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Jul 12 2021
Jul 12

This article was co-authored with Tim Lehnen, CTO of the Drupal Association, and cross-posted on Drupal.org.

Sustaining open-source projects is the challenge of this decade. Understanding how contributions are made—by volunteers, sponsored by an organization, or both—can create incentives for ongoing support. The Drupal project has measured contributions in Drupal.org issues since 2015 using an issue credit system that captures contributions—including code, documentation, speaking at events, security review, etc.—from both individuals and organizations. This insight is used to shape incentives for the business entities that participate in the Drupal ecosystem.

Issue trackers can explain what changes have occurred and why they are important. Version control systems such as Git track changes to a code repository, who changed what, and when. Drupal's issue credit system dramatically expands the kinds of questions that we can ask about an open source project to include questions such as, "How much do volunteers contribute to the project?" or "How many of the contributions to this project are sponsored?"

In this article, we will describe how Drupal's issue credit system works and why we would like to bring it to GitLab and other code collaboration platforms. We hope that other free/libre and open-source projects and organizations that want to understand their return on investment in open source can model their approach on this issue credit system and benefit from the insights we have learned in the Drupal community.

How It Works

Drupal's issue credit system provides an interface that allows a person to describe the circumstances that facilitated their contributions for each issue on Drupal.org. Each issue on Drupal.org can credit multiple people, and may pertain to a code contribution, Drupal initiative meetings, Drupal event planning, podcast, and more. For instance, for each meeting for the group of people working on Drupal's new front-end theme, Olivero, Matthew creates an issue that is tagged as "meetings," the meeting notes are posted in the issue, and each attendee for that meeting receives credit.

Use of the issue credit system is optional, and there are three potential aspects of each issue credit.

First, a Drupal.org user can optionally attribute their participation in a specific issue to a company that allotted time for them to work on the issue. This is typically an employer that pays that person's salary or wage. This organization must be directly tied to the contributor's user profile on Drupal.org as a current or past employer and the organization must have an organization profile on Drupal.org. For instance, in Drupal issues, Matthew can credit his employer, Lullabot, whereas Tim can credit his employer, the Drupal Association.

Second, in addition to attributing a contribution to an organization, the credit system also allows someone to attribute their work to a "customer" (client), which also must have an organization profile on Drupal.org. Thus, in addition to crediting Lullabot, Matthew could also give credit to Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) when he is doing work on their behalf, such as porting the NPR and PBS Media Manager modules to Drupal 8. Tim, who works for a nonprofit, does not usually do work on behalf of a "customer" and would not typically use this field.

Third, for each issue, someone can check a box that indicates they volunteered their own time to work on the issue. For instance, Matthew has a long history of working in public media, feels a deep connection to the mission of public media organizations, and often added features to the public media modules on his own time after work. He added features that were not necessarily useful for GPB, but that would allow other public media organizations to use the module. Therefore some of his work was on behalf of his employer, for a customer, and volunteer. These are the sort of contributions that are difficult to measure without Drupal's credit system.

Finally, because we don't want to overwhelm our contributors with "paperwork," the credit system remembers a user's attributions as the default for their next issue.

This shows how the UI works:

The project maintainer can then select which issue comments truly contributed to the resolution of the issue, and all of the individuals and organizations attributed in those comments will receive credit:

Why and how do we use this data?

We have been using the issue credit system in the Drupal project since 2015. We created the first analysis of the data in 2016 in a report titled Who Sponsors Drupal Development? that has been updated each year since.

Those reports contain answers to question such as:

  • What is the Drupal community working on?
  • Who is working on Drupal?
  • How much of the work is sponsored?
  • Who is sponsoring the work?
  • How diverse is Drupal?

The data are also used to determine the order of the organizations listed on Drupal's Marketplace page. In contrast to a simple alphabetical ranking, or even paid placement for marketplace ranking, using the credit system in combination with other factors allows us to promote organizations that are good open source citizens first — and thus incentivize that behavior from other organizations. In addition to considering data from issue credits, those lists use an algorithm that also considers factors about an organization such as the number of case studies, whether they financially support the Drupal Association, and the number of projects supported.

