 All right, I think I'm gonna start now. So thank you all for coming by. Congratulations, you made it, the last session before closing session. And I hope you all have been having an awesome DrupalCon. My name is Matthew Tift, and I work at Lullabot. We're a design, strategy, and development company. I also, you can find my name in maintainers.txt under the configuration system. I maintain a number of modules, and I formally worked in academia. And I have a degree in music history. I used to teach at the University of Iowa, and I've been interested in critical theory for a long time, which is why today I'm here to talk about public sphere theory. And the way I have this structured is to make it as understandable as possible, because this can be a quite complex topic. So I have four parts. The first three will take about half the time, and I'll talk about Drupal, then public sphere theory, and then Drupal and the public sphere. And then we can chat about it if you want, if you're awake still. So today, although I'm talking about a theoretical subject, I hope that what I'm saying is a kind of practical advice that public sphere theory, for me, gives me a different way of conceptualizing Drupal, which in turn helps my interactions with the community and interactions with the other individuals. And I hope today, then, not to try and criticize other views about the Drupal community, I'm not here to try and convince you of anything or convert you or relay some sort of hidden message about things that have been going on in the Drupal community, I am here to offer up some ideas that you may or may not find useful for yourself. So the first part, we'll talk about Drupal. Now, you've been at DrupalCon for a few days. You probably have a good idea what Drupal is. And the kind of language we use to talk about it, we say it's a content management system. We say it's developed by a community, which in Wikipedia has been happening since 2014. I don't know, maybe a little bit longer than that. On the other hand, you could go to a place like the Linux Journal and read that Drupal is not a content management system. So the language that we use can be contradictory. And maybe you think Drupal is hard. We can use words like that. But however we break it up, whether we say we associate Drupal with an organized group like a local user group or an institution, maybe you associate Drupal with Lullabot or Palantir.net or some other organization you think to me that's what Drupal is. Or maybe an individual. Maybe you associate Drupal with Driess or with Alex Pot or Tim Plunkett or something like that. And then we also talk about Drupal in terms of the market. Driess talked about the idea of the enterprise label being slapped on Drupal recently and how he presented a different label which would be for ambitious web projects. So we have lots of ways of talking about Drupal that are more than just the code. But I'm sure for many people that is the main thing that they care about with Drupal. So you could say as the Drupal Association did a few years back that Drupal has something for everyone. Or you could say I work in Drupal and I'm going to measure how an individual contributes to Drupal. We have this site that has not been updated for a long time which is called Certified to Rock where we measured an individual's contributions to the community. One of my colleagues at Lullabot once gave a talk about Drupal using, let's see, as would be a simile. He talked about it as a platypus where this odd sort of creature that we have assembled. So there's lots of different ways to talk about Drupal. And one that has gotten a lot of attention is this idea of Drupal as an island. And the idea being that the Drupal island is this place where we all are, I guess it's sunny and I don't know, maybe beaches or something. But the idea is that we want to get off the island and go look at some of these other communities like go attend a PHP conference or something like that. But this idea, I've talked to a lot of people this week that have felt that this is relevant, that we're an island. And this kind of thinking, I've been sort of interrogating a bit more recently. Dries has talked about Drupal as a public good which is a really different way to talk about Drupal because it's based on economic theory. At his keynote in Amsterdam a few years back, he compared it to roads or street lights or parks or other types of things that benefit the public. And as a result, then he could look at issues like the free rider problem and trying to entice people to contribute to Drupal. So that to me seems like a very different way of understanding it. Dries and I also published a blog post after months of work looking at commit credit data where we said, who is contributing to Drupal? And then we tried to answer the question, who sponsors Drupal? So while we were doing this, I would talk about some of the things that we found, some of the data that we looked at. And one of the things I heard quite a bit was saying, well how do you measure something like generosity? How do you measure how much time it actually took to create that patch? How do you measure that person who is organizing a local user group or something like that in all of the effort that they have because that would never show up in a commit credit. And there's all kinds of examples of this that we can't really measure. So this idea of actually existing in Drupal to borrow a phrase from academia is a tough one to pin