 Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Drees Note, the plenary session where Drees Bytar will talk about the current initiatives in Drupal, the success of launching Drupal 9 and a number of other important highlights for the community. I'm very happy to welcome you all here for this session and pleased to introduce Drupal Association Executive Director Heather Rocker to give a brief update about the Drupal Association programs before Drees gets started. Thank you, Tim. So I'm here today representing our Drupal Association staff and our board of directors and officially welcome you to DrupalCon. Things are going great so far this morning. We're very excited that all of the things that needed to happen are happening. So thank you for being here and for being part of the experiment of taking this online. So I get a few minutes today to share with you some of the insights about our work and the goals of the Drupal Association. You can meet our team and learn more about our mission by visiting us this week in the exhibit hall. And I won't have time today to walk through all of our programs and updates. So I hope that you'll take the opportunity to watch the DA update to the community in the on-demand content and also join us for the Drupal.org engineering team panel and the Q&A with the board and staff both happening live tomorrow. As Tim said, I'm Heather Rocker, Executive Director of the Drupal Association, and I'm thrilled to be here with you this week. Although this definitely wasn't our original DrupalCon plan for 2020. DrupalCon is not only a mission-centric program for our nonprofit association, but it's also our largest source of funding. Last summer, staff and a myriad of volunteers began the hard work of putting together DrupalCon Minneapolis, which was scheduled to happen in May of this year. However, in March, it became clear that there wasn't a safe scenario for us to bring the community together and have an in-person event as we had planned. As we evaluated all of the options, one thing was certain. We wanted to find a way to convene this community and create the opportunity for further collaboration and contribution. Everyone has worked so hard to ensure that we could bring the energy and excitement of a typical DrupalCon to life in this new virtual format. And sometimes with change comes opportunity and DrupalCon Global has been no exception. Moving this event online had the added benefit of allowing us to dramatically widen our scholarship program efforts with a particular lens on diversity and inclusion. So we've been able to provide more access than ever before for those underrepresented in technology. Thank you to the organizations and the local Drupal associations that partnered with us to recruit new scholarship attendees. I hope you'll get a chance to chat with a few of the over 150 scholarship recipients here with us at DrupalCon this week. Many of them are new to DrupalCon and some are even new to Drupal. So welcome. Thank you for being here. I do want to acknowledge the hard work of the program committee, the summit leads, the speaker team and the steering committee which laid the groundwork for DrupalCon Global. We owe many, many thanks to these event volunteers from the community and we've even recruited some from beyond the Drupal community. So welcome to you as well. This event would literally not be possible without our sponsors. Many of these sponsors pledged their sponsorship dollars back in March when there was no certainty about what would happen with DrupalCon. They pledged to stick with us as we figured out the new plan and we so appreciate their ongoing support. Be sure to visit them in the exhibit hall this week. Thank you also to the Drupal Association supporting partners. Fundings from these organizations help us do the work that we need to do and creates funding that's non-event related which is really important from a funding diversification standpoint. Work we do like supporting the development of Drupal 9, maintaining Drupal.org, funding infrastructure and contribution testing fees, driving diversity inclusion and equity programming, collaborating with various Drupal working groups like the security working group which keeps the project secure, enabling contribution and even expanding the types of contribution we recognize. None of this work would be possible without these organizations. So thank you. So we can't talk about support without talking about Drupal Cares. The Drupal Association along with so many other organizations was deeply impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. We had a lot of difficult community conversations about what the project would look like without the Drupal Association. While we were still crunching numbers on every possible financial scenario, we got a clear signal from you, the community, that you stood by ready to support us and help. And the Drupal Cares emergency fundraising campaign was born. I appreciate how Matt Westgate frames the work of the Association and why our continued work is needed. Early into the launch of the Drupal Cares campaign, Drupal founder Dries and his wife Vanessa made an important pledge to support and encourage other donations. And that became the matching gift challenge where every dollar donated was matched by a dollar up to $100,000. Then a group of dedicated business leaders from the Drupal community came together to make the campaign even better. This group announced the launch of yet another matching gift challenge which made every individual cash donation and every new or renewed membership have tripled the effect. So now we're talking about $300,000 in support. Community members got creative. We even saw wonderful projects like Pixels for Drupal, the Drupal 9 module challenge and more. The point is every action mattered. Every donation, whether large or small, every tweet of support that you sent, every new or renewed membership, you made a difference. You ensured that we met the Drupal Cares emergency fundraising goal of half a million dollars. And not only that we met it, but we did it in record time. You demonstrated once again the power of this Drupal community and the power of the open source model itself. As Dries said, this was really important so that we could refocus. Drupal thanks, Drupal hugs, and all of the Drupal happy things to everyone who participated in Drupal Cares. And as you can also see from Dries's quote about the Drupal Cares campaign, this was all happening at the same time we were launching Drupal 9. And Drupal 9 is here. This is where there'd be thunderous audience applause and participation, so I'm just going to envision that's happening for all of you at home because it's very exciting. Not only did Drupal 9 launch, but it launched during the earliest of the three projected release windows on June 3 of this year, which marks an incredible accomplishment by this community and everyone involved. There are many opportunities to learn about Drupal 9 during Drupal Con Global this week. If you want to fall in love with this community, just take a look at celebrate Drupal.org. Members from around the world contributed photos, drawings, videos, and more, all celebrating the hard work and collaboration it took to launch Drupal 9. And in fact, this site is now also showcasing Drupal Con Global celebrations and videos. So post your submissions this week and be part of the ongoing fun as we celebrate Drupal. Simply put, contribution makes Drupal what it is. It's obvious that code contribution is essential. In fact, we couldn't have launched Drupal 9 without it. And the work for Drupal 10, which launches in two years, actually needs to happen now as well. Contributions is important as ever. But we need to create a broader range of what's recognized to recognize and encourage contributions of all types to the Drupal project. So we launched the contribution recognition committee last fall, announcing it at Drupal Con Amsterdam. And it was part of the Drupal Association's commitment to creating a frictionless and truly rewarding contribution system for this community. Though the committee has paused due to the COVID-19 crisis, the DA team stands ready and will keep working to recognize more kinds of contributions and to make the process of crediting contributions even easier. Speaking of contributions, don't forget to join in this week. Not only have we brought the conference online, but thanks to volunteers, you can contribute online as well. Before I leave today, I want to talk about one of the most important focus areas for the Drupal Association, and that's diversity, equity, and inclusion. We know that diverse representation is low in technology. And with data shared by Drees at the Drees Note in Seattle last year, we also know the numbers in open source are even more troubling. Luckily, the values and principles for our community are a natural conduit to this kind of diversity, equity, and inclusion work. And frankly, it's why Drupal's been a leader in this space for years. Last month, the Drupal Association, we released our official statement in response to the ongoing violence of racism in communities around the world, and particularly here in the United States. We made a commitment to follow these words with actions. Though we began this year with diversity, equity, and inclusion plans and goals for the Association, we have accelerated those activities in recent months. It's important to me that our team is doing the work so that the increased cultural competency and inclusive decision making within our team can be applied to the