Why We Want to Share

Every free/libre and open source project adopts slightly different values. Some projects consist entirely of contributions from people who are all doing work for one employer and Drupal's issue credit system might not seem to be particularly useful to them. However, most organizations know that an open-source project with the support of just one company is a risk. For example, many of the open-source projects used in the financial sector were originally created by people working at a single company. However, the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), which works with companies in financial services, created a rubric to help organizations evaluate the health of open source projects, and one of their definitions of a healthy project is one that "is composed of individuals from 3+ organizations, ideally of 2+ org types, and including 1 bank." A tool like Drupal's issue credit system can help outsiders get a much better sense about the diversity of the contributors to a project.

Interestingly, FINOS also views it as a positive sign that "No requirement exists for developers to create a separate 'work' /corporate Github ID." They encourage organizations to pay their employees to work on open source projects. They want people to contribute as part of their jobs, with contributing written into their job descriptions and NOT something they do in their volunteer time.

In addition to the FINOS rubric, there are other metrics that specifically refer to volunteer and organizational support. Here are a few examples:

  • Internews created the BASICS program (Building Analytical and Support Infrastructure for Critical Security tools) that includes a rubric to help reporters and organizations determine which open source tools they can trust. Among the questions they ask include "Are the maintainers primarily volunteers, or are they employed by an organization or company specifically to work on the tool?"
  • The Apache Maturity Model considers if "contributors act as themselves as opposed to representatives of a corporation or organization."
  • The Community Health Analytics Open Source Software (CHAOSS) community, a Linux Foundation project focused on creating analytics and metrics to help define community health, suggests a wide variety of questions and considerations regarding "organizational diversity" such as, "What is the number of contributing organizations?" and a consideration of "ratio of contributors from a single company over all contributors." This issue credit system also could help outsiders understand the potential "elephant factor," which measures how dependent a project is on a small set of corporate contributors.

We've also seen end-user organizations begin to use Drupal's contribution data in their formal RFPs when seeking a vendor for work. Because this contribution recognition system acts as a proxy for good open source citizenship, both private and public sector organizations have found value in asking companies to provide their contribution history as part of their bids. This feeds a virtuous cycle of continuous contribution.

We would love for other organizations and projects to benefit from the kind of insight we've been able to gather in the Drupal community. But for Drupal's issue credit system to be useful to other organizations, it cannot only exist on Drupal.org, which is why we want to port our system to other development platforms, including GitLab, GitHub, and GNU Savannah. Drupal has already moved its code repository to GitLab and we have an open issue on GitLab to port Drupal's issue credit system.

Limitations

Drupal's issue credit system is clearly an improvement on previous systems that the Drupal community tried and later found insufficient, such as Certified to Rock (too opaque) or DrupalCores (only measures code contributions). However, the issue credit system is not without limitations.

When Dries Buytaert first proposed that the Drupal community adopt a method for giving credit to organizations that contribute code to open source he did so in order to "encourage more organizations to contribute to Drupal and hire core developers." Many of us who care about Drupal hoped this new system could be used to better recognize all aspects of contribution to the Drupal community. We saw people making a wide variety of useful contributions to the Drupal project and we wanted to give credit where it was due.

While there's a common belief that we can use metrics to increase the number of organizational and individual contributors, a great deal of research suggests that trying to use metrics to shape communities can lead to undesirable results. In fact, Goodhart's Law, named after British economist Charles Goodhart, states any measure used for control is unreliable. Indeed, we have found that Drupal's issue credit system, like any public metric, has encouraged some people to shift their focus from making useful contributions to "gaming the system." While some people have found ways to do the minimum amount of work in hopes of raising their profile or that of their employer, we encourage all contributors to break issues down into small parts so a large contribution doesn't count the same as a small one.

Drupal's credit system seems to avoid one of the pitfalls that Jerry Muller mentions in his book The Tyranny of Metrics: "measure output, not input." Rather than giving people credit simply for trying, Drupal's credit system captures committed changes to the Drupal codebase --- the output. However, this system has grown to include many other kinds of contributions, including conference presentations, initiative meeting attendance, accessibility reviews, and much more. Consequently, it could be argued that Drupal's issue credit system has grown to measure all sorts of inputs and the Drupal community has shifted focus toward one of the outputs of the issue credit system: the "leaderboard" on Drupal's Marketplace page.

In some instances, leaderboards positively motivate community members. But leaderboards can also demoralize people when a change to the algorithm lowers their company's rank on the Marketplace. For instance, a long-time Drupal contributor found a change to the algorithm that caused his company to drop down dozens of places on the Marketplace listing "incredibly demoralizing" and another well-known community member felt that his "contributions are now devalued."

