Highlight Supporting Organizations in the Issue Queue

How would this work if I work for company X but company Y hired me separately to fix a bug?

Good brainstorming.

Tricky.

other situations:
a) person has a company in their profile, but their work on issues is on their "own time", not the company. would the *person* be listed?
b) person works for more than one company, how to know multiple companies, now to pick which one sponsored the work when posting work.

Also, I tink this could very quickly result in two problems:

• Companies start to have people spam issue queues with comments for SEO benefit (I've known companies to do that).
• Long discussions turn the issue page into a horrible Sportsball-like advertisement where the number of banners feels intrusive.

The second one could be lessened by adding a new smaller "Issue badge" image field for companied to use rather than just showing their huge logo scaled to a fixed width, but I don't know how to deal with the first issue, or the scenario I mentioned earlier.

It would be easier and probably better to keep it manual and just add a new field to issues that references companies. Requiring an edit to the issue to modify company credit makes the feature transparent and prevents abuse. I don't think the number of comments per company is useful information, just having them manually sorted would be enough.

Personally I would like the logos to be a little less prominent, maybe taking up half the width of the sidebar each.

The audience for the issue queue is people working on issues and troubleshooting problems. Where that intersects with what companies want for exposure, that I can think of, is mostly recruiting. I don't think of the issue queue as a good place for reaching potential clients. I think the issue queue is best focused on issues, not commercial activity.

I think the best place to highlight company contributions is via the marketplace, which is explicitly a place for commercial activity. Company pages, like https://drupal.org/marketplace/openconcept, show some contributions in the right column. If there is something we can do well in an automated way, it should go on those pages. Maybe there are better ways to show the data that is already there.

And I think we should "pave the cow-paths" and formalize existing behaviors on Drupal.org. For example, project pages do list sponsors. That could be replaced with an entity reference to the company, to show the company logo; and list the module on the company page. This leaves project maintainers in control of their pages, and gives us more data to work with.

Some prior art/discussion: #1968480: Keep historical tracking of users' employers

I was tweeted at to comment on this, so here are my comments...

While I support the idea of highlighting companies that are actually supporting their employees' Drupal project contributions, I don't like this particular idea much.

I don't like the idea of having corporate logos on the sidebar of issues. Issue sidebars currently are filled with actual useful information, and logos seem too much like advertising. I just don't think that's the right place or method for doing this.

Also (and this has been stated above), just because a d.o profile lists a person as being employed by a particular company, that isn't necessarily correlated with that company actually supporting their contributions to the Drupal project, or their time participating in any particular issue. For instance, in my case, most of the contributions I make to the Drupal project are done on my own time (which is the same as my company's time, because I'm a freelancer and I am my company). But occasionally I participate in issues on time billed to other companies, or may even develop full d.o modules funded by someone else, and those other companies are not connected to the issues/projects via my d.o profile.

Plus (as highlighted above) there is the historical problem -- many issues have a *very* long lifetime, and someone's current employer is not always relevant for their past contributions.

So in balance I think this idea introduces more problems than it solves.

For us it would be much less important to have our logo mentioned than it would be to have the "sponsoring org" (i.e. the one paying us to make the patch/module), or, if possible, having both might help. Either way, I don't think that this will solve the problems associated with unsupported modules and/or people hacking rather than patching (and submitting back via the issue queue) modules.

IMO, the biggest way to get companies to submit patches is to make it a requirement to get listed in the company directory (which would have the added benefit of creating a method for vetting those orgs). But... the list has gone the opposite direction, with the DA pushing to have more companies included without much (if any) code contributed to drupal.org, and a general watering down of what it means to be a "contributing company". I fought that change for a long time, but ultimately giving a little bit of $ to the DA won the day. Oh well.

Like others, I was tweeted at for my comment.

The idea is well intentioned, but the implementation can be gamed very easily and the value would then be quickly be nil.

The question is what would provide incentive for Drupal shop owners, business and pm-types to willingly provide developer time? If these folks approve contribution time, how can they easily show (and justify) it to their higher-ups?

activity in the issue queue seems to be in the decline

Citation needed.

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That mockup is hilarious.

You'll note the first logo, the one with "26" next to it, is Stanford. That would be my current employer.

While I get time at work now and then to contribute to core, I worked on that issue only during my nights and weekends.

This perfectly highlights the flaws of this proposal.

@drumm won't fixed this, let's leave it that way.

Proposals like this should really be discussed in groups.drupal.org in the annual "what should we do to improve d.o" ideas drive. There, rather than discussing a particular patch's merits, you can more easily have a discussion about how to make incentives or recognition for companies to support developer time, explore the ideas, etc.

mgifford has been asking various companies via Twitter to comment on this thread. Here are a few of my personal thoughts, which do not necessarily represent the views of Palantir or the Drupal.org Content Working Group (which I chair):

In short, I'm not sure that putting corporate logos on issue queue pages would incentivize companies and organizations to contribute more to the Drupal project than they already do, and could have several unintended side effects.

The folks who would find this kind of exposure most appealing (e.g., Drupal development shops and service firms) are most likely to already be active contributors to the project and already receive plenty of exposure to the community through event sponsorship, DA supporting partnerships, and code contributions. For Drupal service firms who don't contribute and who don't already take advantage of these opportunities, I'm not sure that this feature would provide a compelling tipping point.

With a few exceptions, large Drupal customers with in-house development teams who contribute code to the project are less likely to find this kind of exposure compelling, as Drupal.org org is generally not related to their main marketing goals.

In addition, I think putting corporate logos on issue pages poses a couple of potential issues:

• The aforementioned questions of whether or not people are working in the issue queue on their company's time.
• Plastering corporate logos all over the issue queue pages may give some the perception that you need to be part of an organization in order to contribute to the project, which may unintentionally dis-incentivize individual contributions
• Some folks may not like having corporate logos on the issue queue pages, and may be less likely to use the queue as a result.
• Giving companies free exposure on the issue queue pages might undermine ongoing efforts to monetize other pages on Drupal.org through paid placement and advertising.

There may be a good way to develop this feature that sidesteps or mitigates these issues, but I'm not sure that the benefits of adding this feature would be significant enough to justify the amount of time and effort required to design and build it.

If the goal is to get more folks to use the issue queues, I'd take a look at the design and UX of the queues first before adding corporate logos.

If the goal is to encourage more organizations to contribute code to the Drupal projects, there are lots of other things we can do first, but that's a completely different discussion...

[Edited to correct typos.]

Tagging this for the Software Working Group.

Been tweeted as well, and I share the same views more or less of the people who commented before me.
Since I use AdBlock I rarely see ads on websites, but when I do see them - they pollute my view. Adding those to the boring design of the issue queue is not a good idea. This boring design has for many years helping people to concentrate on the actual content, and not be distracted by Drupal shops politics of who has a higher one.

A few years ago there was an interesting initiative to rate Drupal.org users (something with "rock" - forgot the full name) - it had a nice meter that scored users by their activity - patches, forums, issues. I could see, with people I knew, how they acquired the normally bad habit of spawning svn/git with commits - many times tiny ones, just to bloat their numbers. I think the above proposal will lead to similar results (which is basically spam).

@z.stolar, #18:

A few years ago there was an interesting initiative to rate Drupal.org users (something with "rock" - forgot the full name)...

Certified To Rock ;)

#2267789: Add a reference to supporting organizations on projects adds structured references to companies on project pages, as mentioned in #25.

I think #2288727: [meta] Provide credit to organizations / customers who contribute to Drupal issues and #2340363: Add issue comment attribution are more realistic ways for people to attribute issue comments, when they feel it is appropriate.