 Thanks. This talk has its origins in the Drupal community's sort of semi-ongoing crisis and the things that we've been through this year and some thoughts I had and some conversations I had along the way trying to understand better what was going on, trying to not take sides on any individual or organization side but really trying to figure out maybe how some of this can be avoided. Next time I went to the panel, did anybody go to the panel discussion with Shannon and Jen and Angie about Water Underbridge? That was that was pretty cool too. So I am trying to do the opposite of fanning the flames. I just really wanted to talk about how I thought our community could do better in the future. So this might be Drupal, right? But it's not Drupal to me. Our killer app was never the code. Our killer app is a global community of smart people solving hard problems together and in technology online and even between humans. Who went to Drupal Con Barcelona? Right. And do you remember how hard that time was in Drupal? At that point Drupal 8 was just never going to come out. And this opportunity to release it and have like a really super buzzed amazing con. We didn't do that. And it was really hard. I think I was struggling with motivation. I had been I don't know if I'm supposed to say it out loud but you know selling vaporware for a couple of years like we got way too excited about Drupal 8 way too early. So the mood was I found the mood really really tough in Barcelona and yet right this is Drupal on a bad day. This is the this is the first patch ceremony. This is the sprints in Drupal Con Barcelona. So this is our killer app right here. You know look at how happy how happy we are and what a good time we're having. That's that's amazing and it's this is a this is a great group of humans to be to be a part of. So for our purposes today the definition of a community is a group of people with shared goals and values and our goals in the Drupal community are pretty clear to me. We could we should make Drupal better and with the better Drupal we can make better other things and those other things right. They can help other people communicate realize their own visions and so on in the world. That's what we're doing here. So I think our purpose right is to make a better technology stack. So that's a shared goal. What about our shared values. There are a bunch of things that we talk about a lot but when when where are they documented. How did we agree that they're important to us. How do we know that we really share those values. I want to try and figure that out. I created a little survey earlier in the year to try and determine what people thought their important values were and I asked a lot of open ended questions and put up a bunch of abstract nouns around values and and got quite a lot of feedback from it. So we're from all over the place. We're from lots of cultures and it could make it hard to work together but we have this shared goal. We want to make Drupal better together and that kind of glues us together and it kind of is a it's a replacement for for a value and it served us very very well to build a community. But yeah as we saw this year that doesn't always you know doesn't always work out for the very very best. Most people call me jam. I work at a very small company called open strategy partners. I've been doing Drupal since 2005. I was the 18th employee at Acquia and left earlier this year. Acquia is at about 800 people now. So I've been through all sorts of interesting things in the last few years. I write. I do podcasts. I communicate and now my company focuses on marketing strategy and communications around open source and technology organizations. My approach to what I've done over the years is I think that good communication drives connection between people. That connection can grow into communities and our open source communities can create incredible can and do create incredible value around the world. So that's what we're about. Now as I said a technology doesn't make a community. And the definition of community you know sharing goals values attitudes and interests. You know we all seem to be assuming that we share a lot of values and that led to some real communication problems. And my as my now 17 year old son is fond of telling me daddy when you assume you make an ass out of you and me. You know thank you. But you know he's there to keep me honest. So you know what we're all in a relationship. If we don't talk about who we are and what we want we don't we we don't have any values we just have assumptions. And if we all just assume we can't know if we actually agree and if we don't agree we don't have a community right. Then it's just some code and you know things fall apart rather easily. I'm a big fan of Simon Sinek and he has this thing that he calls the Golden Circle who's not familiar with the Golden Circle. Yeah. So this is a way of thinking about organizations and in our case communities. And if you start with I'll give you a maybe a different example. If you start with you know our company uses open source therefore we have to contribute go contribute. You know and you write patches and you teach somebody and you write some more patches and you write some documentation. That's all cool. It probably all helps. But how do we know that that's helped our organization or even our open source project and how is that measurable. If you just start with the what it's very very difficult to establish if you're actually having any effect. If on the other hand you know why you're doing something if you've said well open source contribution improves our bottom line and our company in ways that we've agreed