work we do for the Drupal community. In short, my hope is we create a positive ripple effect. So I'm excited about some of the things coming out for the community as well. We're collaborating with a cohort of Drupal training organizations to create a program focused on developing Drupal talent, with an emphasis on supporting those typically underrepresented in technology and open source. This pilot program is scheduled to launch this fall. And I'm excited about how we can not only move the needle on diversity, but also provide the developer talent that is much needed in our community. With a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive community, the Drupal project will thrive and will drive even more innovation so that people can make a positive impact through Drupal. You can also help us make a difference this week. Aquia and Last Call Media will both donate $5 to Black Girls Code for anyone that registers interest at their booth in the exhibit hall. In addition, Message Agency is hosting a special intermission later today in remembrance of the tragic death of George Floyd. In addition, they'll be making a donation on behalf of all Drupal con attendees to Black Lives Matter. I do hope that you'll join me later today for this important time of reflection. On behalf of the Drupal Association, our team, our board, our volunteers, thank you for joining us at Drupal con global. I'm literally humbled by your presence at this event. We just didn't know if the community would meet us here and be as excited as we are. So we're really just so very thankful that you're here. And I do hope that we'll spend our time wisely together this week, that we'll learn from each other and we'll make connections that move us forward as a project and as a community. And now I have the pleasure of sending it live from here in Atlanta, Georgia, to Berkeley, California. So we're going to go east coast to west coast so that Fatima can officially introduce the dreams now. Thanks, Heather. Welcome everyone to your first virtual Drupal con. This is all really new for us, isn't it? It makes me think back to my first Drupal con, which was four years ago in New Orleans, where I was totally new to Drupal. I didn't know what it was, who core contributors were, what a view was or how any of these things work together. There were so many things to learn, people to meet, buffs to be confused in and swag to collect. I also remember being a volunteer and during the closing session, we were supposed to hand out stickers for next year's conference to attendees as they left the hall and I was so excited that I went and handed a stack of stickers to trees. We had a really good laugh about that and I even have a picture to remember it by. But that first Drupal con was just really overwhelming for me and sometimes confusing as I can imagine this one might be for so many of us. I know that we have fond memories of Drupal con. I know that I will really miss hallway conversations, game nights and even heckling eaten on stage at trivia. But that being said, I am really looking forward to exploring all of the different ways that we will engage and connect with each other virtually this week. And I'm so excited to welcome all of the people for whom this is their first Drupal con. Being virtual, we've been able to open up opportunities to bring in new speakers and new attendees who may not have been able to attend otherwise. We're so happy to have you here and I hope that you'll be able to learn a lot, connect with this community, make friends and feel inspired to take back what you've learned. I also think that this is a great time for us to reflect on the community that we want to be and the traditions that we want to take forward with us. Pantheon is proud to be a sponsor here at Drupal con global. At Pantheon, we're building the world's best website operations platform to help empower web ops teams to take control of their websites and deliver results by iterating quickly, learning and experimenting. So if you have a Drupal site that you'd like to take to the next level, you should come meet us at our booth and find out more. And who says virtual conferences can't have swag? We're giving out t-shirts, answering all your questions and just hanging out. So come stop by and check us out. Without further ado, on behalf of myself and my awesome colleagues at Pantheon, I'd like to introduce you to one of Drupal con's classic traditions, gone digital, the very first of virtual dreams. Now, everyone, please welcome the founder of Drupal live from Boston, passing it back to the east coast trees. Thank you very much. That was a great intro. All right. I think you should be able, awesome. I think you should be able to see my screen now. For those that don't know me, I'm Dries. I started the project and I'm still the project lead today. You can find me online as you can see here. We have a lot to cover today. The main topics for today are the release of Drupal 9. And then I'm going to talk a lot about Drupal 10 and what we're going to focus on next. But before we get started, I wanted to recognize that there's a lot going on in the world right now. And to start, I wanted to extend my sympathies for everyone impacted by COVID-19. This has been hard, this has been hard for many, including the Drupal Association as Heather talked about. For those in the Black community, we know that you carry an extra burden. And I want to be clear that I and the Drupal community stand in solidarity with you. The need for increased diversity and inclusion was a major theme at last year's DrupalCon. And you may remember this slide where I talked about why diversity and inclusion is so important. Not only is it the ethical right thing to do, but it also improves innovation and creativity and collaboration. As a project, we are committed to making Drupal a more diverse and inclusive place for Black people and other people of color so that we can all thrive. At this year's DrupalCon, we actually have our most diverse lineup of speakers ever, which is something that I'm very proud of. And we will continue to make this a priority going forward. I feel responsible as Dries, as an individual, but also as a project lead of Drupal to talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion. But I also feel like we need to make meaningful changes and concrete actions. It's not enough to just talk about these things. So there's a few things that we're doing in addition to what Heather just talked about. One of the things that we're doing is we're reviving the values and principles committee, and we're going to review our values and principles through a lens of anti-racism. Our community working group and community health team is already in process of reviewing our code of conduct to make sure to update our anti-harassment language and things like that to make it very clear that we do not tolerate discrimination, harassment, and racism in our community. We will continue to track and publish diversity data so we can hold ourselves accountable. I will personally make a donation to Black Girls Code. And in addition, Acquia, my company, is donating $5 to Black Girls Code for everyone that joins our booth and clicks the register interest button. And I know this is just the start. I know this is not enough, but we will continue to make progress and work on this until we see true racial justice. So I want to thank you and thank everyone that's, you know, working with us, that's helping us work through these crises, both COVID-19 as well as the financial challenges of the Drupal Association as well as topics like racial injustice. Obviously, I would have preferred to meet in person, but I'm still very happy that we were able to, you know, pull off this virtual conference and able to meet virtually. And while that does feel different, you know, it still feels really good that we are together now here virtually. And it feels really good actually knowing, you know, all of the things that we do, I truly believe that Drupal is in a very unique position where we can have a real impact. If you think about some of the side effects of what is happening is that, you know, in times of financial crisis, many organizations have to do more with less. And when you have to do more with less budgets are cut, and frankly, open source and Drupal become more relevant. We've seen this in all of the previous financial crises. But also, because the retail stores are closed, many organizations are actually going through an accelerated digital transformation, where they have to move more of their business online. And again, this is something that makes Drupal even more relevant today. And so, you know, on a positive note, I would say we have some other exciting news, obviously, and that is that last month we released Drupal 9 and we released it on time, as we said we would. And maybe a little unconventional this time around, but we still found an appropriate way to celebrate the release of Drupal 9 with people all around the world and have a very quick video of that that I would like to show you. Isn't it awesome? I just love how much progress we've made in the last four and a half years and how we were able to celebrate this. There's so much great things that we did. Just to give you a few quick examples, obviously, throughout the Drupal 9 release cycle, we added media management, which is great because it gave us a completely new way of managing images and videos and it's a lot more user friendly than it was ever been before. We also worked on a new way to create layouts and to manage layouts with