The Business of Community
How do you make the most of Drupal's phenomenal growth and leverage the community for your business?
The Drupal project is the largest Free and Open Source Software community in the world, powering 20% of the top 10,000 and over 2% of all websites. Thousands of contributors post thousands of patches of code every week to the drupal.org website, growing the commons and making Drupal more useful than it was last week.
But how does it all work? Who pays for the hosting and bandwidth? How does the project provide support to local communities across the globe?
Fresh out from spending a year as one of the first ever community-elected Directors of the Drupal Association and founder of new Drupal Cooperative http://drop.coop, I provide a unique insight into the business of community - how it started, where we are now, and how we can scale effectively to 20% of *all* websites in a Free and Open Source Way.
Comments
The d.o infrastructure is the center of the whole community and so making sure it is capable of fully supporting the community and the continued growth of Drupal is very important. Creating the needed future funding and other resources is going to be a challenge. Given Steve’s experience, I am sure he will present some insightful ideas to make that happen.
I'm especially looking forward to hearing Steve bring insights from his year as DA at-large rep to this important topic.
I also can't think of a better place to have this discussion than Portland. ;-)