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The Webform module for Drupal joins Open Collective

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Open Source

Open source and me

For the past two years, I have been blogging about my experience building and maintaining the Webform module for Drupal 8 and have had some lively discussions about them all. As the Webform module moved from beta or release candidates, I shared my experience in two posts titled Webform 8.x-5.x: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? and Webform, Drupal, and Open Source...Where are we going?. Throughout my blog posts, the question persists…

How is open source sustainable?

Open source and organizations

In 2018, open source has become a success story, particularly for large organizations. As someone who has been building websites since Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 (1997), I see the fact that Microsoft is going to use the open source Chromium rendering engine as an amazing achievement for open source and even Microsoft. Microsoft has transformed from calling Linux a cancer to fully embracing open source collaboration.

Open source allows organizations to make a collaborative investment that provides them with a large technical return.

Organizations sponsor open source, however, the work is done by individual developers who may work for an organization or independently within the open source community.

What about individual software developers who contribute to open source? At what point do we recognize their part?

Open source and individuals

I recently wrote about Why I am one of the top contributors to Drupal? which explains my motives for my contribution to Drupal and my commitment to maintaining the Webform Module for Drupal 8 for the foreseeable future. One key reason behind my contribution is…

Open source allows individuals to share their passion with a collaborative community which improves their professional profile/resume.

The lone software developer has become a thing of the past. Modern software is a collective and collaborative process. Many software developers’ first experience with software collaboration is when using or contributing to an open source project. Ideally, the lone software developer becomes a member of the open source software community.

That said, building, maintaining, and sustaining collaborative communities where organizations and individuals work together is challenging.

Open Source and community

Growing, nurturing and building anything comes with a set of challenges and difficulties - open source projects are no exception. And this is where structure comes in. Structure, a system, a framework - whatever you want to call it - helps us gauge where we’ve been, where we’re going and where we want to be. Communities need to have some system of governance and sustainability. Open source projects are built by a loosely knit community of developers working together and making decisions.

The most common decision making roles in open source is the 'maintainer' because they help make sure a project continues to grow and work.

Maintainers need to be able to maintain their projects. Projects need to be maintained.

Open source and sustainability

The discussion around open source sustainability is ongoing. Danny Crichton at TechCrunch recently wrote a comprehensive essay about the current state of open source sustainability. It is a worthwhile read with useful background information and references.

There are several approaches to funding/supporting open source developers. To me, the most appealing approach is Open Collective because it is exploring how to collect and distribute funds for an open source project in a completely transparent way.

Open source software is typically created using full transparency. The problem of open source sustainability may be best solved using full transparency.

Open Collective

Open source and Open Collective

Open Collective is a platform for global collaborations to transparently collect and distribute funds.

Open Collective is trying to solve the much larger issue of global collaboration, and open source is one type of collaboration. Besides an open source project, an Open Collective can be set up for a meetup, a political group, or even a Drupal Camp.

Persuading people to contribute funds to an Open Collective requires a mix of marketing, messaging and incentives.

Open Collective and incentives

The strongest incentive to get anyone to do something is to provide a tangible result. Tangible results can be elusive when fixing a bug or upgrading some code. Finding the right messaging and incentives requires experimentation. Incentives should help people get the most out of the software. Incentives could be bug fixes, feature requests, support requests, documentation. If these experiments are successful with organizations and individuals backing and funding an Open Collective; the Open Collective will face its next challenge which is spending the money.

Once a project has money, it is up to the maintainers of that community to decide how to spend it.

-- https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/23/open-source-sustainability/ 

Open Collective and money

It is doubtful that most open source maintainers and contributors can be fully compensated for their late night hours and weekends contributing code, design, documentation, project management, and other expertise to an open source project.

We need to figure how to best spend the money in ways that provide a high return.

In the Drupal, we like to say “Come for the code, stay for the community.” Communities require infrastructure to work and grow. Reinvesting an Open Collective's funds to grow a project's community could give everyone involved some incentive. For example, we could use Open Collective funds to make it more financially feasible for a project's maintainers to speak at events. Another concrete reinvestment of funds is paying for code sprints.

Open Collective is providing a tool which helps improves open source sustainability. It is up to each project's maintainer to determine how to use this tool and collected funds.

How can Open Collective directly benefit the Webform module and the Drupal community?

Webform

Open Collective and Webform

The goal of this blog post is to initiate the conversation around leveraging Open Collection within the Drupal community. Developing and refining the marketing and messaging for the Webform module's Open Collective is going to be an interactive process with some experimentation.

Webform and marketing

The success of the Webforms' Open Collective is going to hinge on the Webform module's project page on Drupal.org, the Webform module's page on Open Collective, and some callouts in the documentation, videos and maybe in the Webform module's user interface

Webform and messaging

After three years of working heavily on an open source project, I strongly feel that the most important message to new and even old people in the open source community is…

Everyone is welcome and we are here to help.

Gradually within the Webform module's Open Collective, we need to figure out how to talk to the consumer of the software by…

Communicating the value of contributing and providing incentives for people to contribute.

Webform and incentives

Support is the most immediate incentive to get people to pay for open source software. WordPress' plugin ecosystem openly asks and sometimes requires people to pay for support licenses. I never want to force or trick a user to pay for support. The Drupal community is passionately against paid modules. Nevertheless, it’s important to communicate to people that supporting an Open Collective will help support the Webform module and the Drupal community. There is no doubt they go hand in hand.

Frankly, I already escalate issue queue tickets created by people and organizations who are active contributors or sponsors in the Drupal community, especially if they are members of the Drupal Association. BTW, I also welcome and escalate tickets created by new members of the Drupal community. I have not publicly documented this policy, but it is worth asking "Should we be providing free software with free support?"

Webform and money

How the funds in Webform module's Open Collective are being distributed is tricky but not impossible. Initially focusing on reinvesting any funds back into the Webform and Drupal community and the software is a fair and reasonable approach. The collected funds should only be spent on event/speaking related costs and direct improvements to the Webform module's user experience, accessibility, and marketing.

Reinvesting funds for marketing might be the only controversial expense. I am going to tread lightly with spending money on marketing, but the Webform module needs a logo, maybe a better slide deck, and some SEO to compete with the 100's of other form builders on the market. BTW, Drupal's community is so awesome I would not be surprised if someone contributed a logo to the Webform module.

Webform and me

I am not going to get rich from the Webform module. I am incredibly fortunate to have steady consulting work, which allows me to contribute my time to the Webform module. The Webform module is a professional and intellectual challenge for me. The sustainability of the Webform module is part of this challenge.

What fascinates me most about the challenge of open source sustainability is the scale that our open source projects are benefiting everyone including large organizations. Large organizations have realized that they can tap in the power of open source software and its communities.

Open source needs to push back on organizations and ask them to give back.

Us and open source

“The culture of our community should be one that gives back and supports community projects with all that they can: whether with employee time or funding. Instead of just embracing the consumption of open source and ignoring the cost, we should take responsibility for its sustainability."

-- Henry Zhu of Babel
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/23/open-source-sustainability

Open source is about us. Us is anyone that uses open source projects. Sometimes, we forget that even the individual or organization that uses the software without contributing back to open source are still peripheral members of our community. We need to explore how we are marketing open source projects, think about our messaging and provide some incentives to welcome and encourage everyone to get involved.

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