Many of the current strategic initiatives in Drupal are based on the principle of user-centered design. When executed well, this means that the needs, goals, and feedback of the end-user are part of the decision making process at every step of development.
Historically, gathering meaningful user feedback has required community volunteers, user surveys, the occasional academic user study, and the expertise of UX experts in our community. And those efforts will continue to be crucial. But we have always hoped to be able to gather real user data on a much broader scale, and proposed a telemetry initiative as early as 2018.
One of the primary tools of modern software development is integration of an telemetry/analytics platform. This can take many forms, from the kinds of analytics data we're used to gathering on the websites, to crash reporting, to user interface heatmaps, to full session/user journey recording. We see these tools integrated with just about every piece of software we use today— whether proprietary or open source—including operating systems like Mac OS, or browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
We'd like to collect similar data to inform the development of Drupal. At this scale, the data can provide us statistically significant insights into what features of Drupal are most commonly used, what creates the most friction, and what most needs our attention in future development. It can also allow us to run UX experiments, ensuring we produce software that is as intuitive as it can be.
In order to do this in alignment with Drupal's principles, we must implement any such system on a foundation that respects user-privacy and choice. Site owners, especially those in regulated industries, must be able to opt-out of data collection, and any telemetry platform we choose must be built with privacy-first principles, ensuring compliance with GDPR and other regulations, and allowing us to house the data in jurisdictions we can trust.
The Drupal Association has been evaluating a number of platforms and potential partners, first through the lens of privacy and regulatory compliance, and then through the lens of scalability and data management. For reasons of internal resource constraints, it's our preference to find a partner that is willing to run this telemetry platform as a managed service, and who will be accountable and liable to protect our community's data.
We've chosen to explore this idea with PiwikPro, a European organization that specializes in privacy and regulatory compliance, including in highly regulated contexts like HIPAA compliance. They offer data warehousing in a variety of jurisdictions around the world, including the ability to 'bring-your-own-keys'. And they have a shared origin with the Matomo project, meaning that they have a strong understanding of Open Source communities and values. They are used by a number of large Drupal organizations around the world, including one of the institutions most strongly advocating for user privacy: the European Commission.
Piwik PRO has joined this project with The Drupal Association because we want to help the DA better understand real usage patterns and shape the future of the Drupal platform with data driven insights.
~ Nicolai Munch Andersen
We'll start our exploration by instrumenting the Drupal CMS trial, and limiting our data gathering to a small initial set of information about application usage. We intend to work closely with the Drupal CMS leadership team to decide what user journeys we want to measure, and how we can share that data in a responsible way with initiative leads and key maintainers to make Drupal the best it can be.