on then we can say how are we going to contribute. We are going to sponsor two events. We are going to submit patches from our ongoing projects into upstream and we are going to you know take on two apprentices a year right. We have a how we're going to contribute and then our contribution becomes very simpler. Developer team submits patches and is good open source citizens. HR for looks for apprentices and marketing looks for good place to sponsor and then we can measure if we've succeeded on that or not. So this is a really this is a really powerful model and I think about it all the time. In the case of Drupal in the case of communities like ours a very powerful tool to establish what our why is is to make a mission statement and Drupal doesn't have a mission statement. So this is missing. You know it could be what I said before make Drupal better and with a better Drupal make better other things. And then the how right we have a how implementation you know sort of we have a code of conduct that I'm going to talk about a little bit but I don't think it's the best possible implementation because it doesn't really necessarily have a why to point at and then you know the what is the product of the why and the how put together and then we're back at a community that is perhaps happier perhaps more sustainable and perhaps you know a better place for us all to be than it has been during parts of this year. I just want to make a kind of a disclaimer along here. This is pretty much my thoughts on dealing with the structural weaknesses I see in our community and the result of that is the events this year. I see the opportunity to iterate on our structures to state what we're about more clearly and then get on with making good stuff again. It's not an answer. If it inspires you to action please reach out please take apart. If I'm getting everything wrong like maybe that's an inspiration for you to get it right. That's great too. The survey that I took is not scientific. It is not data. It is not statistics. I asked a bunch of open-ended questions and got some really really interesting results and it feeds the sort of things that I like to do which is tell stories that help us all understand who we are and what we should do. So in Drupal and our sense of belonging and how much we love each other right has has led us to perhaps assume that we're on the same page about our values. We talk about contribution and karma and paying it forward and all these catchphrases and it feels like we're talking about the same thing. So we must mean the same thing and feel the same thing right. But I was called out on this. I was called out on this actually by my business partner who's here in the room. She said you know you open source people you talk about this. Where does it say that transparency is important to you Drupal people that it's part of Drupal. I can't find anything in writing that says you have to be inclusive and what do you mean by that. And I had to admit that I don't think we have an explicit statement about our values. We have this code of contact but we're making lots of assumptions about what our values are and what they should be right. And that I don't think that's healthy. So we need to reorganize. We need to do better but it doesn't make sense to reorganize unless we perhaps define what our shared values are and we talk about how we're going to live those values. So our why and our how in looking at the Golden Circle model. This spring showed us we probably don't share all common values and our governance is probably out of date with all the love in my heart. No human should be under as much pressure or have as much responsibility as Dries does running a big company. Being the project lead of Drupal running the Drupal association. All of these things. I do not envy him that amount of responsibility and he said himself that he needs to let others take the lead in some of these areas. And as a community we need to step up and take responsibility and not just expect everything to be spoon fed to us forever. The last five or eight years in Drupal a lot of people who's who's been doing Drupal since let me think about how to phrase this who's been doing Drupal more than five years. And who used in production who used Drupal six. And who used Drupal five. And who used Drupal four in production. Yeah. So I installed 4.6 and I ran 4.7 but then I have to drop out too. But people who came to our community in the last five, six, seven years they never experienced a major version release. They never felt what it was like to have contrib completely behind core. They don't remember community organized conferences. They don't remember the creation of the code of conduct or the Drupal association. So people have found like Drupal seven. It's perfect. It has fully functioning everything and we know how to deploy it and it's a solve problem and the Drupal association is here and Acre is going to sponsor us and here we are. And it's been awesome, right? But it's a little bit different from a lot of places in open source and we need to remember that we are the community and we need to do more and we need to take more responsibility for ourselves. So my idea is that if we can agree upon some shared values, that can inform how we want to live and act upon those values and that can help us create clear, repeatable, scalable structures, you know, governance structures, codes of conduct, rules, however you decide to express them. But we have to figure out how to talk about them and agree on them. So I gave this talk at a CXO day, at a business day and there were Drupal users and there were clients and there were business people and