[consulting] Staying Current

[Shai Gluskin]

The "sides" in this argument are really not very far apart. Alex himself has
used "whenever possible" as a qualifier. Obviously different firms will
define that in different ways, and different firms will be more or less
committed to it. I just don't see the positions here as being that far apart
from each other.

I do think there is an "elephant in the room" here though. I'd call that
"the Drupal Community." While Drupal as software has proved that, with
tweaking, it can scale quite well, I think that the Drupal community is
having a much more difficult time scaling.

Let's not forget that open source is a profoundly hierarchical system.
Collaboration is enabled, in part, because one person, Dries, has the final
word. The fact that, legally, the whole project can fork at any moment,
provides an incentive for the project lead of any open source project not to
abuse his/her authority.

Two things have led to Drupal having had a strong community. 1. Dries as a
project lead is serious about: listening AND about truly desiring and
honoring people's contributions. 2. Drupal's modular system allows for
people to be the "king" of their own little hill. Let's say you don't have
the temperment to contribute to core where Dries has the final say and every
character in the code is precious and haggled over. Well, scratch your itch,
solve a problem, learn Drupal's internal APIs and functions, get yourself a
CVS account, and voila --> you are the project lead for your own project,
within Drupal. This has led to massive participation.

The elephant??? Drupal is huge and growing every day. It's struggling to
appropriately welcome people in and help them find a place and a leadership
position within the community. The Drupal Association, unfortunately under
the jurisdiction of Belgium NPO governance rules, is not as transparent as
it should be: it's structure is just plane confusing to many. The board and
the permanent members do not have enough new blood, in my opinion. The idea
of "permanent" members is just plain bad in my opinion. The custom more
often found in North America of having board members rotate would be much
healthier for the organization, in my opinion. Though Dries has set a
wonderful example of welcoming input, criticism, new ideas... I don't think
the members of the General Assembly, with many exceptions, have done as
well. And I'm not sure whether Dries recognizes this problem.

How is all this relevant to the current discussion? Where the line will be
drawn re: "whenever possible" (re contrib over custom) depends, in part, on
how people feel about their place in the Drupal community. The quality of
contrib will go up when people feel that they are a part of that community
and can trust others in the community.

So, in sum, I think that people are closer on this issue than the tone of
the conversation might attest, but that there is an underlying problem about
people trusting the community or feeling as though they belong to it because
of problems that the Drupal community is having in scaling to its massive
size.

This problem of the community scaling is absolutely normal and I mean to
cast no aspersions on Permanent Members of the Association or anyone else.
This kind of growth would be a huge challenge for any organization to deal
with. But I think getting the issue on the table is the beginning of solving
the problem.

Best,

Shai
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