Explore how Ecosyste.ms Funds can help support Drupal community initiatives, working groups, and teams

[gusaus]

Building on the discussion from ecosyste-ms/packages#980, we'd like to explore how Ecosyste.ms Funds can align with Drupal’s funding models and help support its community initiatives, working groups, and teams.

Context

• The Drupal ecosystem has over 48,000 contributed projects, but core and its dependencies account for a very small fraction. This presents a challenge for usage-based funding models, as they tend to prioritize the most popular projects—many of which already receive sponsorship through other means (Who Sponsors Drupal Development).
• There’s already a dedicated Drupal Fund via Ecosyste.ms, and an existing Drupal Collective on Open Collective, which houses projects for core, community initiatives, and working groups. These existing resources can be leveraged to address funding gaps.
• Drupal already tracks contributions (including non-code) through its Contribution Credit system, which may be useful for informing funding allocation decisions—but on its own, it won’t necessarily surface underfunded projects or initiatives.

Use Cases and Challenges

• Contributed Projects: With core and key dependencies representing a small portion of the ecosystem, many high-impact contributed projects could be overlooked in a purely usage-based model. We need ways to prioritize projects that don’t already have robust sponsorship or financial backing.
• Community Initiatives, Working Groups, and Teams: These often have low code usage metrics and contribute in ways that aren’t easily quantifiable (strategy, governance, mentorship, etc.). Even with the contribution credit system, they may not surface high enough in funding algorithms.
• Manual Allocation vs. Automation: While the Ecosyste.ms platform offers automated allocation based on metrics, there’s a clear need for manual fund allocation—especially for initiatives that fall outside the scope of typical dependency analysis.

Options We're Exploring

1. A dynamic leaderboard of funders/contributors, similar to ecosyste-ms/funds#236, to recognize financial supporters and increase visibility across the ecosystem.
2. A separate fund via Ecosyste.ms or Open Collective focused specifically on sustaining Drupal’s community initiatives, working groups, and strategic projects. This would complement the existing Drupal Fund.
3. Leveraging the existing Drupal Collective to centralize and manually allocate funding. Collective admins could distribute funds to community initiatives and underfunded projects, addressing gaps in automated, usage-based allocations.
4. Potential integration with Drupal.org tooling, such as:
   • Funding module (to allow projects to add a funding.yml and opt in for funding opportunities).
   • Innovation Hub (to identify and prioritize key community initiatives).
   • Open Collective module (to streamline funding workflows and visibility).

Goals

• Provide transparent and scalable funding mechanisms for both code and non-code contributions in the Drupal ecosystem.
• Increase visibility and recognition for funders, sponsors, and contributors through a dynamic leaderboard or dashboard.
• Ensure equitable funding distribution that supports not only high-usage projects but also community initiatives and underfunded teams.

Next Steps

We’d love to hear thoughts on:

• The feasibility and potential benefits of creating a separate project or fund specifically for community initiatives.
• How best to integrate Ecosyste.ms funding with existing Drupal.org tools and initiatives.
• Whether leveraging the existing Drupal Collective is the best approach for manual allocation.

[gusaus]

Following up on the idea of a separate Drupal Fund for community initiatives, working groups, and teams (mentioned in the issue description):

The existing Drupal Fund covers the entire ecosystem, but its usage-based funding model tends to prioritize core and highly used contributed projects. Many community initiatives, working groups, and strategic teams—despite their critical roles—don’t meet the usage thresholds required to receive funding through the current algorithm.

Because of this, a separate fund would allow us to:

• Collect contributions specifically aimed at sustaining these initiatives.
• Recognize and credit funders who want to support Drupal’s non-code contributions and community leadership efforts.
• Allocate funds directly to the groups and initiatives that need them most.

The good news is we already have a top-level Drupal Collective, which provides a structure for managing and manually allocating these funds as needed. Project maintainers also already have the ability to commit and manage a funding.yml to opt in to funding.

That said, while we won’t need to parse projects in this case, we’ll still need to work out and document a process for how this funding option works—and make sure we get the word out to maintainers and project leads. The Ecosyste.ms Funds Overview provides a helpful starting point.