some of them at this point I thought might have been wondering what the heck I'm talking about because they're here to like, you know, drive revenue and improve ROI on long-term, crap, capability. So the point is how many of you rely on selling technology project to make your living or to pay employees? Yeah, so and how many of you, so let's see what other questions, the point is, right, the community, the Drupal community has been a sales tool for us all these years. It matters, the health of the community is directly tied to our success and our ability to sell our project and I know this because I was at Acquia when we participated in the Australian government's RFP process to create GovCMS in Australia and they, in the final assessment, they made a bunch of rules, they said it has to be open source, they said it wasn't allowed to be Ruby, which was funny and they had a couple of the rules and there were three systems in the running in the end and I think Life Ray was one of them and Drupal was in there and there was something else and they did a feature comparison like a months-long study and Drupal came in second place. Drupal in terms of their perception of features and functionality came in second place, but they chose to use Drupal for this enormous, really interesting GovCMS project because of the community, because in Australia, I actually don't. I don't remember what the first fully, like the fully featured one was, I'm sorry, but the Drupal community in Australia and Australia and New Zealand Australia is really, really strong. There's a ton of Drupal talent in the region and they knew that they have a global community, Drupal passes the truck test and this level of activity and everything that we do, they thought that was actually our way of doing it. They thought it was a killer app, right? Well, awesome. However, I see a huge danger when our community very publicly has a gigantic, whatever this is being, cataclysm. So I think it's important to our economic survival, you know, for us business people to care about this soft stuff, this community stuff. 112 full responses came in and I thought that was pretty cool. And it's like these are easy questions, right? And especially, first of all, if you answered this survey, somehow you're connected to me on social media, right? And somehow you have feelings about Drupal. So it's very self-selecting. It's all, you know, people who are into Drupal anyway. So, right, this doesn't mean anything. But if you look, how important is the community aspect of Drupal to you, you know, and everybody was basically, you know, 80, 90 percent of everybody was up in the like, very important, extremely important. So everybody thinks community is important to them. Right. And how are you involved in the Drupal community? Basically everyone attends events. Basically everyone said Drupal is part of their professional life. 70 percent of people said they used Drupal for personal projects and 70 percent said they contribute code. 60 percent sponsors the community. 85 percent evangelized Drupal professionally and privately. Other very popular answers I left in other field are things that I probably should have thought of and included in the survey. Lots of people said they mentor. Lots of people said they do public speaking, writing documentation, doing articles in social media and so on. My favorite survey response was this one. So somebody had a dog named Drupal and I thought that was like, I guess that means it's pretty important to him. The next question was on one of those, you know, survey best practices grids where you have to rank, so in this case, how important is this thing to you for the Drupal community? What is the ranking of, let's see, not at all important, not so important, somewhat important, very important, extremely important, one of those grids. And you could rank all of these abstract value words that we came up with when we built the survey. And then I added the very important and the extremely important to produce this ranking. Okay, so not science. I thought it was really interesting for example, that transparency, right? And, you know, we need to know how the decision making process works and how it's secret cabals and how people are appointed in governance and we have to know everything, right? The blogosphere was full of transparency but it only came in, you know, effectively sixth place. It was lower than I would have expected it to. Diversity came in way lower than I thought. My personal, I think, you know, personally for me, giving back and paying forward is very important. Some of these things, making a positive difference is definitely how I feel it's what I like about what I've been doing in the last years. Contribution came in really low. Look, it's down in whatever place this is, you know, 11th place after all these other equals. And inclusive decision making, so I don't know, I felt that there was a disconnect between the people screaming online and what these people connected to me somehow thought was important. Respect is good, openness is good, collaboration, very important, trust, honesty, like those are things we can all get behind, right? Until, of course, you have to discuss what that actually means, right? I left the field open for other values and people had plenty of suggestions. I think that there are some especially interesting ones like tearing for the craftsmanship of the code itself. Democracy, empathy, forgiveness, solidarity, what else is interesting there? Making room for marginalized people, feminism, I mean, there's a lot of different things. I think sustainability is probably pretty darn important if we want to continue to