It’s this time of the year again! Late January is the Global Contribution Weekend in the Drupal community. This year it was from the 29th till the 31st of January. It is a great occasion to take a step back from the daily routine to reflect how we all profit from Drupal and how we give back. This year again, MD Systems was a big part of the Swiss event.
Meeting community collaborators in person at this event and sharing ideas is usually one of the highlights of the year. With everyone permanently working from home, it is difficult to motivate people for yet another virtual meeting when they deserved their weekend offline time. Nevertheless, MD Systems decided to dedicate Friday to the event and was able to make great progress.
Milos Bovan (mbovan) did his now famous first-contribution-workshop, welcoming new-comers, while others reflected on making Open Source sustainable.
The Drupal Switzerland Association higher management shared ideas about the future of the association, in particular concerning the creation of memberships specifically tailored for companies.
MD Systems thanks in particular Josef Kruckenberg (dasjo) for organizing the Swiss event.
This year, 103 issues have been worked on by the whole community (tagged #ContributionWeekend2021 on drupal.org) with more than 10 Swiss participants only on Friday. Additionally, the community contributes and collaborates in many ways that are not represented in the issue queue.
With long term contributor burnout identified as a threatening issue, MD Systems decided to start an initiative to foster Open Source sustainability. The idea is to create a showcase of how progress was achieved in our projects and identify limiting factors that blocked replication. With an improved framework, we try to achieve a more healthy environment that can avoid burnout and will allow us to scale contribution activities and thus boost the speed of innovation significantly. Customers who invest into the approach will receive value worth a multitude of the cost.
MD Systems is not waiting for the Global Contribution Weekend to work on Open Source projects: We have already participated in more than 40 issues since January 1st 2021.
We are excited for the next Global Contribution Weekend, but of course we also have a lot more to look forward to this year. This year is the 20th anniversary of Drupal, so we are expecting many exciting events over the course of the whole year.
Also, the community is always working on Drupal 9 readiness. Meanwhile more than 88% of the top 1000 modules are ready.
We plan to shortly provide an update about modules we maintain.