the layout builder and really dramatically improved page building in Drupal, which is awesome. We made amazing progress through our API First Initiative, which is all about advancing Drupal's web services support to help build headless or decoupled applications. And you can see, you know, some pretty famous organizations in the world have begun using this to build, you know, native apps and to, you know, push content in all sorts of devices and modalities. And maybe best of all, and this one I'm particularly proud of, is that we delivered on our promise to make Drupal 9 the easiest update or upgrade in the recent history of Drupal. Just looking at some of the stats, you know, a third of all of the modules are actually already Drupal 9, which is record breaking. And then another third of all of the modules, there's only one line of change required to make them fully Drupal 9 ready. So hopefully we can make some progress on those this week. And so all in all, Drupal 9 has the easiest upgrade path in the last 15 years of Drupal and maybe longer, which is awesome. And our users love it. Like if you go on Twitter, you see people tweet about it every day. And here's just a handful of these tweets, where people say how smooth and how easy the upgrade path is. I personally upgraded my own site. I know that's a simple site, but it took no more than 20 minutes to upgrade my personal blog from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9. So that was a very special feeling to be able to do that. So all in all, it's difficult to highlight everything, but there's just so much that we've accomplished. And so I think it's fair to say that we really climbed a mountain together and made progress on each of these four strategic tracks, which I think has been fantastic. If you look at that through the lens of data, you have data points like this, where we had 55 Bucfix releases, nine major releases, 35 alphas, betas and release cabinets and 24 security releases. That's a lot of work for the core committers and their release management team. So big kudos to them for doing this like clockwork as a heartbeat for the project. We also have a new innovation model, where new features can enter Drupal core as experimental and can then sort of graduate to become stable features. And we have 13 major features go through this process, which I think is a great testament to this new innovation model and how well that's been working. In total, over 4,500 individuals contributed to Drupal 9, and over 760 organizations contributed to Drupal 9, which is really hard to believe. And it's even more impressive if you look at the names on the slide. There's just so many names of people that helped make this happen. It's really kind of amazing to think about that. And then of course, a lot of these people have been supported by organizations. So thank you all for contributing to Drupal 9. It's a fantastic release. I think it's maybe the most progress we've made in a long time. And I really think it will change the perspective that the world has on Drupal because we made Drupal a lot easier to use and a lot easier to maintain, which is some of the feedback or criticism that people have. So I think it's a fantastic accomplishment. And I really thank you for contributing and making that happen. Just as a quick reminder, if you are on Drupal 8 still, you have about I think 16 months or so to upgrade on some quick math. I hope that's right. And if you're on Drupal 7, you actually have more time, which may sound a little kind of intuitive, but you have more than two years before Drupal 7 is end of life. That's something that we've recently changed. We extended it by a year. And after that, actually, you have commercially extended support as well. So if you're on 7, we encourage you to upgrade. But if you're not ready to upgrade, you can stay on Drupal 7. It is well maintained and supported with Buckfix and security releases. So that's a little bit about Drupal 9. And so now I really want to spend most of the rest of the presentation talking about what we're going to do next. What are some of the new things that we're going to do as we think about Drupal 10. Now, before I dive in, I wanted to share a few quick things. One is that we learned from Drupal 8 that we actually had too many initiatives. If you remember that mountain slide, there was more than 15 initiatives on that mountain. And in fact, not all of the initiatives were on that mountain. So that was a lot. And we didn't finish them all despite a lot of great progress. The other thing that we know already is that we won't have the same amount of time to build Drupal 10 than we had for building Drupal 9. And I'll come back to that in a minute here to explain that a little bit more. But with these two things in mind, my goal for today is to propose five initiatives for Drupal 10. And I know that sounds like a lot less than it is, but it allows us to focus and allows us to make great progress. Now, when I think about five initiatives, I want to make sure that these initiatives are well balanced. And what I mean by that is that we need to balance both technical debt and innovation. We need to consider different stakeholders or personas. For example, we need to think about what developers want, but we also need to think about what side builders and content creators want. And even sellers, people involved with convincing potential customers or users of using Drupal going forward. We also need to balance long-term and short-term goals, which can be hard. And then last but not least, we need to work towards a strategic vision that makes it really, really clear to individuals and organizations as to why they should adopt Drupal. Like it should be obvious if you're doing this kind of work, you should use Drupal to be really differentiated compared to other solutions. Now, the way I want to go about this today is in two steps. And step one is to make a list of all of the important initiatives to consider. So I'm going to make a list maybe 20 to 25 potential initiatives. And then we're going to have the hard chore, I guess, of selecting just five. And that will be hard, but we're going to try and make sure that they're well balanced. All right, so that's the plan. And so let's start with making the list of initiatives to consider. And so the way I think about this, there's sort of four buckets of initiatives to consider. One, are the initiatives or the things that are mandatory because they're security related. Two, are things that we've already started that are still pretty awesome, that people still want, but that we haven't finished. And so things that we want to finish. Three, are things that existing users are asking us for, things that they want to see in future versions of Drupal. And last, the fourth bucket is things that we know we need to do to attract new users to Drupal and to stay relevant in the long term. So things that user are asking us for tend to be a little bit more short term, whereas things that will attract new users and that make people feel confident about picking Drupal for, you know, to build their sites for the next decade tend to be a little bit more longer term. So let's go through these four buckets and let's start with the things that we need to do because we feel they're mandatory to do. And a lot of that comes down to keeping Drupal secure. As you know, Drupal depends on a lot of third party components. And each of these components have an end of life. If you put that in a timeline like this, you can see some of the components or the dependencies that Drupal has. And for some, we already know when they're end of life. And then for others, we know there is a new version, either there is a version already, or we know a version is, you know, a new version is eminent, but they haven't really communicated their end of life. But the point is, each of these components, we need to track them and manage their end of life. And in this case, Symphony four and CK editor four, we know their end of life at the end of 2023. And really what that does, it forces us to end of life Drupal nine as well. Right. And so what we need to do is we need to release a new version of Drupal well before these are end of life, because we want to give our users, you know, all of the users of Drupal nine time to upgrade their site before these components are end of life. And so really, what that means is that we're targeting the release of Drupal 10 to be around June of 2022. Now, some of you may, you know, panic a little bit or be afraid because that is actually, you know, like two years away or even a little bit less than two years away. And, you know, obviously, there will be an upgrade from Drupal nine to Drupal 10. But let's not forget, we made upgrades easy. And we will continue to make upgrades easy, just like we did from Drupal eight to Drupal nine. And in fact, there's a lot of things that we've learned from that, that will allow us to make it even smoother. So don't panic, the upgrade from Drupal nine to Drupal 10 should be easy. Now, what that means for those of you that are contributing to Drupal 10, or throughout the Drupal nine development cycle, is that actually Drupal 9.3 alpha is sort of the last opportunity to introduce new features or replace existing features or API, because we do need some time to prepare for Drupal 10 and to remove deprecated code, for example. So really, what that means is that we don't have a whole lot of time for innovation for implementing new features and capabilities. In fact, if you compare that to Drupal nine, we have less than two years