We had our first face-to-face meeting on Friday regarding the formation of a foundation to support the further growth of Drupal. Creating a foundation is a major undertaking, and requires a lot of work and organization to pull everything together. Some of the most important aspects are to look at the needs and goals of such a foundation, and specifically how it can serve the Drupal community as a whole.

We had a round table discussion about needs and goals, with everyone sharing their point of view. It was good to see over a dozen people passionate about evangelizing and supporting Drupal. I think Kaliya (also known as Identity Woman) is almost convinced that we're not as scary as reported. She gave a brief overview of some innovative sites that she has worked on, and we're all looking forward to some more success stories.

Some examples of needs include:

  • ability to accept and give out funds
  • hold assets (e.g. servers and other hardware)
  • bookkeeping to track funds and how they are spent

A selection of the group's thoughts on goals for the Drupal foundation:

  • attract more users and developers
  • provide server infrastructure for related projects
  • manage IP (trademarks, copyrights, licensing, etc.)
  • fund developer meetups

Chris Messina (factoryjoe) is working with Mitch Kapor and other organizations to see about the feasibility of creating an umbrella organization that can provide services and support to multiple open source projects. Unfortunately, this is something that will take several months to evolve. Chris is representing the Drupal community in discussing this, and the needs of the Drupal foundation will help design what such an organization might look like. He will be reporting back to us over time. Oh, and by the way, Chris's new company is Flock -- a social browser based on Firefox.

Kieran Lal (Amazon), who is CivicSpace's development manager, had a more pragmatic view. The Drupal community has figured out how to get money, we've got a great ecosystem that can come up with solutions on the fly. With free hosting from OSL and a great set of server infrastructure, we're fine as we are now.

Dries shared that there are minor expenses like domain names, but the major expense is the time spent in maintaining the Drupal.org website and related infrastructure, somewhere in the range of 8 hours per week -- another great goal would be to fund a position to do these tasks so that they don't all fall on Dries, Steven, and others.

Those are very brief summaries of the range of items discussed. Everyone agreed that doing further work on organizing and growing our community are important tasks that need to be focused on, but is not something that can or should be rushed. In fact, the very minimal requirements today only include a checking account to manage Drupal funds.

An attendance list and the raw notes will be published over the next week, along with the option to participate in the planning for a Drupal foundation.

We'll also have more posts to make about the outcomes of DrupalCon. To touch on a few things, we'll likely see the creation of a new mailing list dedicated to Drupal consultants. As mentioned on my Bryght blog, Doug Kaye from IT Conversations has volunteered to work towards coming up with a best practices guide/working group dedicated to the creation of multi sites with shared user databases and various techniques to create hub and sub-site architectures of Drupal sites.

Also, the next major Drupal event will take place in Amsterdam in mid-October, along side O'Reilly's Euro OSCON. As with Portland, we'll be sure to schedule events in and around OSCON to make sure that people can attend and share information about Drupal without having to attend Euro OSCON. You can see who's attending through the Amsterdam 2005 profile filter -- make sure to check your own profile page if we're going to see you there.

Of course, there are many OSCON presentations worth attending, including Drupal's own Károly Négyesi (chx) talking about the Drupal API: An Advanced Web Application Framework. You can register at Euro OSCON before August 29th and get early bird pricing.

Keep an eye on the events page for further information.

Comments

deekayen’s picture

As many of you know, I want Drupal to start getting incorporated. The last time I made a push to move forward, I was told nothing would happen until after the DrupalCon meeting. These meeting minutes sound like nothing really happened that didn't happen before.

Dries’s picture

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make, or why the pot needs stirring. Either way, the meeting was an important milestone, whether or not we agreed on new things. We defined the foundation's goals, attended a FOSS summit, talked to the Plone, Perl and PostgreSQL Foundations, swapped ideas about processes, challenges, pitfalls and so on.

jvandyk’s picture

Imagine a Drupal Association.

There are multiple membership levels. Anyone can be a member for free. Paid membership supports Drupal.We encourage people to be regular members at the $25 level, supporting members at the $50 level, or sustaining members at the $100 level. Companies may have supporting memberships at the $500 level.

These monies go into a pot that provides for the advancement of Drupal: maintenance of the website, reverse bounty-of-the-month based on a poll to determine the greatest current needs, and maybe seed money for an annual Drupal conference.