make a living doing this. So those were some of the answers that people added to my list. My favorite additional answer here was levity and explicitly called out the pre-note. Thank you very much. It's always flattering to know that somebody gets up to be here at 8 o'clock on Tuesday for that. So when we put together the survey, we actually did this thing on purpose and several people noticed it, right? Well, these will mean different things to different people, right? Who's ever heard of the war on abstract nouns? Corey Dr. Olexa talked about that. The war on drugs, right? How do you fight drugs, right? How do we be transparent? What is that? What is fairness, right? I think that's the what of the Golden Circle, right? And plus, we actually have to agree what it's for and how we do it before we can be that, right? And these value words that I put up are neither concrete nor measurable, right? We can have a war on respect, or we can support openness, right? Or we can promote inclusiveness, but I don't know, are we being inclusive enough? We're a pretty diverse project in the open-source world. We're pretty successful financially. We enable people all around the world to make a living. Like, that's all great, but is it enough? I don't know, because I don't know how to measure inclusive or open, right? I don't know. So what we need, like, if we have a mission of making the software better, because that's what we're actually about, right? Creating a sustainable, happy, productive, respectful community, I think that we need a statement of values, right? And how would we... You know, and we could choose, right? We could choose the top five or the top 10 here and build them into a statement of values, okay? And then... But how would we do that, right? And then how would we take mission statement of values and make it actionable, make it measurable, turn it into a new code of conduct and use set of rules, governance, bodies... Whatever your taste is in that, sort of a thing. We're missing how to express them and we're missing how to measure them. And we need to define our working definitions as concrete actions. Simon Sinek talks about this a lot. We need to turn abstract nouns into verbs. Wherever we go with this, this stuff needs to be articulated and agreed upon in a community process. And then, you know, then it can be like documentation. Does doing this action, does this idea, does this process fit our definition of who we say we are? Yes or no? Does that go with how we say we live and act? Yes or no? What's important to us? Yes or no? Now that's measurable and we can say, you know, does being a misogynist in public in your session, does that fit who we are and how we want to live? I mean, I want to get to a community where that's not the case, right? And I think it's a case we can agree on and it's easy. But then you have like an up-down, yes, no. Is this thing acceptable? If you formulate it right, you shouldn't make a body of laws like this and make it a game to work around it, right? It needs to be respectful and open. But as we grow and change over time, this gives us a framework that we can also iterate and improve on over time and we can be agile and we can be, you know, the good open-source practitioners that we want. So I like this idea. I found this all very appealing. We make a why. We have a mission statement and we have a how, which is this implementation of we say we are this and that we live this way. We express these things and then we have a nice community out of it. And I got some challenges. I got some people complaining that I had taken the survey, complaining that I had dared to express an opinion about this and who was I anyway and how did I get assigned to decide how we live by this stuff. So I decided also that I wasn't going to draft anything like anything near what a statement of values could be because it felt, you know, especially earlier this year that just felt like too many landmines to step on. What I did do though is with some help from my business partner, find examples of guiding principles, statements of values that are really interesting and really admirable and very easy to adapt and adopt for ourselves and some of them frankly, I think we can take them word for word and they reflect very well the community that I would like to be part of. So I have a couple of good examples of how I think that these statements of values actionable, measurable, verb oriented statements of values can look like and the consequence of them would be then we decide how we codify that. So Black Lives Matter is not uncontroversial but it's a very, very interesting movement and their guiding principles are really interesting to look at. This is a really interesting little page on the web but three of their values are very, very well expressed. So empathy. According to the BLM guiding principles, empathy, they say we are committed to practicing empathy. We engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts, okay, that is action oriented. So empathy is a verb and it takes empathy and it expresses how they want to live empathy and then it makes it pretty easy for me to judge whether I am being empathic enough in my interaction with you. I find it very powerful. Another value that they have, they call loving engagement. We are committed to embodying and practicing justice, liberation and peace in our engagements with one another. And the third one that I especially like is diversity. They say we are committed to acknowledging, respecting and celebrating differences and commonalities. And that is super interesting. What do we have in common? What's different about us? That can all be positive