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We can modify any of the above courses to best suit your needs! We are also capable of teaching about many other aspects of Drupal. Look here to get a better idea of our teaching experience and expertise and how we can craft custom trainings for you and your team.

Why Agaric

Clients and colleagues know Agaric developers for taking on the hard tasks when we collaborate on larger teams. We combine this expertise with the desire to raise people up. From our first projects fifteen years ago, our goal has been to make our clients need us as little as possible, to put as much power as possible in our client's hands. That is why we started using content management systems in the first place, and it is a tradition we uphold through developing with free/libre open source software, through writing documentation and blog posts, and above all through providing trainings.

Agaric is active in the Drupal community at-large and has presented at various Drupal Camps. We have also taken initiative in organizing Global Training Days in Nicaragua since 2013.

Today we will learn how to migrate content from Microsoft Excel and LibreOffice Calc files into Drupal using the Migrate Spreadsheet module. We will give instructions on getting the module and its dependencies. Then, we will present how to configure the module for spreadsheets with or without a header row. There are two example migrations: images and paragraphs. Let’s get started.

Getting the code

You can get the full code example at https://github.com/dinarcon/ud_migrations.

The module to enable, as in yesterday's post in which we imported Google Sheets, is UD Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, and LibreOffice Calc source migration whose machine name is ud_migrations_sheets_sources. It comes with four migrations: udm_google_sheets_source_node.yml, udm_libreoffice_calc_source_paragraph.yml, udm_microsoft_excel_source_image.yml, and udm_backup_csv_source_node.yml. The image migration uses a Microsoft Excel file as source. The paragraph migration uses a LibreOffice Calc file as source. The CSV migration is a backup in case the Google Sheet is not available. To execute the last one you would need the Migrate Source CSV module.

You can get the Migrate Spreadsheets module using composer: composer require drupal/migrate_spreadsheet:^1.0. This module depends on the PHPOffice/PhpSpreadsheet library and many PHP extensions including ext-zip. Check this page for a full list of dependencies. If any required extension is missing the installation will fail. If your Drupal site is not composer-based, you will not be able to use Migrate Spreadsheet, unless you jump through a lot of hoops.

Understanding the example set up

This migration will reuse the same configuration from the introduction to paragraph migrations example. Refer to that article for details on the configuration. The destinations will be the same content type, paragraph type, and fields. The source will be changed in today's example, as we use it to explain Microsoft Excel and LibreOffice Calc migrations. The end result will again be nodes containing an image and a paragraph with information about someone’s favorite book. The major difference is that we are going to read from different sources.

Note: You can literally swap migration sources without changing any other part of the migration.  This is a powerful feature of ETL frameworks like Drupal’s Migrate API. Although possible, the example includes slight changes to demonstrate various plugin configuration options. Also, some machine names had to be changed to avoid conflicts with other examples in the demo repository.

Understanding the source document and plugin configuration

In any migration project, understanding the source is very important. For Microsoft Excel and LibreOffice Calc migrations, the primary thing to consider is whether or not the file contains a row of headers. Also, a workbook (file) might contain several worksheets (tabs). You can only migrate from one worksheet at a time. The example documents have two worksheets: UD Example Sheet and Do not peek in here. We are going to be working with the first one.

The spreadsheet source plugin exposes seven configuration options. The values to use might change depending on the presence of a header row, but all of them apply for both types of document. Here is a summary of the available configurations:

• file is required. It stores the path to the document to process. You can use a relative path from the Drupal root, an absolute path, or stream wrappers.
• worksheet is required. It contains the name of the one worksheet to process.
• header_row is optional. This number indicates which row containing the headers. Contrary to CSV migrations, the row number is not zero-based. So, set this value to 1 if headers are on the first row, 2 if they are on the second, and so on.
• origin is optional and defaults to A2. It indicates which non-header cell contains the first value you want to import. It assumes a grid layout and you only need to indicate the position of the top-left cell value.
• columns is optional. It is the list of columns you want to make available for the migration. In case of files with a header row, use those header values in this list. Otherwise, use the default title for columns: A, B, C, etc. If this setting is missing, the plugin will return all columns. This is not ideal, especially for very large files containing more columns than needed for the migration.
• row_index_column is optional. This is a special column that contains the row number for each record. This can be used as unique identifier for the records in case your dataset does not provide a suitable value. Exposing this special column in the migration is up to you. If so, you can come up with any name as long as it does not conflict with header row names set in the columns configuration. Important: this is an autogenerated column, not any of the columns that come with your dataset.
• keys is optional and, if not set, it defaults to the value of row_index_column. It contains an array of column names that uniquely identify each record. For files with a header row, you can use the values set in the columns configuration. Otherwise, use default column titles like A, B, C, etc. In both cases, you can use the row_index_column column if it was set. Each value in the array will contain database storage details for the column.

