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Building a sustainable contribution culture

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By Team Srijan Feb 23, 2016
Building a sustainable contribution culture
Building a sustainable contribution culture

The DriesNote and the keynote by Diva Danese, both emphasised on the importance of contributions and giving back to the community. In tune with this, Manjit Singh and Ashish Thakur presented a session on creating a sustainable contribution culture in your organisation.


The session started with a introduction about Srijan and how Srijanites strated contributing to the Drupal community. The speakers emphasised that giving back to the community is a selfless act, just like doing our bit for conserving resources or preserving the environment.

Why should we contribute?

    • To build a better software.

    • To help in the growth of the community.

    • To enhance our own skills.

    • To foster friendship and bonding among Drupalers.

    • To network and collaborate with Drupalers across the globe.

How to contribute? 

The most obvious way to contribute is by publishing modules/patches/themes. These are technical contributions.

But one thing we need to keep in mind is that contribution do not necessarily have to be technical. They can be any type of contributions, ranging from: 

 
  • Financial contribution
  • Organising events and volunteering
  • Translating (contributions where you help translate the software)
  • Documentation
  • Helping/getting help via forums and IRC
  • Publishing case studies on Drupal.org (with the client's permission)
 
 

Once you start making individual contributions, you need to make sure you are doing sustainably. This means ensuring regular contributions and also encouraging new contributors. Apart from individuals, contributions must also happen from an organisation's point of view. This helps in understanding what they want from Drupal and chart out a future course of action.

How can organizations help with contributions?

    • Dedicating full time core contributors

    • Organizing sprints to kick start contributions

Next, the speakers shared the results of some of their contributions. They also talked about the challenges that one might face while contributing. They concluded the session by reminding everyone that contributing to Drupal is a great way to learn stuff and remove dependencies from a single person. The lasting message was that personal motivation and consistency are crucial to building a sustainable contributing culture in any organisation.

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