Lessons Learned: Open Source Contributions - A Case Study of Workbench

Are you thinking about contributing a module or other major contribution to Drupal? This session will show you one way to manage the process with a focus on business strategy, sustainability, and community involvement.

There are many technology companies supporting open source software projects. Larger companies like IBM, Google, clearly provide R&D time for their developers to work on “free as in free speech” software, but what about smaller firms? How does a company that is predominantly service-oriented give back to the community?

This session will show one example of how to manage the process of the development of a product for internal use and community involvement. Workbench (http://drupal.org/project/workbench) started as a “Wouldn’t it be great if...” idea that turned into a suite of modules released to the community. Let’s explore:

the business strategy (including funding)
managing the project
the process from inception to the 1.0 release
Lessons Learned will be included during this session. Tips of what to do and what to avoid throughout a project’s process