We are excited to announce some big changes to the Drupal.org Marketplace. In Dries’ Amsterdam Keynote, he made a compelling case for showing the contributions of organizations that are helping build Drupal. By highlighting organizations that give their employees time to give back, we make it possible for more people to give time to making the project better.
In March, we took steps to begin collecting this information by allowing individuals that were contributing in the issue queues to attribute their contributions to organization that they are employed by or customers that funded the work. When a maintainer of a project (module, theme, distribution or Drupal Core) closes an issue as fixed, they have an opportunity to pass on credit to the individuals who helped contribute to fixing the issue—and not just code contributions, but any kind of feedback, review, designs, etc.
We called this system issue credits and it has been a huge success. We now show the last 90 days of issue credits awarded to an individual or organization on their profile.
Today, after months of collecting this data, we are taking how we highlight contributing organizations to a new level.
With this launch, we are removing the distinction of "featured service providers" versus "all service providers". By using data about these organizations contributions, we can provide a single list of all organizations ordered by their contributions.
For now, we are using issue credits as the primary sort. The secondary sort highlights organizations that are giving back by supporting Drupal.org through the supporting partner program or organization membership. Soon, we plan to incorporate case studies submitted, DrupalCon sponsorships, and camp sponsorships to help make a more complete picture of how organizations are contributing to our community.
Give it a look and give us your feedback.
Comments
Bias towards large companies
It's great to incorporate contributing back as a criterion. However, the current approach has a significant bias.
Larger companies have more employees, larger budgets, and so on, and so will, by and large, generate larger statistics. If the sorting statistic is not normalized in any way, the result will be highly biased towards listing larger companies first.
A more balanced approach would ask: how much does a company contribute for its size? This question could be addressed by normalizing the contribution data before sorting.
The most obvious factor to normalize by would be number of employees. At its simplest this would be: "number of issue credits in the last 90 days" divided by "number of people on drupal.org".
the current approach has a
Using FTE skews the statistics towards small organizations dedicated to only Drupal. I now work in higher ed. Universities are typically very large organizations where only a small percentage of people have anything to do with the web technologies and even fewer contribute back to Drupal.org.
The current approach is biased on a whole different level in that the focus is entirely on contributions from organizations selling Drupal services.
I don't understand why organizational representation has to include the services sold... or rather I understand and would like to help change it. In order to have a page that summarizes the contributions made by the University of Colorado Boulder like https://www.drupal.org/node/2458049, we have to exist in the marketplace.
Recognition is a powerful tool to justify the time anyone spends contributing back to a project. The order of this list is never going to make everyone happy, but the fact that there is room for improvement and more options to sort the data should stop the DA from doing it. Just comparing the top 2 in the list, it seems like 18 people supporting 41 projects w/ 310 issue credits would trump 506 people supporting 41 projects w/ 490 issue credits, but I'm sure this isn't factoring in the popularity of the projects or the difficulty of the issues. I'd hate to see a push for perfection kill off any progress.
If you want to see a dramatic increase in credited contributions, give universities a similar list https://www.drupal.org/drupal-higher-education. Nothing motivates higher education like seeing their name on a list :)
More detail
Since the data on drupal.org is not FTE at an organization but drupal.org users who have edited their profile to show an association with an organization, it includes only a subset of staff (Drupal participants), so groups like your example of universities should be fine.
The big problem with how this has been implemented is that it appears likely to drive business further towards large Drupal-focused companies and away from smaller ones. A quick illustration.
On Sept. 6 (the latest date that archive.org has a snapshot of the Marketplace landing page prior to the change), 6 out of the first 10 "featured providers" (organizations that have contributed to Drupal) listed had 10 or fewer associated people. I don't have easy access to the full stats, but that ratio that seems broadly representative of the distribution of sizes of Drupal service providers.
Today, that statistic is zero out of ten. In fact, only one out of the first ten listed today has less than twenty associated people.
(Disclosure: personally I may stand to both benefit and lose out from this change. I do work for a larger, now top listed company, and also for one that is tiny and way down the new listings.)
Strongly agree. By making service listings apparently the only way to list contributing organizations, the current listings seem to risk conflating contribution with selling services--a particularly unfortunate association.
FYI - I created a patch to
FYI - I created a patch to Start decoupling Organization nodes from Marketplace. This doesn't address the small shops that dedicate a larger percentage of their staff time to Drupal than a large shop, but it would allow a similar contribution sorted listed be generated of organizations that contribute to Drupal without selling services.
