 So, if you are here to see D8 lessons learned and how we can make D8 9 better, or sorry, D9 better, then you are in the right room. So, I'm Shannon Vitas. Hi. I work for Commerce Guys and I've been doing project management for a long time and I've been doing some project management on Drupal 8, which is why this all came about because I was able to get some information from the team about how things were moving and a lot of ideas kind of churned out of that, especially at DrupalCon Munich, lots of conversations were happening around how could we improve this, what are the problems that we're having. So, obviously that was a long time ago and lots of things are changing and evolving, but I still feel like those core conversations that were happening are still relevant today. So, that's why this happened. So, obligatory plug, go to the Commerce Village. It's amazing. We'll change your life. So, we have all kinds of awesome partners that are there with really amazing commerce services. We're doing a kind of challenge where you have to go around and get something from each partner and then you can come to our Commerce Guys saloon, which is tomorrow night, well, tomorrow at 3 o'clock and have a beer with us. So, that's your challenge and I wanted to point it out to you. So, please go do. And then, you know, obviously what am I doing up here? So, I've been project managing and I feel like I've been being a little bit crappy because I've been working a lot. So, if you're interested in working on Drupal 8, please do come and talk to me and give me your card. I'm recruiting actively all the time. So, we're looking for people to help and I'm just basically trying to get the word out about things that I think this is easy for me to do. Point out trends, point out issues and that's why we're here to talk. So, feel free to join the conversation. It's basically going to be like what's going on right now? How are things looking in the Drupal initiative like set up, the process that we're using? What is it? How's the organization? What are the teams doing? What if we did something different and then talking to you about like what is involved in that? So, here's what I think we're doing today. We have people at the bottom and I apologize for the small text. So, people at the bottom who I consider abstainers, they use the software but they're not really involved. They're not actively building things. They're not actively building core. They're just kind of there using it. And that's a big group. Then you have your novices which are people who don't have a ton of experience but you know they've done some things and they've got a little bit of experience and they're able to do limited things so we can't use them a whole lot. But we have a lot of those people and we like those people. So, keep coming. But then we have another level which I'm calling tier two which is beginners and so they have experience and they can do stuff but they haven't worked on core extensively and they don't really know about the process and that's where people like Jess are awesome because core mentors and you can go to Drupal.org and search core mentors. They will give you all kinds of information there. Beginners are really useful to us because they are people that we can turn into experts which is the next level. And experts and beginners are kind of cruelly missing in our triangle as far as I can tell today. And then you have initiative owners which are kind of these awesome people up front who are doing things and over here they're interspersed. So initiative owners are I think you know carrying the torch for what they want to do and trying hard and they're getting totally run over by all the work that needs to get done and burned out. So our current organization right now is pretty much an initiative owner with some help and I think that there are a few problems that are involved in this. So this is the current organization right now. So you've got initiative owners at the top. They've got a couple of experts working with them usually maybe a few more than just two but not usually like five or six or ten experts that are working with them. Usually it's just a couple of people that are just really awesome really dedicated. So they're bearing the brunt of all the work. And these people are also helped out by some reviewers which are all the little diamonds underneath and those people are awesome too. They help them get things done. But it's not like there's a million of those people. It's limited in the initiatives and so this is a problem for us because we're missing those two key groups and these are people that we can kind of level up and teach and bring on board. So the current organization also has a couple of other parts which are obviously like people like me who try to do project management which is right now very limited. So it's basically down to communication and then people who do committing and finally people who do front-end things. So that's the second group and finally you have a third group which is just other community people. So people do ladders, teachings, you know how to get involved with core. People work on funding and people who do all kinds of awesome design stuff and then all the other community members just a random person who comes in and reviews one thing and then leaves and just like this is too hard I can't do it or whatever. I'm lumping them into that kind of other community people. So this is how we're working today and it's a little bit hard because obviously the people in that top level are really doing all the main hard stuff all the time. So they're the most prone to all these different problems. So burnout and well poisoning. We're picking the same people to do the same things because they've got core management knowledge and they've got all this background info and they know how this works because they had to work on that. So they keep on having to pick the same people to do the same things and they're getting really, really burned out. And then they also have lack of information for the public because these people are so knowledgeable they can't always take the time because they're really overburdened to do all this stuff to give a weekly update of what's going on in the initiative. So everyone else is like when are we getting Drupal 8? They don't know anything about what's happening or maybe they get some information but it's maybe not in the digestible format that they need so PMs could really help with that but they're hard to come by and we're all really busy and blah, blah, blah. So that problem exists and then we have some poor interaction and dependency issues because, again, the same people are really burdened with all the same work. It's hard for us to take the time to sit down for two hours and say, okay, in the next month where are the dependencies that are going to affect us? What is the biggest risk right now? And we're doing some of that but not enough in terms of being able to plan for them. It's more just reaction. Like, okay, we're on fire here. What do we do about that type of stuff? And then that also leads to really hard to plan schedules issues. So it's almost impossible right now in the current setup to actually plan anything because people are not reliable. Myself included to do stuff because we're all volunteers. So planning a volunteer project is really tough because we don't have any funding, we can't organize correctly. And also it's just really hard to onboard newbies because we've got those two levels that we're missing but we don't necessarily have the infrastructure to teach them how to do stuff. So I wanted to talk to you about an idea that came out of Munich which was how could we organize teams for the next round of Drupal development and maybe even something