Ryan Szrama

The mission of the board isn't to help out the Drupal community in any particular country. However, continuing to make drupal.org and DrupalCons usable and accessible to folks from all over the world are in line with its mission to support the project. By accelling at these tasks, the Association provides the infrastructure and environment for individual and corporate leaders in your country to help your community more directly and effectively.

Agreed.

While I could brainstorm ideas, it isn't a question I'm best suited to answer given I don't regularly pitch against those technologies. If there were a clear communication need that experienced community members wanted contribute to - e.g. documentation on drupal.org or programming at DrupalCon - then it would definitely make sense for the Association to support that initiative. (For example, something like https://www.drupal.org/8 particularly targeting enterprise user concerns ... stability, roadmap, vendors for 24x7 support, etc.)

Growth in the enterprise is very helpful to the Drupal project, especially when paired with a culture of contribution. At Commerce Guys our largest users are often the most significant investors in the deevlopment of the core / contributed modules that make up Drupal Commerce as well.

Thanks for asking, Fernando. Good to hear from you!

As I understand them, the priorities of the D.A. board include fostering the growth of the Drupal project through continuous improvements to drupal.org and DrupalCon and increasing the financial sustainability of the association itself. In many ways, I see what we've done within the realm of the Drupal Commerce as a smaller scale expression of what might be accomplished at the Association level. Allow me to explain...

First, from my earliest days of developing Ubercart until now, we've bumped against the limits of what project maintainers could do on drupal.org. The single biggest leap drupal.org took into "the future" was The Great Git Migration, which made my job as a maintainer much easier and drew in many new contributors. (Even I was forgetting how to use CVS by the time that happened. ; )

Drupal Commerce 2.x for Drupal 8 is pushing the limits once again as we fully adopted a strategy of developing standalone libraries that make our modules depend on Composer. My vision was to take an "outside first" strategy to export our knowledge / experience off the "Drupal island" in the form of PHP libraries to draw outside contributors in, which has worked out great for our internationalization, taxing, and addressing libraries. To help push this vision forward, we contributed heavily to Composer support for contributed modules on Drupal 8, and we were thrilled when the official drupal.org Composer Repository came online.

I'd hope to see drupal.org continue evolve to support developers / more general PHP development practices to grow our contributor base and make project maintenance easier. Similarly, I want to see it continue to improve at marketing the Drupal project and community, rewarding / incentivizing contributors and maintainers, and simplifying project management / support tasks. All of these things should help us grow the pool of contributors and increase the efficiency of the ones we already have.

Additionally, Commerce Guys often tried to do new things at DrupalCon to engage attendees around eCommerce. This has involved bringing co-sponsors to the event who want to introduce their products and services to the Drupal community, which brings additional outside investment into supporting the event and more generally the community. My vision for DrupalCons and our involvement has shifted over time, but even now for Baltimore I've reached out to multiple companies to secure their sponsorship and find ways to collaborate on the exhibit floor.

Given my personal experience (and the experiences of my fellow team members), I'm a huge believer in the power of events like DrupalCon to engage new contributors and foster the development of new initiatives. DrupalCon Barcelona 2007 was my "Drupal tipping point", and even today my kids love Nancy's Drupal crafts and the numerous other trinkets / memories we've collected at DrupalCons / Camps over the years. I'd hope to see these events continue to bring people together and draw new contributors in for years to come, and finding new ways to engage sponsors and help them find an ROI like we have will contribute to this.

Finally, when we developed Commerce Kickstart 2.x, we made it the first self-sufficient Drupal distribution out there by finding new funding strategies. Our payment gateway and technology partners help made that happen when we demonstrated to them the economic value of investing in Drupal in general. I continue to share this vision with new vendors in the eCommerce space, providing a sustainable funding model for Commerce Guys's continued investment in Drupal Commerce... and it works! Even as a small team, we have one full-time contributor on staff and a day / week dedicated to contribution for all of our other developers.

I believe there are other verticals and categories of vendors who could similarly be engaged to invest in Drupal in ways that assist the D.A. at large, and I hope my vision and experience can contribute to this priority more generally in board discussions / initiatives.

Honestly, it's a bit of a wait and see re: just how much impact I can have in a two year term. For all I know, the agenda has been set for this year and I wouldn't reasonably be able to influence the roadmap for either initiative until at least the next year. ^_^

That said, as soon as I understand where the conversations are re: both drupal.org and DrupalCon and what options are being evaluated, I'd be sure to speak up. I think most long-time contributors are used to the balancing act (namely what makes sense for a project and its resources vs. what's being asked for from users), and I don't consider myself any exception.

From my perspective the D.A. is really hitting their stride with respect to improving drupal.org. and the new sponsorship opportunities (e.g. the industry pages that have just launched) should hopefully begin to impact #2. I'll certainly share my perspective from day one re: what will help sponsors see an ROI and renew year over year.

I actually think I like the movie better than the book.

Thanks for the kind words, Dinesh! Regarding your two points, at a high level, I'd say the Association itself should really continue doing what it is doing. Providing stable infrastructure and semi-annual events where developers can collaborate is the best thing it can do to drive innovation and maturity for sub-ecosystems like Commerce. I foresee future use for new sections of drupal.org like the industry pages that will also help raise awareness about solutions and service providers in the Commerce, Government, and other verticals.

In terms of affordability, open source has always amazed me because it gave me a vehicle to contribute code that could be used for free by people all around the world to build their businesses / provide for their families. I love that! I think it's possible that the software we have can be used to create affordable, hosted eCommerce platforms, but ideally the core of Drupal Commerce itself will continue to become so easy that all folks will need is a host. (Otherwise, you might be better off with Shopify or something similar.)

The only thing the Commerce ecosystem needs to thrive is continued improvements to d.o with respect to Composer, and I'm happy to point out that that's already heading in a great direction. I'd just simply cheer on the teams responsible and continue to dedicate our team's time to helping make it happen. : )