Would love feedback from folks in the community and leadership about the feasibility and next steps for setting up this dedicated fund.

[gusaus]

This upcoming Open Source Pledge campaign could offer a great opportunity for organizations looking to financially support Drupal contributors. While the existing Drupal Fund provides a way to support the broader ecosystem, many funders may prefer a more focused option for supporting core, strategic initiatives, and community-led efforts—such as the proposed stand-alone "Drupal Community" fund outlined in this comment.

The campaign should also serve as a catalyst to work through these related action items:

• A dynamic leaderboard of funders/contributors, similar to #236, to recognize financial supporters and increase visibility across the ecosystem.
• Leveraging the existing Drupal Collective to centralize and manually allocate funding. Collective admins could distribute funds to community initiatives and underfunded projects, addressing gaps in automated, usage-based allocations.
• Potential integration with Drupal.org tooling, such as:
  • Funding module (to allow projects to add a funding.yml and opt in for funding opportunities),
  • Innovation Hub (to identify and prioritize key community initiatives), and
  • Open Collective module (to streamline funding workflows and visibility).

Looking forward to seeing what’s possible—and how we can move these ideas forward in alignment with the needs of the Drupal community.

[gusaus]

There’s a timely opportunity to pilot a targeted fund for the Drupal ecosystem, especially with the launch of the Drupal CMS Marketplace Initiative. The initiative aims to create a curated marketplace of site templates that lowers the barrier for new users while showcasing Drupal’s strengths.

As discussed on Talking Drupal #504, one major concern is that successful templates could place additional unpaid burdens on upstream module maintainers. A solution raised on the episode was the creation of a centralized fund to help offset those downstream support costs.

A Drupal Ecosystem Fund, powered by ecosyste.ms and Open Source Collective, could provide a transparent, automated solution—without requiring the Drupal Association to manage funds or distributions directly.

While automated payouts aren’t yet possible because Drupal uses its own GitLab instance, that limitation is tracked here: ecosyste-ms/packages#980. Setting up the fund now would allow the community to:

• Aggregate support from Drupal-aligned organizations, both within and outside the ecosystem
• Publicize the fund across upcoming events and partner networks
• Enable future allocation of funds to maintainers and contributors once GitLab support is added

With stakeholders from multiple ecosystems convening next week in Basel for Alt Ctrl Org and WordCamp Europe 2025, this is an ideal time to soft launch the fund.

Here are the available fields for fund setup. If the Marketplace working group would like to proceed and can agree on a name, I’d be happy to work with @andrew to get it set up before he goes offline in June.

[BenJam]

I think we're fairly open about the fact that, right now, Ecosystem Funds has a huge blindspot around non-code based dependencies. We have a plan to tackle that in the future but we're pressing on with the Ecosystem Dashboards that are intended to pair with Funds.

I think adding support for Drupal Modules and adding a specific Drupal module fund, separate from the Drupal fund we created from GitHub data is a good, quick, first step ecosyste-ms/packages#980 (comment).

That could be a good way for successful template creators to support the work of modules in a general sense, but we'll be adding package manifest and SBOM support in the future for more specific giving.

One question I have is: do Drupal Modules use the funding.yml spec as it is today, in their repo's?

[gusaus]

Following up on @BenJam’s comment (#256 (comment)), I was under the impression that once Drupal’s GitLab is supported (ecosyste-ms/packages#980), the modules included in Marketplace templates would automatically surface on funds.ecosyste.ms/funds/drupal.

What I’ve been proposing above is the creation of curated funds (#290) to help support the development and maintenance of these templates (and their dependencies) — with a particular focus on enabling more independent contributors to participate.

These could include:

• Drupal Community Fund – to support contributor pathways, onboarding, and mentorship
• Drupal Innovation Fund – to support contributions to projects and programs associated with the Drupal Innovation initiative

While I previously asked @andrew about setting up the former, it now seems more appropriate, based on a recent follow-up with @hestenet (CTO of the Drupal Association), to wait until DA leadership has a chance to review this issue and approve the creation of each fund.