Update organization content type to better reflect types of organizations in Drupal ecosystem

Based on feedback from organizations in our ecosystem, the following is a proposal to substantially change the way we approach organization profiles on Drupal.org. This is a follow up to the marketplace changes from 2015.

Current form for confirmed users

Only confirmed users can create an organization. This has helped fight spam considerably. It is a bit of a barrier to a new user that wants to create an organization, but it keeps the quality of submissions very high.

Once a user creates an organization, they are encouraged to take steps to request that the organization get promoted to the marketplace listing. This is quite time intensive for community members to vet and very subjective. This subjective check is unnecessary with the confirmed user requirement, spam filtering, and the new default order of the marketplace that puts non-contributing organizations quite low on a very long list.

Current form for administrator users

There are a lot of unnecessary fields that are used for determining whether the organization should appear in the marketplace, hosting partner listing, training listing, and supporting partner listing. Some of these fields would be impacted by the proposal that follows.

Proposed changes to organization creation process

The following proposal simplifies the self reported aspects of an organization and removes the community review process for appearing in the Drupal Marketplace. Please read through all of the impacts in the full description below.

1. A user can select their type of organization and have additional conditional fields that help further describe the organization.

In area 1 highlighted in the above diagram, we give the user three options for their type of organization.

1a . A user selects "Provides services others can buy " and is presented with a secondary conditional field to select the types of services they provide.

This is a more limited list of service types than the current list to make selection easier and to provide a simpler navigation experience for someone interested in finding a Drupal or related services provider. Within this list are additional conditions.

1aa. A user selects "services" and a service type with more options

In this example, the user has selected that they provide both hosting and training. These service types have additional sub categories that can be used for more targeted lists on Drupal.org marketplace listings. We currently use hosting types for our supporting partner listings. Additionally, there is an option to show up on training listings that goes through a community review process.

In follow up with training organizations, they don't find the training listings useful for explaining their offerings and would prefer more specific listings for online training as well as enterprise training.

1b. A user selects "Drupal customer with one or more Drupal installations that enable your business"

While I'm not convinced this wording is perfect, it is an important distinction from a Drupal service provider. Additionally, this list allows us to figure out the industries in which Drupal customers exist. Currently, Drupal service providers are allowed to provide "sector" information, this would no longer allow that self-reported data for that organization type. That would make these sector descriptions more accurate for the customer companies that choose to provide this information. (On a related note, Drupal service providers can specify sectors on Case Studies, which will be a more accurate way to collect that information.)

1c. A user selects "Volunteer community"

Another advantage to getting better organization type options is that we be able to credit volunteer communities for the issue credits attributed to them. This would be a great opportunity to highlight which camps or DrupalCons had the most active participation.

Eventually, it would be nice to associate the organization profile with the Group in groups.drupal.org (or organic group on Drupal.org).

Better location selection

We would like to achieve better location accuracy by requesting this data similar to Drupal Jobs. This means users first select a country, then the appropriate form appears based on that selection. Organizations would provide physical addresses in optional fields and specify whether the location was a headquarters. These locations would be listed on the organization profile complete with the option of contact email and phone numbers for that location.

Better notification after creation to encourage contribution

After an organization has been created, it is important that we get that organization involved with the community. To do this, we can take two steps.

First, the "success" message that appears on the organization profile immediately after creation, should contain the following instructions:

Thank you for creating an organization on Drupal.org.

Next:

1. Learn about issue credits and supporting a project
2. Give back

• become an organization member or supporting partner
• sponsor a DrupalCon or camp
• hosting a Global Training Day
• and more!

Add users to your organization.

Add a case study to Druapal.org to show off your work.

Each call to action would like to appropriate instructions or forms.

In addition to the printed message, we could also generate a personalized email from the Drupal Association with next steps to get involved in the community and instructions for Drupal service providers and customers on how to contact an account manager to sponsor Cons, camps, or Drupal.org. For community organizations, we could have a message from our community manager with information about ways to highlight their community.

These messages would be a much better welcome than we currently provide and get organizations engaged more quickly.

Next steps

• Community review and feedback
• Document needed views
• Complete content type and taxonomy changes and export to feature for testing
• [Add more]