For everyone who feels proud to see their company placed highly on the Marketplace page there are many others who are left out. This is consistent with research on leaderboards in other communities that found how such rankings discourage contribution when "leaderboards elevate the top ten or twenty-five participants in populations of tens of thousands" and the "vast majority of members ... perceive that they have no chance of making the list" (50).

This is an ongoing area of concern that requires careful attention for any community looking to implement such a system. For the Drupal community, we are careful to ensure that this contribution credit system is used to provide recognition for individuals, but not rank. We believe ranking individual contributors is an unhealthy model that doesn't account for the privilege of free time.

On the other hand, because presenting an ecosystem of Drupal service providers creates a defacto ranking system—it's in our best interest to choose one based on contribution behavior that promotes good open source citizenship, rather than something more capricious or arbitrary like a simple alphabetical or randomized list.

Start with a Goal, Not a Metric

The CHAOSS community recommends that free/libre and open-source communities adopt a Goal-Question-Metric format. In this format, a community first establishes goals. Then they need to establish questions that characterize the assessment or achievement of a specific goal. If the answer to the question does not matter, the community does not need information (metrics) and therefore does not need to measure.

Consequently, we view that Drupal's issue credit system is most well suited to organizations that have specific goals and that have questions pertaining to sponsorship, volunteerism, diversity, and related topics. In the Drupal community, many people who had been participating for a decade or more saw a clear shift in the community from being that of primarily hobbyists to that of professional developers. If nothing else, Drupal's issue credit system has shown us that organizations have played a significant, and growing, role in the development of Drupal. We can now state rather confidently that more and more contributions are sponsored, but volunteer contributions remain important to Drupal's success. We know that of the people using the issue credit system, 5% were "purely volunteer" compared to 69% that were "purely sponsored." We know that Drupal's contributors have become more diverse, but that we would still like to increase diversity.

Despite its limitations, we feel that Drupal's issue credit system offers significant value and we would like to see it adopted more widely. We are in the process of making individual and organizational credit an official metric of the CHAOSS project. We would like to see it adopted on GitLab, GitHub, GNU Savannah, and other platforms. Furthermore, if we standardize across these platforms, then the project health analytics researchers can study these attributes across all the projects and tooling ecosystems that support this data, and we can share the effort.

Would you like to know at a glance whether an open source project is primarily sustained by individuals or organizations?

Would you like to know who they are?

Would you like a window into good citizenship in your open source project?

Please join us! You can show your support by adding your own feedback on the issue to add the feature to GitLab.

Jun 02 2021
Jun 02

Last week, when I renewed my yoga teaching credentials through the Yoga Alliance, I was required to agree to an "Ethical Commitment" based on values intrinsic to the practice of yoga, such as ahiṃsā (nonviolence), satya (truthfulness), asteya (not stealing), aparigraha (non-possessiveness), and santoṣa (contentment). While it might seem like such an agreement would be limited to my role as a yoga teacher, these same principles inform decisions that I make in all aspects of my life, including how I build my website.

The page on this site titled "How I Built This Site" describes some of the technical choices I have made to represent myself online. This is the first article in a series of articles that will describe each of these choices in more detail.

This website is built using a content management system called Drupal. The Drupal community is one of the largest free software communities in the world, with more than 1,000,000 contributors working together. The values and principles of the Drupal community align well with the Ethical Commitment to which all yoga teachers certified by the Yoga Alliance must agree. While not all of the ethical commitments overlap, here are a few examples to support my claim:

While words and documents are important, I am more influenced by my lived experiences. In both communities I consistently interact with people and witness behaviors that align with my conception of an ethical life.

One significant difference is the Drupal community's commitment to free software that is difficult to find among yoga teachers. Yoga teachers rely heavily on "free" proprietary services that exploit their users, such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc. While I have accounts on all of those platforms, I avoid using them whenever possible.

Rather, my online presence relies heavily on Drupal. In this sense, Drupal functions as my "ethical base." Many of the methods I use to communicate with people online — newsletters, RSS feeds, forms, etc. — are provided by Drupal. Certainly there are many ethical alternatives to the tools used by "surveillance capitalists," but Drupal happens to be the one that I know well. I've been using Drupal for more than a decade and I personally know many of the people who contribute to Drupal.

