Drupal does not belong to the Drupal Association. It does not belong to Node One, Phase Two, Chapter Three, Four Kitchens, Palantir, Acquia, or even Agaric. It does not belong to Dries— except the name. It belongs to you, and every other person who steps up to claim it, equally.
What does it mean to take ownership?
Black Star Co-Op Pub & Brewery [in Austin, Texas] opened doors in the summer of 2010, with a large banner outside that reads "Community-Owned Beer." A consumer cooperative (owned by the community it serves) and also a worker-coop (run by its employees), Black Star is attracting a full house of business seven days a week.
Drupal's banner, too, should be Community-Owned Software.
This will be a completely new session for DrupalCamp New Hampshire, but it will draw on sessions previously given, so here are their descriptions, gratuitously pasted in, with a third theme held back for the live audience only.
Contributing to the Community for Joy and Gain
SESSION TAKE-AWAYS
0. If you use the code without engaging in the community you are missing many of the benefits of Drupal.
1. Community participation powers the success of the Drupal content management framework.
2. You and your business can power community participation.
3. Three simple things you can do to participate in the Drupal community locally, regionally, and globally.
4. Participating in the Drupal community directly benefits and can be sustainable for your business.
WHY THIS SESSION?
Drupal and its galaxy of modules, themes, and other projects are too big to understand by oneself. The most knowledgeable people are key contributors, and are too busy to help people who don't also contribute. And too much is riding, for all of us, on Drupal's continued improvement to leave this improvement to chance.
It's time to get involved— and to reap the benefits of participation.
The Drupal community provides everything there is in Drupal, and is the number one reason to choose Drupal. It is not the functionality, the extensibility, the power, the flexibility, or even anything related to the code. It is the community of developers, documenters, administrators and more who overcome obstacles and fix problems every day— frequently working together and helping each other across company and country lines.
The top ten Drupal shops could switch to stone tablet technology tomorrow and there would still be an amazing array of contributors to carry development forward. Not many open source free software projects can say that, and of course no proprietary products can make such a claim. This is what both protects and makes so promising your future in Drupal.
It is difficult but possible to work with Drupal sustainably as a professional and as a participant in the Drupal community. But in the long run, it's easier and more profitable than not engaging in the community.
This session will cover ways to contribute effectively, sustainably, and with joy.
Staying Free: Contributing to Drupal and the World by Building Our Collaboration Infrastructure
Our software is free.
We are free.
Both are in part because we are craftspeople who can be compensated quite well. We have remarkable control over our work, and we have time to put into building Free Software and the community around it.
This fortune and freedom is historically crushed out of every trade.
Trying to preserve the trade as it is never works; technology and societies change.
Most of us will be able to ride the technology wave of not having our labor commoditized.
We are fortunate to have guts and passion and willingness to use our brains and to have found a technology and skills to learn and a community, all of which lets us do some good things for good reward while having a good time.
Given our remarkably fortunate position, though, if things aren't flowering roses and unicorns for us 24/7, how in the world are people without as favored circumstances (hint: the answer, in too many cases, is not bloody well)
Is humanity doomed, in the main, to underemployment for many and overwork for many of the rest?
Is it the natural order that only at a rare intersection of climate and season can regular people (if i may be so self-complimentary) grow into lives of self-determination?
And what in tarnation does that have to do with Drupal?
Is riding the thin crest of the technology wave the best, or even a sufficient, way of preserving our privileged place in the global economy?
What if we could use our privilege to work
Power is organization.
Because power is organization, people who have power and seek to gain or maintain an outsize share of control of what other people do (even if it's not that they're evil villains or anything, you know, they just appreciate a large house, and a large boat, and perhaps a well-staffed island) prefer organizing mechanisms that can be monopolized by a relative few, such as gold, a central-bank-created currency, or knowing what God really wants everyone to do.
As massive and eternal and unchanging as all of this seems to be, organization (in this sense, systematized coordination) is all necessarily built on communication, and there are historic shifts that prove this.
We can build tools that help us communicate and collaborate.
The same tools and infrastructure that we need to make our software and our community rock ever harder are some of the same tools and infrastructure people the world over need to win their own lasting freedom.
So working on issue queues and project management and democratic communication and collaborative decisionmaking – the free software and the infrastructure and the community processes that surround everything of importance – is the best way to ensure we stay free.
Why is this relevant to the Drupal Community?
Everyone who has been observer, instigator, or participant on any question of #drupalappstore, "why doesn't the Drupal Association do X, Y, Z", "who makes decisions about Drupal Planet and why?", "why isn't administrator action 73 easy to do", "how do we get more resources put toward making the core APIs awesome and the developer experience great?", and "why isn't Drupal more relevant to people fighting for freedom all over the world?" will have something to think about during and after this Ignite talk and perhaps even have an action or two to take.
Also, i will be giving a unicorn pony to every member of the audience.
Past Speaking Experience:
DrupalCon Boston, DrupalCon DC, DrupalCon Paris, multiple Drupal meetups and Drupal camps, 2010 US Social Forum, Online News Association Toronto.
