Drupal.org is more than a single website. It's made up of a number of sites and services that all together create the home of the Drupal community. Depending on where you are in the *.Drupal.org ecosystem, the features and content may be targeted at very different user personas. Some areas of the site are targeted at Learners: providing support, documentation, and helping them find modules and themes. Other areas of the site are heavily oriented towards Expert users: providing Git repositories, releases, issue management, code testing. Still other parts of Drupal.org are consumed purely by other servers hosting Drupal websites, such as the updates system, and the Drupal.org APIs.
With such a diverse collection of sites, content, services, and users it can be difficult to prioritize what area of the site needs to be improved next. The Drupal Association must focus on a few key priorities at a time that we feel will have the maximum impact on the Drupal community and ecosystem.
Where do initiatives come from?
Ultimately, every initiative to improve Drupal.org stems from the needs of the community. But as we've seen above - the community is much larger than its component parts. These are just a few of the places that our initiatives come from:
- User research
- Initiatives proposed directly by members of the community
- Requests from the Drupal Core maintainers
- Directives from the Board of Directors of the Drupal Association
- Initiatives and tasks sustaining support and maintenance
- Bug reports in the issue queues
- Monetization initiatives to fund Drupal Association operations
How are initiatives prioritized?
This is the hard part. Every single initiative is valuable. Some initiatives affect every user of Drupal.org. Other initiatives only affect a small sub-set, like the core maintainers, but they enable faster, more efficient development of Drupal itself. Association staff must weigh the impact of the initiative against the breadth of the audience that will be affected and against the estimation of how much work and how much time it will take.
We use a number of inputs to our prioritization process: community demand, consultation with key community members, input from the board, etc. We take all of these factors and use methods like the Six Sigma weighted prioritization matrix to decide what to work on next.
How can I get involved?
If you are interested in helping move the Drupal.org roadmap forward, you can do so in a few ways. Start by taking a look at our current roadmap, to see what work is prioritized and what is upcoming.
Once you are familiar with the current work, there are two ways to get involved:
The Drupal.org Roadmap is updated by the Drupal Association staff with the input from the community and the Drupal Association Board. The roadmap is reviewed on a quarterly basis. To keep up with this work, visit the initiative issues listed, subscribe to our change notifications, and follow @drupal_org on Twitter.
