 Some familiar faces nice to see We're gonna Probably make this a little participatory I wasn't quite sure what the stage was me like I had this vision of being able to even sit on the side of the stage But I don't think that's gonna work For those of you who don't know me Tom Erickson, I'm a How does this supposed to go? It's like I'm a droop list I've been a dripless for 10 years and I haven't used WordPress or Squarespace or Jumla for that period of time Something like that isn't how the confession goes But let's let's try to have a little bit of fun here Most of you if you don't know me I Have a very lofty title I've been Dries's partner at Acquia for really Since Acquia got started helped to start the company as a board member and became the CEO a little bit later and There's I'm gonna use today to talk a little bit about Some of the observations I've made In that time as a CEO So I've got a little bit of an agenda We're gonna vary from that and we're gonna have a few questions as well I'm just a couple of things about me. I'm You know I Am actually kind of a technical person I graduated with an engineering degree and I was a programmer in 1974 we didn't call them software engineers and the technical degree I have was actually an engineer and back then Anybody wanted to call them an engineer who didn't have an engineering degree was looked down on because you weren't really an Engineer, you know you were something else so I certainly started my life in a very technical way and Somewhere along the lines got involved in business and found out that other people were better at the technical things than I was and So I better get out of the way and let them do what they do better than me The last ten years have been really interesting. Yeah, if you if you don't want to hear from a non-technical guy Probably not a good place to be But It's been a very interesting time as far as Drupal cons and Drupal Community there have been times it's been very frustrating Certainly very times as well that it's been very humbling It's an amazing thing what the Drupal community is it is I I Every time I meet someone new and I talk about Drupal I talk about how amazing the community is that there's million plus members with tens of thousands of developers get together and Create something. That's totally awesome. And and I really believe that in the bottom of my heart I've never lost my enthusiasm and my passion And as I step down at Acquia as the CEO I'm planning to spend Some more time even on the board of the company and really trying to contribute back in in ways that I can Going forward So this is the business track of Drupal and I'm going to ask just a couple of questions about that I'm going to deviate from what I was asked to do which is help people understand how to build better businesses in Drupal And I'm actually going to talk a little bit to you as opposed to Sort of do that coaching role. I'm happy to do the coaching role and I've attended many many business summits and CxO days and other things where I've had the chance to play that role and I've enjoyed it a lot But that's not what's going to happen today. So First I want to just start out asking a bit about you. The first thing is are any of you I assume raise your hands How many of you are non-technical? Okay You only somewhat qualify you have because you also have business responsibilities So of those raise your hands again the people at their hands raised how many of you? Everybody it was non-technical. How many of you are responsible for a business? Leave your hands up like running an agency or something like that. So good number of you How many of you are technical Yeah, okay, so why did you come and you don't know it's interesting. Why did you come in the back? Get a different perspective, right? Okay. Well good. I'm glad and hopefully you'll get a different perspective here I do want to say that I I really do have an appreciation for everything that's That is technical. I realized the world does revolve around that we At Acre about two years ago decided we're gonna make all of our we're gonna make a much bigger focus on marketing to developers and Telling the story because developers are making a lot of decisions I think at the same time if you take a look at a lot of businesses with the proliferation of marketing technologies What we're seeing happening is that dollars are shifting from technical areas in businesses like IT departments and CIOs to Marketing departments and the decision-making for which tools they're going to use and how they're going to Deploy that is shifting and there are people who believe that in the future the marketing budgets around technology will be bigger than the IT budgets for For those businesses and in some businesses like Consumer technologies that might indeed be the case And so there's a big message here that replates to to that and I think it's important that we get that down So my next question and then I'll get into some of the things is how many of you think that Drupal is The very best CMS content management system on the market today All right, I'm not seeing some hands here. So help me understand. What is missing? Either yeah, you or somebody else right next to you sure Yeah, it is Mm-hmm. And what was that? Yeah, I said Woodpress great. Yeah, no, we're gonna talk a lot about names today and there won't be bad things We're gonna talk about marketing that won't be bad thing We're gonna talk about WordPress or talk about Squarespace. We're gonna talk about Adobe This is gonna get it all on here today. So bring it all out. Pardon me Life rail. So yeah, sure. Yeah Yeah, so it's a really good point depends on the use case as