down. And as a result, I tend to like talking about Drupal just in terms of the way that we talk about it. So I wrote an article about this a few years back called The Cultural Construction of Drupal and I talked about some of these issues that we construct ideas of Drupal using these kinds of language like an island, like a platypus and that kind of thing. And if you're interested more, you can check out this article. But in essence, Drupal is changing constantly. We know not just the code contributions but how we talk about it, how we understand it. All of these things contribute to our understanding of it and our participation in the community. And ultimately, I think it is really interesting to try and say, I want to measure this. I mean, how do you relate to that? How do you say Drupal is important because of blank? And as a result, we have this kind of relationship to it because certainly there are people in the community that have a real affinity for Drupal that you want to go give it a big hug and say thank you for everything you've done. And that to me is just kind of a fascinating question to try and understand why people come to the community. So one way of understanding that I think is through public sphere theory. And this brings us to the next section of the talk. So there are a few things that we can say about public sphere theory with relative certainty. We can say that the term was coined by a scholar named Jurgen Habermas. We can say that Habermas is a very influential scholar. In a, there's lots of rankings where he shows up saying, hey, who are the smartest people on the planet and he'll be up there. In this particular one from a few years ago, he was just after Elon Musk and ahead of Naomi Klein and Slavoj Zizek and other people who we think of as influential, especially or at least in the academic world. But even if you're not an academic, you've probably heard of Elon Musk and to see Jurgen Habermas next to him might be kind of a shock for some people. But I wanted to sort of contextualize the impact of this theory on other folks. So what is this theory? So if I was to boil it down, taking the dozens of books that I've read on the subject and articles and that kind of thing, I think this is one of the key concepts that we can find as useful. That there is an idea of a private realm and there's an idea of the state and then somewhere in between there's this public sphere. So this was key for Habermas's theory in that it was different from a setup where maybe there's an authoritarian telling people what to do. That the public sphere was not just this different place, but this influential place. And the theory is useful because it's both historical and it's what we'd call a normative ideal. And that's a very academic phrase that says, this is what it could be. This is like this idealized place. This is a place that is desirable. So by treating it in this way, we can use that sort of as a benchmark for how we're going about our day-to-day interactions with Drupal that the theory is describing a place that's both historical and idealized. And what is this place? Well, one way to understand it is thinking about an 18th century coffee house because the public sphere in Habermas's theory was actually a place. It was in England, a coffee house in France. It was a salon in Germany. It was a Tischgesellschaften. So we had these different like physical locations where people would get together and debate ideas. They would read the same journals. They would come in with ideas and they would debate. So what did they debate? Well, they had rational critical debates and that's one of the key ideas of this theory of the public sphere, that people are offering rational ideas, that people are analyzing, that people are saying, here are some of my ideas about specific subject and they're not just coming in with crazy ideas. So it's important in the public sphere in this theory that you disregard status, that it is a place where everyone is welcome and it didn't matter if you were a lord or a working class person that you came in and it was about the ideas that you had. What could you contribute to the debate that was useful? And the debate was often about unexplored topics. It looked into habits we had formed, ideas that we had held and said, why do we do that? So it's not about holding on to any own personal ideas. It's about saying, we've thought about this for a while and why do we do that? So that would be the type of topic in the public sphere location. And if you wanna use some big language, I guess, you could say that it frees society from domination. It was a place that had a very different effect from people who were told what to do. It had power and importantly, the ideas that came out of the public sphere were legitimate because everyone was welcome in theory, because everyone could present these ideas, you would end up with legitimate ideas that in turn became effective ideas. So to bring about change in the public sphere in theory, it had to be legitimate, it had to be effective. And it's important to note then that as John Dewey did, the distinction between the public or the private and the public is in no sense equivalent to the distinction between the individual and social. So it's not simply that people got together to discuss things, but they did it in public. So you could still have groups of people that are getting together in private discussions, making big important changes, but in the public sphere, it