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Sustaining tools that support Drupal contribution sprints

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Following up on my post announcing updates for ContribKanban, I wanted to take the time to write about an initiative taken by AmyJune Hineline. AmyJune is the Open Source Community Ambassador for Kanopi Studios. She has taken upon herself to work with Drupal camps and make sure they have a Contribution Day sponsor tiers and that a portion of that sponsorship goes to community tools. Through her work, SimplyTest.me and ContribKanban have received funding to ensure they have maintenance and feature development.

Community contribution tools

What is a community tool? A community tool is any type of resource utilized by a contributor that is not part of the Drupal.org infrastructure. Drupal.org provides nearly all of the tooling we need: Git repository hosting, issue queues, DrupalCi, and more. These are funded by the Drupal Association. (In fact, there is currently a #DrupalCares drive to ensure funding for the Drupal Association and our infrastructure.)

What community tools are there? 

  • SimplyTest.me allows you to launch on-demand instances for testing Drupal with different modules and themes. You can even choose what patches to be applied, so you can test out patches without requiring a local environment.
  • ContribKanban uses the Drupal.org API to represent project issue queues or tagged issues as Kanban boards.
  • Dreditor is a browser plugin that extends Drupal.org functionality for patch review and other helpers. Note: I'm not sure the status of the project's maintenance, it is still listed in browser's extension directories for installation. (It still works.)

How Drupal Camps are funding these tools

For example, Midwest Drupal Camp and Bay Area Drupal Camp have contribution sponsorship tiers that provide $250 to both ContribKanban and SimplyTest.me. Other camps, like Florida DrupalCamp, make donations out of their sponsorship funds.

Because of AmyJune, I have received $625 in funding on OpenCollective through contribution day sponsors.

I think this is especially wonderful for Adam Bergstein with SimplyTest.me. That project has a much larger development demand and support requirement. Thanks to monthly contributors and conference sponsorships the project has an estimated annual budget of $5,000! 😱. That is amazing! I encourage you to read the most recent OpenCollective update about SimplyTest.me from Adam and AmyJune: http://nerdstein.net/blog/simplytestme-opencollective-update.

The impact it has for ContribKanban

There isn't much cost of running ContribKanban. The project receives complimentary hosting by amazee.io on its Lagoon platform. The only cost is my time for maintaining it, providing support, and some feature development. I estimated the annual budget for maintaining ContribKanban around $2,400 a year. That is roughly $200 a month. That allocates to about 2-3 hours of paid time to work on the project per month.

The recent revamp took about ten to twelve hours, so about half of that budget, leaving plenty for the miscellaneous composer update and yarn upgrade commands along with bug fixes.

Again, thank you AmyJune!

Again, I just wanted to give a huge thank you to AmyJune and all of her efforts 🙏.

I know who I am nominating for the 2020 Aaron Winborn Award.

I'm available for one-on-one consulting calls – click here to book a meeting with me 🗓️