Drupalfund.us is a crowdfunding platform for Drupal-related projects.

The Problem

As Drupal-the-software and Drupal-the-community grow and mature, we are coming to a point where we must find sustainable ways to continue Drupal’s growth and success. We created Drupalfund because we, like you, love Drupal and being part of its amazing community. The saying, "Come for the software, stay for the community," gets to the heart of it. Drupal is all about people: The innovators, developers, visionaries, designers, and everyone else who devotes their time and resources to keep Drupal a top of the line content management platform.

Most Drupal development has always been backed by individuals and companies volunteering or donating their time and money to contribute to Drupal. The majority of this development (even core development) is done during developers’ free time, even cutting into time that could be spent on paid work for many. While this generosity is laudable, it still means many issues, fixes, and changes get pushed back and fixed only when a developer can find or “steal” some time.

We’ve been asking ourselves, “How much more could we achieve if there was and easy way for people to contribute financially to Drupal’s development? What if companies and individuals could join together and pay someone to build Drupal functionality? What if we could support and reward our developers?”

The Solution

Our community is huge. There are nearly one million registered users on Drupal.org. Doing some back-of-the-envelope math, we figure that if only 1% of us donated only 1% of our salaries each month, we’d raise more than $5 million US dollars a year.

With that kind of money, in a community crowdfunding effort, the possibilities are mind boggling. That's enough money to:

Employ dozens of full time developers
- Hugely accelerate Drupal core development and module porting
- Add features and functionality to Drupal.org., Drupal Commerce, Open Atrium...
- Support the production of new books, training materials, products and services in the community
- ... probably all at the same time.

Picture how much we would all benefit from this; individuals, organizations large and small. If we all pitched in to support development and the Drupal platform this way, we wouldn’t have to depend on our amazing volunteers' goodwill alone. We think we could not only unblock issues that have been holding us back, but take Drupal to new levels.

Drupalfund on Drupalcon

Come talk with us on Wednesday. We'll be there to discuss Drupalfund, answer your questions or just help you set up your first Drupalfund project. We're looking forward to seeing you there!