In the free & open source software world there are a lot of reasons for getting involved. Principles of mutual aid, profit, community building, and identity politics co-occur. My impression is that Drupal is drifting towards the business end of the spectrum.
Burned in my mind, is the businessman who, talking about a major contributor to Drupal, says that he is thankful for the long-haired bearded guys because without their work, he would make no money.
In his opening keynote, Dries defined goals for 2020 - lets grow by an order of magnitude. He addressed quality and accessibility as a means to the end of growth. Implicit in his speech was the assumption that the primary vector for Drupal's growth would be economic.
More eloquent words than mine have addressed what happens to institutions and movements that rely on accumulating and mobilizing mass. I don't think the concept of size is worth throwing out altogether, but I am not convinced by the benefits of growth.
I also noticed that many of my co-attendees had difficulty using words that folks in social movements have used for decades: workshop, outreach, mobilization, even worker. Instead they have invented or re-purposed words that mean fundamentally the same things: 'communities of practice' and 'gardening' being the ones that spring immediately to mind. To me this suggests that these concepts are not really at their mental fingertips.
Ultimately many of the folks at DrupalCon, even those who are most interested and committed to taking care of the community, seem more at ease with business language. In a business culture, the goal is to make money, and collaboration and consultation are just means to that end. They do not have value in and of themselves. Unless we are able to sustain taking these values seriously as ends in and of themselves, when they are in conflict with the primary goal of making money, they will fall to the wayside.
That said, the Drupal community is still very strong, collaborative and open-minded. Speaking to this are both the concerns around sexism at this con and all the effort going into adopting a shared code of conduct. Just the fact that we are discussing outreach and mobilization at these events, in whatever form, is a silver lining as far as I'm concerned.
I chronicled my experiences in more detail on membres.koumbit.org:
