the developers that they don't care about Drupal 8 they say oh they asked me in a walkway that oh so how is Drupal 8 work going on are you still contributing so it's kind of sad I think if we could have done this a step earlier that could have helped us but it's never too late you just said that you were assuming that if Drupal 8 was not getting released you would still be in business because you would still be able to sell Drupal 7 I disagree on that because I think that clients are looking for sustainability of their websites sustainability of the product they're basing their websites on and since Drupal 8 has been announced so long ago and it is still not released clients are actually losing trust in the Drupal project as a whole and therefore not only in Drupal 8 but also in Drupal 7 so I think what Kathy said is that if Drupal 8's release is two years two extra years away we would all be out of business I guess you're correct and I'm it's great when he says it but not when I say it it is, sorry, okay you are both right the thing is that I still trust that Drupal 8 will be released thinking about if it's one month away or two months away, if it's two years ago always till we then we have a problem but one of the problems is maybe in the other end why do we announce it to our customers like three years before we release it because it was announced to us two or three years ago yeah but that is part of the problem maybe but I think we have strategies in place to fix that we are not planning on repeating that yes, there are nowadays 70% worsening and introducing some agility in the core of contribution and stuff so I think we are heading in the right way now and the community is understanding this problem Lasiu, I just wanted to share that we've been a bit before the D8 Accelerate Fund with the D8 Rules Initiative to get funds to port a contributed module that's used on 25% of all the Drupal websites what's challenging but also a very rewarding experience and we raised 18,000 euros more than a year later we finished the first milestone so we spent all the money and it was kind of a great experience because on the way first of all we could fix a lot of Drupal core issues we could work on the module we could also train a lot of people of more people involved but also feel like it's still really challenging now having to ask again for money and having to ask twice for milestone two and milestone three I have to raise double of the money that I've already raised I just feel like I don't know if I really will have the energy to do that again well it's fundraising is a separate job that I mentioned earlier so maybe a bit broader question so if we take the Linux kernel for example I mean they get a lot of people full-time paid to work on it because it's critical to businesses Microsoft and all those guys so the question is how can you make Drupal occupy the same critical space for the company so that they have to hire full-time core developers if it's even possible can I answer I think the Linux kernel is quite different it's not so easy to contribute to that so if we want to have the Linux model we should make it harder to contribute to Drupal core contributing to the Linux kernel is extremely hard and if you have one patch most likely get a job somewhere because you made that happen so Drupal is really easy to get into and people rely on the fact that at some point we fix it if you're a professional company in Linux and there's a specific problem nobody will fix it for you you have to do it yourself you have to hire core people that's not the case in Drupal so I think it's hard to compare but I think that Drupal community is doing awesome work today is just what we have had now they are doing things right so I don't think that's actually a problem currently Hi just to read the conversation I heard you mentioning about the current competition of Drupal I would like to maybe understand better what you think is the current competition on Drupal and what do you expect in the next five years in terms of competition what would be our what would be Drupal's main competitor whatever you see that to still be a platform like a community development one or whatever some new framework that will come up ok so you heard the competition and took it as competition to Drupal I was referring to competition to Druid but I think different countries have different different problems with this I don't know well I'm not going to mention in systems and starting those wars but anyway we have some competition there but Drupal is now extremely strong the way to keep Drupal alive is to keep the Drupal companies alive I think the community is awesome but you need the business around Drupal to keep it alive but in Finland it's really strong now I think maybe Tris already answered that to some extent in his keynotes if you saw it and otherwise very soon I think after this slot there is a Drupal 8 retrospective and it's a good question so we have about 10 minutes left in the session I would like to ask all of you about what do you think the future of paid contribution looks like and what is your kind of a wish list for that or ideal state that you can imagine so I've seen a trend recently within the last year of companies who have a strong secure financial business position are publicly announcing that they're hiring people specifically to contribute to open source projects half time or full time people are either adding to what they already have in place in terms of company policy or they're rearranging their resources to have some people who have concentrated time obviously Druid is doing it Pantheon has two people now I work for Black Mesh, Alex is a Chapter 3 Aquia has six to whatever and being public about it not keeping it a secret so I see that trend I don't have concerns about the trend I think it's effective and healthy so I would like to see that continue as part of one of the ways that happens I also think triple aid accelerate should continue and improve and in terms of the recent things that have changed I think those are really good I think one of the things we're really lacking right now in terms of at least Drupal 8 is where lacking clients, huge gigantic clients with money that want Drupal 8 right now and I think for past releases of Drupal we've had those in the past and we don't have those right now and I think we're feeling the effect of missing that it wasn't public in the past and I think we're missing it right now and I think we can sense that I'd like to address that thing first I think why we are missing that is because the company is a little bit afraid because the chains are a lot bigger now when we went to Drupal 8 the whole framework changed when we switched from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 companies were confident that they still have the skills to offer