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.

Ben Finklea (@BenFinklea), the CEO of Volacci, talked to me about the Blue Drop Awards while I was at DrupalCon Denver, and I decided I needed to have him on the show to help spread the word about the Blue Drop Awards.

The timeline looks like this:
Deadline for submission: Thursday, March 22nd
Voting period: Tuesday, March 27th - Friday, April 6th
Winners announced: Tuesday, April 10th

Go vote!