that we can use during the last legs of Drupal 8. That would be awesome if people would kind of rise up and get this done but I'm not going to hold my breath, I'm just thinking more D9. This would be cool. So I think that it would be really cool if we could have three groups. Helpers, builders, and organizers, or sorry, designers. So the helpers are people who are going to help organize things and communicate and fund. So these are all the support mechanisms and people like initiative owners, I don't think, want the burden of that on top of having to do all the architecture and all the big heavy lifting and all of the onboarding and teaching and documenting and upgrade path building and all of that. I think if we could have a group of helpers, that would be really cool. Builders would be people who obviously are doing all the building and testing and documenting and reviewing and designers are people in my mind who would be doing UX, UI, reviews, usability all kinds of really awesome things that are not incorporated enough into the initiatives right now but also very, very important. So let me tell you a little bit more about this vision and then we can have a conversation. So the first group helpers, I see it as project managers so coordinate, document milestones then there's people who teach so they would find the education gaps like where do people get stuck where do they not know how to learn how to do something help build letters that they can learn those things and then find new mentors and track those KPIs and finally communicators, people who will meet with groups communicate about their progress and basically keep all the rest of us who are not in the issue queues every single day like watching what's happening kind of up to speed on how things are going like well we're getting close to the end or we're really far away that type of high-level thinking is not easy to communicate unless you're in regular contact we need more of those people so that's what communicators are to me and then finally funders I think it's really important to have funding in order for this method to be sustainable because it's so hard to plan a volunteer team you don't know where they are you don't know when they're going to be available something personal, something professional might come up and trump whatever they're doing volunteer at any given moment so it's just impossible to plan for without funding but if we could fund people and we have been funding people, especially Greg it just makes it easier so I think that that's a really important part and then you'd have tier one and tier two so this is basically people who are interested but don't know what to do and then tier two would be people who have been doing a little bit of it and who can help the tier one people kind of learn more and that's what I see as helpers and then you have builders which I really think is the key to this having multiple levels of builders is where we're going to see the most success and you'll have initiative owners who are there to do architecture monitor progress, unlock issues help find teachers and funders and help coordinate with communicators and project managers on what needs to actually happen in the initiative I see these people as the leaders they're there to set the strategy and they're there to communicate about the strategy and the progress of that vision and then the experts I see as people who are there to do the awesome stuff so this is a bit of a switcheroo from what we're doing right now because right now it's like the initiative owner is the expert and I think we need to have them be in a different level than the experts experts are people who can do stuff and this is where we're cruelly lacking people right now funding might help with that so these people code stuff, they maintain things they do summaries, they do trainings, they find people they can do all kinds of things Tier 2 would be a certain level of beginner who have some limitations they're not yet experts but they're pretty well up there maybe they can train Tier 1 or maybe they can even train novices and then you obviously have people who are just getting started who need some documentation so that's how I see the builders group these are people who are actually doing things in terms of code and then finally designers I'm sorry I'm lumping it into this category if that makes any of you mad but it was the best category that I could come up with I see this as people who really care about how things work for the user and who care a lot about usability and user experience so I see that it's a little bit tough for me to really define what that should look like but I'm thinking like themers, designers UXers unite to find ways to review the work that's coming out of the code with Project Manager and with an initiative owner on the progress of when is the right moment to step in when is the right time to really start talking about UI I know it's a challenge we face right now in D8 it's not super clear and I think that having some more structure around this would be great so if anyone in here is working on that type of content I'd love to talk to you afterwards and just get your feedback or maybe even during the session since it is a conversation so basically the big difference that we have to do is that right now we don't have a clear plan and we're just kind of going about as best we can so we plan a little bit we don't really know how to train anybody to get started it's more like, core mentors please come save us teach people how to get started and I think in an initiative level it would be great for them to have each their own core mentor an onboarder, a person to help they're doing instead of just one group that has to cover all areas and you're all over the place in triage so I think that's where we are right now and it's really hard to train because we're all too busy doing things D9 I think would be great if we could actually plan ahead know more about what the goals and milestones are based on what didn't get into D8 for example and then decide if we like the initiatives and how that's going maybe we can do another round of funding and try and get a set group of teams I think at least the initiative owners and at least three experts should be funded for every single initiative I think if we can't do that yay if we can't do that then I think that we're just relegating ourselves to the same fate that we've already had which is try your very best but no guarantees I don't think that's what anyone wants so I think that's going to help us and I really think education is key to this methodology working having a way to bring people into the fold is important especially with each release how much more complicated and how much more interesting and awesome it's getting it's also getting much harder to teach people so we need those steps so there are a few dependencies and questions that I'm going to put out there for us to discuss and then I'm going to shut up basically initiatives need these trends so what if you disagree with initiatives not everyone likes this idea so right now if you're not familiar with it initiatives are basically different groups of goals for features like whisky and views and all of this stuff so not everyone agrees with initiatives if you disagree I want to hear from you to know why you wouldn't want to keep doing that ladders is another one initiative I think it's not got its legs yet it's sea legs it's still trying to find people to stay involved I was involved briefly but got pulled away and a bunch of stuff so maybe that's happening to everybody so basically ladders is a teaching initiative that says I'm going to learn how to do something I'm going to document it and then I'm going to share it and then I'm going to teach someone