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Drupal Rights and Responsibilities

Free as in freedom.

Drupal Rights and Responsibilities

Day:  Wednesday, 25. august 2010
Time:  09:00-09:50
45 minutes (+15 minutes Q&A)

Room:

tags

Working with Drupal brings the power of its community to work for you. But it also involves you in that community in ways that you might not expect. We'll cover some of the hidden costs of bringing Drupal into your organization, plus the resources you will need in order to keep your project sustainable.

This will feature lively panel discussion covering best practices for Drupal contributions maintainers and the rights and responsibilities of Drupal users.

Topics that we will cover:

* What are the rights and responsibilities of Open-Source developers?
* What are the rights and responsibilities of Open-Source users?
* How to manage code effectively on Drupal.org
* What defines a stable release?
* Working with the security team
* The care and feeding of maintainers: (i.e. how to get your issue fixed).
* Why we’re ignoring you: simple ways to get your issue black-holed.

If you’d like to be on the panel, please drop a note in the comments.

Resources

This is a different take on

5. July 2010 - 3:49

This is a different take on rights and responsibilities – of tech people in general working within and in support of social movements – but i think it can inform our thinking about various roles and the rights and responsibilities thereof in Drupal.

Progressive Techie Congress Principles (from the United States Social Forum held in Detroit, 2010 June)
http://pma2010.org/node/167

In particular i'd recommend looking at Participatory Technology Design, Digital Inclusion, (Organizational) Sustainability, Community-Owned Infrastructure, and an working against power inequity and privilege.

Ben -- You want to

5. July 2010 - 20:20

Ben -- You want to participate?

This sounds like a fab

7. July 2010 - 19:00

This sounds like a fab session!

I've been pondering a blog post on the same lines ever since the D7*X pledge spam started -- it's not about pledges, it's about commonly understood responsibilities.

Looks like I can't edit this

15. July 2010 - 15:01

Looks like I can't edit this post anymore, but two more for the panel.

Moshe Weitzman
George DeMet

[Edit] And one more:

Gábor Hojtsy

Based on the schedule, it

2. August 2010 - 15:10

Based on the schedule, it looks like we can hold a BoF about the topic immediately following, too.

It will also be interesting

12. August 2010 - 12:38

It will also be interesting to include short case studies that are not Drupal, to gauge how our favourite OS project compares against other projects. Not just content management systems, but projects that have wide-ranging or diverse appeal, or specific strategies. I'm thinking of FreeBSD, Wikimedia, AsteriskPBX. Where does logistics management and volunteer coordination fit into the responsibility list? Are there strategies that Drupal employs (or could employ) that help manage a volunteer base in the tens of thousands?

It strikes me that the people involved in managing a large project may not be considered "developers" or "users". Sure, many of them are also developers, but making sure documentation is in order and answering "silly" tickets takes time away from development. Do open source software projects need to do a better job of recognizing the contributions of non-developer volunteers? A meritocracy rewards contribution, but we only seem to have formal measurement techniques for source code contributions.

Yep, looking forward to this

16. August 2010 - 23:59

Yep, looking forward to this one!

A most important topic! If it

20. August 2010 - 18:56

A most important topic!

If it was me I would force everyone who ever downloaded a module to attend this session, handcuffed to the chairs and with their eyes forced opened! OK, that was a bit too much, but well, I'm sure you know what I mean.

I did a session explaining the whole bug->patch->fix process in the last DrupalCamp Spain in Barcelona. There is interest in understanding this, and not many ways to find out what's all about for new comers to Drupal. There isn't an awareness of how critical this is either, so best of luck with the talk!