Drupal and the perception of success
Submitted by sepeck on Thu, 2008-02-21 13:14
This is the result of seeing one too many 'For Drupal to really succeed' posts. Drupal is already a success. There is certainly room to get better and grow more, but Drupal has already succeeded.
When listening to interviews with musicians who have a new 'hit' album/song I often get a sense that the interviewer has this fundamental assumption that the artist just started playing/singing last month. When you listen carefully, you find that the artist has been working at their craft for years. So it goes with Drupal and Drupal's success.
For the time I have been with the Drupal community we have had a steady progression of success. In my first few years, the community took pride in the fact that sites could be built by skilled developers with no indication that it was using Drupal (Yes, many hobbyists often implemented sites that were obviously Drupal). Calls to put 'tagging' into the code to more easily identify Drupal based sites were often met with resistance. The prevailing attitude was to focus on quality and capability rather then count implementations.
What really attracted me to the project was a combination of things. Initially it was that I could run it on IIS. What kept me, besides being able to get it working, was the community and that the project had a defined mission and principles. When I first entered the IT field, I thought things like missions statements and principles were silly. Over time, I have found they are actually tremendously important for keeping a projects focus and not wandering to far afield. They help keep everyone near the same place in regards to how a project grows and evolves.
From the history page, we know that the 1.0.0 release was in 2001. A summary from the CHANGELOG.txt shows we are now at 13 full version release from the initial 1.0.0. and each one is our best yet.
- Drupal 6.0, 2008-02-13
- Drupal 5.0, 2007-01-15 - First release using X.y versioning
- Drupal 4.7.0, 2006-05-01 - Last released version using X.Y.z for major release numbers.
- Drupal 4.6.0, 2005-04-15
- Drupal 4.5.0, 2004-10-18
- Drupal 4.4.0, 2004-04-01
- Drupal 4.3.0, 2003-11-01
- Drupal 4.2.0, 2003-08-01
- Drupal 4.1.0, 2003-02-01
- Drupal 4.0.0, 2002-06-15
- Drupal 3.0.0, 2001-09-15
- Drupal 2.0.0, 2001-03-15
- Drupal 1.0.0, 2001-01-15 - Initial release
The development cycle is so very funny in it's predictability too;
- The developers contributing to core already have ideas and code for the next version for things that didn't get in this release.
- The edge implementors working with the code are already discovering areas that could use a closer look and perhaps a better solution based on work they are doing for clients.
- Contributed module developers are updating modules or hoping that others will supply them with patches and testing so that the less involved members of our community can catch up and start using the latest version.
- Newer folks are trying to figure out which to go with, Drupal 5 or Drupal 6.
- Non-participants are lining up to point out and decry how unusable things are because module x/y/z isn't updated and it's unconscionable that anyone would release something without it and demanding that someone do something (and being ignored because frankly that type of complaining isn't interesting)
Scattered through the forums you will see this pretty much every release. It can be fun helping people through this process of discovery. Many can and do become awesome contributors and build lasting relationships. Others, well, we see some others every release saying the same old thing, but oddly, never in the contribute category.
Drupal has already had success. As long as people continue to contribute to the project; donate time, code, reviews, support, documentation and other things we will really continue to really succeed. We can do better, but that too is a universal saying.
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Reflections on success criteria
Great post. Thanks for linking to the mission and principles.
I think this is the crux of Drupal's misssion: "Diverse and geographically-separated individuals and groups can collectively produce, discuss, and share information and ideas."
I think while some people can, many still can not. Tomorrow I'll be flying to the University of Minnesota to spend a week watching people try to "produce, discuss, and share information and ideas". I've done these kinds of usability studies before, with more modest resources. This week will be a big eye opener for us. That will give us a good idea of how far we have to go to get university educated individuals in the midwest of the US to achieve our mission.
But as we start to lower the cost of testing, and this knowledge dissipates through the community we will see how far we have to go to get really diverse and geographically distributed individuals able to achieve this goal.
If we do succeed in making Drupal usable around the world for diversely educated and diversely geographic groups of people, then we are still going to have to let them know that this software is available. That means we need to start building a marketing plan for sharing our success geographically and to diverse groups.
So we have success. But we have not succeeded.
Cheers,
Kieran
The mission is a goal, not a ruler
and continuous improvements are not new. We will never not have a new audience for whom things cannot be made easier.
We have already enabled diverse and geographically-separated individuals and groups to collectively produce, discuss, and share information and ideas. Someone like me, who is not a web developer and without any real knowledge of coding has been able to leverage Drupal for my friends and self now for years and I have been able to take better advantage of improvements each release.
We have already succeeded. To say otherwise makes light of the success and dismisses countless hours of work contributors in the community have made and continue to make. The very culture of the community is to improve and to continue to improve. We, all of us, built the community that produces Drupal.
If we stop, if we fail to continually improve, then we will fail. But we have already really succeeded.
Drupal has lowered the bar for hundreds of thousands and allowed them to achieve things they had believed out of their reach. It's good that we build and supply the tools to enable an even wider base of people and skill sets to leverage these tools and to do so continue to seek to find that which can be improved, but this is not new. This happens every release, this happens every time a new member sticks around to add input, contribute ideas, code, code reviews, or simply just helps another.
It's good that others are joining with the community to help improve things but we must not forget that we have done this before. While they were not a University with all the pomp and circumstances that entails, others have helped with these usability suggestions in the past and that is how we got here.
Success is not defined entirely by the software, it is by the community. Some things we have done well for years, others we have desired more input and have had to develop the knowledge from within our community rather then from outside but these studies will not make or break Drupal. It is merely another opportunity for the community to learn from and grow and therefore continue to succeed.
We have already succeeded. We merely change our potential target audience with each success.
Mission statements
Steven, you're so right about the power of mission statements.
Years ago I was a cynical news editor back in Minneapolis. I would get a copy of the company mission statement and immediately promote it to the circular file.
But when I took responsibility for the newspaper's first online efforts I realized the great philosopher Yogi Berra was right: "You've got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."
What I like most about Drupal's declarations is the first principle: "Modular and extensible." Sometimes objectives can come into conflict with one another, and so long as that one continues to win, we'll be all right. Each of us may have a different vision for how we want to use Drupal, but so long as Drupal remains flexible and extensible, each of us can achieve our individual ends.
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