Problem/Motivation

This project needs to have concrete goals to be successful. Some have been added to the project page already and pasted below but these should be reviewed and updated/augmented as needed. Ideally, very specific goals can be created such as increasing the number of contribution events by x% by y date in order to better measure success.

  • Allow contribution events to easily credit organizers, mentors, participants, and sponsors
  • Create documentation to help individuals and organizations host contribution events
  • Increase the number, type, and attendance for contribution events

Steps to reproduce

Proposed resolution

Brainstorm :)

Remaining tasks

  1. Think of relevant goals
  2. Add to project page
  3. Add to a documentation page (needs to be created)

User interface changes

API changes

Data model changes

Comments

Kristen Pol created an issue. See original summary.

Kristen Pol credited mradcliffe.

kristen pol’s picture

kristen pol
she/her
Primary language English
Location Santa Cruz, CA, USA
commented

At the mentoring meeting today, @mradcliffe brought up the tracking and marketing of the events. We need to decide if that should be a direct goal of this project.

kristen pol’s picture

kristen pol
she/her
Primary language English
Location Santa Cruz, CA, USA
commented

Note that we can have immediate goals, short term goals, and longer term goals as well :)

Maybe we can discuss this at the next meeting: #3281459: Contribution Events Initiative meeting / 6 June 2022 5am UTC

gusaus’s picture

gusaus commented

If #3281963: Relaunch drupalcontribution.org and #3280986: META: Explore connecting Drupal Contribution to Open Collective funding are both components of this initiative, maybe one of the goals could be altered a bit to something like...

Create tools and documentation to help individuals and organizations host and sustain contribution events

kristen pol’s picture

kristen pol
she/her
Primary language English
Location Santa Cruz, CA, USA
commented

I like that adjustment +1

Kristen Pol credited leslieg.

kristen pol’s picture

kristen pol
she/her
Primary language English
Location Santa Cruz, CA, USA
commented

Had a great call with @leslieg today on alignment between the Event Organizers Working Group (EOWG) and the Contribution Events Initiative. There are definitely many common goals. The following are areas that this initiative may be able to help out and are already outlined in various issues:

  1. Documentation and resources (gathering and filling in gaps specifically for contribution events)
  2. Marketing (figuring out how to market events)
  3. Open Social platform (how to use, maintain, and extend)
  4. Funding for contribution events (note that funding is something the EOWG does not want to focus on at the moment)

We will still need to figure out if this is a standalone initiative or ends up being a subgroup of EOWG. Either way, we need to keep a pulse on EOWG to make sure we are not duplicating effort.

kristen pol’s picture

kristen pol
she/her
Primary language English
Location Santa Cruz, CA, USA
commented
Related issues: +#3285490: Determine working relationship between EOWG and Contribution Events Initiative

Added related issue: #3285490: Determine working relationship between EOWG and Contribution Events Initiative

kristen pol’s picture

kristen pol
she/her
Primary language English
Location Santa Cruz, CA, USA
commented
Assigned: kristen pol » Unassigned
Status: Active » Needs review

Per previous discussions as noted in #8 and included in the overview slides #3290965: Create Contribution Events Initiative overview slides for Contrib Half Hour.

Short term goals:

  1. Documentation - Gather existing documentation and resources across all of drupal.org and identify and help fill in any gaps
  2. Marketing - Find effective ways of marketing contribution events and provide resources for event organizers
  3. Open Social Platform - Evaluate how Open Social has been used for contribution events and document for future events
  4. Open Collective Funding - Explore how Open Collective can be used for funding contribution events and how it can be governed

Possible longer term goals:

  1. Marketing - Promote events through social media, newsletters, podcasts, etc.
  2. Open Social - Maintain and improve the Drupal Open Social contribution platform
  3. Funding - Find funding sources and help direct these funds to contribution events
  4. Organizing - Create regular global online contribution events focused on core initiatives
gusaus’s picture

gusaus commented
Related issues: +#3294434: Set up Drupal Contribution collective with Open Collective Foundation

Following up here as we should probably sync up our scope and goals with what we provided to Open Collective Foundation in our application.

As it looks like we were approved, we've begun to draft some copy for the collective on this Google doc. With the disclaimer that the copy will improve on the google doc, the initial draft below should provide a sense of the 'larger' scope and how the current focus 'Contribution Events' could be a subset... possibly even a component of the Event Organizers Working group (and channel)?

Drupal Contribution

This Drupal community initiative focuses on creating educational resources, training, and events for engaging in open source contribution. We have a positive social impact by working together to improve free software that powers ~2% of the web.

We do this the following ways:

Contribution Events

We help run global remote contribution events, and organizers and mentors from around the world volunteer for these events. Some volunteers are sponsored by their workplace, but some are not. We would like to be able to provide funding to those who organize and mentor at these events, but are not sponsored. For in-person contribution events, there are additional costs that we would like to cover such as venue fees and catering.

Training

To increase contribution, we have found that having mentors available to guide newer contributors is key. Community members don't always have the confidence to jump in as a mentor even though they may actually have all the necessary skills. We would like to create mentor training events and documentation to recruit new mentors. For similar reasons as above, we'd like to be able to provide funding to those who organize, teach, and participate at these events, but are not sponsored.

Documentation

Our initiative creates and consolidates a lot of documentation for the benefit of running smooth contribution events and for helping contribution in general. It takes a lot of time and effort to create these resources and we would like to improve them by adding videos as well. We would like to provide funds to unsponsored community members to work on these guides and video resources as well as creating talks for community conferences.

Marketing

One thing that is often overlooked for open source projects is marketing yet this is a crucial aspect of any product or project. We would like to be able to hire marketers, content writers, social media specialists, and designers to create website landing pages and email newsletters as well as post relevant information on our social media channels. This work would be in tandem with the website.

Sustaining

Promote sustainability of Drupal projects, initiatives, events, and contributors by enabling transparent funding and crediting tools that would provide incentives to sponsoring organizations and individuals.

gusaus’s picture

gusaus commented
Related issues: +#3281981: META: Contribution Events Initiative roles and tasks
gusaus’s picture

gusaus commented

Following up on sustaining, I was turned on to https://labs.quansight.org/ from listening to this podcast.

Looking over their model -

We created and continue to refine an innovative hybrid employment model. We give open source maintainers a significant amount of time to work on community-driven open source projects, while also spending part of their time on consulting work with Quansight's commercial clients. Benefits include learning opportunities for our team, bringing back concrete needs and ideas to open source projects, and the flexibility to scale up our contributions to the open source projects we support quickly when we receive direct financial support for them.

Now that https://opencollective.com/drupal-contribution has been approved we have the ability to pay contractors and hire employees. We'd obviously need to generate a good bit of revenue to do that, but we could do that by using the collective as the hub for all the major contribution areas/groups (by creating 'projects' each team/group could manage).

On top of that we could/should create an organization on drupal.org so 1) all the contributions that we enable will be recognized; 2) contributors could provide a variety of services; 3) we can explore partnership opportunities with other agencies and the DA (considering there are overlapping goals).

We still need to decide if we're actually changing this initiative and Slack channel to match the name/scope of the collective. Do we need to create a separate issue or just discuss in this one?

gusaus’s picture

gusaus commented

Following up on #3279806-11: Determine goals for the Contribution Events community project there should be almost total compliment with DA as the 'Contribution Initiative' should be a way to extend/enable their existing goals (like getting more folks involved with the project).

Another way to define the scope is to look at the list of contribution areas on https://www.drupal.org/community/contributor-guide/contribution-areas

The goal is to enable, rather than create anything new.