The Drupal ecosystem is changing ... a lot. We have venture financed startups, we're powering 2% of the interwebs, and our community has already seen exponential growth–in 5 years Drupal.org has gone from ~25,000 to ~1,000,000 members–and it can be baffling (and a little terrifying) to think of the community growing bigger still. And yet, the community of contributors is what drives Drupal, and so in order to grow Drupal, we must also grow ourselves.
Intended audience
Sounds cliché, I know, but hopefully everyone. Those outside the Drupal community wondering "How does that all work?" those within the Drupal community who are passionate about continuing the awesome, those within the community who are pissed off and looking for answers, and those "formerly" of the Drupal community who are skeptical about the whole hippie open source love thing. Hopefully even someone without any familiarity with the Drupal community who is interested in general information about how a website filled with opinionated, perfectionistic, multi-cultural people holds itself together.
Questions answered by this session
What is the history of the Drupal project and some demographics about its community?
When disagreements in the community arise, what are some good and bad ways to handle that?
How has the Drupal community sustained such massive, massive growth without splintering and forking?
What are some major "mine fields" we've encountered as a community, and how have we/are we working around those?
If I implement Drupal for a Fortune 500 company's intranet am I still changing the world?