else how to do it and then they become a mentor to someone else and they tell two friends type of thing it's a great concept it would be really cool if we could do this but I think there's also dependency like we need to do this now if we're going to be able to use it in the next round so we'd need a massive following to get on board and that sounds kind of tough to do and then finally the big ugly question of funding like who do we ask who gets what how much how much do we need it's just all very hairy who manages the money it's a big problem in this environment especially because we're open source and we're non-profit so we can't just say oh just write me a check I'll deal with it no it's like really a tough issue to solve so that's a whole other question and I'm interested in whatever ideas you have and these are some alternatives because what I just said is super ambitious so maybe we could try like funding one initiative or like one resource initiative instead of all four that might be a little bit more realistic trying to leverage several parts of visibility to get interest so really a lot more communication about what we're trying to do to help people who are busting their bums almost at the A word trying to get funding and help them get that really good reasoning of why this is going to make a huge difference maybe we could focus on ladders that's another way instead of trying to get the money we could try to get the people and then finally just combining roles so this is kind of the route where we're out right now it's like pms slash communicator slash coordinator slash whatever and that's a way that we can have fewer people involved to do these things but I think these things still need to happen individually so like you should have someone to communicate but you should also have someone to organize and if that can be two people that's better but worst case scenario it'll keep being one person so then finally trampoline off ladders to get special educational perks basically have their employer sponsor what they're doing which is what commerce guys does a lot so we've got several employees who do a lot of core work and it's a great way to try and get the help so those are some ideas that are a little bit less ambitious and that's everything that I had for today so now we can talk about stuff so things to kick us off that conversation I'm really curious to know first of all do you have any questions about the D8 organization right now and these ideas on D9 and then second I'm really interested in having a conversation about what do you think about the feasibility of these teams and these roles does this like even make sense to you or does this sound weird someone answer you who do you see as organizing all of these things is that a role for the DA or is that a role for the community and self-organizing teams or for a company to who becomes the initiative owner and who becomes the project management lead and who becomes whatever okay that's a good question so I think right now we're doing it in a kind of self-organizing way and it's very organic I think that's the best way it's a scratch your own edge community and if you want to take a big chunk of your life and devote it to Drupal 8 you should be allowed to do so you should stop you so I don't think it should be the DA coordinating and organizing I think maybe in terms of funding that might get trickier because the DA or some other entity would need to handle the funding for that so maybe it's like the community decides and then that person gets funding support in order to do it so the DA is actually prohibited from trying to shape the direction of core development that's like part of their charter so I think that's something important unless we wanted to change that some people suggest there should be like a different organization that's responsible for that but something else that I think I might disagree a little bit is that there's something to be said for being willing to work on something but you get people who are a lot more committed when you ask them say I've noticed that you're interested in this and you empower them to be a leader to be an authority in a particular area so I think that just saying that it will happen organically I mean I think that you get people interested in organically but I think that then like nominating them to be someone and do something and giving them responsibility and control over it makes them feel a lot more successful and then they'll give you more time without feeling burnt out about it so Totally. Agree with you Me first So what Jess is saying is really relevant to Ash's talk that was on diversity and how underrepresented groups don't volunteer themselves for things they just don't so if we want some diversity in leadership we might have to recruit and ask because they won't volunteer themselves they don't have any like you know there's no pictures of people that are like them in whatever way like is like so I think that's true for the for some of the under level but I think for like the lead top queer people they need to come of their own free will I don't think we could ask someone like Hey Larry do you want to be an initiative owner That's like a That's what he did to you Wow okay All of you I am wrong Most of the Drupal 8 initiative leads currently were invited to be so by Dries based on things we were already ranting about doing some of us louder than others some of us were more willing than others but we were all appointed by Dries based on trends he was seeing that part I don't think is a problem definitely getting the team like you're describing behind those people and making sure that those people have the backing and authority to be able to then coordinate that team and get things done I think is critically important so it's building up that structure and accepting that structure is the challenge I think figuring out who's going to be part of it is an easier problem to solve to an extent like they have the will but not the means yeah you know like Greg was willing to you know throw himself into configuration management because he's just that crazy but unless he'd had you know support from his employer at the time to do so probably would not have been able to do so not everyone has an employer who has the willingness or financial capability to put someone 50% on core for a long period or 100% or 100% so those employers that can have off to them but not everyone does and you know that's where I could I think the which parts of the team get funding and how much I think that's really the trickiest problem followed closely by accepting that their structure would be there and that would be direction setting for core even if it's that's still coming down from Drees it's much more top down than we've done in the past the first year of Drupal 8 was a lot of painful arguments and discussions about that you know this isn't bottom up grassroots how dare you and it took a very very long time and not a small amount of blood to get past that and so we need to make sure we can keep doing that I didn't add that into the presentation but it's such a good point that like even when your initiative owner and we've seen this under Blake that doesn't mean everyone just lines up behind you and decides to do what you're doing and you guys need some support that is top down and you need the authority in order to make those decisions and get consensus obviously it's not over look that but it's often easier to build consensus when you're building consensus from a position of authority than from a position of first among equals the process becomes smoother even if the end result is the same thanks that's Larry if you don't know Larry you can know him by his vest so I'm Gabor and I want to talk about the money