compared to 4.5 years. And we only have three minor releases that we can use to innovate, compared to eight minor releases in Drupal nine. So that's just something to keep in mind. And another reason why five initiatives for Drupal 10 seems sufficient. Anyway, with all of that said, the first initiative that I think we should consider, and we may not have a choice here, is what I've called the Drupal 10 readiness initiative, which is really all about making sure that the dependencies or the components that we use are properly managed and that we have proper security coverage for all of them. Now, if you go into a little bit more detail, you can see there's a long list of these initiatives here. And for each of them, we need to figure out what to do. Often, it's just an upgrade. But in some cases, we need to think about, do we stick with that component? Or do we actually want to change it to something else? Like, for example, CK Editor 4, CK Editor 5 is a major rewrite with lots of API changes. So we need to decide, do you want to go with CK Editor 5? Or is this a good time to maybe reconsider our options? Now, some of these initiatives and these upgrades, I should say, of components are actually very good. Some of them actually give us new capabilities, new APIs, new innovation. So it's not just maintenance work. We actually, in some of the cases, get real benefits and user benefits too from these initiatives. And CK Editor would be a great example because they've made a lot of improvements and they allow collaborative editing and these kinds of things with future versions of CK Editor. As you can see, the total effort for all of this is large. Some of them are extra large on their own. But then if you add up everything, it is kind of a large undertaking to get ready for Drupal 10. And this is not even everything that we have to do. So that's really the first initiative that I believe we should consider. And so I'm adding it here in the bucket of things that are mandatory. So with that, let's move on to the next bucket, which is things that we've already started, but not finished. And there's actually a lot of amazing things that we've started, but not entirely finished. And so one example is the media initiative, which gives us this new media library to help manage images and videos. Now, it actually ships with Drupal 9. It's stable and it ships with Drupal 9 and we encourage people to use it. However, it's not enabled by default. So if you install Drupal, it's not part of the out-of-the-box experience. Now, we don't love that because it's such a great feature for beginners and people that are less technical. They really benefit from this. And so what we want to do is we want to finish this. We want to add some of the things that are missing, like integration with some parts of Drupal, some usability and accessibility improvements and things like that. In the same boat is the layout builder. Again, it is stable. It ships with Drupal 9. We encourage people to use it. But it's also not enabled by default. And that's a shame because it's a much better experience. A lot of usability improvements come from using the layout builder. So we need to finish it in order to do so. We need to think about replacing the existing or the old block placement UI. We also have to make some usability and accessibility improvements and some other things as well. Our new admin theme, the name of that theme is Claro. It's more or less in the same boat. It's ships with core, but it's still beta. So it's not stable and it's also not enabled by default. And it's such an improvement in terms of the administrative experience, also in terms of accessibility, that we want to enable it by default and ship it to be the default experience for everyone. And so again, there's a few things that we need to finish, like media integration, toolbar support, and we want to make sure that the module administration page, as an example, looks really good. So I think it's pretty close, but it still needs to be finished. And so what I did is I actually bundled each of these or all three of these things into one initiative. And the goal is to push them over the finish line and make it an out-of-the-box experience for Drupal. And that will be very important because it will make Drupal a lot easier out of the box. And that is very important because you may remember from my DrupalCon Amsterdam presentation that we did some user research. We interviewed CMS users, not just Drupal users, but different users of different CMSs. And we asked them what their perceptions are of the CMS over time. And what we've learned is that beginners don't love Drupal to put it plainly. But then as they advance, as they become more experienced, they start to love Drupal more and more, which is why this line goes up and to the right. What was interesting is that other CMSs had the exact opposite trend line. When we spoke to WordPress or Adobe or Sitecore users, we learned that the beginners loved those platforms. But then over time, as the user became more of an expert, they start to love these platforms less and less, which is kind of remarkable that Drupal trends sort of the exact opposite direction. But it speaks to the opportunity. It speaks to the opportunity of improving the beginner experience. Because if we can attract more people to Drupal, give them a great experience, we should feel confident that they will stay with the platform for a long time. And so that's why I believe the easy out of the box experience is an important initiative to consider. I believe that ease of use of Drupal is probably the number one thing that we should focus on other than obviously security. But there is more. Another example is Oliveiro. And Oliveiro is our new frontend theme that we've been building for some time. Now, Oliveiro is not even in core yet. It doesn't ship with Drupal yet. So the goal here would be to get Oliveiro included in a future version of Drupal 9, make it stable, and also enable it by default. So then again, we leave people with a first great impression and a great theme to look at and learn from. And so a new frontend theme is another initiative that we should consider. Another one is automated updates. Today, when we do a security release, organizations that use Drupal often have to keep an expert on call to help with that security upgrade. And these security releases tend to happen around noon, Eastern time. And of course, for some people, depending on where you live in the world, that is sort of an inconvenient time zone. And so making security updates automated would be a great win. Now, some of you may recall that this was actually an existing initiative, which means that we have a pretty good plan for this initiative and that we've actually already made a lot of significant progress. And some of that, thanks to the European Commission, we really want this feature for themselves and have been funding a lot of the work on automated updates. So let me give you a little bit more of a detailed look at where we're at, so that you can maybe help contribute to the initiative. So if you think about automated updates, if I simplify what needs to happen when an automated update occurs, it's basically four things. First, we need to prepare for the upgrade, which means Drupal needs to check that it's in a, let's say healthy or clean state that nobody modified or hacked Drupal core, as we say. Once we know that Drupal is in a clean state, we obviously have to figure out what needs to be updated. The things that need to be updated may have dependencies that need to be updated. So there's a whole process on figuring out what are the updates that I need to download or what Drupal needs to download. Once we've downloaded all of the different updates or packages, we want to check that they're also not compromised, right? We want to verify that these are things that we know and are safe to update. And once we've downloaded everything, once we have verified everything, we need to switch to the new code, to do these new updates. And that's actually a little bit complicated because we want to support different workflows. Maybe some people want it fully automated, maybe other people want a quick manual approval step. So we need to be able to fit that into different workflows. But then we also need to account for what to do when things fail, right? So we need to have the opportunity or the ability to do a rollback if the update didn't work. And so, you know, switching to new updates, it may sound easy, but it's actually not that easy. And so if we think about these four pieces, the way we have been working on them, you can see on the screen. So, you know, we've been working on integrity checks, that's actually mostly done to manage the dependencies and download the updates. We want to switch from Composer 1 to Composer 2 and make that really the core of that system, which it's designed to do that. And Composer 2 comes with some much needed memory improvements, which is, you know, why that is interesting. To verify the updates, we have a package signing system that works in the background with Drupal.org. That's mostly done. And then to do the whole switching to new updates, we will be using a custom bootloader. Again, I won't go into more details here, but this should give you kind of an understanding of the plan, where we're at, and then hopefully also how you can get involved. We can help with each of these four work streams. We would love your help. So if we do that, if we finish that, I think that would be fantastic. It will allow site owners to sleep well at