Track | the Future of Open Source Business Mikko Hämäläinen, CEO, Druid Oy Mindtrek Conference 15th of November 2022. Tampere, Finland www.mindtrek.org

1. Win-Win-Win
How Customers, Vendors and Developers are
working together in getting the most out of Drupal community
Mikko Hämäläinen
Druid Oy

2. About me
I’m Mikko Hämäläinen, the CEO of Druid, a Finnish
Drupal company.
Facts about me
● Graduated as a BSc in SW engineer in 2004
● Ended up doing open source web development
related stuff for 20 years. Mostly sales.
● Agile and Teal fanboy
● Dog person

3. About Druid
Druid is a software company that specializes in
delivering customer web services with Drupal and other
open source technologies.
● Founded in 2012 by five software engineers
● Business was based on Drupal and agile delivery
methods. Nowadays Drupal + React is the default
stack.
● Active in Drupal community since the beginning
● Customers include multiple cities, healthcare
providers and private companies that needed self
service portals

4. Drupal

5. Content Management Tool
● Content Management Systems are one of the backbones
of modern web - around 66% all sites is run by one
● Typically they are used to create and update web sites, but
can also be used for wide variety of other tasks such as
self-service portals, webshops etc.
● Drupal is a Content Management Framework– less ready
out of the box but highly customizable
● Other well known CMS systems include Wordpress,
Joomla ja Liferay

6. History
● Drupal was created by a Belgian developer Driers
Buytaert for an university project message board /
forum in 1998
● After gaining some popularity Dries decided to
open source it and Drupal was born. Name comes
from a Dutch word Dorpje meaning a small village
● Howard Dean’s campaign site in 2003 helped
Drupal to get momentum and has been very
popular choice for high-traffic sites during 2010’s

7. What makes Drupal relevant
● GPL licensed
● A content management framework – not just for websites
● Enterprisey – one of the few CMS’ to play in the “big
league”
● Built with best practices and extensibility in mind
○ Relatively small core + huge amount (11,037 for D8
only) of contributed modules
● Uses PHP and Symfony framework
● Has probably the largest open source development
community in the world

8. Who uses Drupal
Drupal excels in high-volume
sites with plenty of
integrations.
● Cities and Governments
● Educational institutions
● Large corporations
● Custom web stores and
self service portals

9. The Community

10. Developers
Companies
Customers
Drupal
Association
Drupal
ecosystem
National
associations

11. Associations support the community
● Drupal Association is a nonprofit organization funded by
individual and corporate donations
● Mission is to foster Drupal software project and the
community
● Main focuses are
○ Drupal.org - the online home of the Drupal community
○ DrupalCon - an annual international conference.
In addition to DA there are 29 independent local Drupal
associations that work on the national level

12. Developers

13. Making things happen
● Collaboration happens through drupal.org and Git
● Some focus on Drupal Core development and some create and maintain
modules
● Plenty of other ways to contribute: organizing events, giving
presentations, translating etc.
● Community is very inclusive and special effort is made to keep it so
● There’s no hard line between developers and agency heads: many
companies are founded by techies and everyone mingles freely in Drupal
events

14. Growth of the community
Source: Driers Buytaert, https://dri.es/drupal-contributor-statistics-2011

15. After 10 years
● As the platform has matured, the number of contributors has
stabilized
● In 2021 there were
○ 7,420 individual contributors
○ 1,186 organizational contributors
○ 23,882 issues "fixed" or "closed"
○ 3,779 projects worked on
● Small drop compared to previous years might be caused by COVID-
19

17. Companies

18. Agency perspective
● While the competition is sometimes fierce between
the Drupal Agencies, they also collaborate a lot on
both national and international level
● As long as Drupal is doing well, the agencies are
doing well
● In addition to agencies, there are subcontractors,
PaaS, SaaS and other service providers in the
ecosystem
● The companies have their focus in the future:
○ training new developers
○ ensure the product serves the customers
○ spreading the word

19. How companies contribute
● Agencies have most of the resources: time, money and developers
● Companies can allocate developer time to contribution work. Some of the
issues are fixed during normal customer work and the companies only sponsor
the time to commit the fix, but sometimes developers are allocated 100% to
contrib work
● Sponsoring Drupal events
● Participating and sponsoring national and the international Drupal
associations
● Training and other educational work

20. Customers

21. Customers and Drupal development
● Most of the site owners experience Drupal through their selected agencies, but some
customers are more involved and have a presence at Drupal.org
● There are 63 organizations listed at Drupal.org that have tagged themselves as end users
of Drupal and have offices in Finland
● Drupal.org has an issue credit system where a solved issue gives attribution to the
developer, the agency and the customer who paid for the work

22. Benefiting from the community
● Open Source is a stable platform for business critical applications
● Being part of the Drupal community benefits the customer in several
ways
○ independence from agencies
○ building a positive relationship with the developers
○ understanding Drupal development plans
● Steering the development effort through commissions and
contributions
● Drupal has a community driven professional security team

24. Case Yleisradio
● Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE has been a Drupal user for almost 20 years
● Their staff has participated in several Drupal events over the years
● One of the essential Drupal 7 modules, Organic Groups, was commissioned by YLE in
2004
● YLE has several people listed at Drupal.org and gets constantly credited for contributions

26. Case Turku
● City of Turku started a website renewal project in 2014 using Drupal 7
● They decided to publish the source code and modules for anyone interested in using
their work
● Turku owned the project but the development of KADA-platform was mostly done by
three Drupal vendors
● Several Finnish cities (Jyväskylä, Pori, Varkaus, Imatra) adopted Turku’s Drupal codebase
and created their own websites using it

27. Questions?