Open source project management in the Drupal community, lessons from the multilingual team

The Drupal 8 multilingual initiative was announced as the fourth initiative (after configuration management, web services and design) to explore new ways of moving Drupal forward. Even though these initiatives were supposed to transform Drupal the software, they were also transformative for Drupal as a community, and in the case of multilingual, for me personally.

As one of the most successful initiatives in Drupal 8 involving over 1200 people discussing issues, providing feedback, testing, etc. and the longest running with public meetings and in-person sprints, I think the lessons learned in and with the multilingual initiative are interesting as a use case on how to organize work in an open community. While the success of the initiative is attributable to sheer luck as much as adapting well to the changing landscape of Drupal development, I hope to share things I learned on what worked and what did not.