funding

It's easy to make a living building Drupal solutions, and there's a good business case for contributing patches, documentation and new features to modules. But increasingly, we all depend on "tools to build tools", such as CCK, Views, Drupal core enhancements, and other frameworks or API's that make our work point-and-click easy.

These efforts are more difficult to fund because it takes a long time to architect and perfect a reusable solution before it begins to save us all time and money. Usually, that means that one intrepid developer or company must invest a lot of up-front effort. How do we make these efforts sustainable, or support other work that provides a long-term return on investment without immediate gains?

It's important to showcase business models that are making this work, but in contrast with the company showcase sessions, this panel will include both business leaders and individual developers who are making this work on their own. We had a fantastic dialog using this format in Paris, and it will be great to see what has changed during the past year.