Note that nowhere in the plugin configuration you specify the file type. The same setup applies for both Microsoft Excel and LibreOffice Calc files. The library will take care of detecting and validating the proper type.

Migrating spreadsheet files with a header row

This example is for the paragraph migration and uses a LibreOffice Calc file. The following snippets shows the UD Example Sheet worksheet and the configuration of the source plugin:

book_id, book_title, Book author
B10, The definitive guide to Drupal 7, Benjamin Melançon et al.
B20, Understanding Drupal Views, Carlos Dinarte
B30, Understanding Drupal Migrations, Mauricio Dinarte

source:
  plugin: spreadsheet
  file: modules/custom/ud_migrations/ud_migrations_sheets_sources/sources/udm_book_paragraph.ods
  worksheet: 'UD Example Sheet'
  header_row: 1
  origin: A2
  columns:
    - book_id
    - book_title
    - 'Book author'
  row_index_column: 'Document Row Index'
  keys:
    book_id:
      type: string

The name of the plugin is spreadsheet. Then you use the file configuration to indicate the path to the file. In this case, it is relative to the Drupal root. The UD Example Sheet is set as the worksheet to process. Because the first row of the file contains the header rows, then header_row is set to 1 and origin to A2.

Then specify which columns to make available to the migration. In this case, we listed all of them so this setting could have been left unassigned. It is better to get into the habit of being explicit about what you import. If the file were to change and more columns were added, you would not have to update the file to prevent unneeded data to be fetched. The row_index_column is not actually used in the migration, but it is set to show all the configuration options in the example. The values will be 1, 2, 3, etc.  Finally, the keys is set the column that serves as unique identifiers for the records.

The rest of the migration is almost identical to the CSV example. Small changes were made to prevent machine name conflicts with other examples in the demo repository. For reference, the following snippet shows the process and destination sections for the LibreOffice Calc paragraph migration.

process:
  field_ud_book_paragraph_title: book_title
  field_ud_book_paragraph_author: 'Book author'
destination:
  plugin: 'entity_reference_revisions:paragraph'
  default_bundle: ud_book_paragraph

Migrating spreadsheet files without a header row

Now let’s consider an example of a spreadsheet file that does not have a header row. This example is for the image migration and uses a Microsoft Excel file. The following snippets shows the UD Example Sheet worksheet and the configuration of the source plugin:

P01, https://agaric.coop/sites/default/files/pictures/picture-15-1421176712.jpg
P02, https://agaric.coop/sites/default/files/pictures/picture-3-1421176784.jpg
P03, https://agaric.coop/sites/default/files/pictures/picture-2-1421176752.jpg

source:
  plugin: spreadsheet
  file: modules/custom/ud_migrations/ud_migrations_sheets_sources/sources/udm_book_paragraph.ods
  worksheet: 'UD Example Sheet'
  header_row: 1
  origin: A2
  columns:
    - book_id
    - book_title
    - 'Book author'
  row_index_column: 'Document Row Index'
  keys:
    book_id:
      type: string

The plugin, file, amd worksheet configurations follow the same pattern as the paragraph migration. The difference for files with no header row is reflected in the other parameters. header_row is set to null to indicate the lack of headers and origin is to A1. Because there are no column names to use, you have to use the ones provided by the spreadsheet. In this case, we want to use the first two columns: A and B. Contrary to CSV migrations, the spreadsheet plugin does not allow you to define aliases for unnamed columns. That means that you would have to use A, B in the process section to refer to these columns.

row_index_column is set to null because it will not be used. And finally, in the keys section, we use the A column as the primary key. This might seem like an odd choice. Why use that value if you could use the row_index_column as the unique identifier for each row? If this were an isolated migration, that would be a valid option. But this migration is referenced from the node migration explained in the previous example. The lookup is made based on the values stored in the A column. If we used the index of the row as the unique identifier, we would have to update the other migration or the lookup would fail. In many cases, that is not feasible nor desirable.

