@University of Szeged, 2013-05-09

1. Contribution
in the Drupal community
Kálmán Hosszu, Senior Drupal Engineer at Pronovix
Diána Lakatos,Technical Writer at Pronovix
Thursday, May 9, 13

2. What is contribution?
By definition:
• the part played by a person in bringing about
a result
• act of giving in common with others for a
common purpose
In the Drupal community:
• contributors are the sole force behind
improvements to the platform
Thursday, May 9, 13

3. Session structure
What drives us? What is the psychological
background of open source communities?
How can you contribute to Drupal?
Practise and exercise
Thursday, May 9, 13

4. The psychology of
contribution
The drive for contribution
- What motivates us?
(Drive by Daniel H. Pink)
• reward good behavior
• punish bad behavior
Thursday, May 9, 13

5. Study
reward top performers, ignore low performers,
others are in the middle
Results of the study:
• for mechanical tasks: the higher the pay, the
better the performance
• once the task called for even rudimentary
cognitive skill: higher reward leads to poorer
performance!
Thursday, May 9, 13

6. How could that be?
Let's test again!
maybe the reward ($50) wasn't significant, let's test it
somewhere else: Madurai, Rural India
Replicated experiment:
• low performance: 2 weeks' salary
• middle performance: 1 month's salary
• high performance: 2 months' salary
Result: low and middle reward lead to similar
performance, high reward lead to worse performance
Thursday, May 9, 13

7. What have we learned?
For simple,
straightforward tasks,
the motivation scheme
is valid:
IF you do this
THEN you get that
Thursday, May 9, 13

8. What have we learned?
When a task gets more complicated, it requires
some conceptual, creative thinking, then
...these kinds of motivators don't work!
Thursday, May 9, 13

9. Motivating factors &
personal satisfaction
• autonomy (leads to engagement)
• mastery (satisfying)
• purpose (ikigai - a reason to get up in the morning)
Example:
Linux - from volunteers given away for free
Why do people who otherwise do sophisticated, challenging
work in their jobs, volunteer to work for free?
Thursday, May 9, 13

10. Contribute to Drupal
Thursday, May 9, 13

11. Mission
• develop a leading edge open-source content management
system that implements the latest thinking and best
practices in community publishing, knowledge
management, and software design.
Key values:
• flexibility, simplicity, and utility in our product
• teamwork, innovation, and openness in our community
• modularity, extensibility and maintainability in our code
Thursday, May 9, 13

12. Principles
• Modular and extensible
• Quality coding
• Standards-based
• Low resource demands
• Open source
• Ease of use
• Collaboration
Thursday, May 9, 13

13. How can you contribute?
• User support
• Documentation
• Translations
• Design and usability
• Donations
• Development
• Themes
• Marketing
Thursday, May 9, 13

14. Community events
Code sprints
Drupal User Groups
DrupalCamps
Drupalcons
Thursday, May 9, 13

15. Mentors and apprentices
What makes a good mentor?
What makes a good apprentice?
What your Drupal.org profile says about you:
• core developments
• contributed patches, modules, themes, ...
• projects
• memberships
• ...
Thursday, May 9, 13

16. Practise
Thursday, May 9, 13

17. Get a Drupal.org account
• post questions in the Drupal.org Forum
• report a bug in a module or theme's issue
queue
• request new features in a module or theme.
• report documentation errors
• filter modules, themes and translations by
Drupal version
EXERCISE 1: get a Drupal.org account
Thursday, May 9, 13

18. Get a Github account
• Git is the version control system
Drupal.org developers use to share code
with one another.
EXERCISE 2: get a Github account
Thursday, May 9, 13

19. Use the Drupal.org issue
tracker
• verifying bugs are still bugs
• marking duplicate issues
• answering support requests
• responding to issues in a number of
constructive ways
• creating and rolling patches
EXERCISE 3: examine the Drupal.org issue tracker
Thursday, May 9, 13

20. Issue statuses
• Active
• Needs Work ["CNW"]
• Needs Review ["CNR"]
• Reviewed & Tested by the Community ["RTBC"]
• Patch (to be ported)
• Fixed
• Postponed
• Postponed (maintainer needs more info)
• Closed (duplicate)
• Closed (won't fix)
• Closed (works as designed)
• Closed (cannot reproduce)
• Closed (fixed)
Thursday, May 9, 13

21. Thank you for your
attention!
Questions?
Thursday, May 9, 13