Individuals win because they have the warm fuzzy feeling of supporting the Drupal project.

Institutions win because they have something to spend money on -- it's easier to buy an association membership for $500 than to donate $500 to an open source project.

Developers win because there are financial incentives for them to develop.

Dries and Steven win because some things can be offloaded as mentioned in the original post.

Drupal wins because progress happens at a more rapid rate, because there is a more predictable source of funding, and because having an association makes Drupal look more professional.

I hope that ideas like the above are included in the discussion of incorporation.

Dries’s picture

Memberships can result in quite a bit of (paperwork) overhead. I'm not sure that is worth it.

jvandyk’s picture

Yes, there is some overhead with any organization. But suppose memberships are electronic and handled completely by Drupal.

Membership signup is automatic.

Membership notification of expiration is automatic, as is renewal.

The only paperwork (actually busywork, since no paper should be involved) would be handling one-off things that the system didn't handle. For this, a portion of the membership fees goes to pay someone who does administration, possibly in concert with other organizations (e.g., what factoryjoe is working on).

It seems to me that, properly done, a Drupal association that runs on Drupal would be a shining example of organizational efficiency.

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

I think this is a pretty good idea. To keep things easy, I'd like to avoid the all-free membership option, though.
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Bèr Kessels’s picture

.. the development of a membership.module will be one of the first paid jobs for the Drupal coörp.

All in all: great news this is gaining more momentum. Its a hard job, that none of the developers really is able to solve. Wich is probably why they are Drupal developers and not lawyers. :). I beleive our collaborative efforst will bring us somewhere!
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[Bèr Kessels | Drupal services www.webschuur.com]

rbrooks00’s picture

I believe the eCommerce module already handles this fairly well, it might be worth determining if this module would meet Drupal's needs. If not then the appropriate enhancements could be made.

This module also already has all of the integration points for popular payment systems built in.

Torenware’s picture

I also think that some kind of paid membership is not a bad idea. But they should be low: low enough so any student developer can easily afford them. It has the advantage of making clear who is the "electorate" that would vote on a change of the Foundation charter, but would not keep out anyone with a genuine interest in Drupal. But the fee would at least fund a base level of activity, which is handy in and of itself.

I'm less familiar with the system used by the Apache Foundation (the system has some kind of "reputation" component, from what I hear), but I'm curious what people with more experience and knowlege think about that.

Certainly, we want a system with some accountability to the membership (and also to people who donate money, to make sure that money is handled tranparently), but mostly we want to leave the top developers alone: any system that makes them less likely to contribute to the project, or that would create a lot of "politics" is not something that will help Drupal, and we should be careful to avoid that. That's not a democracy, but that's fine: we want the project to prosper, and the Foundation should be set up with that as the paramount goal.

Rob Thorne
Torenware Networks
http://www.torenware.com

Rob Thorne
Torenware Networks

Rainy Day’s picture

Democracy is an intellectually appealing idea, but may not be so practical for a Foundation. Typically, an Executive Director runs the day-to-day business of a Foundation, overseen by a Board of Directors. Ideally, the Executive Director and Board will look to what the membership wants when making its decisions.

If the base membership fee is low, say $5-10/year, this will encourage more people to join, people who might not otherwise have joined. The Drupal community is growing, keeping the fee low will foster that growth to achieve critical mass.

shane_curcuru’s picture

I'd be surprised if none of the drupal folks have not yet looked over how the ASF (Apache Software Foundation, to be precise) runs itself, since several other FOSS groups have used bits and pieces of our model for their uses.

There's no specific "reputation component", or points, or anything like that. It's a meritocracy that promotes concensus driven, community-based projects. Each individual project's committers vote on things like major project changes, releases, and voting in new committers to their codebase. On the larger scale, the Members of the Foundation elect the Board and officers, who run the legal foundation itself. Any Member can nominate someone for membership, which is then voted on by the Members at annual effectively semi-meetings.

Although our doc quality isn't always as good as our code quality (although many folks are now working hard to organise it much better), we have most stuff spelled out at apache.org/foundation for anyone to read.

One difference between the ASF and Mozilla (foundation) for example is that the ASF mainly does geek tools - httpd, xml processors, CMS systems, etc. - Mozilla primarily does end user tools like the browser. That difference in focus is significant.

robertDouglass’s picture

- Robert Douglass

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I recommend CivicSpace: www.civicspacelabs.org
My sites: www.hornroller.com, www.robshouse.net

kbahey’s picture

I like this idea, and want to send my annual membership fees as soon as there is a foundation.