and we can all make something great out of that. I really like that. So Black Lives Matter, guiding principles, empathy, loving engagement, diversity, they very much speak to me. Interestingly, my very, very favorite statement of values online comes from the Harvard Divinity School. Harvard itself has a statement of values and the Divinity School, which is a very, very old part of that institution has taken that statement of values and reworked it for themselves like they've extended it even further. So a couple of them let's find yes, so right. A Harvard University value is accountability for actions and conduct in the workplace. That's admirable. It's okay. At the Divinity School they say in seeking the long-term welfare of all, we endeavor to accept responsibility for the impact of our actions on our community, our environment, and the world. We hold ourselves and each other accountable for our behavior and our use of resources. It's pretty good stuff. My favorite one from this community values statement at Harvard University they say respect for the rights, differences, and dignity of others. Good, respect is good. Respect is also on my list somewhere. At Harvard Divinity School, quote we seek to respect, understand, and learn from the cultures and beliefs of the members of our diverse community conscious of our own levels of privilege. We seek with kindness and compassion to engage in open and active dialogue that broadens our perspectives, increases our knowledge and awareness, and fosters mutual understanding and empowerment. I could have used this spring in our interactions with one another in the Drupal community. I could have used a lot more kindness and compassion in engaging in open and active dialogue to increase knowledge and awareness and fostering mutual understanding honestly, really. So I really like this one. I find this a really, really admiral document. I've read it a bunch of times. I got a piece of feedback from my survey that said, quote I think a statement of values can be helpful, but ideally would be intentionally succinct. I've always loved the agile manifesto in style and substance. Four values of things we value more than others and a dozen principles that provide more detail. So the agile manifesto is probably something we're all very familiar here, familiar with. We value, so we value one thing over another thing. Individuals in interactions are more important to us than processes and tools. Responding to change is more important to us than following a plan and so on. And this is influenced how we all work for years and years now. And I particularly like two statements in the 12 principles. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need and trust them to get the job done. That's cool. And somehow this fits for me this idea of enabling a sustainable community for ourselves. Then having a goal of sustainable development is obviously we'd love to see Drupal go on forever. I could do DrupalCon forever. I'm not tired of you all yet. This is my 21st DrupalCon. So, agile manifesto. Here's an example unfortunately that I think this statement is dated. The community process that's created this in 2010 was incredible. I think it was a shining moment. I think it was a shining moment in our community's history. The water under the bridge session yesterday Angie Byron talked about past community conflicts. And there was a classic moment of Drupal history from 2007 that she brought up in which a now very, very former Drupal core committer was very, very nasty to someone asking an honest question in the issue queue. And it was before we had codes of conduct or any of this other stuff and it was like looking at it now, it's kind of funny and cute to look at it, but it was horrible. Someone asked some questions about the JavaScript break tag to create previews that we had in 2005 and because he's horrible and uncaring he asked a question that was already answered in the issue description. I'm joking, right? He asked something that was actually already mentioned in the issue description and the core contributor who shall remain unnamed didn't say like, hey, re-read the issue please and then get back to me. So stick your head in a microwave and grill it until you understand. That's not very nice. So over the years we decided that we needed a code of conduct and I think that was right and we needed conflict resolution mechanisms I think the community working group is a very good idea and in 2010 the idea of the code of conduct was floated and it was this incredible for me this really typical moment so who here is from North America? Yes so the North American faction came up with the first working draft of the code of conduct and the language was about perpetrators and incidents and violations and punishments and procedures and remediation which is really beautiful community promoting language, right? Everyone calmed down at the airport and like, right we love that stuff over here in Europe so that's like the extreme on the one hand and then out of Europe came the voices we don't feel that reflects us someone proposed all the code of conduct needs to be is don't be a dick somebody else said you know it just needs to be act with respect and then a negotiation this is a shining moment for me the Europeans are like all we got to do with talk with each other we figured that out in the last 60 years in Europe it's going to be fine and then this negotiation process happened across two giant, giant, giant very, very, very long threads and we came to the Drupal code of conduct and it is very well put and there's a lot of really right ideas in it looking at it through the lens of this year for me I