Both yoga and Drupal have improved my life, and there is nothing magical about either of them. Drupal allows me to interact online in a way that feels consistent with my values. People who use Drupal are granted the "four essential freedoms" of free software. While it would certainly be easier to just use the tools provided by Big Tech, I cannot use those tools in good conscience. Drupal is not automatically ethical, and can be used for all sorts of purposes, both beneficial and harmful. In my case, I use Drupal because I wish to be nonviolent, truthful, and kind to all people. For more than a decade Drupal has provided a solid ethical foundation for my online presence.

Sep 06 2016
Sep 06

(This article, co-authored with Dries Buytaert, the founder and project lead of Drupal, was cross-posted on drupal.org, lullabot.com, and buytaert.net.)

There exist millions of Open Source projects today, but many of them aren't sustainable. Scaling Open Source projects in a sustainable manner is difficult. A prime example is OpenSSL, which plays a critical role in securing the internet. Despite its importance, the entire OpenSSL development team is relatively small, consisting of 11 people, 10 of whom are volunteers. In 2014, security researchers discovered an important security bug that exposed millions of websites. Like OpenSSL, most Open Source projects fail to scale their resources. Notable exceptions are the Linux kernel, Debian, Apache, Drupal, and WordPress, which have foundations, multiple corporate sponsors and many contributors that help these projects scale.

We (Dries Buytaert is the founder and project lead of Drupal and co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Acquia and Matthew Tift is a Senior Developer at Lullabot and Drupal 8 configuration system co-maintainer) believe that the Drupal community has a shared responsibility to build Drupal and that those who get more from Drupal should consider giving more. We examined commit data to help understand who develops Drupal, how much of that work is sponsored, and where that sponsorship comes from. We will illustrate that the Drupal community is far ahead in understanding how to sustain and scale the project. We will show that the Drupal project is a healthy project with a diverse community of contributors. Nevertheless, in Drupal's spirit of always striving to do better, we will also highlight areas where our community can and should do better.

Who is working on Drupal?

In the spring of 2015, after proposing ideas about giving credit and discussing various approaches at length, Drupal.org added the ability for people to attribute their work to an organization or customer in the Drupal.org issue queues. Maintainers of Drupal themes and modules can award issues credits to people who help resolve issues with code, comments, design, and more.

example issue credit on drupal.orgA screenshot of an issue comment on Drupal.org. You can see that jamadar worked on this patch as a volunteer, but also as part of his day job working for TATA Consultancy Services on behalf of their customer, Pfizer.

Drupal.org's credit system captures all the issue activity on Drupal.org. This is primarily code contributions, but also includes some (but not all) of the work on design, translations, documentation, etc. It is important to note that contributing in the issues on Drupal.org is not the only way to contribute. There are other activities — for instance, sponsoring events, promoting Drupal, providing help and mentoring — important to the long-term health of the Drupal project. These activities are not currently captured by the credit system. Additionally, we acknowledge that parts of Drupal are developed on GitHub and that credits might get lost when those contributions are moved to Drupal.org. For the purposes of this post, however, we looked only at the issue contributions captured by the credit system on Drupal.org.

What we learned is that in the 12-month period from July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016 there were 32,711 issue credits — both to Drupal core as well as all the contributed themes and modules — attributed to 5,196 different individual contributors and 659 different organizations.

Despite the large number of individual contributors, a relatively small number do the majority of the work. Approximately 51% of the contributors involved got just one credit. The top 30 contributors (or top 0.5% contributors) account for over 21% of the total credits, indicating that these individuals put an incredible amount of time and effort in developing Drupal and its contributed modules:

How much of the work is sponsored?

As mentioned above, from July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016, 659 organizations contributed code to Drupal.org. Drupal is used by more than one million websites. The vast majority of the organizations behind these Drupal websites never participate in the development of Drupal; they use the software as it is and do not feel the need to help drive its development.

Technically, Drupal started out as a 100% volunteer-driven project. But nowadays, the data suggests that the majority of the code on Drupal.org is sponsored by organizations in Drupal's ecosystem. For example, of the 32,711 commit credits we studied, 69% of the credited work is “sponsored.”

