A word of appreciation for Group’s sponsors

The idea was that, in order to get things done, small personal or professional sacrifices will no longer cut it. While I am still very grateful for Factorial sponsoring my one day a week to work on core or contrib, it’s a drop in the bucket when it comes to effecting large scale changes. So I set out to find meaningful ways to make contributing easier.

While many things were discussed, we have to realize that some changes will not be happening overnight. In the short term, we could look into finding sponsors for specific features, but that still leaves the issue that you often need to have something first before you can entice sponsors into helping out.

In the mid term, we should keep voicing our concerns, write blog posts (like this one) and try to find positive examples of other projects making a difference. The long term goal is that we overhaul the entire system of contributions so that time spent can be paid for by more than just a handful of believers. If we expect to keep this project running on people’s free time, then it’s destined to fail as responsibilities and time spent become bigger the longer you stick around, but the pay remains zero.

Big announcement

On that note we have a pleasant announcement to make: The Group module has a new release and it was almost entirely based on sponsored work. And our sponsors could not have been more different: the European Commission and Global Game Jam.

The EC sponsored permissions for translations, which sadly could not make it into the release just yet (see release notes for more details) and GGJ sponsored the implementation of making Group entities revisionable.

If I were to have done this on my one day a week, it would have taken me somewhere between six to twelve months to achieve. Now, we managed to finish all this work in a little over a month. It’s amazing to see what we can do when people decide to sponsor the volunteers so that they can spend more time on the things they do.

That’s basically all I had to say. The intro being longer than the meat of the story, I still thought it was worth posting nonetheless. Even if only to say “Thank you!” 

In closing, I’d like to thank Factorial for obvious reasons and ANNAI for the previous sponsorship of the Subgroup module. They were the ones who set us on the path of seeking more sponsorships so it’s only natural we give them some credit too.