was about individuals getting together in a public place. So there's not just one public sphere, as I said, this was a phenomenon that from the 18th century onward occurred in lots of different places, so there's no one public sphere. It's not a place where you go to talk about your feelings or why you're upset or something like that. It's about rational critical debate. It's also not a place where you engage in commodity exchange. It's not about doing business, it is about the ideas again. And it's also not a place where you go to get good polling data or something along those lines. So it wouldn't be as though somebody is gonna go into a public sphere or in a coffee house and they are going to tally up everyone's opinion and based on that make a decision. That is also not part of what it is. Again, it's about the ideas, it's about the debate. So no institution then can come in and sort of push their weight around. I couldn't go into the public sphere and say hi, I'm Matthew Tift, I represent Lullabot and here is the institutionally sanctioned opinion that we would like to present. It was not that because, again, that would go against the notion of it being classless and it would go against the notion of the importance of the debate and the individual as part of that group. So if all that seems a little bit overwhelming, the basic things that I think you can pull from that is that we have a public sphere is inclusive, classless and rational critical. So that's what I am sort of highlighting because I think that is perhaps what can be useful for us as we look into the Drupal community. But lots of other people have used this to look into other communities. So for example, to give you a better sense of how public sphere is used, a lot of feminists have looked at this and said, public sphere, oh that's different because people traditionally have thought of women's role as in a private sphere, not out in public. So lots of feminists have looked at this and sort of interrogated the theory and understood how women play a role in society in a different way. Black public sphere is another idea where you can imagine maybe with what I've told you how different it would be to understand a public that is classless versus a slave society, for example. So there are all kinds of public sphere theorists. One recent was about, for example, YouTube as a public sphere. And I could go on and on, but I just wanted to highlight one that I thought is particularly relevant for our purposes which is this idea of a transnational public sphere. So that might sound like a big, hard to understand concept but basically the theory that I had mentioned before talking about public sphere as between the private realm and the state, Nancy Frazier looked at that and she said, well that's not really relevant to us anymore. And she said, there's not just one state that people are trying to influence anymore. We are all people from lots of different countries, I'm sure just in this room, for example, we're all people from lots of different countries and what we're trying to influence is maybe a much more amorphous than we're trying to influence one particular government. So the transnational public sphere reconceptualizes the public sphere as influence by looking at what the influence is. What is it trying to do? And our keynote speaker today has highlighted in one of her articles because she's a public sphere theorist of sorts. She wrote an article in a peer-reviewed online journal by the way called, or not peer-reviewed open access journal called the first Monday and she started off by saying the emergence of network technologies instilled hopes that interactivity in the public sphere could help limit or even cure some of the ailments of late modern democracies. So big words again, trying to affect democracy through the public sphere. So this theory can be used in all kinds of different ways. And I want to talk a little bit about how we might use that to understand the Drupal community in a different way. So you may be sitting there thinking, wait a second. We don't go to coffee houses and argue. We sit at home and our underwear and get our work done. We play video games. We don't talk to people. That's not relevant for us. And if I do go to a coffee house, it's not a bunch of old white guys and wigs. I'm gonna be sitting there with my facing somebody else's back and I'm gonna be there because they have good wifi and cute little flowers in my coffee. And really, come on. Drupal is about business. So I would not particularly want to get into big arguments saying those things are incorrect. However, I would like to highlight some aspects of the Drupal community that I think are relevant for public sphere theory and I think we have our own public sphere. So for example, the IRC. This is one of the key ways that members of the Drupal community can communicate. And we have handles where we don't necessarily know who we're talking to. We don't have a place that is moderated with an agenda. You go into the IRC channel and you present your ideas or you say I have a problem with this and somebody helps you out and somebody else might say oh, that's not quite correct. But it is this sort of classless place that we don't necessarily know who we're talking to. Or our issue cues are similar in that way. And then there's the human element too. We value being human in the Drupal community and lots of us attend local user groups, Drupal camps, Drupal cons. And in these