We then looked at the distribution of how many of the credits are given to volunteers versus given to individuals doing "sponsored work" (i.e. contributing as part of their paid job):

contributions by top x

Looking at the top 100 contributors, for example, 23% of their credits are the result of contributing as volunteers and 56% of their credits are attributed to a corporate sponsor. The remainder, roughly 21% of the credits, are not attributed. Attribution is optional so this means it could either be volunteer-driven, sponsored, or both.

As can be seen on the graph, the ratio of volunteer versus sponsored don't meaningfully change as we look beyond the top 100 — the only thing that changes is that more credits that are not attributed. This might be explained by the fact that occasional contributors might not be aware of or understand the credit system, or could not be bothered with setting up organizational profiles for their employer or customers.

As shown in jamadar's screenshot above, a credit can be marked as volunteer and sponsored at the same time. This could be the case when someone does the minimum required work to satisfy the customer's need, but uses his or her spare time to add extra functionality. We can also look at the amount of code credits that are exclusively volunteer credits. Of the 7,874 credits that marked volunteer, 43% of them (3,376 credits) only had the volunteer box checked and 57% of them (4,498) were also partially sponsored. These 3,376 credits are one of our best metrics to measure volunteer-only contributions. This suggests that only 10% of the 32,711 commit credits we examined were contributed exclusively by volunteers. This number is a stark contrast to the 12,888 credits that were “purely sponsored,” and that account for 39% of the total credits. In other words, there were roughly four times as many “purely sponsored” credits as there were “purely volunteer” credits.

When we looked at the 5,196 users, rather than credits, we found somewhat different results. A similar percentage of all users had exclusively volunteer credits: 14% (741 users). But the percentage of users with exclusively sponsored credits is only 50% higher: 21% (1077 users). Thus, when we look at the data this way, we find that users who only do sponsored work tend to contribute quite a bit more than users who only do volunteer work.

None of these methodologies are perfect, but they all point to a conclusion that most of the work on Drupal is sponsored. At the same time, the data shows that volunteer contribution remains very important to Drupal. We believe there is a healthy ratio between sponsored and volunteer contributions.

Who is sponsoring the work?

Because we established that most of the work on Drupal is sponsored, we know it is important to track and study what organizations contribute to Drupal. Despite 659 different organizations contributing to Drupal, approximately 50% of them got 4 credits or less. The top 30 organizations (roughly top 5%) account for about 29% of the total credits, which suggests that the top 30 companies play a crucial role in the health of the Drupal project. The graph below shows the top 30 organizations and the number of credits they received between July 1, 2015 and June 30, 2016:

contributions by the top 30 organizations

While not immediately obvious from the graph above, different types of companies are active in Drupal's ecosystem and we propose the following categorization below to discuss our ecosystem.

Category Description Traditional Drupal businesses Small-to-medium-sized professional services companies that make money primarily using Drupal. They typically employ less than 100 employees, and because they specialize in Drupal, many of these professional services companies contribute frequently and are a huge part of our community. Examples are Lullabot (shown on graph) or Chapter Three (shown on graph). Digital marketing agencies Larger full-service agencies that have marketing led practices using a variety of tools, typically including Drupal, Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, WordPress, etc. They are typically larger, with the larger agencies employing thousands of people. Examples are Sapient (shown on graph) or AKQA. System integrators Larger companies that specialize in bringing together different technologies into one solution. Example system agencies are Accenture, TATA Consultancy Services, Capgemini or CI&T. Technology and infrastructure companies Examples are Acquia (shown on graph), Lingotek (shown on graph), BlackMesh, RackSpace, Pantheon or Platform.sh. End-users Examples are Pfizer (shown on graph), Examiner.com (shown on graph) or NBC Universal.

Most of the top 30 sponsors are traditional Drupal companies. Sapient (120 credits) is the only digital marketing agency showing up in the top 30. No system integrator shows up in the top 30. The first system integrator is CI&T, which ranked 31st with 102 credits. As far as system integrators are concerned CI&T is a smaller player with between 1,000 and 5,000 employees. Other system integrators with credits are Capgemini (43 credits), Globant (26 credits), and TATA Consultancy Services (7 credits). We didn't see any code contributions from Accenture, Wipro or IBM Global Services. We expect these will come as most of them are building out Drupal practices. For example, we know that IBM Global Services already has over 100 people doing Drupal work.

contributions by organization type

When we look beyond the top 30 sponsors, we see that roughly 82% of the code contribution on Drupal.org comes from the traditional Drupal businesses. About 13% of the contributions comes from infrastructure and software companies, though that category is mostly dominated by one company, Acquia. This means that the technology and infrastructure companies, digital marketing agencies, system integrators and end-users are not meaningfully contributing code to Drupal.org today. In an ideal world, the pie chart above would be sliced in equal sized parts.

