 Lot of people a lot of people ask me what what do I even do here? And I think this topic is kind of interesting for all of us And I wanted to do a little bit of qualification for myself just to explain how how do I even get here and so in the last century I started I Was attending high school and high school got modems these dial-in modems that were like 56k And you would need to wait for minutes to get internet and I was kind of intrigued how to do something on the internet How to build something on the internet and how to publish something and I decided to be this lazy teacher Who reads like five pages ahead of the book and then teaches everybody about the cool stuff and then reads five pages again so I Started web laborer, which is a Hungarian web development community It still exists and I started that with a Hungarian person living in Vienna Shandor Shomkuti who I never ever met ever since so if he's somewhere here that would be amazing And we started this community to share what we learned and our idea was to learn from others So they would share what they learned and then the the then the things that we learned put together will be so much better at the end and That kind of grew out to be too big and it led me into working on the PHP documentation itself It worked on the CHM the Windows help version Which was by the way amazing like you could download the whole thing and search and free tech search in there And everything was very cool so I worked on the build system for the PHP documentation became the lead of the PHP documentation and the php.net website and Our custom build system we kind of grew out on the site and then in 2003 we were looking for a better system and Unfortunately 2003 is when Matt and Mike decided to fork B2 to be WordPress So it was not yet viable for what we needed but Drupal was there and It kind of provided all the features that we needed so we wanted the forum we wanted to manage users We wanted to have posts and we wanted to have Fresh news all kinds of things feeds. We want to aggregate content and it was all there And the only thing that was not there is we wanted it to be all Hungarian Because it's a Hungarian community and people can just go and read English stuff so our value was that we learned stuff from all over the globe and then distilled it in Hungarian and provided it back to the community and Drupal was not really capable to be Hungarian And I wanted even the URLs to be Hungarian such a control freak I was so I worked a lot on making it be able to do Hungarian and generally just to support multilingual and So I'm working on Drupal for 13 years now, and I'm still working on multilingual So either it is a hard problem or I suck trying to solve this problem Or maybe both But we managed to get all the URLs Hungarian we managed it to be Hungarian and we launched it next year and that Basically by default made me into a Drupal core developer because we needed to make those changes in the system And it was not possible to do it otherwise so I was providing patches fixes and I became a Drupal core developer and that that led me into a lot of things in Drupal through the versions and That jumps us straight into Drupal initiatives Because Drupal in 2003 was small and tiny and you would submit patches on a mailing list You would send them in as email attachments and then they would download email attachments and apply them from there to CVS It was great the Wild West, but then Drupal grew out to be so big and so Impossible to grasp at once that we needed a way to focus attention on specific things and focus work on specific things and for Drupal 8 when Drupal 8 started in 2011 Dries Barthard the project lead for Drupal decided to launch these initiatives and the idea behind them was two different things so one is to have Have a road map that we didn't have before that we can point people to is like hey We work on these shiny things. It's gonna be great And the other one was to help focus the community to work on these things and actually make them happen And the road map was kind of coming Naturally, but to help focus on people to do things It did not come naturally and you would think that I was a right choice for a leading initiative because I've I've already had like These nine years of experience with Drupal and even more with the open source and the PHP team and everything But I was not naturally right for the job So I was selected for the multilingual initiative in 2001 May something start of May and One year into the multilingual initiative I think I made my biggest mistake because another initiative was announced views in core and Views is the most popular thing in Drupal It allows you to take the data from Drupal and then generate whatever output out of that you want feeds rest endpoints or tables or galleries or pagers or Whatever you want sliders. It doesn't matter So it's a query builder and an output generator and it was four times more popular than any multilingual module ever They got money. They got funding. They've had a stable team Some of that team was people who worked on the multilingual initiative before and I totally felt betrayed People were stolen from my team. They got money. They've had funding. They were focused They were four times more popular than what I was working on so I've sent out this very angry email to everybody in Drupal leadership that I will probably be unable to continue this and it's it's just bad and and I don't see a way out and it's impossible and I think they were very smart because they did not reply to any of my feelings They replied to some of the facts that I included in the email but totally ignored all of the feelings and let me to ferment in that thing and to figure it out for myself and What I figured out is I was totally approaching that from the wrong side So what I was seeing is that Drupal is this very delicious nice small pie That we are chipping away from and if they steal my people then I will have less people and if they steal money From the pool then I will have less money and that's not how it is Okay, because there's always more people to come. There's always more people to come to this event There's always more people to watch the live stream There's always more people to watch the videos later on and they are all interested in where things are going and a lot of Interested in contributing to the project the thing is we usually don't do a very good job of attracting them Even in Drupal so I realized that I need