Except for the name of the columns, the rest of the migration is almost identical to the CSV example. Small changes were made to prevent machine name conflicts with other examples in the demo repository. For reference, the following snippet shows part of the process and destination section for the Microsoft Excel image migration.

process:
  psf_destination_filename:
    plugin: callback
    callable: basename
    source: B # This is the photo URL column.
destination:
  plugin: 'entity:file'

Refer to this entry to know how to run migrations that depend on others. In this case, you can execute them all by running: drush migrate:import --tag='UD Sheets Source'. And that is how you can use Microsoft Excel and LibreOffice Calc files as the source of your migrations. This example is very interesting because each of the migration uses a different source type. The node migration explained in the previous post uses a Google Sheet. This is a great example of how powerful and flexible the Migrate API is.

What did you learn in today’s blog post? Have you migrated from Microsoft Excel and LibreOffice Calc files before? If so, what challenges have you found? Did you know the source plugin configuration is not dependent on the file type? Share your answers in the comments. Also, I would be grateful if you shared this blog post with others.

Next: Defining Drupal migrations as configuration entities with the Migrate Plus module

This blog post series, cross-posted at UnderstandDrupal.com as well as here on Agaric.coop, is made possible thanks to these generous sponsors. Contact Understand Drupal if your organization would like to support this documentation project, whether it is the migration series or other topics.

Benjamin lives and works to connect people, ideas, and resources so more awesome things happen.

A web developer well-established with Drupal and PHP, he has also been enjoying programming projects with Django and Python. His work with Agaric clients has included universities (MIT and Harvard University), corporations (Backupify and GenArts), and not-for-profit organizations (Partners In Health and National Institute for Children's Health Quality).

Benjamin tries to aid struggles for justice and liberty, or try not to do harm in the meantime. He is an organizer of the  People Who Give a Damn, recognized as an incorporated entity by the IRS and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts charities division. He has also supported several artistic and philanthropic ventures and was a founding, elected director to the Amazing Things Arts Center in Framingham, Massachusetts.

He led 34 authors in writing the 1,100 page Definitive Guide to Drupal 7, but he is probably still best known in the Drupal community for posting things he finds to data.agaric.com where developers running into the same challenges find, if not answers, comfort that they are not alone.

You can get more (too much) of ben on a cooperatively-run part of the fediverse at @mlncn@social.coop.

Agaric, as a worker collective, does not have bosses and employees. We have skilled, hard-working teammates coming together to figure out and do ... everything.

We will make an exception to hire an excellent business director, project leader, attention-to-detail-and-the-big-picture person. If you happen to be a front end dev too, then great! If not, well, part of your role will be helping bring on more talent.

In addition to forging grand coalitions and leading amazing projects, we need help keeping track of invoices and payments and doing financial planning, managing people's skills and availability, and writing role descriptions way better than this one.

We want someone who expects within six months of joining us to have helped make things 300% more awesome. As a principal or a hired boss, part of this role will be making the decisions of what to prioritize, and saying no to potential projects that don't fit.

OK we'll just say it: We want someone to be Agaric's Liza Kindred.

Want to be part of something that's bigger than yourself, that works on projects and ideas bigger still?

Agaric's model is Free and Open: free and open standards, free and open work and management, free and open source code, free and open documentation. So be prepared to help us share everything we build, as a collective company and with code, to the Drupal community and beyond.

Agaric is not just about doing web work as a collective. We work on interesting, exciting projects (both client work for solid financial compensation and our own platform-building initiatives for dreams of riches). We then, also collectively, take some of the resources, skills, and connections we gain in this work to help build tools, networks, and open learning projects that change the world for the better. We see tremendous potential for a better world by helping people gain more control over their own lives, and open source free software is both a metaphor and a tool for how we can better lives.

We welcome serious and/or comical inquiries.

Surviving a civil war has a way of making a person focus on the present. Putting in a solid day of work and taking time with family tend to come before putting items on an agenda for a board meeting, even if one owns the company.

Most of the 30 workers at Brookline-based A Yard and a Half Landscaping, who have chosen to take ownership of their company and transform it into a cooperative, are immigrants from El Salvador. From 1980 to 1992, El Salvador endured a civil war in which 80,000 people died—more than two percent of the population—including many, many noncombatants, most killed by the US- and oligarch-backed anti-Communist military government. The violence still echoes.