far as the best thing, you know, what is the best thing and That's that's a really good point anybody else have another perspective they want to share before I get stuck in Yeah, right Yes Yes, so it depends on the investment that deals with some of the things Rhys talked about this morning for those of you that saw the You know his keynote talked about Ambitious websites so Drupal very good for that. Yes. Yes Depends on support of the technology as well. Yeah. Yeah All great points. So what I want to do though now then is take that and Take these thoughts and lessons because as we think about those questions, it depends You then have to think about okay, how do we best make Drupal? All right, that's called positioning in marketing context How do you take what Drupal strengths are and how do you position it in the market? so that the right people know about it at the right time and you have a good chance of winning that client as opposed to position it incorrectly and trying to provide it to people who won't see the benefits of the product and That is all about this marketing thing that we'll talk a little bit about a little bit about more about me because It's fun to talk about yourself But just to give yourself some knowledge on my technical chops in 1981 I was the first person to put a computer on an offshore platform It was in Western, Australia, and it was a very big computer the size of this stage almost and We used it for project planning on building this billion dollar at the time. That was a lot of money Maybe it still is a lot of money But in 1981 a billion dollars was is a lot more money today And we used it for planning to try and save time and money on that platform And I was the tech guy responsible for that not the business person So when I talk about things that have a technical bias I want everybody to appreciate the fact that I talk about someone who has it in my heart and in my soul I still build computers today one of our clients a Drupal user very proud CMO of AMD Who introduced a new microprocessor a couple of few months ago? sent me a kit that I could build my own computer again because this is what I like to do and I Do that but at the same time I have to admit I've never committed a single line of code for Drupal not one Not any niente zilts zero nada, and I thought about it and and Well, I just didn't get it done at the same time What the heck have I been doing for ten years and and I like to think about the fact that I Wasn't a parasite just leveraging and living off of all the Drupal community efforts that we were doing things Also in contributing so you know we raised a lot of money at Acquia And we use that money to fund development to pay developers to pay marketers and others to do things with Drupal and We've also been selling the heck out of Drupal to anybody that will listen so Hundreds of thousands of miles of travel for me personally thousands of meetings dozens of presentations and Millions of dollars spent marketing Drupal just to give you some idea we spend For a typical analyst on any given year almost a quarter of a million dollars convince them that Drupal is a worthwhile solution And just lest you think that that's an easy job to do when we started Gartner who is not just a an enterprise analyst Gartner is also Somebody that universities listen to in nonprofits, you know, there are the people who say what's good in the CMS world And if Drupal wasn't in appropriate place in that chart It would loo it would not be considered for a lot of decisions And when we started talking to Gartner, they said well, what's the revenue that you get from Drupal? And we told them it was zero zero today It's going to be zero tomorrow and to be zero in five years But we have a lot of clients and these are big Organizations that matter and they said well, I'm afraid our criteria on the vertical access is revenue It's a primary driver of execution And what did we say to them? I got very furious at a table pounded the table This is that Drupal con Munich just in case you want to know when it happened and I said you need to change your criteria Because you guys are out of touch The world is going open source and all you have to do is see mule soft or MongoDB who filed last week for public offering or Obviously red hat or other players and you can see This is all happening So lo and behold eventually Gartner changed their criteria after we cancelled our subscription with them After we did some things and then we came back to the fold But that takes a lot of work It takes a lot of effort and it takes a lot of people who aren't developers and so the message I have is This world Takes a lot of work to make the whole Drupal ecosystem work Marketers are one it also takes designers it takes people that do videos it takes people that organize conferences and I think it's time that the Drupal community really start to accept the fact that a Community has to include and embrace all of those people. It's a concept. I call inclusion and Inclusion has been an area of discussion in the Drupal community This is something I call role inclusion and I think the future the Drupal community is going to be very much Based around the ability for that for this community for our community to include others And I'll walk through some of that later today, but just to give you a little bit of a briefing on Sorry, this is I'm talking too much and not Showing enough a little bit of a briefing on how well some of this stuff works This is a slide that we're gonna be able to share Sorry a video share with everybody and give back to the Drupal community So an example of giving back and just listen to this and then we'll see how you