question so there's like three or four reasons that I did not go into the money thing for the EMI so the first is there was a lot as I've heard and as I've expected there was a lot of overhead to get money so if you ask Greg he took a lot of time to pitch his stuff and to get money proposals and convincing arguments and expectations figuring out how you propose at all and then the next thing is the entity that handles the money so if I would take money then I would need to pay taxes on top and I would lose like a third of the money at least on paying taxes for my government so I would not take that would not be a good idea so we would need to have an entity that's not the DEA because the DEA is prohibited from directing core development so they might not be able to handle this money and we don't really have an entity that can handle this money so we have to create one which is why it's so hard so we need to figure out some kind of entity that will be able to handle the money and just funnel it through and the third one is was Larry said how do we get the money and how that's decided is like if you're doing a sprint then you're flying in people and like maybe some people the company will pay for them others they don't have a company they need to pay for themselves if they are freelancers they earn money but they don't have money to fly and if they are students they don't earn money and there's all those hard questions of course they're one of answers to them so there's no clear rule that we can set and I think just to piggyback on the last thing that you were saying about like companies sponsoring people like commerce guys sponsored me to be here and about 15 of my colleagues which is awesome and yay but not everyone is so lucky but at the same time like if like Chris who is an initiative lead owner and works for commerce guys if he weren't if he were able to get a scholarship would commerce guys fund him like money because obviously like saving 10 grand a year whatever in flights and what not is kind of nice for a company so I think it gets really like so hard when you start talking about funds because then you have the chicken before the egg issue of they have funding today but will they have funding tomorrow if they find out that they can get a scholarship it's also hairy so I mean honestly if I were to decide today it would be something like um look at who is in a company that is getting karma for doing a lot of work and then balance that like 50-50 with people who are making a really big contribution who can't go themselves and I think we have to favor people who would onboard and become experts over um things like you know random person who does stuff once or twice if someone is habitually committed to an initiative I think that's a great sign of someone who should be funded because then maybe they can become you know a lieutenant to the initiative owner or something and I obviously think initiative owners should be funded because you guys are so critical to the entire process I mean would any of you even accept that if you could get a year of funding to work on Drupal 8? Yeah, sure I had a better job Yeah That's a separate question No it's not For a year That's the hard question So I think the hard question is what you do a year later Right, so I mean if we're gonna Exactly Right Just to repeat that for everyone in the back um funding and like giving up your job to do this for a short time is different for a freelancer than someone who has a full-time job it's just not the same commitment so I mean that's just where it gets really tough and I think in order to have the success that we need like we need you guys to be available it's really hard when you have a second job besides Drupal Initiative owner and you can't always be around to support and you know help because you need to earn the Dalla Dalla right so I mean it's tricky And there's at least two more points that I wanted to mention about money as the other the other one which dovetails in what you said is that if Commerce guy if Chris or me would come on a scholarship would we get a scholarship since we're already working for Aquian Commerce guys and Aquian Commerce guys are here to have their big presence at the booth and market their company so why would we get paid for it come because we're also Aquians and Commerce guys people and you know this is a wishy-washy question I would get sent either way so I don't need a scholarship but maybe like if my boss heard that I can get a scholarship maybe he wouldn't for to send me and then I'd be like oh shit I need to get a scholarship or something I mean we don't know how it's going to turn out and then the other thing is like the who gets the money is we have we work a lot coming up coming up from the from the beginner part from from down and what's the point when when they are at a point where where we finance them and how do we tell so we have in the EMI we have quite a few people who just grew out of out of being told the new contributors and they are like in that they like we have people who are like 2% they they are mentioning 2% of the core comets in Drupal 8 which is huge and they just were an unknown 2 months ago or 3 months ago so that's a hard question yeah maybe it becomes like rolling funding short term funding tough so hi Christoph initiatives were really interesting for Drupal 8 because can you get a little bit closer to the mic okay so initiatives were really interesting for me during Drupal 8 development because it got me really deeply involved into Drupal core but I'm now talking from from a field API perspective as a co-maintainer our plan we had a really nice slide this morning during our session the plan for Drupal 8 for field API was just sit back and relax and basically just I mean that was it I mean field API is in core and you can do a lot of stuff and then suddenly Drupal 8 decides to rewrite everything and then we have to do and we have to follow that there are not really an initiative but there's a lot of work and I mean a lot of stuff touches what Greg has been doing but there's also the plugin system so do you see some place for subsystems in core that are not an initiative and we actually really need a lot of help on that part as well I mean just basically only me and YChat and maybe two other people but we don't have that visibility I mean field API needs to be converted but it's not open and public I mean so you bring up a really good point at what point does something deserve initiative status essentially right I think my personal choice would be when the workload exceeds four to five people working their asses off then it kind of seems to me like it deserves attention because that means lots of people are going to need to review it and comment on it and make sure that it works with everything else Yeah right now we could get a decent team together like that's I think the point of having a team if you're an initiative it's because you need a team of people so I think if you're getting to that point where you're doing the work of three or four people and it's burning you out you could use a team, you should probably be an initiative and if that means that we have like 20 initiatives for Drupal 9 so be it, fund everyone get your shit done and be awesome So I've said in a bunch of core conversations now and the topics keep coming up the subject keeps coming up about we need the resources and if we can actually do the funding and oh yeah we want to get a lot of new people involved in core as core contributors and so one of the points that I think that I think needs to be considered like you're talking about for Drupal 9 like oh I've got this great idea we're going to have the initiative owners and we're going to have this many experts fund this many people