India's journey from a Consumption to Contribution culture and the road ahead - Panel Discussion

India has been the world’s 2nd largest software producing country since a decade. Yet it has frequently being touted as a cheap, low quality, code producing outsourcing hub for the world.

In a previous talk titled “Consumptions to Contributions - Lessons from India” I presented at Drupalcamp London 2015 and Bangalore 2015, I have tried to break this generalisation and explain how this has changed over the years, in particularly within the Drupal ecosystem. From a code consuming culture towards becoming the 2nd highest contributor country to Drupal 8 core ( refer Paul Johnson’s blog post “Which countries have contributed most to Drupal 8?” ).

It's not for no reasons that IT giants like Wipro, Sapient, TCS, CapGemini, Cognizant, Accenture, Mindtree have built significant Drupal teams (50+) in India while companies like Intel, Time Inc and Verizon have their own Indian Drupal delivery teams.

From being the 2nd most visited country to Drupal.org ( per Drupal Assocation’s drupal.org analytic reports ) to 2000+ attendees & 300+ code sprinters participating every year in Drupal camps and meetups in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderbad, Ahmedabad & Jaipur.

The panel will be comprised of Indian & International community leaders and will take this subject forward, as an attempt towards evaluating the current maturity levels of Indian Community from a global perspective, discussing various challenges being faced and learn from individual experiences of the panelists in how they overcame similar challenges within their communities.

Some of the points that the panel discussion would touch upon :

• Contribution culture & community involvement levels / scores at Indian organisations along with their maturity levels.

• Challenges faced by companies in advocating / promoting contribution culture within their organisations like.

  • balancing contribution hours vs billing dollars.

  • developing sustainable talent pipeline, preventing poaching & controlling churns.

  • hiring and committing dedicated contributors to Drupal project along with their cost to benefit analysis.

  • establishing organisational credits from code & non code contributions and subsequent branding for business growth and as thought leaders.

  • convincing clients in approving/ sponsoring code contribution if there’s value to be shared with the community as open source.

• Perspectives and experiences from International leaders as to how they addressed these similar challenges as learnings and takeaways and the path ahead.

More such burning questions and challenges as above will be open sourced from the Indian Businesses and community and raised during this invigorating panel discussion.

Panelists

• Holly Ross 
• Mike Lamb
• Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire
• Hussain Abba