places, we allow for debates. And so often we'll say things like, well, the really important conversations that I had at DrupalCon happened in the hallway. And that too is another sort of public sphere kind of place where it's sort of you happened across someone else. You had a discussion, you worked something out, you did it in person, you created a new idea, you interrogated some sort of predetermined idea that you were going to question. So we have these kinds of conversations. And the agencies that a lot of us work for, they believe in open source values and they promote those through articles and podcasts and speaking and we contribute to Drupal core. So I see that there are not just people that are working for themselves or working for an agency, but they're participating in these places and they're doing so in a variety of different spheres if you will. So I have my own podcast and I give it away and I offer my opinions and I debate people on the show or I ask them the tough questions. So these are the kinds of things that I think reflect well on our community is when people are doing this kind of thing, sharing these ideas in a public way and that that is the kind of part of our community that is important. So what then are we influencing? What does the Drupal public sphere influence? So you could say that we influence the public good in general or you could say we have some sort of influence on states. So we have a wiki page on Drupal.org that lists more than 150 countries that are at some part of their government using Drupal. And that's more than three quarters of all the countries in the world. So you might say, well, you know, they're just using the software as a business decision. It was about accessibility or something like that. But I would at least like to think that maybe the practices that we've adopted as a community have some influence in these countries in how people interact. Maybe there's something there. Maybe that's a stretch for you. Maybe you think, well, do you have specific examples? And we heard about one this morning in the introduction to our keynote about the first Drupal distribution to help empower one particular presidential campaign. So this is somebody who was motivated in the Drupal community and wanted to take Drupal and do something specific with it. And here is one potential place where we could look at as a site for influencing governments. Orges people in 2013 at Drupalcon Portland, more than 70 developers got together to help some victims in Oklahoma City of a tornado. And the community was devastated by this in the Drupal community. Or one section of that tried to help those people in the way they knew best. So this was an example, again, of people getting together saying, how can we help? How can we have some influence for good? Or another more recent example is Drutopia, which is a, there's been a couple of buffs, I think that have mentioned Drutopia. I know some of you were there at one of them because I was at least at one of those. And it's again, a group of people that said, there's something about our community values. There's something about the way that we do things that we think we can use this software for good. And these are the kinds of things that I hope that we can continue to cultivate. So typically when we talk about Drupal and the community and growing the community, we will talk about things like sprints. As a speaker at Drupalcon, one of the required slides that I'm supposed to have is mentioning the sprints tomorrow. We're all supposed to go to the sprints and sprint. And the page that describes this has some information about how it works and that sort of thing. There's not a lot on that page that talks about why. Why do we sprint? Why do we try and get new contributors to the community? What are we trying to influence in those practices? So maybe we would think, okay, I'm gonna go to the sprint because currently, as of yesterday, we had 106,840 active contributors and I think we need to get that number up above to more like 106,900 because then I would feel good about my community. Then I would feel good if we had that commits closer to 3,000 or something like that. And I honestly don't think that many people in our community are driven by metrics like that. I don't think that's why most of us contribute. I don't think those sorts of numbers would somehow explain why people want to go hug a giant blown up Drupalcon. So why? Well, Tocqueville has an interesting quote to this effect and I think it can help us out a bit. So I'll read this. He says, each person withdrawn into himself behaves as though he is a stranger to the destiny of all the others. His children and his good friends constitute for him the whole of the human species. As for his transactions with his fellow citizens, he may mix among them, but he sees them not. He touches them, but he does not feel them. He exists only in himself and for himself. And if on these terms, there remains in his mind a sense of family, there no longer remains a sense of society. Now these words struck me pretty hard when I first read them because I used to tell people what really matters, the only thing that really matters is the health and wellbeing of my friends and family. And I used to believe this and I'd tell people that and they'd say, yeah, that sounds about right. The health and wellbeing of my friends and family. And this Tocqueville quote suggests that if you believe something like that, well that's going to