By robertDouglass on

DRAFT: Mission Statement

The Drupal Association fosters and supports the Drupal software project, the community and its growth.

DRAFT: Purpose

The Drupal Association does this by:

  1. Maintaining the hardware and software infrastructure of Drupal.org and other community sites.
  2. Empowering the Drupal community to participate in and contribute to the project.
  3. Protecting the GPL source code of the Drupal project and its community contributions.
  4. Protecting the Drupal project and community through legal work and advocacy.
  5. Organizing and promoting worldwide events.
  6. Communicating the benefits of the Drupal software.

The Mission Statement

The purpose needs to sum up, very succinctly, what the Association is trying to achieve. We decided that words like foster, support, and nurture fit our purpose best. The sentence tries to clearly show three things that receive fostering and support: The Drupal software project, Drupal's community, and the growth of Drupal's community.

The Purpose

How do we go about achieving our Purpose? We thought of six ways.

  1. The Drupal.org family of sites need care and nurturing. The Association provides this in the form of hardware and software infrastructure. In short, the Drupal Association takes responsibility for making sure the sites run, and that the user experience is as good as it can be.
  2. The Drupal community: Come for the software, stay for the community. While the software project must always clearly come first, as without it there would be no Drupal, we see the Drupal community as a unique and precious aspect of the Drupal project. The community's participation and contributions are what we want to foster and nurture in this case.
  3. Free (libre) and open source software has enemies. People or companies may try to inappropriately use the assets and missions of open source projects, As a result, software is often used in circumstances that violate the GPL license. In the case of Drupal, Protecting the GPL source code means that the Drupal Association assumes the responsibility for pursuing GPL violators and enforcing the legal agreement that is invoked whenever you use GPLed software.
  4. Doing legal work and advocacy is a proactive way to reduce the misuse and abuse of open source software and licenses. It demonstrates how the Drupal Association cares about making a healthy legal environment for Drupal software development to happen.
  5. Events are a big part of Drupal, and one of the biggest functions of the Drupal Association to date. We have been producing two DrupalCons a year, and we plan to add a third as early as 2012. The Drupal Association is also interested in the success of DrupalCamps and other events including sprints, and plans to increase support for those events.
  6. Finally, the Drupal Association takes it upon itself to talk about why Drupal is good software. Marketing Drupal and promoting its use, as well as the use of free and open-source software in general, is one of our paramount roles.

Please let us know what you think about this draft version of the Mission Statement and Purpose. Your feedback is very valuable and welcome.

⋅ Categories: drupal planet

Comments

mlncn’s picture

mlncn commented

I think the titles for Mission Statement and Purpose got reversed in the discussion section? Anyhow...

3 and 4 look like they belong together as one point, maybe edited down a little.

As i understand it from this, the purpose of the Drupal could be summarized as:
1. *.Drupal.org maintenance and development
2. Supporting community initiatives (grassroots up).
3. Defending Free Software (GPL) nature of the Drupal code.
4. Coordinating and supporting Drupal events (relatively top-down compared to 2).
5. Promoting Drupal.

Protecting Drupal's trademark as a separate point? This should be stated clearly, and who owns the trademark has to be mentioned clearly also. On who owns it, personally, I trust Dries implicitly, but i think our goal as a community should be to build a Drupal Association which Dries trusts even more than he trusts himself. The point is simply that if legal work is going to include trademark as well as GPL protection, this should be stated clearly.

Thanks to everyone working on the Drupal Association for everything they do, and the perhaps equally challenging and important task of communicating about it.

robertDouglass’s picture

robertDouglass commented

Thanks for the feedback.

The headers were wrong... I just fixed them.

3 and 4 define different targets. One is the code that the DA is protecting, and the other is the people and infrastructure. That's why they're not together.

The summary you provide is pretty good.

We did not address the trademark in these statements. Dries owns the trademark and as such the Drupal Association is not in the business of enforcing the trademark. There is no legal agreement between Dries and the Association that would enable us to be the enforcers. So right now there is no DA legal work to protect the trademark. All of the trademark protection that happens is financed personally by Dries.