How can we explain that unbalance? We believe the two biggest reasons are: (1) Drupal's strategic importance and (2) the level of maturity with Drupal and Open Source. Various of the traditional Drupal agencies have been involved with Drupal for 10 years and almost entirely depend on on Drupal. Given both their expertise and dependence on Drupal, they are most likely to look after Drupal's development and well-being. These organizations are typically recognized as Drupal experts and sought out by organizations that want to build a Drupal website. Contrast this with most of the digital marketing agencies and system integrators who have the size to work with a diversified portfolio of content management platforms, and are just getting started with Drupal and Open Source. They deliver digital marketing solutions and aren't necessarily sought out for their Drupal expertise. As their Drupal practices grow in size and importance, this could change, and when it does, we expect them to contribute more. Right now many of the digital marketing agencies and system integrators have little or no experience with Open Source so it is important that we motivate them to contribute and then teach them how to contribute.

There are two main business reasons for organizations to contribute: (1) it improves their ability to sell and win deals and (2) it improves their ability to hire. Companies that contribute to Drupal tend to promote their contributions in RFPs and sales pitches to win more deals. Contributing to Drupal also results in being recognized as a great place to work for Drupal experts.

We also should note that many organizations in the Drupal community contribute for reasons that would not seem to be explicitly economically motivated. More than 100 credits were sponsored by colleges or universities, such as the University of Waterloo (45 credits). More than 50 credits came from community groups, such as the Drupal Bangalore Community and the Drupal Ukraine Community. Other nonprofits and government organization that appeared in our data include the Drupal Association (166), National Virtual Library of India (25 credits), Center for Research Libraries (20), and Welsh Government (9 credits).

Infrastructure and software companies

Infrastructure and software companies play a different role in our community. These companies are less reliant on professional services (building Drupal websites) and primarily make money from selling subscription based products.

Acquia, Pantheon and Platform.sh are venture-backed Platform-as-a-Service companies born out of the Drupal community. Rackspace and AWS are public companies hosting thousands of Drupal sites each. Lingotek offers cloud-based translation management software for Drupal.

graph of contributions by technology companies

The graph above suggests that Pantheon and Platform.sh have barely contributed code on Drupal.org during the past year. (Platform.sh only became an independent company 6 months ago after they split off from CommerceGuys.) The chart also does not reflect sponsored code contributions on GitHub (such as drush), Drupal event sponsorship, and the wide variety of value that these companies add to Drupal and other Open Source communities.

Consequently, these data show that the Drupal community needs to do a better job of enticing infrastructure and software companies to contribute code to Drupal.org. The Drupal community has a long tradition of encouraging organizations to share code on Drupal.org rather than keep it behind firewalls. While the spirit of the Drupal project cannot be reduced to any single ideology — not every organization can or will share their code — we would like to see organizations continue to prioritize collaboration over individual ownership. Our aim is not to criticize those who do not contribute, but rather to help foster an environment worthy of contribution.

End users

We saw two end-users in the top 30 corporate sponsors: Pfizer (158 credits) and Examiner.com (132 credits). Other notable end-users that are actively giving back are Workday (52 credits), NBC Universal (40 credits), the University of Waterloo (45 credits) and CARD.com (33 credits). The end users that tend to contribute to Drupal use Drupal for a key part of their business and often have an internal team of Drupal developers.

Given that there are hundreds of thousands of Drupal end-users, we would like to see more end-users in the top 30 sponsors. We recognize that a lot of digital agencies don't want, or are not legally allowed, to attribute their customers. We hope that will change as Open Source continues to get more and more adopted.

Given the vast amount of Drupal users, we believe encouraging end-users to contribute could be a big opportunity. Being credited on Drupal.org gives them visibility in the Drupal community and recognizes them as a great place for Open Source developers to work.

The uneasy alliance with corporate contributions

As mentioned above, when community-driven Open Source projects grow, there becomes a bigger need for organizations to help drive its development. It almost always creates an uneasy alliance between volunteers and corporations.