result in the decline of society that we need to do more than just do things for our friends and family, that we need to get together, that we need to meet new people, that we need to interact, that we need to share our values, that we need to have these debates in the public sphere. So I'm not up here suggesting I want you to increase your commit credits and if you can't do code, you need to come up with some new revenue models or volunteer some more time or convince your company to sponsor. These are the kinds of things we hear quite a bit. But instead I'm saying, and this is not directly public sphere theory, but we need to refrain from divisive speech, share our knowledge, act with compassion and follow our code of conduct. So with that as a base where we are considerate and respectful and collaborative, we can then look maybe at other parts of our code of conduct and interrogate some of these words. So we say as our community grows, it is imperative that we preserve the things that got us here, namely keeping Drupal a fun, welcoming, challenging and fair place to play. So maybe you read those words and say, yeah, let's just make Drupal fun. Let's make it challenging and playful. And for many people I think that does speak to them, but I kind of look at those words and I think there might be something more that influences how people are participating. And I think that looking at that through the lens of public sphere theory that we could think about it differently, that we could say we want to be part of something greater. So I saw this the other day and I can't honestly remember, or I don't honestly know where this comes from and if you Google these words on the internet, you won't find an answer, but I read this and I thought immediately about the Drupal community. The expectations of a wise water drop. I don't want to go alone in selfish pursuit of my own path where I only dry up and disappear. The place for me is a reservoir where I can live forever as part of something greater. So that to me feels like Drupal. Like I feel like I'm participating in something that's greater, something that's good, something that's helping people. And whether or not that's real, whether or not that's like a historical fact or something that I'm imagining, it's something that I want to cultivate. And as a result then I want to look more closely at those unexamined aspects of our interactions. What sort of habits do I come with? This is my eighth Drupal con and I have ideas about, oh, when I'm at Drupal con I want to make sure I see Tim and hang out with Mike and I know I'm going to want to go to the keynote and the Dries note and I have these sort of habits, but then I kind of want to look at, well, do I have enough time in there to meet new people? Am I missing out on those interactions? Am I simply just catching up with anyone, someone in particular, or am I here to try and affect some sort of change? And I think each of us could ask these questions, whether we're here for the first time or we've been here many times. What expectations are we coming to Drupal with? Where do those come from? And what might we want to consider as something that we want to cultivate, something that we think is beneficial versus something that maybe there's some aspect of the community that we might not find as useful? So some of the questions then that we could ask are, are our spaces inclusive? Do we interact in ways at our parties, at our keynotes, at our sessions in the hallway that are open to everyone? Do we really provide a place for rational critical debate? Do we allow any sorts of crazy ideas? Maybe the sense that I'm standing up here behind this podium is one sense that we do, so that's cool. Do we disregard status? Do we question unexplored topics? So all of these aspects of the public sphere theory, we can sort of hold them up and say, how does our community do that? How do we contribute to the public good? How are we helping? And if so, are we just here because we want to try and get another client? I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but I'm saying if you really look at that, you say is that why you're here? Is it because the good code, more clients, I can support my family? And I'm saying this as a guy who writes Drupal for a living. And I'm telling you now that when I really think about what motivates me, it's not just to get another client for Lullaby. And one of the easiest ways I think we can do this, whether right now, whether you leave this room or a week or a month from now, is think about those times or notice those times when you think Drupal is like this. Right now, talking about ideas about Drupal for me, that's Drupal. Watching Dries' keynote when he says, I'm gonna talk about the technology. And then he proceeds to show us six videos of people and stories about people that contribute to Drupal. When I saw that, I thought, that's Drupal. It's about the people. It's about some guy in an island off the coast of Spain making everybody laugh, saying, hey, I saw somebody on the road. And they recognized me, that's Drupal. I mean, that's why, I think that's why a lot of us get motivated, that we see somebody else and we think, oh, well, they use Drupal, and we have these sort of expectations around them. And I think when I see stuff like that, I say, yeah, Drupal's like that. And I wanna cultivate those things. And there's other aspects of what happens at these conferences where I think about, why are we doing