feel after this video Think for a moment of the brands and companies shaped by Drupal the power brands the makers the institutions the cultural icons that unite us The ones that make us sing carry us away the agile the resilient and the ones who support them The developers The millions across the globe The marketers The front line behind the glass the road warriors The people out in the wild fighting every day the agencies The masters of strategy and emotion so what do all these people have in common? The digital platform that powers some of the most exciting experiences on the web We guys think It's nice, huh? You know it needs some work a little bit. It's not it's not perfect And we have a chance to do that But it's something that we want to be able to to share and And give back and it really comes back to this idea that the Drupal ecosystem is more than code And it's time that you know, I think we start to recognize that and And after 10 years here The reason I titled this presentation Observations from the peanut gallery. I'm not sure that translates into all languages but the peanut gallery is where the people sit that don't matter and I will admit that I've sat through many of Drupal community sessions and areas and I felt like the person that doesn't matter even though we're contributing back in many different ways and I think it's time that we take a look at that and say hey, we're all in this together and whether you're a marketer or a designer a You know a technical support person back to the point that was brought up earlier We're all building a amazing community that does very very special things You know we need to put more value into the efforts of these designers the facilitators the event organizers the volunteers The case study and the creative agencies who create this The world just doesn't know about how powerful Drupal is Dries often goes places and we'll ask you know How many of you know of Drupal and the number still is relatively small compared to what it needs to be and the only way We're gonna get that change the only way we're gonna get that done is by valuing what marketers do and not using it You know as a dirty word Dries himself and thank you for joining us Dries has been bringing this issue up in different ways He wrote about the contributions And we've got this nice credit system in Drupal that talks and can walk through all the credits you give But what about the contributions of these non-technical folks? And I really want to take this opportunity to challenge us and the community think about how to measure those credits One of the ideas I have here Today is hey Why can't we give credits to case studies that are created and case studies that are submitted and and announce that and say hey, you know And Vika last Quarter did or last year did 30 case studies on Drupal including Arsenal wouldn't that be cool and And that gives credit to in vika in certain ways and and likewise and on and on and there's other ways to give credit I'll give you another example Do any of you remember the name of the person who built views or ninja originally? Earl Miles almost everybody knows that Do any of you remember the name of the individual who redesigned it in? 2004 sorry for Drupal 7 and made it substantially easier and made it so it could actually be used in a big way By a larger number of people No a designer was Kevin O'Leary working with Dries did a fantastic job Completely took worked with her all but completely took it and redesigned it so that it was much easier to use And that's the kind of celebration that I think we have to have in in this world So I've asked Dries about why the credit system is only for Code contributors and the answer you heard this morning, but I'm challenging that statement And I'm I really want the team to start to go out and say how can we measure things that are not code Contributions, how can we embrace those folks? How can we bring them into the fold and I'm going to talk a little bit more about that now? I may be getting a little bit extreme in my remarks here But I'm you know hopefully get the point of what I'm trying to make and the video showed us that the promotional efforts of marketers Are really important and we've had a chance to introduce people to Drupal that otherwise would would not be there I know marketing is word a dirty word to most developers and we've established that very few people here in this room are developers So what's not happening today is that words not getting out to them? It's a little bit like the debate I have with diversity In tech in general and I started a group at aquia called women at aquia and Then the group proceeded to then decide that they would only have the discussions amongst themselves And they never wanted to share any of their conclusions or any of their observations or any recommendations with the rest of the organization and My question there was how do you improve if you don't share if you don't communicate if you don't you know at least make requests and demands and ask for change and that's that same kind of of Effort that needs to happen here in the Drupal community where people need to say yeah hey at Drupal con I want to see marketers here I want them to be part of it. I want to see more designers. I want to celebrate what they do How do you get that? diversity into this community Hey marketing can be ugly thing. I did it Years ago. I did a sales training marketing and sales with a tech guy and he got up And he was doing the role play and we were doing role play one point You you role played the buyer in one point you role played the seller and he got up when he's role playing the seller and boy He just he started