night. It will reduce the maintenance cost of Drupal. And so I think it's a fantastic feature. All right. So there's a whole bunch of other things, of course, other than automated updates that we are working on and have been working on. And these are very valuable. These are, you know, I'm passionate about many of those. However, I decided not to include them here, because I don't think they are the most important or the most strategic relative to sort of, you know, defining five strategic initiatives. Now, that doesn't mean we should work on them. We should definitely keep working on them, especially if you're passionate about it. But it may mean that we're not prioritizing all of the resources around them. So, for example, the committer time or the time that committer spent, they may prioritize other initiatives over these initiatives. So wait times might be a little bit longer and things like that. But by all means, we'll love this work and keep working on it if you're passionate about it. All right. See, these are the two first buckets. So now I'd like to move on to the third bucket. And that is to talk about things that users are asking us to do. Now, the way to figure out what users are asking you to do is to do a survey and to do user research. And so guess what? We did a survey. Over 2000 people took the survey, which is awesome. That's a lot of data points. And one of the things that we asked every participant to do is to self-identify. So we know who took the survey. So you can see there's backend developers, 50% of them identified as backend developers. There's site builders. And the difference between backend developers and site builders, just to be clear, is that site builders tend to be more whizzy wig and drag and drop. So they don't necessarily open up an IDE to create a custom module. They try to do things through the UI. Content creators and then sellers. So sellers, meaning those that help sell Drupal to potential users. Now, if you do the math, it doesn't add up to 100. It's actually over 100. And that's simply because people can self-identify as more than one persona. Like a lot of content creators are also site builders. Some developers are both backend and front-end developers. So that's why the total number is more than 100. Now, what I did is for each of those personas, I looked at the data and I looked at the top two requests for each of the personas. And the way I filtered the data is that I looked at the top two as voted on by the persona. So what that eliminates is maybe a content creator voting on backend developer features. So I thought it was important to use that filtering. And then I also filtered by Drupal 8 experience. So quite a few people that took the survey had not used Drupal 8 yet because they're still on Drupal 7. And so if I didn't filter the data by Drupal 8 experience, a lot of the requests would be for things that we've already implemented through Drupal 8 and Drupal 9. So that's why I filtered the data this way. So it's basically, as an example, what do backend developers experience with Drupal 8 ask to do for other backend developers? That's the idea. If you look at the data, there's actually quite a bit of data points for each of those personas, hundreds of answers that we considered. And then what I did quite simply, and by the way, I will make all of this data available in all of the details so you can do your own analysis. But this is my analysis. And so then what I did is I basically put these top two requests for each of the personas in a table. And so I'm going to reveal it to you now. I'll go bottom to top to build up some suspension given that a lot of you are backend developers. But sellers, they basically ask for things that help them demo Drupal. And the number one thing was a better looking administration theme. And the second thing was out of the box integrations, specifically integrations with marketing technologies, because that's what end users tend to ask for. They want to see that Drupal can do the things that they want to do, and that it looks good, and that it's easy to use. So no real surprise there. Content creators also asked for a more modern administration UI. And, you know, one that's responsive and snappy, and sort of application like. And then they also asked for easier to use page building tools. So despite the layout builder, they want even more easy to use page building tools. That could be improvements to the layout builder, but also I think out of the box blocks, like maybe to add a title or an image or different components on pages. So that's content creators. So moving up, site builders, they asked for automated updates and more modules in core. Now, the more modules in core is interesting. And we did have a little bit of a follow up research on this. And the reason why is really manyfold. One is, you know, 80% of the websites use, you know, very similar modules, and people are a little bit tired of having to download these modules and install them. They just want them to be there. But also by adding them to core, it removes some of the maintenance burden. It makes it easier to update those modules. And so actually, some of that could be fixed by automated updates in core. Next, front end developers, they asked us to modernize the JavaScript in core. And, you know, to look at JavaScript frameworks. They also asked for a component based theme system. And I won't go into the details of what that is here, but more modern way of building and designing front ends. Last but not least, backend developers, they asked for improved API documentation. That was a number one ask. And we did have a question in the survey that was kind of a deep dive on that specifically. And what this was about was actually less about the quality of the API documentation. It was all about the discoverability and the search ability of the API documentation. So that's what we learned from the survey. Again, the details are in the detailed survey results. But it just wanted to be easier to find the documentation that we have. And the second thing was to replace the hook system with events. And this one actually made me smile because, you know, years ago, this was a little bit controversial, where most people love the hook system. Now people want the event system. And I think that's great because it means two things. One, there's sort of a general interest in moving away from old Drupalisms. But also I think people want one system versus two systems. So cleaning that up is important for the developer experience, no doubt. So these are the top twos for each of the personas. Now you may wonder what didn't make the list because some of the questions in the survey had more than 10 different options. So a lot of things didn't make the list. I won't go through them all here. I'll put them on this slide. So if you're watching or recording, you can hit pause. You can read a little bit more about them here to see what didn't make the list. Now, next, I wanted to look at what beginners versus experts are asking for. And for me, that was important because of what I said earlier, the need to really focus on the beginner experience based on the research presented in Amsterdam. And so what I did is this. I basically came up with this star system, where I would add two stars when half or more of the respondents of the survey said, drop everything that you're doing and do this, which if you think about it, more than half of the people that took the survey were extremely passionate about it. So two stars is an incredible endorsement for a feature or a feature request. I gave something, one star, if one out of three people said drop everything and do this, which still is an incredible endorsement for a particular feature. And not everything on this list got a star. And so when you do that for both beginners and experts, you can actually see not only what do these personas have conviction for, but also is there a consensus or a lack of consensus between beginners and experts. And so if you fill that out, it looks something like this. And if you look at the data, you can see that clearly automated updates is the number one. It's the only one that has two stars for beginner and experts. So a lot of conviction from both experience levels, and also a lot of consensus because both of them really want this. The number two is clearly a modern administration UI. It has the most stars next to automated updates. And it also came back in two personas. So what I did is I put all of those top feature requests in this bucket. And I added two stars to automated updates and one star to a modern admin UI. And I did that just as a reminder so we don't forget about what had the most votes based on the survey. All right. So next, the fourth bucket is things that we must do to attract new users and for Drupal to stay relevant for the next decade, let's say, this is longer term. And there's nothing new here. I've been talking about this for many, many years actually, and as recently as Drupalcon Amsterdam, where I've reminded people that we are evolving from a browser only world where a CMS was a standalone application where you did manual entry of content and it would generate an HTML page or HTML pages. We're evolving from that world to something much more complex, something much more rich, where you have many different integrations with backend technology and marketing technology, where you have many different output channels, not only web pages, HTML pages, but mobile applications, chat, voice, you name it. And all of that happens in many different formats. Could be JSON, could