Drupal 7 not many companies are not so sure but that wasn't the original question I think the game is about the chains with the paid core contribution now if the versioning changes and the release system changes because I think that the best point for companies in terms of visibility is to contribute when the Drupal version is getting visibility and that's usually when it's announced first when it's announced and then like four years goes no one contributes because it does not gain attention and then when the release gets closer then people start contributing again because they get more return on their money I think that's exactly right and when a couple years ago when I was talking with Hey Rocker about that, that was exactly his point when he was trying to raise money for CMI for the configuration management initiative he said his biggest problem was that he had companies that were willing to give him a lot of money but they wanted to see something in six months not three years so the semantic versioning and the being able to add features thing you're one point there what concerns me a little bit about people getting core developer jobs is the way they got it like you and Alex basically if somebody wants to do the job that you're doing they have to be unpaid for one and a half year do lots of stuff in the volunteer time make a big name in the community then making the rounds to like 20, 30 companies please hire me, please hire me, please hire me a lot of begging and then finally you get your job so it feels a little bit I don't know I agree I didn't understand correctly so did you say that it's hard to get to work for a company that wants to contribute if you want to do a purely core developer job there are no job advertisements out there that would provide that so you have to find your way in by working for free for several years and there's also another risk because now we're releasing Drupal 8 your company's not going to be looking to the horizon to Drupal 9 for quite some time so they might actually fire you it could happen with others I don't think so sorry can I answer first I don't think it's reasonable to expect maybe that you can work 100% of your time for four years towards the core but it's reasonable to ask like to put part of your time because it's too expensive for company even if they like to do it they don't want to get bankrupt but so if you want to do a part time core development I'll get you the deal and you can sign it we'll hire you right now but okay just to answer your question or the thing you just mentioned note that Drupal 9 is so far out what is the value, why not just fire those people exactly because of semantic versioning you will actually have only six months from the time that you're actually working on something to actually being able to use that is only six months instead of years to change the difference on the other hand some companies were looking for Drupal 8 because it had so many things on it that they wanted the new semantic versionings are some companies will say yes I want that on the other end they will say but I want that other thing that is going to be only three years from now I don't want to wait I just do not bother I don't know just one possibility I think it will actually help because it will be more apparent which things are on the horizon and then when you're keenly interested in them you will have more optimism that that's going to happen so instead of some kind of generic like something is coming you probably want to fund you'll be like oh my god this thing and as a company that could be directly in your interest one thing that I didn't see in the conversation up to now and it was just you two talking in private before the conversation started the new sorting of the marketplace is probably going to do a lot to encourage companies to actually get their employees contributing it's going to be only now only code because that's the thing we can measure unfortunately so mentoring and being the mentor everywhere does not count but well that's not actually true so a while ago we had for years a culture of counting contribution only code and counting it through core commit mentions so if your name wasn't in the message of the core commit there was no way to count your contribution and culturally that had started to shift and additionally now the core committers are making significant effort to give credit to people who do reviews so there are now people getting commit mentions that are not writing code on maybe that specific issue it's very difficult to actually do a review on something without having ever done that but there's more there and I was talking to Jess the other day because as part of the mentoring conversation that we were having about what what benefits mentors get and how they don't get recognition and Jess recommended that when mentors are helping somebody else work on an issue that the mentor make a comment on the issue saying I as a mentor am helping so and so work on whatever and when a mentor does that that allows the core committers to then even give credit if a mentor does not comment on an issue at all they can't get credit for it so if we can start to establish a pattern of exposing mentoring on the issues that at least gives us the availability of giving those mentions that are now counted through the new comment attribution so when you make a comment on Drupal.org now there's a place where you can say I'm working as a volunteer or I am working for my company and then you can auto complete which company you work for if you work for more than one and additionally you can say you can add on for customer whatever so as if I'm mentoring and I'm working for black mesh and I'm helping somebody else work on an issue I can make a comment on it saying I'm mentoring them attribute my comment to black mesh and then my mentoring things that may not have otherwise produced any kind of commit mention start to increase their ranking in the marketplace just as if I had worked on a patch for the issue and because of the multiplying effect of mentoring so she was recommending that we could use that as a way of recognizing that contribution and encouraging companies to do that also I think that would be great I would like to give Kelpa a chance to talk about her wish list as the last thing our session is now over my wish list is like how can I if I'm for example I'm not looking for a job but if I'm looking for a job and I have certain patches in core that's only my resume that's the main attraction of my resume how would I attract companies to sell my resume and say please hire me because I know something about maybe other people don't know and how can I encourage companies to encourage more employees to work on core all right thank you we can continue this conversation but we should need to close up very great yes