This theory played out in the Linux community well before it played out in the Drupal community. The Linux project is 25 years old now has seen a steady increase in the number of corporate contributors for roughly 20 years. While Linux companies like Red Hat and SUSE rank highly on the contribution list, so do non-Linux-centric companies such as Samsung, Intel, Oracle and Google. The major theme in this story is that all of these corporate contributors were using Linux as an integral part of their business.

The 659 organizations that contribute to Drupal (which includes corporations), is roughly three times the number of organizations that sponsor development of the Linux kernel, “one of the largest cooperative software projects ever attempted.” In fairness, Linux has a different ecosystem than Drupal. The Linux business ecosystem has various large organizations (Red Hat, Google, Intel, IBM and SUSE) for whom Linux is very strategic. As a result, many of them employ dozens of full-time Linux contributors and invest millions of dollars in Linux each year.

In the Drupal community, Acquia has had people dedicated full-time to Drupal starting nine years ago when it hired Gábor Hojtsy to contribute to Drupal core full-time. Today, Acquia has about 10 developers contributing to Drupal full-time. They work on core, contributed modules, security, user experience, performance, best practices, and more. Their work has benefited untold numbers of people around the world, most of whom are not Acquia customers.

In response to Acquia’s high level of participation in the Drupal project, as well as to the number of Acquia employees that hold leadership positions, some members of the Drupal community have suggested that Acquia wields its influence and power to control the future of Drupal for its own commercial benefit. But neither of us believe that Acquia should contribute less. Instead, we would like to see more companies provide more leadership to Drupal and meaningfully contribute on Drupal.org.

Who is sponsoring the top 30 contributors?

Rank Username Issues Volunteer Sponsored Not specified Sponsors 1 dawehner 560 84.1% 77.7% 9.5% Drupal Association (182), Chapter Three (179), Tag1 Consulting (160), Cando (6), Acquia (4), Comm-press (1) 2 DamienMcKenna 448 6.9% 76.3% 19.4% Mediacurrent (342) 3 alexpott 409 0.2% 97.8% 2.2% Chapter Three (400) 4 Berdir 383 0.0% 95.3% 4.7% MD Systems (365), Acquia (9) 5 Wim Leers 382 31.7% 98.2% 1.8% Acquia (375) 6 jhodgdon 381 5.2% 3.4% 91.3% Drupal Association (13), Poplar ProductivityWare (13) 7 joelpittet 294 23.8% 1.4% 76.2% Drupal Association (4) 8 heykarthikwithu 293 99.3% 100.0% 0.0% Valuebound (293), Drupal Bangalore Community (3) 9 mglaman 292 9.6% 96.9% 0.7% Commerce Guys (257), Bluehorn Digital (14), Gaggle.net, Inc. (12), LivePerson, Inc (11), Bluespark (5), DPCI (3), Thinkbean, LLC (3), Digital Bridge Solutions (2), Matsmart (1) 10 drunken monkey 248 75.4% 55.6% 2.0% Acquia (72), StudentFirst (44), epiqo (12), Vizala (9), Sunlime IT Services GmbH (1) 11 Sam152 237 75.9% 89.5% 10.1% PreviousNext (210), Code Drop (2) 12 borisson_ 207 62.8% 36.2% 15.9% Acquia (67), Intracto digital agency (8) 13 benjy 206 0.0% 98.1% 1.9% PreviousNext (168), Code Drop (34) 14 edurenye 184 0.0% 100.0% 0.0% MD Systems (184) 15 catch 180 3.3% 44.4% 54.4% Third and Grove (44), Tag1 Consulting (36), Drupal Association (4) 16 slashrsm 179 12.8% 96.6% 2.8% Examiner.com (89), MD Systems (84), Acquia (18), Studio Matris (1) 17 phenaproxima 177 0.0% 94.4% 5.6% Acquia (167) 18 mbovan 174 7.5% 100.0% 0.0% MD Systems (118), ACTO Team (43), Google Summer of Code (13) 19 tim.plunkett 168 14.3% 89.9% 10.1% Acquia (151) 20 rakesh.gectcr 163 100.0% 100.0% 0.0% Valuebound (138), National Virtual Library of India (NVLI) (25) 21 martin107 163 4.9% 0.0% 95.1%   22 dsnopek 152 0.7% 0.0% 99.3%   23 mikeryan 150 0.0% 89.3% 10.7% Acquia (112), Virtuoso Performance (22), Drupalize.Me (4), North Studio (4) 24 jhedstrom 149 0.0% 83.2% 16.8% Phase2 (124), Workday, Inc. (36), Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (4) 25 xjm 147 0.0% 81.0% 19.0% Acquia (119) 26 hussainweb 147 2.0% 98.6% 1.4% Axelerant (145) 27 stefan.r 146 0.7% 0.7% 98.6% Drupal Association (1) 28 bojanz 145 2.1% 83.4% 15.2% Commerce Guys (121), Bluespark (2) 29 penyaskito 141 6.4% 95.0% 3.5% Lingotek (129), Cocomore AG (5) 30 larowlan 135 34.1% 63.0% 16.3% PreviousNext (85), Department of Justice & Regulation, Victoria (14), amaysim Australia Ltd. (1), University of Adelaide (1)