for each of the initiatives and we've already started touching on some of this stuff here with the idea like I'm a freelancer and so there's also been talk in other sessions about like oh yeah so just demand I think it was Greg who actually said demand that your employers pay for your you know you are a resource that's in demand so demand that your employers will pay for some of your time to work on core well there's people like me that are the freelancers that like you know we don't really have that situation that we can just demand hire us and pay us money to work on doing core stuff and again we're freelancers so if I'm volunteering my time doing stuff I understand when anybody volunteers they're not going to pay but like I don't have a salary and the time that I volunteer to do things I'm not going to be making the money so yeah no I understand but so like when you hear the talk about yeah we want to get more people involved in core and we want to be able to fund things and so that you know that's the thing that like for a person for me it's like yeah that would be awesome to be able to get some funding so that I can actually work on Drupal and do stuff with this but then it does bring up the questions because like who do you know you need some of these experts on the project but when you're looking at these experts like Larry and the question was already brought up so even the idea of funding Larry okay so if you're going to fund Larry because he puts in a ton of work and he really knows what he's doing that's great and he's being rewarded for it but then you're not meeting the goal of getting new people involved that could then maybe pick up some of the work later on and then there's also the other issue of like even the idea of funding Larry like when Greg brought up like yeah but are you willing to quit your job for a year if we fund you for a year so this the the idea like oh let's get funding and let's add more resources has another component to it is like then the those practical aspects of like when you're talking about who gets the money you're asking me like what initiatives get the money but there's a big there's another question as well like but who are the people that you're going to be paying to do it because there's the pros and cons of like you guys don't know who I am and sure I'd love to be a step up and say yeah pay me to work on Drupal but you guys are going to want to look to somebody who's like but we don't know him and we don't know if he's going to be any good at this we don't want to give him the money so we want to look to the people who have already proven themselves but then you're tying yourself to the situation of like they're invested and you aren't bringing new people into the process so there's another layer of this that I think that you need to think about is like the how the dispersal of the money would work because there's tons of people in the community like me that say yeah that would be totally awesome for me to be able to get paid to work on Drupal but so that's currently an expected investment from your part before we get to know you and we get to know you but that's the truth of any job you know personal growth that's true of any job personal growth and job development is always our own personal responsibility on our own time and so you know if that means contributing the patches so that you get visibility or taking a class to learn a new technology or building a personal project to get more visibility those all fall into the same things yeah like that's why I think it should be tiered because if you're like your situation you're a freelancer you're interested in working on this you're willing to commit to it if someone can fund you because you just can't afford to stop all your freelancing work and do it full-time I completely understand that neither can I so I think the best way to go about that is to have you start at the beginner tier so you start reviewing patches and you work with Jess and all the awesome people doing core mentoring and they will help you start out and then when you feel comfortable you move on to the next level and you help document where you came from and how you got to where you are so that that that learning path can start to begin for everyone else that is a critical component to the entire project if we don't have people doing that teaching other people how to learn what you did then we're kind of screwed so it's a huge task it has to be crowdsourced it has to be a group effort and if you want to get to the point where you feel like you're an expert I think you need to start at those levels unless you're just like a crazy genius and you can just go straight to the top in which case you've probably already like committed major patches and got the visibility that you wanted so deciding who gets funding is a tough it's a bear but at the same time I think that like experts are critical to the project success initiative owners are critical to the project success if we want to reduce all the pain points those two pieces are needed more than anything else so I would start there and I think the initiative owners are going to be really key into helping decide who they want in that core group of people working with them every day or every week or however much funding they have to get those people regularly on their team and I think that they know who they need to work with Larry said like finding the people is not hard getting them to do this stuff is hard because either they need training or they need time right so I now agree with all that I totally understand what you're saying but then what that brings you back to is because the reason I bring this up is that a lot of the talks has been here like all our problems are going to be solved if only we would have funding for the people that's not what I'm saying nobody's saying that but there's what you get back to and I agree with your idea that you need to put in your time, you need to prove yourself, you need to personal growth but then that puts a person like Larry in the position that I'm like okay yeah I want to make my way up the ladder here but I'm not going to give 10 hours a week or 20 hours a week to pull that I'm going to you know maybe I want to do something for an hour a week and then put something like Larry in a position because he made the comment he's like if I've got 50 people for one hour a piece I really can't get anything done with that I'd rather have the 10 people for five hours a piece Larry has access to experts who have access to funding anyway anyway yes thank you for your comment I have like two pages of notes here I don't even know where to start everyone else sit down I actually sympathize a lot with the last speaker I of course did quit my job to get funded for Drupal core and managed to do it successfully as a freelancer and I did but I mean I had all of the downsides that were brought up I did give up 35% of that income straight to the federal government I did suddenly at the end of that find myself with no money and wondering what I was going to do now with my life because unlike normal I mean you know normally you're freelancing and you're reaching the end of a gig and you're shopping for next gigs and I was at the end of this gig but I'm not really a freelancer I'm just a guy who got a bunch of money to work on core and now all of that money's about to be gone and I'm like well do I want to fundraise some more do I want to get a real job do I want to be a freelancer to which the answer of all was no but that's a personal decision you know and I mean a lot of stuff comes down to priorities in your life and things like that but you know I sympathize a lot and obviously not all of the 1,000, 1200 people who contribute patches to Drupal Core are going