that? No, I don't know if that's good for the community. So again, I'm not here to try and tell you what to believe, but I'm here to ask you to notice. And I'm here to say, one way you can think about it is this idea of the public sphere, that we can't really measure a lots of these kinds of contributions. But we can alter our perception of the community, the way we think about it, the way we talk about it, to say, here's what we are, here's where we fit in, we're separate from the private realm, and we're trying to influence something, and we're going to do something that works well for our values. And let's cultivate that. So with that, I would like to open it up for discussion. Could you speak into the mic? Thanks. I just wanna point, my background, I'm a psychologist. So when you said that part about we cannot really measure, we can actually do that. But I think it would be actually helpful. My thesis was about the mental construct. I don't know if you're familiar with Moscow Viseba. It's a French, Russian theorist. And you can actually measure the interaction between all this area and the mental construct of Drupal and see how interfere with all the area or our life, you know. It's not an absolute measurement, but you can have point of reference between, I don't know, what's the public sphere and what's the private sphere? What's the mental idea of work? How much is, you know, for example, how important is for us as a simple way to put food on the table or how much important is for us as a community, you know, things like that. So how do you measure then? Hey, questionnaires, you know, that's the best things, you know. And, you know, since most of us are online all the time, you know, it's relatively easy to get something like this through the community. At least the people that are more involved than the community would be probably interested in something like this. Okay, sure. Yeah, I think there's a value in trying to find ways to measure, yeah. Yeah, so last fall, when Dries and I looked at commit credit data, it was one effort to try and measure, to try and say, how are people contributing? Well, what can we sort of measure? What, and one of the things we had come up with was, well, we can say, did I write this code sponsored by a company or did I write this code as a volunteer? And we found that 69% of the code that had a commit credit information was sponsored. That, you know, almost three quarters of the code that goes into Drupal Core was code that people were writing while they were getting paid. And that to me is, you know, it's interesting. And from there, we can maybe ask other questions. We could then, you know, one of the, some of the stuff I started to do and that we're going to do is to say, well, let's see what we can do to compare those commit credits to profile information and look at, say, gender information as compared to commit credits. How does it change over, you know, at a DrupalCon? How does it change when we change the rules about being able to maintain a module? So there's all kinds of interesting things that we can kind of, what we can sort of measure, I guess what one of the points I want to make is that that measurement is just, it's difficult to get a full grasp of all of that, that there are so many different things and that part of what we can do is to notice it for ourselves why we participate and then to sort of cultivate those values. This is Tim, thanks Matthew. So we have these community discussions going on right now and I think a lot of these are about figuring out what the community is. One of the things we were, I went to one yesterday and we were talking about, I was thinking about the Drupal project versus the Drupal community and I'm trying to figure out if these are different things or if they're the same thing. I think some people that the idea come for the code stay for the community, some people are really, you know, their connection to Drupal is the code, it's a tool that they use, they might contribute to the code but that doesn't necessarily mean that they imbue the community with any extra, that there's any extra value in the community for them. I think, you know, we've talked about this before, there are people like myself who really the community itself in a lot of respects takes precedent over the code. I'm very much attracted to the Drupal community and like the fact that we're producing good code that's useful to make the world a better place, I think, to the extent I have a question for you or anybody in the room is does this public sphere theory at all help us, help me figure this out? Like what's the difference between the project and the community and or how do I make sense of that? I'm thinking, you know, is in your idea, the public sphere being between the private and the state, you know, is could the Drupal project in a sense, the code and that be the state and that we've got a bunch of individuals and companies and then we've got this community in between the two. I don't know if that makes sense to anybody. I'm just figuring this out. I'd be curious what anybody else thinks. Yeah, me too. Anyone else wanna? Yeah. It's actually a very interesting question and I feel like there's a lot of overlap and it's hard to, you know, the public sphere is kind of an amorphous thing because like, so I work at a company that, you know, and obviously it's a job and I'm getting paid fairly well, but it's so much more than that because of what the work that we're doing is