be XML, could obviously be HTML too. And that's really where the world continues to go. And as I mentioned, I believe this is a multi decade trend, where years into this, so this is nothing new. But I think we have a long way to go. And I think we should expect an acceleration of this trend as well. Just to put that in perspective, one data point today, there's about 20 billion devices. And it's expected that in less than 10 years, there will be 300 billion devices connected to the internet, generating data with or without displays, but just an explosion of content, an explosion of data. And so that's why it's really important for Drupal to continue to evolve from a web content management to what I call a content repository to more of a structured data engine, where we need to think about supporting more kinds of different content, maybe binary content even, where we need to think about managing much more content than we've ever managed, just more volume of content, not only different kinds of content. And where we need to make it really, really easy to integrate with both these backend systems and these frontend systems. And so the integration part is really important, backend and frontend integrations. Now, in addition to that, there's actually another important trend. And that trend is that frontend developers don't always love PHP. Even though PHP is faster than ever before, even though PHP is better and richer than ever before, frontend developers don't always love it. So if you look at the numbers, while PHP is vast, while PHP powers almost 80% of all of the websites in the world, which is incredible, the numbers are starting to decline. And if you compare them to the JavaScript numbers, you can see in this case, React, that the adoption of JavaScript and React is literally exploding. And it doesn't look like it's going to stop any time soon. The same is true, actually, for other frameworks like Vue. You can see Vue, same thing, growth is off the charts. And if you put them next to each other, you can see that PHP is still like what, 10 times or more than 10 times bigger than React on almost 10 times bigger than React and Vue together. So there's no reason to panic. PHP is strong. But I do think we should really look at embracing more JavaScript in Drupal, especially for the frontend. And this made me think if I were to start Drupal today, almost 20 years after I started Drupal, if I were to start today, I would write the frontend in JavaScript, to be quite honest. I wouldn't write it in PHP. Now, it's a different story for the backend. I may not write the backend in JavaScript, but the frontend, to me, with all of the richness of the JavaScript community, all the components that they have to build frontends, it feels like a no-brainer to do that. So I put JavaScript and web services on the list. And so this is the list, right? So this is the list of initiatives that I think we should consider. And so now let's select five, which is a hard part. So what I did is I just kind of flipped this on its head, if you will, and I created these empty slots for five initiatives to consider. All right, are you ready? So for me, the first three initiatives are actually no-brainers. You know, we have to get ready for Drupal 10. We have to make sure that Drupal is secure. So we have to manage these components. The next two, easy out of the box, a new frontend theme. I believe they're so important. We're so close. We need to finish them. It's the right thing to do. It's like we're so close to the finish line and pushing it over the finish line is where we unlock the real value of all of the work, which is improving that beginner experience. So yeah, for me, these are really important. Now, the fourth one, I also think is obvious. We have been working on it, and it's by far the number one request, by far the number one feature request. So automated updates in my mind has to be item number four. And not only is it useful for security updates and hopefully other updates, I actually do believe it's very strategic. If you think about what we're doing, I've been pushing for this idea of the assembled web, which nowadays people call composable architectures, where you can basically mix and match modules to build different kinds of applications in a very composable way, sort of like Lego pieces, which is exactly how people describe Drupal. So we have a real strength there, but if we could make it easier to manage all of these components and to update them, it really could accelerate this vision of the assembled web or composable architectures. And if you think about what could come after this, it's not just automated updates, but also making it easier to find and install modules, where you have like a module browser from within Drupal, and maybe a distribution browser from within Drupal. I think that would take a lot of complexity out of Drupal and getting started with Drupal, so really good for beginners, but really also long-term strategic in terms of ease of use, flexibility, composable architecture. So I'm actually pretty excited about that for more than one reason. So now, last but not least, again, I have to go with the vote of the users, which is a modern admin UI. I got the second most votes after automated updates. I think it's really important. So let's talk about that. So some of you may remember, we actually had an initiative to modernize Drupal's admin UI. And we actually did a lot of great work. We identified sort of all of the parts and we identified what was hard and easy. We did prototyping and I think I even showed some of these prototypes in previous Dree's notes or Drupal Compresentations. And we set various things in motion. But we also learned in doing all of that work that the scope is very, very large, that redesigning the complete administration UI is a lot of work. And so we should have known better, and that includes me and all of the core committers, that this was huge. But I'm still very grateful of all of the work that we've done because the fact that we learned so much. And so if you think about the scope, there's all these pieces that we had to do, which may not be obvious at first, but we identified a number of architectural changes we need to make. Some of them pretty hard. Like, how do you validate configuration entities as an example? And then we identified that we had not complete coverage, obviously, with our web service APIs and that we needed to add a lot of web service APIs. And we did that. And some of that lives in contrib. And all of these things were necessary to even begin to redesign the administration UI using JavaScript components, which is what we want to use. And so, you know, good progress was made, but we don't have a new admin UI to show for because it was just so large. And so what I'd like to propose next is that we actually kind of pivot and that we reduce the scope and that we take a small but specific step to set this admin UI work in motion. And I'll explain what I mean by that. So first of all, if you go back to this slide, there's all these pieces and, you know, obviously, not showing you all of the details. But the way I think we should go about it is basically follow the Pareto principle, which effectively says that you should focus on the most impactful problem first. And then once you solve that problem, you move on to the next problem, and eventually you arrive sort of at the finish line after you solved, you know, most or all of your problems. Now, actually, I think we solved some of the biggest problems already in my mind that's getting content in and out of Drupal, which we did by adding the JSON API module. But if I think about what could be the next biggest problem in terms of impact, I think it's menus. You know, if you think about all of the sites and applications that exist, almost all of them have a menu to navigate. And it's also really hard for JavaScript developers, you know, because you have to think about hierarchies, some of these menu items may be module defined or programmatic, if you will. Some of them are user defined. You have to think about pad aliases, access control. I mean, menus sound easy, but they're actually really hard. And as a result, most applications hard code them, like nobody builds them to be sort of dynamic. They're all hard coded, because frankly, there is no web service API in Drupal for managing menus. And when I looked at some of the competitors, they don't have an elegant solution for this either. So it seems like there is an opportunity to solve menus so that you don't have to resort to hard coding them, which looks a little bit like this, where a developer has to check out the project, make code changes, commit those, and then deploy them and go through the whole deployment process along the way. So, you know, there has to be a better way. And for us, CMS experts, it's not that hard to imagine what that would look like, meaning the better way is for, in this case, Arjun, to be able to make changes to the menu in the Drupal backend, and then have these changes automatically reflected in the frontend application, like this is what everybody expects a CMS to do, yet in the headless CMS world and in Drupal, this isn't solved properly, right? And so if we can solve this, we would empower Arjun and obviously, you know, and Maya too, because she wouldn't have to do this all the time, right? And so specifically, I believe our mission should be to provide the best way for JavaScript frontends to consume configurable menus managed in Drupal. Now, that's a lot. So let me break that down and help you understand