hammering the other individual and saying hey you got to get this. It's the best thing around It's not like anything else And I said whoa Andreas. Hold on. He was an English of obviously from German descent and And I said Andreas what what makes you think that that's what a sales person is and he said well last weekend I went to you know I forget the name of the high street store that sells appliances in the UK He said and that's what the sales guy was like and I said of course That's what you think a sales person is like and sales people can be pushy, you know and the word spam You know was invented You know 1993 let's say and it wasn't invented by a marketer for sure So there are lots of things that aren't nice about sales and lots of things There aren't nice about marketing But we need promotion and we have to embrace them not just as potential users, but also as our brethren and I do want to say that part of this certainly been recognized by Drupal community and you'll see some names up here And I'm sorry. I haven't got Miram up here But a big part of that as well You know and I purposely did not include And that you'll understand why in a second I did not include the great Drupal agencies that are around that are doing this as well So agencies have definitely been a really big part of promoting Drupal along the way But note that none of these agencies are sponsors And I'm not sure any of these people are here today Drupal con and we have to ask ourselves. Why not yet? They are out there selling and marketing Drupal So they're not full members of the community and there's reasons why they don't feel like they need to be and part of it Is and I would propose this is that they don't see the people at a Drupal con that they expect to be here and Need to be here in order for them to say Yeah, I'm gonna step up and be a better member of the Drupal community and that's another call to arms to say Why do we have to think about how we can change and what we need to do to be more inclusive? I will add that even though these success stories are there. They're not at scale for every Drupal Recommendation that's made today. I estimate there's another five that are made for a competitor So there's got to be work that we have to do It's not easy work, but it's work that has to be done through spending money And I hate to say this But it's not something normal that a normal agency who works off of the kind of cash flow that an agency works off of Can spend large sums of money to do and this is perhaps the most controversial thing. I'll say in my talk today is So while agencies can't afford to do it There are other companies that do have products and I'm going to use words and names and you know If you're from these companies feel free to stand up and say I disagree. I love a debate as trees knows and but You know if you take a look at what our brethren from Pantheon do they say They'll tell you if you haven't decided on Drupal don't talk to us when you decide come and talk to us And oh by the way, if you use WordPress as well, that's okay, too If we're going to be a Drupal community, we've got to find a way to put money behind the efforts And it can't just be aquia or if it is just aquia We need the community to stand up and say hey You know, we're going to trust aquia on some of this stuff in a way that the community doesn't trust aquia today So that is one of my most important observations In my time at aquia It feels crappy to be honest with you to feel like we're spending all this money And we're alone in this and then not getting any respect in the words of the great Rodney danger field of any of you Remember him Did a great movie called back to school anybody remember that? Happened to be filmed at my alma mater University of Wisconsin, so I can really identify with Rodney danger field and not getting respect so and now we're being threatened by some new fast-growing systems trees put up today a slide that said the Headless systems are growing at 500 percent a year 500% a year these organizations are spending money to do marketing because they own their technology So Drupal is competing against organizations Proprietary organizations spending money because they get the revenue from them and I would encourage the community to think about New ways to collaborate and cooperate for the benefit of everybody Which still allows more Drupal marketing to happen? And I've been picking on marketers a lot and I've been talking about it You know we have a lot of competitors adobe site core at the high-end wordpress wicks. We bleep at the low-end and these are the company spending Millions and they're not immune either wordpress is definitely being attacked if you haven't noticed by medium by square space and they're feeling the effects of what's happening to them on their core platforms So open source in general has some challenges to maintain a business model to be honest with you At the same time I have this theory that I believe in which is that the Drupal community is aging and The great Contributors who were in their 20s and had lots of time and free time as they started their agencies Now are in their 30s or 40s and have families with kids and mortgages and stuff That caused them to do other things in their spare time other than contribute to Drupal and This is another big challenge that has to be addressed Now some of that can be done through changing technology and getting new and exciting technologies like Dries talked about earlier today Into Drupal, you know, including JavaScript in ways that JavaScript can be included, you know And continuing to add those things that the 20-somethings want to work on and improving Drupal