The Yard and a Half landscapers are laying a new path of owning and managing the company themselves. To do so successfully, they must cultivate a culture of involvement in decision-making. Carolyn Edsell-Vetter is the first CEO and President of A Yard and a Half Landscaping Cooperative after its transition from ownership by its founder. Carolyn, who was the featured speaker at the Boston worker coop meetup on November 17, is determined to work herself out of presidency of the board. Along with ownership, all worker-owners must take on more leadership roles, including board officerships (all worker-owners are already on the board of directors).

For many at the meetup, the challenges Carolyn recounted about making a cooperative work matched experiences of our own, even though none of the rest of us were part of a transition from a non-coop company. Indeed, those of us in and out of cooperatives found much to discuss, from democracy to dollars.

How we talk about work and other things in worker-owned cooperatives was itself a topic of interest. Part of this is treating everyone with respect and trying to remove oppressive language, words and phrases or statements that intentionally or unintentionally reinforce racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and gender conformity.

"We spend about 30 minutes a working day working on our language," said James Bachez of Boston Collective Delivery, "and not the lunch hour." Collective organization calls for a "whole new language just beginning to understand." James stood up and paced while he thought and spoke. "Capitalist businesses talk about culture all the time," as something set from the top. Company culture is key for cooperatives too, but it comes from everyone. "The coop develops its culture. It's there. Whatever bubbles up to the top. I feel far more effective as part of a cooperative."

Most agreed that working on communication needs to be a constant, conscious effort. Collaboration, like other skills, should not be left to chance. Carolyn's praise of the AORTA Collective for its help with cooperative assistance was echoed by other cooperatives in attendance. Carolyn further thanked the Boston Interpreters Collective for making multilingual workshops possible.

The business of co-owning a business calls for financial literacy for all workers, too. "Everyone needs to know how to read a P&L", said Carolyn, referring to a statement that shows the profit and loss of a business. Used to see and estimate sales and expenses, it is fundamental to understanding any business's financial health.

We talked a great deal about fair compensation and balancing effort and types of work. A Yard and A Half does not have the same pay rate for all workers, and exactly what to pay everyone "has been really contentious. We inherited the wage structure from the previous owner," said Carolyn. They wanted their starting wages to be higher, but now people coming in can get almost as much as a crew leader who has been working for ten years. Either all pay rates have to bump up proportionately, or pay differentials have to flatten and everyone needs to be all right with that. "Thirty-five percent of cost to field labor would make us uncompetitive."

Like Carolyn, most felt there could be fair tiered systems in cooperatives, but no one felt they had one permanent answer. "This is how worker cooperatives reconcile the valuation of our labor in a capitalist system," said James, "while building something new." Most felt equal pay to be a good goal, but also that more experience, more responsibility, or just doing boring work no one else wanted to do could all justify more money. Sharing skills and sharing different kinds of work might be ideal, but isn't always practical and different work can be treated differently to have an overall just outcome. One attendee said she learned in Argentina that retirement age for physical labor is set lower, at 50 years.

Whatever the pay, there's no replacement for enjoying what one does. "Landscaping, you just have to love it," Carolyn said, "to make it through one season. We've had people come to [start their first day of] work and turn in their work clothes at lunch break." For those who like all that physical work, changing landscapes, making things beautiful, are extremely worthwhile.

A final big topic we talked about was hierarchy. A cooperative does not mean you don't have one person in charge of certain domains. Hierarchies help accomplish specific tasks efficiently, but they need not be permanent, and the structure adopted for a specific purpose or project in a cooperative is "a consensual hierarchy".

As interesting as our common ground was, the transition-specific experiences were also fascinating. A Yard and a Half has some great advantages coming from a transition— an established, profitable business and the passed-on wisdom from their founder, including advice which Carolyn said they are just beginning to recognize the truth of: "You either have to grow or you'll lose ground." The clientele is largely friendly to the progressive business that was built and the worker cooperative that it has become: hippies done good, people who want their kids or grandkids to be able to run around on the grass and eat dirt without being poisoned, thanks to a decision to stop using chemical pesticides and adopt organic practices.

Unexpected challenges of A Yard and a Half's transition to a cooperative corporation included having to re-establish the company's credit. Some businesses wanted personal guarantees from all of the owners for debts. They had to discuss and ultimately accept that some worker-owners—with homes and credit cards—were putting more at risk than others.