what I think we should do. I believe we should have an official component for React and ship an official component for React. I believe we should have an official component for view as well, so that we are not dependent on one framework and that we can build this with, you know, abstraction in mind. And I think we should really think about the developer experience and specifically the frontend developer experience, so that we deliver it in a way that they expected to be delivered, which I imagine is true NPM, you know, the way other components are made available to them when building an application. And if we do this well, we could have another advantage over some of the headless CMSs and actually have a better developer experience and a better end user experience. Now, for some, this may sound like maybe a small step, right? Menus, is that really that interesting? And I think it actually is really interesting because in reality, and I alluded to this, menus are pretty hard, right? Not only do you need to add more web service API coverage for menus, but you really need to figure out how to manage these different kinds of menus and hierarchies. And when you're talking about menus, you can't ignore things like path aliasing and routing because when you click on a menu item, you expect to navigate to another page. So it really kind of pulls out some of the harder pieces to figure out. And then maybe the hardest part is figuring out how we actually make an official component. How do we go about testing JavaScript components? What about documentation? How do we create these packages? How do we do release management for these packages? What about security? What about the dependencies on other JavaScript packages? And so there's just a lot to figure out. So while it sounds easy to do menus, I think it's actually quite a bit of work. Now, menus, I think, are a real problem. And I think it's actually a problem that many frontend developers have. But what I'm actually more excited about is all the things that it sets in motion for Drupal specifically. So if you think about it, what we're going to do with this first official component menus is establish a clear pattern and a pattern that can be repeated. Think of it as a recipe or a playbook. Once we've figured out how to build one component and how to manage a component and release a component and package and test a component, we can really start building many more components in parallel, all following the same pattern. So if we can enable all of the contributed modules to build components in a uniform way and make it part of our tools and workflows, I would expect to see a lot more components, components for blocks and forms and shopping carts and maybe carousels and views and toolbars, you name it. And once we have enough of these components, we'll be in a much better position to start improving the admin UI. If you think about building our own admin UI, well, we have menus too in the admin UI. So that's an example of a component we could use. We're also using views in the admin UI. If there was a good component for views, we would be able to use that too. And so, again, it's what it sets in motion, which is so exciting to me. And for me, ultimately, it actually solves a very big, what I call industry problem, a problem that everybody has. And by solving it, we can be the best decoupled CMS in the market. And let me explain what that means. Today, we often have to make tradeoffs. If you go with a headless or decoupled approach, you're really optimizing for the developer experience because you allow the developer to use JavaScript, which is what the majority of front-end developers outside of Drupal typically want to use. But when you do that, you really compromise what I call the non-developer experience, the side builder and the content author, because they lose things like menu management, but also layouts and previews and many other things. And there's other modes like progressive decoupling. And really, that's not the ideal solution either because as a front-end developer, now you have to learn both Thwig and JavaScript because that's what progressive decoupling means. And so, the question is, can we build something that doesn't compromise one persona, that is both a positive experience? And I think we can. If you think about the menus, if we can build a menu component that can be used by a front-end developer, but that then connects into Drupal to generate the menu or the content of the menu, it would be a win-win for both personas. And that would be a big deal. And I've been blogging about this for a couple of years, and you may have seen some of my blog posts. In those, I put these complicated flow charts to help people decide should they go with coupled, decoupled, something in between. And there might be an opportunity to get rid of those flow charts or at least make the choice a lot easier or not as dramatic. So an official JavaScript component, an official React, an official view JavaScript component, we've never had. This would be a first in the lifetime of Drupal in 20 years of Drupal. And I think it's actually a giant leap for Drupal to add a first official component. So what I am proposing is that we don't do the modern administration UI that we learned from the past, that that is too big of a scope. And that instead, we focus on a JavaScript menu component to make that first step and to set that snowball in motion to make that start rolling. And if you think about it a little bit more, it's actually very strategic for other reasons, because I believe it allows us to make some progress on some of these other important initiatives. It really connects into a lot of things. It helps us modernize JavaScript. It helps us evolve into a component-based theming approach. It improves web services because we have to add more API coverage. And eventually, I think it can lead to easier page building and a more modern administration UI. So I'm not saying it solves these initiatives. What I'm saying is it helps us make some important progress. So I think of the JavaScript menu component initiative as very strategic, actually, as I just explained in the last five to 10 minutes. So here's the five proposed initiatives that I think we should discuss and consider. And I've had an opportunity to run them by the core committers. And they're on board. And I talked to some others about this as well, but open for feedback by all means. And I believe they're well balanced. As I said in the beginning, we need to make sure they're well balanced. I think they help with technical debt and innovation. I think we're looking at different stakeholders, beginners and experts, but also developers and non-developers. And making progress to be a great headless and decoupled CMS. In addition to be a great traditional CMS, this approach of API first, but not API only. I think it gives organizations and individuals a very clear reason to adopt. And I think it puts us on a path to be long term relevant. And last but not least, I think it's hard work. It's a lot of work, but also achievable. Maybe a slight stretch. But it feels achievable in the next 16 months to make some great progress. I would actually love to see a stake like a flying start, if you will, with the JavaScript menu component. Imagine we could add a first component in Drupal 9.2. Maybe we can get some more components in by 9.3. I know this is a little bit wishful thinking, but it might be worth a shot. So we have to get organized around this. We don't have all the details figured out or we haven't made plans for everything. We need initiative leads for each of these things. In some cases, we already have leads. In other cases, not. And we've also learned that it helps to have a main sponsor. And a main sponsor is an organization or someone who provides resources, usually time and talent, sometimes money too, to help drive the initiative with the help of others, including volunteers. So they don't have to do all of the work, but they are the main sponsors. So we're also looking for main sponsors. If you're interested, we have contribution tables at this event. You see the link at the bottom of the page. You can join those and raise your hand and it will help welcome you and help you get involved. So if you want to learn more about some of these things that I just talked about, we actually have a lot of sessions on these topics. You can see them here. Some of them are tomorrow. Some of them are Thursday. By all means, if you're excited about this, please do get involved. And if you do this well, I think the Drupal 10 press release could be pretty exciting. And so kind of drafted one. So let me try and read it to you. Here we go. This would be June 2022. Drupal 10 extends Drupal strength in headless or decoupled applications. And for developers, that means that Drupal 10 simplifies the development of JavaScript applications. Drupal allows developers to use their framework of choice, but it ships with out of the box support for react and view. For marketers, this means that Drupal 10 allows the building of omnichannel digital experiences without giving up the ease of views that marketers and content creators expect. This makes Drupal the best decoupled CMS for less technical users. Drupal 10 also ships with automated updates. This makes it drastically easier to maintain Drupal sites and to apply security updates. It also advances Drupal support for composable architectures. Like Drupal 9, Drupal 10 continued its focus on improving the beginner experience with a new look and feel and an improved out of the box experience. I think that could be great. If we can achieve all of that in two years, I think that's worth another celebration. If you are excited about this, please help. I really do believe that it's not only fun to work on, but it's also really an opportunity to have a positive impact on the world. With that, I'd like to thank you. I will make the slides available. On my site, I will make the survey data available on my site. I probably need a week or so to do that, because this week is pretty busy. I will not be taking questions right now, but we have a dedicated 45-minute Q&A session tomorrow. If you have questions, if you want to talk about this more, or other things, you can ask questions about anything, please join the Q&A session tomorrow. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dries. Thank you, everybody who listened into the Dries note. My name is Tim Lennon. You probably saw me at the welcome session this morning. I'm the CTO here for the Drupal Association. I wanted to spend just a couple of minutes here in an outro saying thank you to everyone who was here and also reflecting on and bookending something that happened at the beginning of the presentation. I'll actually share a slide or two in just a moment when we get there. But first, I do want to thank Heather Rocker, Executive Director of the Drupal Association for her initial presentation for all of us and for talking about the initiatives being led by the Drupal Association to support the community. I want to thank Fatima for a wonderful handoff and introduction to the Dries note. It was really a great conversation and some wonderful memories about DrupalCon's past. But now I'd like to spend just a moment of reflection. We made a large theme of both the Drupal Association update and Dries's update, diversity and inclusion in the Drupal community. And I wanted to share some personal reflections on this subject because I've had a little bit of a personal journey with this issue before and after my time with Drupal and the Drupal Association. So let me share just a slide or two with you to close us out today and I'll share a little bit of a story. So my name is Tim Lennon. I'm just a I'm a cis white guy in the Drupal community. So why am I here to talk about diversity and inclusion in the outro? I'm here to talk because I've learned three skills recently that I think are really critical and important for all of us who believe in the value and who believe in those values in our daily lives, in our work lives, and everywhere. So I think those skills really represent the three skills represent the ability to be vulnerable, the ability to be empathetic, and the ability to be an ally. So I want to talk briefly about those. So first, vulnerability. For myself, vulnerability means being able to talk to all of you who know me as a technical individual, as someone who leads initiatives for the Drupal Association and works on Drupal.org to talk about something that's outside my comfort zone and frankly outside of my expertise. Empathy means understanding the needs and wants of people around me, understanding where people are coming from, and looking to my own experience and experience of others to learn from it. I'm going to share some fairly personal stories about that in just a second. And then allyship means understanding how to take action in a way that supports the community rather than relying on a community to do work for you. So on the note of being vulnerable, it's it's always difficult to talk about, but I'll share two two ways that I've learned empathy over the course of my my recent life and later career. In college at Reed here in Portland, Oregon, I was part of a household and kind of community that was very close with the transgender community on campus. We had housemates and things like that rotated and out of ours and several other campus houses for folks who needed for folks who were perhaps going through transition and other sorts of things. And my best friend that I grew up with was part of that community. And I learned a lot from living with that community of people and talking with these people who were were and are some of my closest friends. Unfortunately, my best friend died in 2009 in an accident. And since then, I have been honoring and remembering her by finding ways to be involved as an ally and active in this community. And to bring it to the other things that I do in the other parts of my my passions. More recently, when watching the protests all around the United States and around the world, I and my wife went out to the Portland Black Lives Matter event and went there to bear witness and participate with what was going on in the community and support the community, listened to the land acknowledgement and the given by the confederated tribes of Warm Springs here in Oregon, listened to the founder of the Portland Black Black Panthers speak about their experience. And it was very meaningful and very difficult to someone who often feels like they're maybe part of the problem to understand how to be part of the solution. So to talk about good allyship for just a moment, what that means to me is understanding the experience of others listening to their voices, elevating their voices and knowing how to engage and how to help in a productive way. So just to talk a little bit about that engagement, Heather, our executive director and Dries, both talked about various initiatives that are going on. And one of the most important kind of principles behind this, right, whether it's our internal Drupal Association training or whether it's partnering with Drupal Diversity and Inclusion to bring a code of conduct training to the community or to provide booth space, or whether it's just changes to our own hiring practices or things like that, is that everybody has actions of their own that they can take within an organization and that is part of good allyship. And the other part of good allyship is knowing how to engage your community. So the Drupal Diversity and Inclusion group is a self-organized part of the Drupal community that has existed for, I believe it's around four years, three or four years now, and has been organizing ad hoc speaker trainings and other events. It's not in the official hierarchy of Drupal Governance, it's a totally independent group. And I have found a lot of value from regularly attending conversations with that group. I've certainly found places where we've been in disagreement as well, and that's okay, too, as long as we know how to do it respectfully. One of the things that I do want to say, though, is that if you are an ally or someone who wants to be an ally, seeking out support, seeking people who are maybe more experts than yourself, ask for help, but don't expect that help. Don't expect people to do the work of educating you for you. So if you have some issue where you have a significant diversity or inclusion concern, and you want to engage a group within the Drupal community, like DD and I, engage up front, ask if they'd be interested in participating, but don't come to them with a problem that's already happened and ask them to solve it for you, right? It's about engaging in a way that shows thoughtfulness, that shows your own education and willingness to participate. So also don't depend solely on that group. There's a group of great people who want to be participating and helping this community as a whole, but everybody can do this work. Everybody can participate individually. So the Drupal Association is doing some of our work entirely independently. We want to do some more work together as well. There's work that the core maintainer team can do to talk about how we choose no more new core maintainers. There's work that any individual Drupal business can do to talk about their hiring practices and training and even how they interact with clients. So I just wanted to share some of this vulnerability, some of this empathy, and perhaps inspire some people out there to do the same. I want to say thank you to the DD and I group for helping me in my journey over the last year or so. I want to say thank you to the Drupal Association leadership team for some of the really powerful internal trainings that they've organized for us as staff. And I want to say thank you to all of you listening for taking this to heart, taking it seriously, and perhaps thinking about how you can engage with it yourself in your own way. So thank you very much, everyone. With that, we'll get back to the slightly less serious stuff. If you want to have a DrupalCon t-shirt, that will be available on the community driven, community led t-shirt store. If it's important to you to complete your collection, feel free to pick one up. And also feel free to participate in the group photo. That's what we always do at the end of a Jerry's note is we all go gather out in the courtyard somewhere and take a group photo. We're going to do a version of that virtually. So let's go ahead and we can take some selfies of us attending DrupalCon, upload them to celebrate Drupal.org, and then tweet them out with the hashtag DrupalCon photo. And we'll use that to assemble a mosaic group photo for this virtual DrupalCon event. So thank you so much again for being here. Thank you so much for your attention. I hope you're as excited as I am about the initiatives that Jerry's has outlined and about the ways that we can evolve and improve our community. Have a great one. Take a look at your schedules. Get ready for your next event. You should have a little bit of time to get rolling. And thank you again, everyone. Bye-bye.