see that it's a bit of a mix of idealistic statements and vague procedures and leaves a lot of questions open for me and also reading the mandate of the community working group in its current form for me leaves some real questions about what are they supposed to do when they run out of ideas and how is it that if we're in a conflict situation that would seem to involve the project lead how is it that the community working group then escalates to the project lead that's really challenging so I propose that we can talk about whatever values we want we can agree what's important to us and we can agree how to formulate them in actionable measurable ways and if we agree on our mission is making our software better enabling people in the world digital world to communicate better and we codify what our values are and how we want to live those values right we are then enabled to modify our code of conduct create a new body, make procedures whatever we want to there's some danger of letting a genie out of the bottle I spoke with a very good friend of mine from the community working group about the dangers of letting go of that document in its current form I acknowledge that that can be tricky but I see an opportunity here to make a to make our community a little stronger to make it a better place and for me I would really like to see all of us acting with more empathy and more loving engagement looking for diversity where we can get getting to a more sustainable open source community that we can continue to enjoy continue to deliver value with, continue to meet each other when we can so thank you very very much for coming to my session I'd be completely happy to answer any questions or hear how I got it wrong thanks a lot yes I think you're supposed to ask into the microphone actually how Gem, you see the community in the next two years how do I see the community in the next two or three years well, we're in a really interesting moment structurally I don't think I don't, well so I think we've damaged our sales tool a little bit with the community and I think that choosing not to have an official Drupalcon I I'm not sure that's the signal that we want to be sending right, because I still see an incredibly strong, vibrant community doing great things in the world and I think that what we're doing is better than how we're presenting ourselves in the world right so we really have some challenges to go out there and tell people about us about open source I gave a talk at Drupalcon Baltimore as well where, you know, we've been kind of like it's the golden age of open source you know, even Wired said so or whoever it was it said so but the proprietary competition is catching up on us and we need to be very aware of those dangers there are legal and regulatory lobbying efforts underway that would forbid us from gaining government work in Germany for example okay, there's a lobbying effort in Germany that says you have to have a vendor to buy software Drupal doesn't have a vendor we don't have a contributors agreement Drupal would be closed out of all government work in Germany if that lobbyist gets that sentence in there so we have a huge amount of work to do to pull up our reputation to spread the word and make sure that things like that don't happen so I don't know, we should see it as an opportunity but we have to find the energy for that right I think we have a challenging three years ahead of us and I the people that I know and love here in Drupal I think we're up to it and I think a lot more people have to stand up and do the community, we have to do our part again and you can't refuse to answer as a speaker at DrupalCon I am legally obliged to answer any question you ask me now thinking about the sustainability of the project and any open source project some of that involves money and finances to be able to allow us to do things now we already see some companies sponsoring people to work on code which is fantastic but not so much sponsoring people to do all of the other things that make a sustainable project what would you like to see people sponsor ooh this is a tough one because the counter the other side of that coin if you look at Linux for example which is undoubtedly the biggest and most successful open source project Linux is highly highly highly professionalized and highly siloed I don't know how much 90% of the work on Linux or more is paid for by a company between IBM and Ford I mean embedded systems and all the cell phone manufacturers they don't celebrate themselves they don't care about getting together but boy do they make money so what if our priority is like having a roof over our heads and our families and the price we have to pay is that we have to find new people to hang out with that's not how I want our project to be so I would sponsor I would sponsor teaching open source stuff in schools you know you want to teach coding make sure it's open source you want to like really do something that's really really effective I talk with Vinitarati from London who runs women who code in London and we were talking about the gender diversity gap three or four years ago and I was doing a thing about women in tech and it was really interesting he said oh you don't need to worry about that at all 10 or 15 years it's going to be 50-50 you don't even have to worry about that because they're teaching coding in all the schools the thing that you need to worry about is what they're teaching and who's sponsoring that teaching and who's designing the programs so let's make sure that Drupal is one of those things let's make sure that PHP is in there I think that is something worth sponsoring okay hey well thank you so much