Transitioning from a hierarchical structure or creating a new worker cooperative both mean learning to self-govern. It is work that all in attendance recognized as hard but affirmed as worthwhile. Worker cooperatives offer control over our own work, increased control over our lives, and the promise of, perhaps, an economic base that can support collective liberty and justice.

A Yard and a Half Landscaping was not the only inspiring worker-owned cooperative we got to learn about that night. Boston Collective Delivery is one of three cooperatives in a fledgling federation that plans to grow, and in five years or so apply to be accepted into Mondragon, the largest federation of worker-owned cooperatives in the world— but we hope to learn and write about more on that later. There's no reason for you to wait if you're anywhere near Boston though! Meetup coordinator Micky Metts, James, many other attendees, and many more look forward to meeting interested people at WORC'N's holiday party this evening at Industry Lab. Join the meetup group for notice of new events or the WORC'N discussion list for discussion of worker cooperatives in the Boston area, including notice of these meetups.

Websites powered by Find It connect people to all that their communities have to offer.  Developed under the guidance of the Cambridge Kids' Council on a Free and Open Source License, Find It ensures that people from all backgrounds can easily find activities, services, and resources.

Find It's design was informed by hundreds of hours of research, including over 1,250 resident surveys and over 120 interviews with service providers. Six years of research and development and continuous improvements has resulted in the Find It approach and platform, ready to be implemented in cities and communities around the world.

When writing a bio, think about the voice and tone you'd like to use and the audience you are speaking to. What information will site visitors want to know about this person? What questions are they trying to answer when they visit your team's profile pages?

If written in the first person, this is a great opportunity for someone's personality to come through.

In preparation for Agaric's migration training at DrupalCon Seattle, we've seen again that getting a development environment suitable for working on Drupal 8 with Composer is a big road block. For that reason, here are instructions for getting it all going, suitable for our training or for working on Drupal in a code sprint, with only one hard requirement: PHP.

Getting a local development going is a problem for everyone, including programmers and people who should be skilled at this. Vagrant and DrupalVM were created to make identical development environments work on any computer. Unfortunately, that's more a pipe dream than a promise, as our own experiences and support requests we've received can attest,

Docker is another attempt to make local development match production environments, and a newer generation of Drupal-adjacent development workflow tools, such as DDEV, Lando, Docksal, and Humpback, build on it. Using an online development environment is also an option, but has too much reliance on working WiFi for conference situations.

The goal is any Drupal development environment—any of the above or anything else—where you can go to your project root directory in a terminal and type, say, composer update and have If you don't have a local development environment of any kind, here is the minimalist approach. All the steps start with opening your terminal.

Goal

The most power possible for all people over our own lives.

Building blocks of freedom

• Free software
• Cooperative platforms
• Solidarity economy (examples: Ujima Boston, Cooperation Jackson)
• Personal power (ask Micky)

Power is coordination

“Knowledge is not power,” said Mariame Kaba (prisonculture), who knows a thing or two about it as a longtime organizer focusing on ending violence, dismantling the prison industrial complex, practicing transformative justice, and supporting youth leadership development.

Power is organization.

Ben tends to fixate on the injustices caused by an organized, unaccountable minority making decisions affecting a much larger but unorganized majority, but there are plenty of problems that have nothing or little to do with the problem of concentrated benefit and distributed cost.  They're just still problems because we, society, hasn't gotten our act together.  Traffic jams affect millions of people who, while mostly not in the 1% of income or wealth, are easily in the top couple quintiles.

Coordination requires not doing everything oneself

Ben notes: I strongly believes that we, people generally, need to have the ultimate say in the things that affect our lives, including our own workplaces, our Internet connection, our home water supply, mediating platforms like Facebook and Google, and our medical care.

That does not mean I or anyone else wants to be micromanaging my coworkers, laying cables and arguing protocols, inspecting plumbing, reviewing commits and moderating posts, and ordering doctors and nurses around.

Even various approaches to direct democracy don't mean people do all the work directly.  But how can we be the ultimate decision-makers in so many aspects of society?

"The market" is attractive here: vote with your money.

A regular systematic redistribution of wealth could make that a feasible answer, but for now it means a certain few dozen people have more decision-making power than a few billion people.

So we need to try some other way of delegating authority.

On the problem of self-selected leaders

The major problem — one of the major problems, for there are several — one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

Chapter 28, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.