to grow this pie instead of thinking about it as a fixed pie And try to figure out how to grow this pie and to make people happy Be on my team. So my problem was that I did not have enough money So I could get some money for some things events some food Maybe a flight ticket or two, but I didn't have sustained money to work with a thousand three hundred people for four years That was impossible to fund on this scale, right? so what I wanted to figure out is if I don't have money and I want to work in the classic open source fashion where People contribute on their own time and for their own benefit Now how can we make that happen and how can we scale that out? So I went in and did a lot of research on how can you make people happy? How can you make people come and see that what you do is great and enjoy staying with you? And even if they leave they would regret that they left So I went in and did a lot of that research and one of the things I found is If you try to focus on making people successful in different ways Then they will find their where their place in your initiative so damping did a lot of Writing on this and he has a great book called drive that I suggest you read and he line lines out these three things as the Main drivers behind what drives people to make things happen. The first is that autonomy It's the way to to to choose your way and to make your ideas happen and to have a ownership over things The second is mastery to improve in something and the third is purpose to find find a reason find a higher purpose that you join to We did a lot of things in these areas that only clicked later on when I read the literature that it kind of made sense that we did some Of these things so it's not like I Architected the initiative around this system But in hindsight it makes a lot of sense to explain it like this and purpose is kind of easy for you as well But it's not that hard for Drupal also because multilingual Drupal powers a lot of things So if you use games unity 3d their website is totally multilingual Drupal if you are interested in education children immigrants that Refugees etc. Then UNESCO runs a multilingual Drupal if you're interested in disseminating science and findings and physics Then the CERN runs a multilingual Drupal if you are interested in technology and saving the planet Then Tesla runs a multilingual Drupal as well and these companies can kind of pay their way to have those solutions Right, so they can make things happen. However complicated it is And they could do it even if it was even if it was impossibly hard and would take a long time What I'm was more interested in what gave me purpose is the small sites like this site go-go board is Is an initiative to have tools to get kids into technology and have them interact with technology to understand How how it operates and have them tinker with all kinds of things and they run a multilingual Drupal as well So what I like is if we improve the experience Then we don't only improve them for these big sites But we improve them for everyone and especially what we did in Drupal 8 is just to make it clicky Simple to do everything multilingual and don't need to download anything to make it happen So these folks will be able to do it much easier and basically make their world a better place so that's I think is Equally simple if you look at where wordpress can go and where wordpress already went What's much harder to deal with is autonomy And as yesterday the Matt said in the Q&A or Matt was questioned in the Q&A if he should make more decisions I think that's the wrong answer Because if you ask the leader to make all the decisions Then you don't get to choose your way Then it becomes the day job where you are told what to do. You don't choose your way What the leader needs to do is set up high-level goals and Then give you enough autonomy to figure out the rest So what was great for me as the multilingual initiative was so huge that I couldn't oversee it at all And I basically needed to take off Take rid of ownership of a lot of things because I couldn't do it anyway I basically ended up with Delegating that responsibility to a lot of people so if you agree on the high-level goals Then people can take ownership of the of the layer below that and figure out how is it going to happen? And even if it's not going to happen the way you wanted to implement it originally It's going to happen So if you have an attachment to specific implementations and ways to do things and you want to implement it that way Then you are limited to the power that you personally one person has to make that happen If you give up that ownership and say yeah, go there, but I don't know how Then you'll get there and it may not be the way you want it But you'll get there and it will happen so much easier to scale And then the other thing is our open source projects grow so big now that they are very scary Everybody says here to come to the contributor days But if it would be a contributor day where it's like everyone together and do funky things it wouldn't work because we need to set up these small spaces that are safe to people to go and They feel like they belong to somewhere belonging to WordPress or Drupal is such a huge thing It's very hard to to to do anything tactile with that But belonging to a small group a tribe or however you want to call it is much easier to deal with so what we found in the initiative is if we've had regular meetings if we've had a website where people could go to if we've had a List of people who are working on the initiative like list them all and if we've had a Textual medium for meetings that was very inclusive for everyone in the multilingual Scene who would not be able to speak so fast in English that was very inclusive and very enabling for people to come and Have that safe environment Once you have that you need to ensure that things are going to happen Even if single people for some reason fail go away or cannot figure it out for themselves So nothing is going to happen if one person works on something because there's always need to be a reviewer, right? There's always need to be someone who commits it So if we set that up at the start if we make them work together that they can fail much faster figure out what's wrong early Fix it and then they have a much better chance to move forward It's also I don't know if you've if you've put together furniture or something It always feels better if you do it with multiple people. It's not