Dutch Drupal Foundation

• What is the Dutch Drupal Foundation?
  • Dutch Drupal Foundation supports Dutch Drupal Community. We’re groing. Trying to handle work in a professional way in a voluntary way. Lead double lives: daytime job versus community commitments.
• How is this different from the Drupal Association?
• How has that been going for you?
• Would you recommend other regional areas start something similar?

Events

• What events have you organized recently?
  • Drupal Events in Dutch speaking part of EU (Belgium and Netherlands) became big. E.g. DrupalJam (350ppl), Drupal Training Day (250 students). Relatively large events become routine. Now ppl spreading cross border on tour to share experience
• Tell me about DrupalJam. What is it, and how long have you been putting it on?
  • DrupalJam largest event in Netherlands. Started small in 2007 with 30 persons and some pizza boxes in a basement. Now 350 ppl / €25K. Outgrown study dorm and pizza’s. Also started Drupal Training Day (largest worldwide) and Drupal Splash Awards. Lot of work and commitment. Getting more serious. Growing pains expected
• What are some difference in paid events vs. free events?
• What has the attendance been like for free events?
• Where does the income come from?
• How do you get sponsors?
• When do you recommend charging a ticket price to attendees?
• How have you seen your community transition from coders who just come to code for fun, to people who are making their living using Drupal?
  • Come for Drupal, stay for code. Sounds fun. It is. But business side of things and commitment to making this work professionally is different cake.
  • Balance between business side and community side, which is a recurring topic for everything we do in the community. Drupal has become enterprise platform, community still many smaller agencies w/ different values (see incline on Gartner oct. 2014)
• What does the Drupal landscape look like in europe
  • Pan EU events: Frontend United, CxO, Drupal Government Days Brussels 2009
  • DrupalEU

Project

• What is Drupalfund and what’s the idea behind it?

  • Drupalfund.us is a crowdfunding platform for projects related to Drupal. Think of it as a Kickstarter for Drupal.

  • The problem which Drupalfund is trying to solve is that as we all know - Drupal development is backed by volunteers (individuals and companies) that donate their money or time to contribute to Drupal. However, most of the development (even core development) happens against the developer's personal free time or his paid hours. Because of this many issues, fixes and changes are pushed back and fixed when the developer can steal away some of his time. To be a little more specific I looked at top 25 most installed modules and their issue queues and got some interesting numbers:

  • These most installed or most popular modules have in average over 400 issues. It takes in average 279 days to fix & release the module. I know that the critical or security issues get fixed much faster but it still is a long time.

  • We started to look for a solution to this problem and so we've asked ourselves a question: What everything could be achieved, if we would provide an easy way how how the Drupal community could contribute financially to the Drupal development? Our community is huge. There are nearly 1M registered users on Drupal.org. If only 1% of us would donate 1% of our salary each month, we would be able to rise over $5M/year And that is enough to hire over 65 developers to work on Drupal development full time.

  • With these numbers in your mind - think about how Drupal 8 development, porting modules to Drupal 8 could be accelerated. Think about that missing part of Drupal Commerce or Open Atrium, new features to Drupal.org. Or think about the plans you could have to write a book on Drupal development, or release a training materials. Think about new products and services that could be born out of this. How much could we all as individuals and companies benefit if we together supported the development and not only depend on volunteering time.

  • So we built Drupalfund as our answer to this problem.

• How does Drupalfund work

  • It works as all of the standard crowdfunding websites work:
    1. Submit a project idea
    2. set some rewards
    3. generate buzz around it
    4. get some valuable feedback from the community
    5. raise funds
    6. and deliver your project.

• What kind of projects can it be used to raise money for?

  • Drupalfund can be used to support both coding and non-coding projects
    • Coding projects can be submitted to support existing and new modules, Drupal core initives, Drupal.org infrastructure, or installation profiles or products.
    • A good example of non-coding projects can be a book or curriculum, documentation, art & marketing projects or organising a sprint.

• What plans do you have for Drupalfund

  • We would love to integrate or connect Drupalfund with Drupal.org
    • share user accounts
    • provide badges for activity that could be displayed on D.org account page
    • create an easy way how to turn an project issue into Drupalfund project
    • provide widgets to embed on the module page
    • We would love to become the official platform for Drupal fundraising

• Who is behind Drupalfund

  • Our team consists of two groups:
    • Mogdesign developed and is operating & managing the platform itself
    • we have a team of community advisors. These are very valuable and respected members of our Drupal community and we discuss very closely the future of Drupalfund with them. At this time they are Robert Douglass, Jeffrey McGuire (or Jam) and Kristof Van Tomme.

• Why should anyone use Drupalfund?

  • I have 3 core answers to this
    • We believe that crowdfunding can be a new way to achieve greatness in Drupal development? Drupal has started in
    • Sustanability - as Drupal itself and our community grows and matures, we need to find different ways how we can multiply the amount of people that actively contributing to it. There are many people who would love to contribute to Drupal, but they are not coders, they would love, but simply don't know how they could help. Drupalfund aims to lower this barrier and provide an easy way for this to happen.
    • Giving back - we all got so much by using Drupal on our sites or selling it to our clients and I personally believe that it is time to give back from what we have gained. It does not matter if you are a large company or an individual, Drupalfund wants to help anyone to give back to Drupal.

• Why not just use Kickstarter?

• What should we do if we want to start?

  • If you have an interesting idea go and submit a project. Or if you know about anyone who would benefit from using Drupalfund, point him our way. Go to Drupalfund.us, get in touch with us, we would love to help you setting up the project.

  • First 3 submitted projects will get a $100 credit each:)

  • Also if you come to Drupalcon Prague, we will have a BoF session on Wednesday @1pm in the Club B · Windows Azure room where we will be to discuss Drupalfund, answer any questions or help with setting up projects. Looking forward to meet you.

This week Nathan Haug talks with me about the Webform module and Webform.com.

He starts out by explaining what the Webform module is, and what it does, and also talks about some of the contrib modules that extend Webform. Then he talks about the recent release of Webform.com.

Some of the things we discuss include:

• Background behind webform.com and how it got started?
• How webform.com is different from installing webform on a "traditional" Drupal site
• Some of the limitations
• How the data can be exported into a "traditional" Drupal site
• and Price

Questions from Twitter

• Richard Lyon (@richthegeek): Do you plan to release the Webform.com UI as a contrib module for other sites?
• Damien McKenna (@DamienMcKenna): Thoughts for v4? Rebuild to use Fields, merge with EntityForm, or something else?

Follow me on Twitter (@ModsUnraveled) to ask your own questions!