Karen Borchert on Product Managing an Open Source Distribution

Phase2 Technology's Karen Borchert has a relatively unique position in the Drupal community. She's the product manager for four major open source Drupal distributions, and she talks about her responsibilities and what it takes to create a successful distribution as well as the challenges around finding the right revenue streams to make working on distributions viable.

She talks specifically about Open Atrium, Open Publish, Open Public and Managing News / Tattler, and what the three major needs that each of these distributions are trying to solve. Borchert talks about the importance of listening to the needs of customers, and has a lot of insight into finding the right business strategy for open source distributions.

It'll definitely be interesting to watch Phase2 as they experiment with different business models, such as the possibility of Drupal Apps, which could ultimately help to grow the Drupal ecosystem.