to get funded I think that's a realistic thing to say I guess I'll leave my comments to the most controversial ones in your slides and Larry was saying this too you sort of had an initiative lead and then a team and I think that's the wrong model I think the initiative lead should be a team and I think that the way that the views team did that is really excellent and should really be used as our model because I don't believe and I don't think it works well with our community that the single vision of one person should be going top down to all of these people you should have I like the idea of having a variety of viewpoints and a variety of skill sets together coming to these conclusions as a small group and then branching those off to the greater community and it actually helps a lot because you know when I launched my 350 comment thread about file formats for CMI I was the only one sitting there trying to manage that and you know within eight hours I wanted to shoot myself I had nobody else to fall back on but if you've got a team of people you can all come out you can all respond to different questions depending on your expertise and everybody can sort of take the brunt of it and when somebody gets burnt out they fall apart and somebody else can come in and you're on vacation you don't have to be thinking about it and stuff like this and I think having a small team of equals leading each project is a really really important thing right so this IO block you want like three or four of those and then like five or six experts in that case because different people working with different groups well to some extent that melds because they're the experts as well and they did a lot of the work but they also had a lot of people underneath them contributing up as well yeah but that's not sustainable if you want to do the other stuff like the communication coordination long-term planning all of that is hard to do all at once it is all hard to do all at once but you have people with specific skill sets in there that's right just interrupted Greg to say you don't have to be to also be the person who oversees like the strategic integration with larger entities and that's all because I did the second part and definitely not the first ever because I mean if you have a cross-functional team of four people and one person's really good at being the communication and project management part and one person's really good at being the technical architect and one person's really good at the front-end side and then one person's kind of a generalist who helps work on and review patches I think that's a really really strong team that you've got there especially some of those skills translate among the other members so that they can fall back on each other when they need to this concept of cross-functional teams has been very popular in software development in for the last few years and I think it's super and I think it totally applies to us of course that comes to the problem where we have no project managers and designers and things like that but that's a recruiting problem that's something else but do you have the recruiting problem on your level right now like could you tomorrow come up with a team of three or four people to support you I could if I had a way to fund them you know I mean you know who you would want on that team so this is definitely a possibility I mean I've already got four major contributors to CMI there's like me, Alex, Son and Bejibus now that's not as cross-functional as I might necessarily like but it's more maybe more dysfunctional than cross-functional cross dysfunctional yeah but the concepts are still there I really wish that I had started with a team of four people it wouldn't have been those four people because I didn't really know any of them at the time and started funding the whole team from the very beginning instead of just coming up with that for myself at the end another really controversial thing I want to bring up is the fact that 10 seconds as a community we are extremely suspicious of centralization and that's a huge problem it's a huge problem because it's really really really difficult to do the kind of fundraising that we're talking about without some sort of centralization and without some sort of organization behind it and the kind of businesses that typically drive our community namely service businesses to be honest don't have the kind of funding all the time to be able to fund at the level that we need and they don't have the long-term vision either their businesses are very cyclical they tend to have to put a lot of money away through the downsides of the cycles and it's very hard for them to devote significant resources beyond say 10% of someone's time to this kind of contribution unless they want to take away 4 people's 10% and give it to one person which doesn't necessarily work out in all situations I've talked a lot about how I've talked to members of other open source projects for a long time about their funding models and almost all of them have a commercial entity behind them and while there's a downside to that I mean the Fedora project has it written into their clause that their board of directors has to have at least two members from Red Hat and it's a representation of Red Hat's dedication of resources to the project but on the other hand it means that there are dedicated resources to the project and vision coherent focused vision not necessarily something the Drupal community has been very strong at over the years and while I understand the suspicions around centralization and around focusing power and sort of ideals around a specific group I think it's going to be very very very difficult to achieve our goals if we don't figure out some way to do that and I mean just the monetary side is like I think that we could probably convince the DA to sort of be the fiduciary representative of an initiative because they do that with Drupal camps right now actually they hold the bank account for the Drupal camp and act as the money people like they do the granting basically and so the camp people collect money and they just provide a bank account an illegal entity to hold it but I mean without some sort of organization collecting money the scale of money that we're talking about I think things are going to be really difficult I think that's something that we as a community given the size that we've grown to are going to have to really really think about over the years okay let me recap what you're saying and I won't say the A word let me recap what you just said so not one person as a figurehead at the very top of the tier but a team of two, three maybe even four people working as a hive mind and then having a group an entity that's responsible for money management so that you guys don't get taxed to death and get screwed basically and then having a way to make it acceptable to the community that some people are getting funded for certain things and some people aren't and then a lot of that funding is being centralized in one place and that may also mean that that one place has a greater voice than others do is evil I'll leave the rest of my notes for later okay yeah thank you Greg sure for a beer yes let's so we already do have some funding models that live in parallel to what's getting proposed here we've got the large scale Drupal project that Acre has running that have I so my understanding of the large scale Drupal project is that large organizations like NBC have contracts with Acre that involve hosting and other services and it involves a sum of money that is pooled for common interests I don't know exactly what that funds but I imagine it's things like large scale performance because large sites like NBC have similar needs I don't think there's anything