informing the larger public on issues that are affecting them even when they don't realize it. We're trying to sort of educate and inform and kind of fun way that's easily consumed and shareable and we're actually having an impact because I was literally in a bar in Brooklyn and the bartender knows where I work and he says, oh, my sister was visiting last week and she said, I got this great new site to tell you about and it was ours. So like, you know, we're doing a public good even while we're making money and I think that's true of the Drupal community too. We do both simultaneously in a lot of cases and I also spend a lot of time in the political realm and I do a lot of volunteer work with Drupal for political type things. I mean, so we kind of do both. Yeah, I think it is difficult to sort of tease out the differences between those things. Like I said about Drew's keynote where he said, I'm gonna talk about the technology. There's been a lot of pain and suffering in the community and I'm gonna talk about the technology and that to me was totally fine. I didn't hear other people like complaining. Oh, he's not talking about the technology. Instead he's showing this video of this woman talking about testing, that kind of thing. So teasing those out, I guess I would say what would be the advantage to sort of differentiating those things? Like what might be gained by saying, well, really the code of the community, same thing. And if that's the case, well, what does that mean? I'm not sure that making some sort of conclusion as to, well, I think this way versus I think that way might change how we'd go about on our day-to-day basis. But I think what helps me with the public sphere theory is the interconnectedness between our different activities and the influence that they have on something else. That to sort of offer a different narrative that we're not an island to me actually helps me think about the repercussions for what I'm doing. I think it's so easy sometimes to get lost in the code to say, there's a bug, so I'm fixing it. And that on its own, it's easy to think of that, not having any sort of influence other than I fixed the bug and now the code works better. But then if I say, well, what bug is this fixing? What module is this affecting? How is that module used? And what organizations use that module and what people are affected by that? So just sort of reminding ourselves perhaps more often that those choices have repercussions and the theoretical stuff can be interesting. I mean, I personally would say something like, well, there's no difference between the code and the people. But that's like getting into philosophical or religious grounds or something like that. And I don't know how helpful that is. That seems to just cause more angst with some people. Mateo, the star of Drupal Khan. Something that happened in my town was that someone went to visit an African country. They didn't get their shots and they came back with a highly contagious airborne disease. And we live in a country where we have universal free healthcare. He was very poor. He was homeless, basically. And since everyone contributed to have these very expensive healthcare system, we were just safe. Like I probably am not dead because many people contributed to something that they were not gaining immediately from, but they are protected by. Many times when I work with Drupal in the issue queue, I can just solve my problem and the code. I multiply the time that I spend with these issues by three times probably by making sure that I put a UI on top so someone that doesn't know code can go and use that code. Cause that's the Drupal way, right? We've been doing this, we've been doing it like this forever. It's almost like an automatic thing that we do. I think that both stories are connected in the way that I like to be in my day-to-day society, my day-to-day Drupal society in a place where people are more empowered, therefore are happier somehow. They can, I don't know, maybe afford to just live where they want to, like I do because they can work from home, they have secure work. And I don't think about any of this, right? I just try to do the thing that I feel it's the best. Sometimes it feels that it's the technical challenge, but I think that somehow the philosophy in Drupal is affecting my actions. So I can create a greater good where everyone is safer. And thanks to this kind of mindset that we have, we are affecting everyone else's kind of state of life, like empowering all people. I think that kind of makes, like for me, both things are deeply interconnected. And I don't know if there is a separation between the two. That's a good point. I'm manning, and this is awesome because it's helped me rethink everything that's been happening in the last month and thinking of it in terms of the public sphere and making reason-based arguments and decisions. And, but there are two slides that you had that were very striking to me. One was the Code of Conduct where it said, we wanna keep it fun, which is what brought us here. And that conflicts with when you said, if you're thinking of yourself and your friends, you're not thinking of society, you're drawn from society. So if we're thinking about what made it fun for us, that will continue to attract people like us and not grow the community. So what brought us here might not be the same thing that are gonna bring other people that we need to have a bigger community, not just like us, to think of the social