just like you doing your your thing Okay, and then you need to plan for a succession So what I've said is I've had people I delegated Different parts of the initiative to but all of them through these four years have had personal life events That made them unable to fulfill their tasks at the time So the thing is they built teams around them themselves as well So they can jump in and own things when they need it to go away And then once things actually get done Very important to praise their work if you don't praise work It's kind of the same as if you if you just like if you ignore them entirely So you need to celebrate every single accomplishment The more you celebrate people's accomplishment the more they will feel valued and understood And that their thing moves the needle forward And if you have that goal defined and celebrate the steps there Then they will see that they are making the contribution to the final goal to the big Initiative that should happen and the other thing is you should praise time off because if somebody goes off from your From your work, they probably go off already late They probably burned out two months before but they were kind of sticking around because they had this responsibility And now they finally go away, which they should they should have rest they should go away and have some time for themselves and You should praise them because it's it's good for them to do that And they may or may not come back at the end if you praise them They may actually come back because how friendly you were right, but if they don't come back at least you've had a nice goodbye so I think you should praise both hard work and time off and Value your people that way as well and for a personal story two years ago I woke up and started having breakfast with with my wife and we never finished that breakfast Because she started having some strong pains in her stomach and it went so strong that we need to go to the ER to get examined and They didn't know what it is and they were examining her for five hours straight And they kind of figured out that the blood results are getting worse and worse, but there is no blood anywhere so that means that she had internal bleeding and she was Was about to die in a few hours if not operated So they collected a group of doctors to operate her that night 11 p.m. And they operated her and they saved her life that night and She lives and now we have a kid. So it's amazing but these are the kind of things that You cannot plan for they just happen and you may don't you may not even know why but they just happen But the thing is if you do those things right that I've talked about Before then you're gonna have the support network that already understands the goals that already has All the stuff to work on and they just gonna do it and you can go away and do your stuff and have your life Restored so that's what I did and at the same time Austin was happening and they sent me this photograph and Sent us private messages sent us flowers and all kinds of stuff So it was just amazing to feel that support and to see that everything that I plan to do in Austin happened Because we shared all those responsibilities And finally mastery is I think easy Because people always want to get better at things and you always want to have more people to work on things You just need to match those two So one of the things we did is being radically open about all the things that we did we built a we built a workshop About multilingual Drupal that we've had a 23 page handout that said click here right this click here right this click here right this We video recorded that we've had a Drupal distribution that can contain all the things and then people just took that and Translated that to Spanish and delivered it in Spain took that translated that to one of the Indian languages and delivered it in India and Just basically took this everywhere on the globe and that's because we just published it Then we put it there and like do whatever you want and the same thing we did with user testing We created the script we put it up for people to test and a lot of people took it for themselves and did the user testing I did a lot of reading on a lot more reading on things to do to get people Get people active and one of the stories I found is about car wash loyalty So there's a lot there was some research into having a car wash loyalty card with 10 empty slots and the car wash loyalty card with 10 empty slots and two stem stamped in already and eight empty slots Okay, and the 10 empty slot version already stamped in Worked twice as good as the eight empty slot version, although they were the same amount of slots So what they did there is basically made you feel like you're on your way of collecting car wash loyalty points, right? So you were on your way and you kind of felt this urge to complete that way so I translated that to blog posts and what I decided to do is I wrote blog posts about different aspects of how Multilingual Drupal is going and then at the end I presented by the way It doesn't actually work perfectly here are the issues that you can help with and That basically made people to understand that oh, this is progressing well But okay, well, I still need some work and then they could just go in and help there and that worked wonders So there's a lot of these things that you can do but generally overall What you need to understand is open source is not one small fixed pie You need to grow this by you need to always look for growing this pie because people will have their life events people will burn out People will start what I'm working on other things new shiny technologies. Whatever doesn't matter And your project will only sustain if you keep looking for new people and keep looking for their interests that match with your Interests and that way we managed to attract a thousand three hundred people including the long tail of everyone who contributed ever to Issues reported problems or whatever else So if you want to learn more about these things then I suggest these books Chip and then Heath switch is amazing. So if this is the only thing you take away from this talk chip and then he's switch Then pick drive and David Markey turn the ship around is very good for handing off Autonomy he's a he's a nuclear reactor captain Who handed off a lot of a lot of a responsibility on his ship and that's kind of pretty scary So it's a very good book to read for that as well, and that's it for my talk. Thank you