stopping say a consortium of colleges from starting a nonprofit that could fund fixes that colleges need and that may not line up to you know a nonprofit funding just whiskey but if we had a nonprofit that was interested in making Drupal better for all universities multiple universities could give money directly to that nonprofit that nonprofit could then fund whatever they want they could give 10% of their money to whiskey 10% to mobile we don't need we don't necessarily need one funding model to rule them all there's nothing stopping anyone right now from creating a nonprofit dedicated to making Drupal run better on shared hosting I was just about to add to what you're saying because like why is everyone talking about funding as in giant entity X funds 20% of someone's salary what about crowdfunding we are huge we are millions of people why can't we crowd source this bit you know sure we so we could even didn't you raise a bunch of money in Kickstarter no no okay okay so maybe that model doesn't work but maybe it also doesn't have the same visibility like da has a lot of visibility at the Drupal con maybe if there was a be a core benefactor you know badge that you can put on your site or it goes on your tag or something and you donated five bucks to help work on core if a million people do that what right you'd have to like that's implied so what I'm saying is we don't necessarily need one entity to rule them all we already have de facto entities like commerce guys that funds the open source project Drupal commerce that is a funding model for supporting open source but they're an entity right they have taxable issues and things like that sure so what I'm saying is to my knowledge there is no legal barrier stopping anyone in this room from creating a nonprofit dedicated towards solving issue X in Drupal and I think the large mental hurdle that we have is if we start a funding agency the Drupal community will push back against whatever centralization there is that that nonprofit could be dedicated to solving the least controversial issues in Drupal it can be dedicated to fixing the oldest code in Drupal if the mental hurdle we have right now is that funding by its very nature is controversial someone in this room could start a nonprofit dedicated solely to fixing Drupal WTFs only yeah I mean they could but how many people actually take that step I feel like if there was an entity dedicated to handling just the fundraising and then the delegation and the allotment of that funding is a crowd sourced decision or a consensus based decision that would take a lot of the so and so got money and I didn't kind of crap out of it because it would be a group decision I think that that would make it a lot easier to manage versus like you want to do something go start a nonprofit how do I do that I think you have to be really motivated I think it's a great idea I'm not going to shoot down your idea it's awesome go do it what I'm saying is I don't personally have the motivation but if all of us just keep saying we need an entity we need an entity we need an entity we're not going to get one until someone just makes one I think we have to have infrastructure to make that happen I just want to give you data because you asked about LSD and you have ideas about what my allotment finance I think does not want to brag a lot about it because we're not doing it so that people see we are all doing all that stuff part of it is because the central control problem that oh aqueous funding all this stuff so everything's controlled by aqueous but there's been there's been funding for things like the from the new note edit form all through to the views initiative to configuration management to to parts of whiskey so different people in different areas where have been funded and helped by funds from LSD their individual block posts about their work mentioned this funding there's no like central list of all this stuff that's being funded so it's not secret information but it's not something that aqueous wants to break about because there I don't think it's a point there's a point in bringing about it I'm somebody who has quit their job to work on Drupal 8 what's your name Alex Pot Alex Pot I just met him but I've been like saying his name for a year so it's we're not really confronting one of the facts that core development has become professional can you get closer to the mic core development is professional we are behaving professionally you actually have to face the mic to figure out what you're saying easy to talk to you facing it core development is a professional activity now and there are big companies involved in funding people to work on it and the reason that we don't let the DA fund it is because we think it's got some direction on it but companies have direction on core so there is a conflict of interest already so get over ourselves we have to create some entity to do it I want to ask a question why do you think companies have input into core because commerce guys has like zero input into core Chris decides what he wants to do okay so you're saying commerce guys would fund something that we think will benefit us in that way right but actually I don't know that's really benefiting commerce guys directly I think they just like we should fund core that's it that's why I started working on CMI is because I was deploying massive sites and I was struggling with features and I was working for Capgemini really really big company and I wanted to go solve that problem so it was easier for Capgemini in the future to do it so they funded me there was one more thing that's kind of completely slipped my mind what was it it's gone sorry well come back five minutes of questions or five minutes before the break five minutes before the break fine so long I've gone and it's back so it was about both for the gentleman who said that he was interested in contributing and being involved but in a freelance schedule didn't feel like he had the time to devote to it and also about the funding question in general so I think that something that we can do more of a middle ground is like micro grants and this can take the form of like $200 or $500 that you give someone to work on one issue this is something that well never mind I probably can't say it but there's also there's also the idea of giving someone a specific donation or contribution contributions that we're supposed to use to do something particular like checks like paid for my airplane ticket to Barcelona so that I could go to Barcelona to help solve problems for views in CMI he just gave that contribution and he gave it directly to me because there was a trust there but that kind of small funding $300, $500, $1,000 is also useful especially for people who aren't ready to quit their full-time job and work on core for 10K right and if there's you already have some minimum level of the way we vet people in an open source community is through their contributions so you already have to have some minimum level of work to demonstrate that you're going to make good use of funding that you get but I think that for people that we already have trust in and that we know will do good work that's like our interview process right and I think that is kind of the thing I think is possible and I also just wanted to mention a bit how views in core was funded because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about it and this is kind of in response to your point Shannon so our community chip in raised $13,000 which is amazing but the most well-known module in the world only raised $13,000 so half of the $13,000 went to fund my time and I was living like practically poverty level like I worked out a situation with my employer where I would work five hours a week from them which is very generous of