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Personal: Baheyeldin.com

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Personal blog: Ba

Boris Mann’s picture

We definitely discussed the concept of a business model for Drupal -- that is, revenue streams. I think it was drumm and/or Steven Peck that mentioned the concept of an association.

I think a members.drupal.org would be great. We could do various things to incentivize members as well -- list them in different places, use the affiliates module to show traffic being driven to drupal.org, and maybe even get sponsors to provide specials to different member levels. Also: memberships are a professional expense, regardless of Drupal's status, and so can be marked as a business expense.

Some implementation notes: we could share user tables with the rest of the x.drupal.org. The same thing might eventually apply to modules.drupal.org, events.drupal.org, etc. We're now reaching critical mass with the single drupal.org site, and should eat our own dogfood in finding solutions.

If people would like to discuss this further (e.g. implementation) we can perhaps discuss this on the drupal-infrastructure list. Any Drupal foundation list could handle the policy surrounding this.

(Do we have too many lists already?!)

drumm’s picture

I'm not sure there should be a membership thing. Having different classes of developer based upon money isn't good.

I suggested we should write up a Drupal consultant code of ethics. With things like "I do not fork modules," and "I submit patches."

I'd rather have our more-advertised consultants be ones who do the best work rather than buy their spot.

Additionally we might want a "How to evaluate a Drupal consultant" doc which points to the tracker, issue queue, and anywhere else relevant.

Boris Mann’s picture

Having different classes of developer based upon money isn't good.

Definitely, and didn't mean to suggest that. But, that doesn't mean there can't be different levels of membership -- if a company wants to donate $500, I'd love them to.

Their location/standing/etc. should absolutely be based on actual code/documentation/evangelism contributions, not on any monetary based things.

Your "code of ethics" list is a good start. Could you maybe take a shot at writing this up? We could link each section (e.g. forking modules, patches, etc.) to the relevant handbook section.

kbahey’s picture

This is a valid concern, but should not be so.

There should be no privilege that is taken away from a developer who cannot pay, since they may be students, or have no day job, ...etc.

As for your suggestion of code of ethics, and how to evaluate a consultant, I am all for it. Good points.

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Personal: Baheyeldin.com

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Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba

matt_paz’s picture

tobedeleted’s picture

I'm a newbie user, getting to grips with Civicspace, and saw the mention in the newsletter about a possible move to a more structured legal entity to move the whole Drupal thing forwards on a more formal basis.
My background is not in open source, and I know nothing of the models that may be common in this field for org structures. I come from the cooperative movement, and ever since I came across open source I've felt that there is a strong affinity between co-operative values and principles (see http://www.ica.coop/coop/index.html), and those apparently espoused by the open source community. Both are about open, community-led approaches. Democratic, mission driven organisations that are not focussed solely on profit (although you need to generate surplus income in order to be sustainable). Cooperatives are people centred enterprises, whether they be owned and controlled by their employees, customers, software developers, users, or mix of some or all of these.
Unlike many other business or organisational structures, cooperatives embed their values and principles within the written constitution of the organisation.
In the UK, where I'm from, standard company structures have generally been developed out of a private sector ethos - profit driven, capitalist in their outlook. On the other hand many non-profit structures tend to take a classic charitable stance born out of their 19th century patriarchal roots (rich people doing good things to the poor). Cooperative structures sit between and outside both of these, based on self-help, shared responsibility and shared reward through democratic ownership and control. I've always thought that co-ops and the internet was a magic mix, and with tools like Drupal to enable those communities to work together remotely, it just feels to me like a good fit.
I don't know what you guys have in mind, but if you like the idea of a cooperative structure, I'll be happy to help where I can (I work for the main UK cooperative organisation - www.cooperatives-uk.coop). As a user I'd certinly want to put in a bid that whatever structure you go for, users should be enabled to be involved with equal status as developers.
Oh, and in case you didn't notice, cooperatives have their own top level domain, .coop, which I think is pretty cool.

(Addendum: I'm not sure but I seem to recall that some of the core team behind Drupal might be based in Belgium (?), in which case you might want to take a look at http://www.febecoop.be/ as a possible local source of information on this.)

Regards
Graham