Solutions to the problem of self-selected leaders

• Citizens' Assembly: "a representative group of citizens who are selected at random from the population to learn about, deliberate upon, and make recommendations in relation to a particular issue or set of issues. Other similar bodies have operated in parts of Canada – notably British Columbia and Ontario – and there is a citizens’ assembly currently operating in Ireland. This website [citizensassembly.co.uk] draws together experiences of Citizens Assemblies in the UK."

Democracy at scale: Historically possible

almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not.

David Graeber and David Wengrow, "How to change the coures of human history (at least, the part that's already happened)" (2 March 2018) accessed 2018 December.

Tyranny of structurelessness

During the years in which the [open source] movement has been taking shape, a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main -- if not sole -- organizational form of the movement.  The source of this idea was a natural reaction against the over-structured [corporations and universities] in which most of us found ourselves, and the inevitable control this gave others over our lives, and the continual elitism of the Left and similar groups among those who were supposedly fighting this overstructuredness.

The idea of "[openness/structurelessness]," however, has moved from a healthy counter to those tendencies to becoming a goddess in its own right. The idea is as little examined as the term is much used, but it has become an intrinsic and unquestioned part of [open source philosophy]. For the early development of the movement this did not much matter. It early defined its main goal, and its main method, as [writing working code and] consciousness-raising, and the "structureless" [open] group was an excellent means to this end. The looseness and informality of it encouraged participation in discussion, and its often supportive atmosphere elicited personal insight.  If nothing more concrete than personal [itch-scratching and] insight ever resulted from these groups, that did not much matter, because their purpose did not really extend beyond this.

Jo Freeman (aka Joreen) famous essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness (with the references to the women's liberation movement replaced with references to free software).

See also Cathy Levine's response, "The Tyranny of Tyranny".  An excerpt:

Contrary to the belief that lack of up-front structures lead to insidious, invisible structures based on elites, the absence of structures in small, mutual trust groups fights elitism on the basic level — the level of personal dynamics, at which the individual who counters insecurity with aggressive behaviour rules over the person whose insecurity maintains silence. The small personally involved group learns, first to recognise those stylistic differences, and then to appreciate and work with them; rather than trying to either ignore or annihilate differences in personal style, the small group learns to appreciate and utilise them, thus strengthening the personal power of each individual.

Related

Meritocracy

The word meritocracy comes from a political satire. It was never meant to be something we should aspire to. It was the opposite, actually, a warning about how we rationalize what we believe we've "earned". If that sentence doesn't seem to you applicable to the tech industry and our cyclical discussions about sexism, racism, and even occasionally classism,

... then read that blog post, "you keep using that word" (content warning: cuss words).

Rough consensus

Common in technical projects, a particular approach of "rough consensus"—a decision moves forward when all objections have been resolved in a way that everyone can live with or at least have been seriously considered and judged not to be showstoppers, whether or not anyone is still actively making the objection—is probably best described as the Internet Engineering Task Force's ideal in an informational document by Pete Resnick, On Consensus and Humming in the IETF.

Decision-making in Drupal

Drupal is not a democracy

The governance group itself, along with its assignment, is a product of the very power structure it's tasked with reworking. The task force was personally approved by the dictator for life. It reports to the dictator for life. Any decision on its recommendations will be made by the dictator for life.

Nedjo Rogers, Drupal and governance.

Governance group agrees

Having a BDFL model means loyalty, time, and attention is divided. There is often frustration as pressure for change and decisions reach an individual bottleneck. There is a strong feeling that any community change or action requires Dries’ approval before commencing let alone expanding. The project is bigger than one individual; it’s time to recognise that and place a community group at the center.

The Drupal Governance Task Force 2018 Proposal; see the issue posted for this in the Drupal Community Governance project.

Background reading

In addition to the works quoted above, here are some that informed our presentation.

Articles

• Drupal and governance
• Six principles for conversational transformation
• Drupal as a political act
• The dehumanizing myth of meritocracy
• Drupal's Governance
• Zapatista - Caracoles - Resistance and Autonomy
• Murray Bookchin and the Kurdish resistance

Books

• Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, by Jessica Gordon Nembard
• Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta
• The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939 edited by Sam Dolgoff (full text online)

Other links of interest

• Loomio's Decision-making Handbook
• Cooperative Resources
• Privacy and Security in the Digital era