them because they knew they were kind of screwing me over and that I was going to leave soon so that was sort of their way of patting me on the back that was probably not the best way to say that but but I worked out that situation and then I was paid with chip in money for the summer and it wasn't a lot of money and again it was just enough to like make my rent and feed myself but I was willing to do it because I was really excited about what I was working on it was still a dream job and I think that a lot of people are in that situation where they deliberately deprive themselves of things that they would get through employment because they really enjoy the work that they're doing and they care about it but I well you know that's bullshit but on the other hand let me say this to the people in the back in here it's bullshit that people have to deprive themselves in order to work on core amen I made a decision I made a personal decision you know and I don't regret it at all because what happened is at the end of that summer there was a situation where I wasn't going to have access to the funding anymore and I went through a brief period of panic where I oh my god I'm going to get evicted I don't know what's going to go on here but at that point when it became clear that VDC was about to lose a quarter of its contributors before views was merged in Acquia stepped up and and funded me and it certainly wasn't full time but I got like $8,000 from Acquia significantly more than I got from the chip-in and that was for the next segment and then for the third segment of the release cycle Tengen actually funded me and so even though the community chip-in raised a lot of money which is amazing the amount of money it raised compared to these these large companies with an interest in open source who are have their entire business model built around an open source project you know contributed a lot more to the funding and that's just me like three companies so Airdfish, Zivtech and oh yeah a new digital partnership thank you see they all work for different places now Daniel doesn't but so three companies actually funded like a third to a half of those three guys and they've got their heads down and they're not even paying attention but and that's you in the back the value of funding them was a lot greater than the value of funding me in terms of just the number of developer hours that they their companies didn't build them for so so basically like community chip-ins great idea but not necessarily for large scale fundraising and mostly big companies companies tend to chip in more than your average person in terms of the total sum is the summary of what you're saying then more than the aggregate of people okay yeah that makes sense wait how are we doing on time do we want to run through the break okay do you want to set up yeah you can take over while we chat so a lot more things like I was thinking in the line that I could say but a lot of us is let's try and think about ways to be creative about how to go off and incentivize people to go off and to work in core there's a lot of different ways we can do it it's not just about finding money to go off and pay people full-time if the micro grants is a really good idea if there's a way to go off and simply provide advertising or some sort of company recognition on Drupal.org so you can identify who are the companies who've gone off and contributed the work that I've done on accessibility in Drupal I've gotten absolutely no contracts from that put in hundreds if not thousands of hours and a lot of companies have benefited from that work it hasn't been an open concept that has benefited from that work it would be good if there was some way to go off and to I mean there are people who are talking about ways that the accessibility is really a marker for people to one of the differentiates Drupal from other CMSs in the sales CXO meeting on Monday I'd really like to see some of those people go off and say well I'm an expert and let's draw in those experts and try and find ways to not just on accessibility but on views and there's people who here have donated serious time and energy to that but there's no way on Drupal.org to acknowledge that and there's not a culture that is where we're seeking out each other's experts we're finding those people who have really contributed a lot to bring them in to go off and solve a problem just to, I gotta cut you off because we're running out of time and I have to go really soon because apparently the buff people are like so just to come back to your point and Jess's point about micro funding I was just having a conversation with people yesterday about these two things and the idea that we had was to do like benefit dinners for micro funding and karma distribution at the same time and then for like the people there's some debate about creating leader boards and like people who contribute more than others like giving them more recognition I mean of course we want to like pat people in the back and make them recognize them for their contribution and for their code contribution there's also an element where I think we can do more to reach out to the culture outside of the Drupal shops and say how do we get people who are using Drupal to go off and find ways to contribute to the effort there's a lot more that the effort to go off and find ways to bring here all of that money came from the Drupal community almost exclusively that money came from within our ranks it didn't come from the people like the governments and the universities and other agencies who are benefiting from the work that's being done on accessibility is being done from within our ranks and we have to look outside of our ranks and think big so like how do we bring other people in to go off and to make this happen because we can't just keep you know get asking each other to give more money so going outside of the Drupal community to raise funds yes star real real quick guys I think we can probably take like two more questions than I have to go so sorry this is my first Drupal con I represent one of these large organizations we do three billion dollars a year in revenue congratulations over six hundred million dollars we are betting our business on Drupal as a large corporation I can tell you that unless the community comes up with a way where we can and companies like mine can contribute in a way money is easy for us to give we don't have we don't have necessarily specific agendas we're a member of large scale Drupal I think you need to as a community figure out how you're going to deal with some of the stuff where you're going to put the money throw out all the issues about control you need someone simply to do the project management the helping to organize the all the administrative stuff even if that organization did nothing other than just hired people whose job it was just to help answer emails that administrative background and I think this everything you need to do is you need to this is already been solved Mozilla Linux foundation MySQL there's a plethora of communities out there who have solved this problem why are you trying to solve it again this is the first step to that but I hear what you're saying so we should find the people who will get the infrastructure together and fund them first so they can continue on basically so obviously I enjoyed your presentation but one of the funny things is that committers weren't on your thing and they're really scarce resource right now they were the big C crowd sourcing where the funding goes in the community is a really good idea rather than crowd sourcing the funding instead of crowd sourcing the funding where the funding goes so using the crowd to decide who gets it instead of asking them for money cool thanks everyone