We observe that the top 30 contributors are sponsored by 45 organizations. This kind of diversity is aligned with our desire not to see Drupal controlled by a single organization. The top 30 contributors and the 45 organizations are from many different parts in the world and work with customers large or small. We could still benefit from more diversity, though. The top 30 lacks digital marketing agencies, large system integrators and end-users — all of whom could contribute meaningfully to making Drupal for them and others.

Evolving the credit system

The credit system gives us quantifiable data about where our community's contributions come from, but that data is not perfect. Here are a few suggested improvements:

  1. We need to find ways to recognize non-code contributions as well as code contributions outside of Drupal.org (i.e. on GitHub). Lots of people and organizations spend hundreds of hours putting together local events, writing documentation, translating Drupal, mentoring new contributors, and more — and none of that gets captured by the credit system.
  2. We'd benefit by finding a way to account for the complexity and quality of contributions; one person might have worked several weeks for just one credit, while another person might have gotten a credit for 30 minutes of work. We could, for example, consider the issue credit data in conjunction with Git commit data regarding insertions, deletions, and files changed.
  3. We could try to leverage the credit system to encourage more companies, especially those that do not contribute today, to participate in large-scale initiatives. Dries presented some ideas two years ago in his DrupalCon Amsterdam keynote and Matthew has suggested other ideas, but we are open to more suggestions on how we might bring more contributors into the fold using the credit system.
  4. We could segment out organization profiles between end users and different kinds of service providers. Doing so would make it easier to see who the top contributors are in each segment and perhaps foster more healthy competition among peers. In turn, the community could learn about the peculiar motivations within each segment.

Like Drupal the software, the credit system on Drupal.org is a tool that can evolve, but that ultimately will only be useful when the community uses it, understands its shortcomings, and suggests constructive improvements. In highlighting the organizations that sponsor work on Drupal.org, we hope to provoke responses that help evolve the credit system into something that incentivizes business to sponsor more work and that allows more people the opportunity to participate in our community, learn from others, teach newcomers, and make positive contributions. We view Drupal as a productive force for change and we wish to use the credit system to highlight (at least some of) the work of our diverse community of volunteers, companies, nonprofits, governments, schools, universities, individuals, and other groups.

Conclusion

Our data shows that Drupal is a vibrant and diverse community, with thousands of contributors, that is constantly evolving and improving the software. While here we have examined issue credits mostly through the lens of sponsorship, in future analyses we plan to consider the same issue credits in conjunction with other publicly-disclosed Drupal user data, such as gender identification, geography, seasonal participation, mentorship, and event attendance.

Our analysis of the Drupal.org credit data concludes that most of the contributions to Drupal are sponsored. At the same time, the data shows that volunteer contribution remains very important to Drupal.

As a community, we need to understand that a healthy Open Source ecosystem is a diverse ecosystem that includes more than traditional Drupal agencies. The traditional Drupal agencies and Acquia contribute the most but we don't see a lot of contribution from the larger digital marketing agencies, system integrators, technology companies, or end-users of Drupal — we believe that might come as these organizations build out their Drupal practices and Drupal becomes more strategic for them.

To grow and sustain Drupal, we should support those that contribute to Drupal, and find ways to get those that are not contributing, involved in our community. We invite you to help us figure out how we can continue to strengthen our ecosystem.

We hope to repeat this work in 1 or 2 years' time so we can track our evolution. Special thanks to Tim Lehnen (Drupal Association) for providing us the credit system data and supporting us during our research.

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