Growing and sustaining an Open Source Drupal Distribution

How does an open source distribution create a sustainable community of users and provide sufficient developer and product management resources to keep the project secure, performant and evolving with new features?

Drupal distributions are an important part of the Drupal ecosystem, allowing users to install and deploy a full solution to a specific use case. Examples include Thunder for publishing, Opingo for learning management, Open Social for an online community and LocalGov Drupal for UK councils.

Building and maintaining a Drupal distribution takes time and resource, which usually equates to money.

LocalGov Drupal is distribution built in collaboration between UK councils (public sector local authorities) and Drupal suppliers. It was initially funded by the UK government and the community has been growing over the last 3 years. At the time of writing we have at least 28 councils and 10 suppliers actively involved.

This session will share our learnings and how we are developing an open source funding model to fund a core team to provide the support needed for the distribution.