Dries Buytaert

Acquia works with many large enterprises that bet on Drupal. These organizations are doing amazing things with Drupal and innovating by breaking through prior limitations. However, in talking to our customers, we noticed that there is limited knowledge sharing and discussion happening among the heaviest Drupal users. Similar problems are often solved multiple times independently, and in incompatible ways. And since few of these large companies are vocal and active in the community, the expertise gained from solving these problems isn't making its way back into the software that all Drupal users rely on.

To help solve these issues, I'm announcing a new program called "Large Scale Drupal" as part of my group at Acquia's Office of the CTO.

Large Scale Drupal is a group of large enterprise Drupal users who meet regularly to discuss and collaborate on common problems. We provide a forum for enterprise users, listen to their needs, prioritize them as a group, and then figure out a proper way to address those needs through knowledge sharing, white papers, training and development. The intent is not to keep the outcome of these meetings just within the group. We want to share what we learn in the Large Scale Drupal group with the specific intent of it becoming a contributed project to Drupal. Once contributed, anyone is welcome to discuss and assist to the project.

So what are these projects? These are common needs for large enterprises that are considered large and complicated Drupal problems. Through a consensus-driven process our first project is working on creating a better content staging system geared toward supporting a publishing workflow. We've already started having detailed discussions and working on some of the basic architecture. We are connecting Large Scale Drupal program participants with members of the community to help advance projects like Workbench, and build new contributions like a site preview system. This program will add to those systems by helping define the needs of the users, funding some of the work, and contributing patches to the code.

The goal of these projects is to foster knowledge sharing and collaboration among members of the group and the community. The Large Scale Drupal members get the benefits of sharing their development costs with other members. The community benefits by gaining new contributions to Drupal, and an influx of expert talent into the Drupal contributor pool. Both the contributions of these companies, and the expertise that they bring to the table will help Drupal remain a long-term viable project.

I'm excited to work with the Large Scale Drupal program members to get them more involved in Drupal and become active contributors to the community. I have a big vision for Large Scale Drupal; something I hope to write more about later. For now, I wanted to announce and bring awareness to the program.