in that way but part of it also is about making Drupal cool and Quite frankly when I talked to customers out in the market many of them still think of Drupal is Drupal 5 prospects, I mean and that also has to change Drupal has had a policy of breaking APIs to stay relevant and to stay current So the philosophy of staying up to speed is there But unfortunately the market isn't necessarily following that philosophy and not getting the message So there's lots of work to do Now we have an opportunity headless Drupal is in my opinion the ultimate developers product and it really is and Drupal has shown that we can dominate the space when developers are there But what can we do about these other people we have to care about? What about content authors? They need something as easy as WordPress or Squarespace We also need to know Sorry, I lost my train of thought there Drupal excels on the back end. We know that But living in the UI day in and day out is a world of users a world of users that we Consistently lose to is Acquia one of the things we've had to do at Acquia probably about four or five years ago The first two three years of our four years of our life We were able to go into the Drupal community and say hey We've got something better than rack space Let's say and and come and talk to us about how we can make your life easier by scaling in ways that you can Scale before that's another story and I can talk about that but the last four or five years We've had to spend a lot of money selling Drupal we actually go through two sales cycles at Acquia the first sales cycle is selling the client on Drupal and then We have to sell them on Acquia and believe it or not it happens a lot of times we sell someone on Drupal and We never sign them up as a customer That's not good business all of you know that but that does happen and that's a challenge We as Acquia have to face and have to fix but at the same time it's important to understand We understand what it means to sell Drupal and we lose to site core more often than I care to simply because the content author Somewhere said it's too hard. It's too ugly. I can't do this and That has to change and the Drupal community has to help with that change So we have to think not only about marketing But marketers as a client as a customer Dries talked about this a little bit today in terms of some of the modules like the Media module getting more tools for for marketers that they expect We can't continue to lose business to these players unless we make Drupal easier to use So it's really time for the Drupal community to understand embrace marketers from both sides of the equation as Brethren in the community and as potential customers It's time for Drupal to become inclusive Now I changed the word a little bit I've been going on and about marketers But they're not the only key stakeholders for Drupal and I use this term practitioners to talk about it and Drupal's really big competitive advantage in the market is that it can work in lots of different applications and This is something most people don't understand It doesn't have to just work for comms and marketing things. It works well for commerce It works well for service applications and if you are a unique You know if you're a brand person like Hermes has started to launch their sites on Drupal And you want to have a great brand like Hermes and a story to be told and you don't want to be stole by told by Amazon or Somebody else where you're just commoditized You can use Drupal and you will love it. I'm sure of that But who makes that decision? That's a marketer, right? But if you are also a person at Cisco Systems and you're building a new Service portal for your customers to come in and rather than call up and use a help desk You're going to introduce them to a digital experience You're going to build that community and you do build it on Drupal. We're not talking to a marketer We're talking to a service line leader. That's a practitioner someone else but it's a business person not the IT group and so when we talk about Marketers we probably should be talking about practitioners Because Drupal has unique ability to address not only marketers, but everybody else and Gartner will tell you that Adobe is biggest biggest Criticism and biggest hole is that it only thinks about marketers and so we have to also think beyond marketers I'm going to just give you a little bit of a rant rant I'm just check on my time here a little bit of a rant before I start to wind up and And leave some time for questions back in 2010 I Went to various members of the Drupal Association board Drees was one of them and I said hey we've got to find a way to include these practitioners in Drupal con and We got an enthusiastic yes, we do and Jacob you might remember this so and then we got an answer which was but we know how to do it better and we said okay, let's give that a shot and There were business days that were created there were business different kinds of business tracks that were created And here we are some seven years later almost or more than and I would say we haven't really gotten very far All you have to do is look around the room or ask yourselves. How many practitioners do you see at Drupal con and Drupal con Europe is a really good example of that because there are very few here There are more in Drupal con North America for some reason and I will say that one of the reasons I believe is that we at Acquia give quotas to our salespeople to try and get people here and This year is a little bit different because the timing of Drupal con this year is also the time of the end of our quarter And our salespeople have to be hitting their quotas and