The Cultural Construction of Drupal
Matthew Tift
social.matthewtift.com
I work at Lullabot
Recent articles
- The Cultural Construction of Drupal (5058 words)
- Better, then Bigger: Cultivating the Drupal Community (6515 words)
- Why Paid Drupal Modules Fail: Drupal as Art (3744 words)
MATERIALIST
Drupal
is software we use in Minnesota
Drupal
is Twin Cities DrupalCamp
Drupal
enables local organizations
Drupal
is the University of Minnesota
Drupal
is Minnesota Public Radio
Drupal
is the Saint Paul Public Library
Drupal
is the Mayo Clinic
Drupal
is the stories we tell
Other naratives
Drupal
leaves small websites behind
Drupal
is for business
Drupal 8
is for the enterprise
“I think with small sites I’m not willing to give up on them but I think we just need to say we’re more about big sites and less about small sites.”
“We wanted Drupal to be what Red Hat is to Linux, that’s why we started Acquia…. I see us as being the next large open source business model to reach $1 billion in revenue, like Red Hat. We’re on the IPO track.”
Drupal 8
is built by Acquia
Drupal 8
is has 3621 contributors
Backdrop
is a Drupal fork
“As Drupal moves itself closer to the Enterprise market, Backdrop CMS emerges to meet the needs of the little guys.”
Why enterprise?
Drupal 8
accomodates
development > staging > production
“It’s hard not to conclude that Drupal 8 ties configuration management to a (primarily, enterprise-focused) single-site staging model.”
Accused of leaving small sites behind
- Drupal 5
- Drupal 6
- Drupal 7
- Drupal 8
Drupal 8
is for everyone
Drupal 8
is not only for business
Drupal 8
is for small sites
Drupal 8
- WYSIWYG editor
- HTML 5 markup
- More accessible
- Views in core
- Mobile friendly
- Multilingual support
“Drupal is open-source software and I’m excited that enterprises, not-for-profits, schools, individuals and Captain Kirk can use Drupal 8.”
Drupal
is personal
“I’ve been working on Drupal for many years and Acquia is my company. I know how Open Source works, I know the Drupal community inside out, I know how companies should work with the community, and I have no intention whatsoever to destroy my own child.”
“People are individuals, not automatons operating within a corporate machine. Even the six of us in OCTO contribute outside of paid time, to things that are not part of our jobs but that we care about.”
Other communities
“Access without empowerment”
Monumential crisis
“One of the most significant complaints, stated over and over, was about [the email’s] tone”
“Debian’s implementation of meritocracy, like all meritocracies, is a fragile framework easily overtaken by the threat of corruptibility.”
The community was left imagining
“smoky backrooms”
Drupal
benefits both the global rich and global poor
Drupal is
- Open Media
- Open Outreach
- CiviCRM
Drupal
is non-profit friendly
Drupal
is a community of volunteers
Drupal Association
replaced an “underground economy” with D8 Accelerate
Drupal
is messy
“Open source is Darwinian. Eventually the best idea wins, but it is much more wasteful. A regular company couldn’t have experimented with creating 10 versions of an online photo album, then picked the best one.”
“If you’re a developer, and you aren’t fixing #Drupal 8 critical bugs, care to share why? Curious what we can do to help momentum.”
“Perhaps the most important benefit of volunteerism in free software development is institutional independence, [which] means that no company or organization has a monopoly on the ability to define specifications or to direct the project.”
Why volunteer
to work on Drupal
when others get paid?
Drupal
continues
Drupal
is the GPL
Free software licenses deny anyone the right to exclusively exploit a work
Drupalers
want to help
Drupalers
learn from the community
Drupalers
want to find a way
Drupal
evolves code and community
Drupal
is a public good
Drupal
is non-excludable
Drupal
is non-rivalrous
using of Drupal does not reduce the benefits available to others
Drupal
not provided by the government
Drupal Association
is a 501c3
Drupal Association
is not a 501c6
Drupal
is political
ABA
“Most people are too preoccupied with keeping themselves afloat to bother with visions of the future. Social disruption, understandably enough, is not something most men and women are eager to embrace”
To change what we think,
we must change what we do
Drupal
is an activity
So what?
Who cares?
Stay for the community
References
Talk given at Twin Cities DrupalCamp, June 23, 2016. Presentation and slides are Copyright © 2016 Matthew Tift, and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License