public sphere aspects of Drupal. So I'd like those two together. And that might be part of the problem with our Code of Conduct is that we designed it, thinking how we can keep it for ourselves instead of thinking how do we expand it to more people. That's not a question. Yeah, that brings to mind all kinds of issues about why the Code of Conduct is in place, why are we having these listening sessions now? What's gonna happen with the data from those listening sessions? Is that gonna be a process that just ends at some point and then we have new rules and we're gonna stick with those? Or is that an ever sort of growing, changing process that we need to constantly be evaluating? And if we say, we like the community the way it is and we wanna grow it and we wanna have more people, that has a particular sort of appeal to certain folks, growing the community, more numbers. I wrote an article one time called Better Than Bigger, which was actually sort of critiquing a lot of his arguments in his Amsterdam keynote, saying, well, let's not look just at why we wanna grow the numbers but how we want to sort of cultivate the community we have and make sure we have processes in place that make it welcoming to everyone, both the people that are in it now and the people that we want to attract. And I certainly agree that we want to continue to attract a broad diverse group of people in this sort of classless society, this ideal. And to me, that's very appealing and super challenging to try and put those into words if we're gonna say, those are the words. On the other hand, I do feel like with some of these recent events, I think it's important to say, what are the limits of our community? What do we absolutely not stand for? What are those things that are not changing values that define the Drupal community? And those are really hard questions, of course. But I think those are all sort of related to this idea of growing it, making it more diverse and then sort of dealing with the issues that come when we grow the community. When we say we're making enterprise software now as opposed to personal blogging software or whatever we might have said before. I would just say we want to not just grow the community but grow as a community. Much more poetic. Man, I wish I would have thought of that when I was writing that article. Sure, maybe just a snarky remark, but I don't think that Tupacon is a classless forum of debate, because I mean, it is 500 bucks, right? I totally agree. Can I move on other criticism? He started. Now I was saying as a novice to Drupal and one thing that I am connecting with the previous debate that we have about how difficult is Drupal to learn. I think that an effort to make Drupal more accessible would actually increase the amount of contribution and the community will make it much easier to be, because otherwise what do you have? You have a situation where a company that wants to move toward freeware and has to deal with support the company that costs the $50,000 a year and that makes it impossible for a small entity to get access to this community. Yeah, we've made those decisions. We have decided we're fine with complexity. We're fine with it being hard. Certainly, and again, this gets back to the whole difference between this is how it is and this is how we'd like it to be. And we can sort of debate all these kinds of things about how it's been, whatever, but in a way there's the sense that we have something, we're stuck with it, what we have now, and we could make some choices now going forward and how do we make those choices? Now that we have the situation that we're in, we can decide we want to do this based on these particular ideas. And I think that can be a real effective way of bringing about the change, rather than necessarily rehashing or bringing a lot of the feelings into it. I mean, I know feelings are important for, we don't want to hurt people's feelings, but. No, no, no, we'll see if we'll have enough of this but the part that was certain to me was okay to a point where the economy comes as nobody is, where I know what this means and you don't, but I'm sorry for you, there is that part, that the control, I would say. Now this is set up, I understand that general philosophy and what you were trying to say, but to a point that has to be controlled, we're talking about, for example, in the previous lesson about creating a building for that that can be stable and give everybody an opportunity to understand the meaning of things that is the first step to that. Sure. Yeah, things, simple things. Last question or comment, Tim, you get it. Just one last comment, I mean, the idea that sure, it's hard to distinguish, like my idea, the distinction between the project and the community, it's clear those things are intertwined a lot, but I think we're fooling ourselves if we don't talk about the fact that they come into conflict, right? We have, if you're purely looking at Drupal as a technical project and you establish your goal is to make the best possible technical project, the best possible CMS, you may be pushed in the direction of making decisions, which are not necessarily in the best interest of the community, which may exclude certain people from the community or push them out. And I think we're experiencing some of that, I think, with Drupal 8 right now, right? It's, you know, I think most people would agree that technically Drupal 8 is a better product than Drupal 7, but we are, I think, leaving some.