All points taken, but I don't
All points taken, but I don't think what you're saying is relevant to what nedjo is saying. In a word, context. This is about the marketplace as it currently stands. It's about Drupal businesses and how they rank in listings that ultimately impact on their success. Universities and other organisations that do not sell Drupal services are not at all under consideration here.
Though I totally take your point there should be some kind of page for acknowledgement of contributions by organisations - some kind of league table - that is not the marketplace. And I think nedjo's comments stand, because the whole point of people using the marketplace for procurement is precisely to find "organizations dedicated to only Drupal" - so it should skew things that way!
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https://www.codeenigma.com/
How about sorting individuals
How about sorting individuals based on the number of patches? Why the bias towards organizations? :)
My Drupal sites:
Because it's the MARKETPLACE.
Because it's the MARKETPLACE. That's what it's for. There's already pages sorting individuals based on the number of patches. :-)
https://www.drupal.org/node/3060/committers?sort=desc&order=Commits
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https://www.codeenigma.com/
Well, many developers are
Well, many developers are freelancers as well who would be happy to sell their services on an individual basis in the MARKETPLACE. Right? A martkerplace shouldn't just be giant organizations, but individuals too.
The page you link is nothing close to the marketplace list that polls the last x months , and core committers submitted patches to tons of other developers... No wonder the first three committers got so many.
I would imagine, developers would be happy to tick a checkbox, saying I am a developer and would like to appear in a marketplace for individual freelancers.
My Drupal sites:
Nice!
I think it is a great change. As a small shop, we are on the last page. But, it gives us an opportunity to get into the list and a promising way to move up in the list. Thanks.
This is a wise decision .
This is a wise decision .
How are these calculations working?
So my company, Zivtech, contributes a whole lot to Drupal- a lot more than is showing up on these listings. Can you tell me how it's calculating the projects supported metric? We maintain dozens of modules, which you can see under the listings of our employees https://www.drupal.org/marketplace/zivtech . And yet it only lists 8(!) projects as being supported. What gives?
Also, I don't know why people do or don't give credit, but it seems like there needs to be a way to ask for it if you're using it in such a way. I doubt many people would fail to give credit for competitive reasons (i.e. the maintainer works for a competing company) but I do think that people make mistakes, and if this is going to weigh so heavily now then there needs to be a way for companies to do something when they aren't getting credit they deserve.
Alex UA
Zivtech: Illuminating Technology - Drupal experts in Philadelphia
Took me a while to figure
Took me a while to figure this out too. Basically people need to go edit their project pages and explicitly add your company as a supporter. Ditto with credit, you can apply your own credit to work you've done - it's on an individual basis, but a developer working for you can choose whether the work they did on a project or a commit is attributed to them personally, or them in their capacity working for you (so the company gets an issue credit) - but again, it's all down to the individuals who work for you choosing to credit your company with the things they're doing.
To be fair, I like this system.
The only thing I *don't* like is the Marketplace page apparently sorting on "issue credits" alone, as that's clearly going to *massively* skew it towards bigger companies who are active.
IMHO it should be "issue credits" / "people on Drupal.org" ... the ratio of that should be the ranking weight.
Edit: As Nedjo says right at the top, in fact.
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https://www.codeenigma.com/
Issue credits / people on d.o
Issue credits / people on d.o sounds better, but not quite right. I'd suggest Issue credits / members of dev team.
EG the company I work (https://www.drupal.org/node/2330965/) for has our biz dev director on here, and a couple of ex-staff who don't seem to be active in the community that I can't remove. (As the owner of the organisation node, being able to reject people who claim to be our staff would be nice, although I appreciate it's OT here ;) )
This is a good decision
This is a good decision
My big issues is that once
My big issues is that once again, only code contributions are considered. I have spent a significant amount of time providing support on Drupal.org to users, and that counts for a grand total of absolutely nothing. Part of this of course is because the Drupal forums suck - there is no mechanism to mark a reply as having been helpful or whatnot, so there isn't any way to attribute forum support as to being a contributing member of the community. But the other part is because the organization only places an emphasis on code contributions, not support contributions.
Contact me to contract me for D7 -> D10/11 migrations.
Not only this, but now only
Not only this, but now only code contributions on the big-name modules are deemed important, leaving smaller or more niche modules to stagnate.
I would also like to see things like case studies considered for recognition, especially featured case studies which are used as promotional tools for Drupal and the Drupal Association.
Consider on ratio basis
Many people in the comment section put across their views which by far are fair too I believe. Instead of counting numbers, I believe better to count on 'ratio basis'. i.e. contribution vs number of registered users of that specific company.