their targets It's just the nature of the game So it's another little pet peeve is it's hard for us to get our clients here because we need to have our sales people here And our sales people can't be here this week. So it's a kind of a catch 22. So that's Little bit of a rant about the timing of things like Drupal con that we need to start thinking about at least from an Acquia perspective I know not everybody has that same Criteria but back to this notion of having more involvement by practitioners Seven years later. We really haven't been successful at that and here We are at a position where Drupal con Europe is fading and right now you heard today You know, there is no plan for Drupal con Europe going forward There is no plan because it's financially not viable. There weren't enough sponsors We weren't able to get those sponsors and back to the point I made earlier The sponsors aren't here because the right people aren't here for the sponsors to talk to and if we want Drupal con to succeed In Europe and I would put forward even in North America We have to think about this differently as a community to make something happen. So What can we do for starters? Let's start being inclusive, you know, maybe that's not the right way We want to describe it. I like to use it just because it's a little provocative But role inclusivity and thinking about how do we embrace the other people that matter? I know that's hard for developers. So this group and the group of our peers have to really lead that charge We have to help our developers understand why that's important and that maybe sharing a conference with them Isn't such a bad thing. Hey, we do this with our aquea engage We created it four years ago because we we did finally give up that we'd be able to do something in conjunction with the Drupal Association and we have technical tracks at Engage and yes, we talk a lot about aquea, but the primary thing we talk about back to what I talked about earlier is Drupal Remember aquea without Drupal doesn't exist and so we have to talk about how great Drupal is It's the core of what we are and I'm not saying, you know, do exactly what we do But let's have a conversation about what can be done and there are some easy things back to my proposal earlier Let's start finding better ways to get case studies done and find a place to put them because quite frankly Drupal.org Is an embarrassment if you're not a developer If I'm a marketer and I go to Drupal.org, I think I'm not going to use this product. Look at how ugly it is and We've got to do something about that Aquea spent some money to try and build Drupal.com But even we don't have enough money to do everything we want to do and we haven't got it quite as far as long as we wanted to In fact in as a consequence We've still been running our own aquea.com on Drupal 6 because we spent the money on Drupal.com Now we're in the process of changing over to get aquea.com on Drupal 8, but it just gives you some idea There has to be a different approach here if we want marketers to really be excited by what Drupal does And include your customers find a way bring your customers together Let's really get customers to be a celebration of what happens in the Drupal community as opposed to developers Celebrating what other developers do those two things can coexist look at the other great conferences of the world You know Amazon's reinvent celebrates both customers and developers It's an amazing event that grew from 19,000 people in 2015 to 32,000 people in 2016 Salesforce's event embraces both developers and Marketers and practitioners. This is one of the only conferences. I know mule soft MongoDB Red Hat all of those conferences in the open source world embrace both of those folks now They went through some pain I've talked to the folks at Red Hat about their transition because that was not always the case But they've never looked back since that day and that kind of change has to happen here as well And last is kind of a humorous note or maybe not so humorous more of a sad note But this is a true story We had aquea also created these business summits a few years ago and we found that we couldn't quite scale them So we didn't continue to do them but I was at a business summit in California and we invited our partners to come in and We invited them to be on panels and we had a particular agency in the Bay Area founded by Three folks and one of those folks the technical folk was invited beyond a panel about finding talent You know, which is one of the big challenges I spoke to some folks from Japan earlier today said we think Japan is a great market for Drupal But we can't find any Drupal developers so we don't know where to start and I've spoken with lots of customers through the years Figaro in France for example a couple of years ago. I speak into them. They said we love Drupal But we're not going to expand its usage inside of the Figaro because we cannot find developers Tom you're That's good. So I mean the situation has changed a little bit but not enough that We can do things So this was an important track at this business summit finding talent and this Leader of the Drupal community got up in front of business people and said well you know if you're going to hire someone to do Drupal, you know, they don't want to come into work before 11 and Then they're going to do what they want to work on and You know, they'll they'll probably stay late But and you know, you don't you have to pay them a lot but you can just give them a lot of pizza and beer as well and That was literally what was said and if I was a person sitting in the audience as a Marketer or someone trying to decide do I want to use