Five Ideas for the Drupal Association

For those that aren’t aware, the Drupal Association (DA) is the organization that maintains the Drupal.org infrastructure, puts on DrupalCons, and generally tries to further and safeguard Drupal in the wider web development world. They’re a vital part of the Drupal ecosystem, and their work affects us all.

The DA is made up with a bunch of absolutely wonderful people that work there. The team is “small but mighty” and includes engineering folks like longtime Drupalers Tim and Neil, as well as marketing and business people who are newer to Drupal. It’s led by Tim Doyle, who is affectionately known as “T2” (since Tim Lehnen is the O.G. “T”).

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Above the staff, the DA is led by its board of directors. This board sets the direction and goals of the staff. T2 leads the staff on the execution of these directions and goals. I served on the board for two years, and I can honestly say that it’s made up of great and thoughtful people who want the best for Drupal.

The DA has a monumental task for its size. Besides “keepin’ on keepin’ on”, the DA is responsible for Drupal integrations into DA infrastructure (think drupal.org, Gitlab, updates, etc). It’s responsible for marketing Drupal. It’s responsible for documentation infrastructure. And it’s responsible for putting on the North American DrupalCon (Atlanta in 2025!).

The Drupal Association’s biggest and toughest challenge is funding. If we could figure this out, it would make everything else easy. Currently, the DA primarily gets its funding from sponsorships. These include advertisements, certified partner programs, DrupalCon sponsorships, and the membership (recently renamed to Ripple Makers).

Five ideas

Below I’m going to lay out some rough visions… some good, and some bad. The first three ideas are to help with securing funding (which IMO is the biggest challenge of the DA) and the second two ideas are some ways to spend that money that will grow the community.

Idea 1: Training and certifications

The Drupal Association should create its own certification program. Currently Acquia offers the only certification program. Although Acquia is one of the largest Drupal companies (and was founded by Drupal’s founder) they should not control the certifications. I’d love to see the DA take over Acquia’s program, or subcontract it out (there are several 3rd party organizations that do this).

Furthermore, I’d support the DA doing more video training. Currently the go-to website for this is Drupalize.me (which is run by a great group of folks). Maybe the DA could purchase this so it could provide ongoing revenue?

Several other open source foundations fund themselves through similar means. Note that the certification idea isn’t my original idea, but it's a good one. 

Idea 2: Charge money for use of DA infrastructure for automatic updates

The Automatic Updates module has been in the works for several years. It promises to do updates automatically, consistently, and securely for those that enable it. However it will connect to Drupal.org servers to get updates.

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My idea is to charge for the service of using the Drupal.org infrastructure for these updates. My thought is to charge a very nominal charge (maybe $5/month). If you don’t want to pay to use this infrastructure, you could either roll your own (with open source code), or continue doing updates as we do now. The DA could even ship high priority (think “Drupalgeddon”) security updates for free.

My guess is that mostly smaller sites will make use of auto-updates. If we get 17,000 of them paying $5/month to use the Drupal.org infrastructure, that would generate over one million dollars of revenue to the Drupal Association.

Furthermore, this would create a direct lever from the number of active Drupal sites to the Drupal Association’s funding. It would also further incentivise the DA to actively work on growing the total number of sites.

Idea 3: Integrate option to display “premium” recipes/themes/modules within Project Browser

The Project Browser initiative has also been happening for several years. It provides a fancy user interface for finding, choosing, and installing Drupal modules, themes, and recipes.

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My thought is that we should add a “Show premium” checkbox that would allow Project Browser to display selected “for pay” themes, modules, and recipes. Then the Drupal Association would take a certain percentage (~25%) of the revenue. In addition, there would be dramatically more sponsorships at DrupalCon by companies who are advertising their premium projects. I believe this would also generate millions of dollars.

I think this would benefit Drupal on more than one level:

• If we had recipes that put together a whole site, we could rapidly grow Drupal’s market share. 
  
  An example of this is a person wanting to put together a church website. They’d pay $200 for the recipe (the DA would make $50). It would pull down modules (date modules, podcast, etc), a theme that’s integrated into these, and set up sample content. The end user would only need to update their content.
• Companies that are selling the premium recipes would want to advertise them at DrupalCons. This would also generate more revenue for the DA. If you’ve ever been to WordCamps (WordPress’s local conferences), you can see this in action.

Idea 4: Overhaul documentation

Drupal’s documentation is a hodgepodge of diamonds and 💩. It’s tough to find answers for what you need, and newbies are frequently directed by search engines to old pages that are only relevant for Drupal 6 or 7.

Meanwhile, our competitors have amazing documentation. Laravel’s documentation is stunning. React’s documentation is glorious, and WordPress’ documentation is well thought out.

My idea (which I’m sure is not novel) is to radically overhaul the documentation into a system that eases maintenance, makes it easier to keep updated, separates based on version, and has tender loving care built in.

To do this we need a new system (not necessarily Drupal) to manage the docs. The docs need to be version controlled. And we also need a full time employee to manage it all to insert tender loving care. We should split documentation between “official” and “community”. The hired person would have authority to move documentation either way.

This idea is actually in the works (I believe the DA is currently figuring out how to fund this). I’ve been working (alongside John Doyle and several others) on helping to make this happen.

Idea 5: DA Funding for promoting Drupal in the wider web dev community

Pantheon has a “Heroes Program”, where members can apply to speak at conferences and at some point mention that they use Pantheon. The Drupal Association should replicate this with several differences.

• The DA should fund people that want to attend web development conferences outside of our insular community. This includes conferences with topics such as SEO, marketing, open source, CMS, etc. 
  
  Note that the DA did something similar where it invited several companies to Web Summit (which is a huge general web conference). This would be different because it would fund speakers (not sponsorships), and many people would be able to participate.
• The DA should fund people to write about Drupal in wider web development publications. I’ve personally written several articles for Smashing Magazine, and have more planned. I’ve also written for CSS Tricks. But I’m not aware of any other people doing the same. It would be amazing if the DA could motivate other people to do similar articles.

How to help

Do you have thoughts on this? Do you want to help? Well, here’s how you can do so:

1. Vote in the board of directors election.

If you’re a member of the Drupal Association, you will receive an email from “Helios Voting Bot”. In this email you will find info on how to vote. Before doing so, check out the candidates and see if what they say is important to you.

2. If you’re not a member of the Drupal Association, WTF? Seriously… join!

I make all of my income off of Drupal… which is built using the free labor of others. If you also make money off of Drupal, join the Drupal Association Ripple Makers today. You can do so for as little or as much of a donation as you like. We all should really should be giving back.

Wrapping up

Please remember that none of these are official Drupal Association initiatives. I'm putting them out there so we can get some community discussion and maybe something official will eventually happen. Before you tear a hole into all of my ideas, please remember that I took the time to write this because I care. Commenting is open for anonymous users below (please don’t post any Viagra ads), so please let me know your thoughts.

Thanks to AmyJune and Aaron Winborn Award Winner Mike Anello for helping to review.