Two weeks ago, I stumbled upon a two-part blog post by Alex Russell, titled Effective Standards Work
.
The first part (The Lay Of The Land
) sets the stage. The second part (Threading the Needle
) attempts to draw conclusions.
It’s worth reading if you’re interested in how Drupal is developed, or in how any consensus-driven open source project works (rather than the increasingly common “controlled by a single corporate entity” “open source”).
It’s written with empathy, modesty and honesty. It shows the struggle of somebody given the task and opportunity to help shape/improve the developer experience of many, but not necessarily the resources to make it happen. I’m grateful he posted it, because something like this is not easy to write nor publish — which he also says himself:
I’ve been drafting and re-drafting versions of this post for almost 4 years. In that time I’ve promised a dozen or more people that I had a post in process that talked about these issues, but for some of the reasons I cited at the beginning, it has never seemed a good time to hit “Publish”. To those folks, my apologies for the delay.