Drupal? It was definitely not their white way to build confidence in the market and as agencies we've got to be really professional when we speak to these other folks and And figure that out and we need to build confidence You know the value of Drupal is the breadth of our community and the diversity of the ecosystem Future customers want assurances that they can find talent and the knowledge that they can find the teams to succeed with Drupal They need assurances that Drupal is a solid viable and tested platform and secure a Lot of them are overcoming some past prejudices against open source And may still be working under the assumption that open source software is less secure than proprietary alternatives So confidence is imperative They often think that open source is disorganized and lacks governance that open source is somehow less trustworthy Than something they have to pay for and these really are the challenges that we have and so as I I wrap up I just want to thank you all for the last ten years. It's been awesome And I know that Joe likes warn people yesterday my crime get close to that now Joe as I think about this There's been a lot of discussion around Reese's blog post about who contributes to Drupal And how to fix the system we need to really elevate that discussion and accelerate it because we you know We're looking at Drupal con Europe not happening. It can happen. It can be financed There are ways to do this and continue this amazing Show that we have this amazing conference is amazing collaboration this amazing way of getting people together. I Personally don't believe a network of Drupal camps will solve that will work the same It doesn't it doesn't bring together the diversity that we need from just geographies much less thoughts and And that is the beauty of Drupal You know ultimately it's about building a culture of inclusivity and I will emphasize inclusivity Obviously around all the ways we talk about inclusivity here And I want to introduce the notion that we need to celebrate passion for Drupal whether or not they can code Thank you So we have plenty of time for questions I wanted to leave some debate if we want to have it can be on this topic. It can be I know I promised in the in my Synopsis in the abstract that I would share some of the lessons learned at aquia. I did some of that yesterday in our partner Conference, but I'm happy to you. You know if you have particular questions there about what it means to work with Dries for 10 years I can tell you that And why his hair is actually still standing up 10 years later? Just kidding But or you know Other things so I don't know if folks have questions or comments want to debate something. I said happy to take that up Yeah, Rina Yeah, how can marketers become more involved and organically find a place? I think you know part of the inclusion Does need to start with the developers because of the way that we run Drupal cons today and sessions are voted in It's really a developer-led criteria. So I think one of the things that has to happen is as I proposed in 2010 we need practitioners to have an ability to also decide what they want to hear and and and curate and sometimes that means that It's tough sometimes to get practitioners to volunteer. So sometimes you need to have professionals Who are going to decide what's right or wrong and that doesn't fit consistently with the Drupal community model? But sometimes it's the only way because they're paid professionals and they may not Volunteer their time to do the same thing that these great volunteers we have in this community to do At least that's one of the steps, you know, one of the things that marketers can do Well, I have to think about this because as a person been pushing that button I've been trying everything I know and I'm not really technically even a marketer I don't know if others have ideas about things marketers can do Send developers to conferences Yeah, what kinds of conferences? Yeah, but how does that make marketers, you know more You know present Yeah, maybe But I've we've had marketers come I'll just say and they'll come in if you ask them their opinion when they leave It's like this is developers conference. I'm just throwing that out Yeah, cool. Stella, you might be off. Yeah, it's a catch-22. Yes I'll unplug so you don't get all my photos coming up, but I Haven't heard of it. No I've been involved in other efforts to do marketing and I've sat on committees to do that both at Drupal cons and and other calls It was unsuccessful But I personally don't know anything about the global marketing alliance. I don't have Rena if you've heard of it So that might be a marketing problem I'm not just that's a bit of a joke. Sorry. I'm being very pointed. That's my style. So but You know, you know, we are very eager to participate as aquia In whatever ways we can do to get more marketing for Drupal. There's no question about it I mean just as an example we had we we started a site years ago I forget what we called it now But it was basically a reference of all the sites in the world that use Drupal and we built it in Drupal Gardens and when we sunset at Drupal Gardens, we we moved that content over to Drupal.com and All of that content is our case studies Anybody can submit a case study. It doesn't have to be even a partner of ours and say, you know, here's something we can do and That's that exists today We also For our partners for a long time. We've tried to create content that could be customized You know around selling Drupal and what it means to sell Drupal But I'm not familiar with the global marketing alliance and we'd love to participate and contribute to that so Yeah, other Jeff