Community Heroes

If I were to ask you who your favorite super hero was, who would you choose? Would you pick the Man of Steel, your friendly neighborhood Spider Man, or maybe the Dark Knight? Might you choose a group of heroes like the Fantastic Four, the Avengers or the Justice League? Some of you might pick a real life sports hero like Michael Jordan, Joe Montana or Pelé. Or maybe you would pick a great leader like Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa or Lech Wałęsa. All of these superheroes, both real and imagined are known for their amazing skills and their willingness to serve others.

One of the aspects of working on an Open Source project is that I am surrounded every day by people who exhibit these same traits. I think of the many nights and weekends that DNN community members spend working to build and improve the DNN platform that we all know and love. These community members bring their many unique talents to bear, solving programming problems both big and small. For me, as a programmer, these people are some of my heroes.

For the past decade we have asked community members to contribute code to help improve the platform. For a long time we erected large barriers which made that task difficult or impossible for many. Whether it was the tools we used to manage the project or the processes we implemented, there always seemed to be some huge wall that community members were forced to scale. Needless to say for many years we didn't get a lot of code contributions. 18 months ago we set out to fix our infrastructure tooling to make it easier for the community to follow code changes in real time, and to even contribute code directly to the project. The code contributions increased, but it wasn't anywhere near the quantity or quality of contributions we saw on other Open Source projects.

To me, one of the biggest advantages that Open Source software has over any other software development model is that it is better able to scale. The best projects are able to fix code faster and implement better features in a shorter amount of time. It is not uncommon in large Open Source projects to have hundreds or thousands of developers working on the project. The ability of DNN to compete and win in the marketplace is directly tied to our ability to iterate faster and implement features and fixes faster and better than our competitors. Although we had fixed most of our basic infrastructure issues, our processes were still hindering the project.

This last fall I worked to remove many of the process barriers that were holding the platform back. I reached out to many leaders in the community and asked them to work with me to help fix many of the issues I saw in the community. I also asked community members to get involved and contribute to the platform. At first people were a little hesitant. No one wants to spend a lot of effort working on something that is not appreciated or used. Once community members saw that I was serious, a dramatic change began to occur.

In the first twelve months after we moved to GitHub we received 147 pull requests. This is roughly 12 pull requests per month. In September and October this past year we received 37 pull requests (18.5/month). This was good. Activity was headed in the right direction. And then things got exciting. In November and December, in the heat of working on DNN 7.4, community members contributed 67 pull requests (33.5/month) and that pace continued into January when we received another 36 pull requests. As you can see in the graph below, this is getting quite exciting.

The number of pull requests only paints half the picture though. Not only was the number of contributions increasing, but the project started getting larger and more complex bug fixes, enhancements and even a few product features. You can see the numbers very clearly as you break down contributions by the DNN releases.

In every category, the community has had a huge impact on DNN 7.4. We have not had this level of community participation on a single platform release in almost a decade. DNN has an amazing community that loves the product and that have shown they are willing to help maintain and grow the platform. I am especially grateful to the 22 people listed below who stepped up to work on this release. If you run across any of these people in the forums please thank them.

Contributions

*If your contribution is listed here, but I don't have your full name then please leave me a comment and I'll be happy to update the list. Also, if you think I missed your contribution in the list also leave a comment.

I want to thank everyone who contributed to the release of DNN 7.4 which should be out by the time most people are reading this. I am excited by all the progress we have made in community these last 6 months and I look forward to the progress we will surely continue to make in 2015. As Navin Nagiah likes to say – Onward and Upward.