 My first triple pun, I learned how to contribute to poor by sitting next to Karen S, my first sprint. But actually I could sit next to them, meet them, and they met me as an equal almost. It felt like, hey, come get involved with all their messages. I was like, oh yeah, I can do that. I wanted to be here to talk to the most amount of people. I think it's always less an issue to approach someone and ask in person. It's always less intimidating than online. Good morning and welcome to DrupalCon. Welcome to DrupalCon! Hi, I'm Heather Rocker. I have the honor and privilege of serving as the executive director of the Drupal Association. And on behalf of our staff and board, I'd like to officially welcome you to this event. Every DrupalCon event provides the opportunity for our community to learn, connect, and be inspired. How many of you are here at your first DrupalCon? Me too. This is my first official DrupalCon and I get to spend it with the European community, so I'm very excited to be here in Amsterdam. Of course, large events like this could never happen without a large number of volunteers. So we wanted to thank those that have given their commitment and dedication to this event. In particular, our European Advisory Committee. Many of these faces you see on almost all of the committees that have anything to do with DrupalCon and things that happen here in the community. It's because these individuals are so committed to Drupal in the community and we want to thank them. We also have a large number of track team members and of course volunteer coordinators that make all of this go smoothly. Some similar faces that you saw before, I wanted to take a moment to recognize the individuals that held the Splash Awards last night, Standing Room Only event. Very, very successful. But what's really important about it is it's organized entirely by volunteers. So these individuals have put in a lot of time and energy to make it happen and what's very special about the Splash Awards is it starts to move forward the marketing effort to the business community around Drupal. So what they're doing is very important and we thank them and congratulate them on an awesome event last night. I'd like to thank our DrupalCon sponsors. So while it takes a ton of volunteers to do this, it also takes a ton of money. So thank you to their funding. We're able to have affordable-ish tickets to DrupalCon and they also not only sponsor events like this, but they also have outstanding services and solutions they provide to the Drupal community itself. So if you would take a moment, go through the exhibition hall today, find these companies and tell them thank you for what you do to bring DrupalCon to Europe. I would like to send a special thank you to our new partner in event production, Quoney Congress. Thanks to their partnership, we have a new format and we were able to bring DrupalCon back to Europe this year. So one thing I've learned in my four months here in the Drupal community is that you're passionate and have opinions. So we want to make sure you have an opportunity to share those with us. It is a new format, a new partnership and we want to learn for next time. So you can not only provide feedback on the individual sessions themselves, but we've got two opportunities. You can provide feedback in person at the debrief box or online at the survey link that you see here. So everything that we do at the Drupal Association is a combination of volunteer support, sponsor support and staff support and I wanted to take this opportunity to publicly thank and recognize our amazing team. Though they are paid resources, I assure you they work many, many hours above and beyond to make sure that our Drupal community has a fantastic experience. This is a great team and I'm thrilled to be with them. I would be remiss if I did not take a moment to recognize our board of directors led by Adam Goodman, our board chair. These individuals provide outstanding thought leadership and strategic planning that helps our organization drive the mission forward. So thank you board of directors. I promise you won't have to clap the whole time. Contribution is what it's all about, right? So all the work we do at the association is to enable you, the community, to drive the Drupal project forward. We'd like to recognize some of the contributors to the Drupal project. Top individual contributors, the list is too long for me to read individually but we wanted to have them get their moment of recognition and also top organizational contributors without whom we would not be able to drive the project forward. So we looked at a little data and because of what came out of the results, I thought you would be particularly interested. Europe is the largest contributor by region to the Drupal project. So thank you. The European community is a huge asset to the Drupal project. We wanted you to get your due recognition and bragging rights that you can share for at least a year until the rest of the world gets jealous and tries to catch up. And speaking of contribution, if you've never had a chance to contribute to the project before or you'd like to do more of it, we have opportunities every day here at Drupal con. So the Drupal association has always existed to bring the community together to build Drupal but increasingly the association has become essential to Drupal itself. Over the past few years, our small but mighty engineering team has taken on more and more work and now manages a significant number of Drupal services. If you haven't done so already, I encourage you to join our ongoing individual membership campaign. You can join while you're here at the conference. Join us at booth three. If you haven't gotten your sticker, it's the thing to have on your badge. Make sure you get one. Don't feel left out. We can help you with that. You can join at the booth or online. So promote Drupal is an initiative I hope most of you have heard about. But one of the things that I hear very often in the Drupal community is we have a need to better promote and market the Drupal project. Now to that end, the promote Drupal initiative was created where we brought together volunteer sponsors from around the world to create resources like the video and brand book. The idea was we wanted to give materials so that anyone anywhere in the world could effectively share the word about Drupal. You can find those materials and start to utilize them today at this site. Thank you to the top contributors of the promote Drupal project, thanks to individuals and companies we are able to bring that initiative to life. If you'd like to be involved, we are in need of volunteer translators so that we can take the case study slides and better share them around the world. If you would like to join this effort or submit your own case study, you can do so here or you can contact us at the Drupal Association for more information. There's true power in the events and activities that happen at the local level. So Drupal is not the only place for our Drupal community to get together. Event organizers all around the world are building a bigger and stronger Drupal community. We want to thank everyone who organizes a local event for everything that you do. Speaking of event organizers, we wanted to take a moment to highlight and congratulate the official event organizers working group. Their charter was just approved so we're official and ready for action. We at the association are very excited about collaborating with this group and what we can do for event organizers around the world. And I wanted to take a moment to say congratulations to Colleen Clarkson, organizer of Drupal Camp Atlanta, my hometown. And Avi Schwab, the mid-camp organizer for their leadership and guidance in making the charter a reality. So if you get a moment, tweet them, say good job, thank you, and get involved. And if you organize local events or would like to organize local events, you can contact us at the Drupal Association and we'll get you connected to this group as well. Here are just a few of the events coming up in the region. If you would like to get more detail or see events that are happening all around the world, you can find them at Drupal.com. So I mentioned the event sponsors, but there's also work that we do year-round. And so one of the most important programs at the Drupal Association is our supporting partner program. I'd like to thank our supporting partners. This program in particular funds Drupal.org and our Drupal Association engineering team. All the great work our team is doing to maintain and improve the Drupal.org user experience would not be possible without these supporters who give funding to last throughout the year. As you'll see, there's a lot of overlap between supporting partners, event sponsors, volunteers, contributors, and that's the kind of ecosystem that's going to make Drupal successful. So at DrupalCon Vienna in 2017, Dries proposed making automatic updates one of the strategic initiatives for the Drupal project. Throughout 2018, members of the community along with the Drupal Association developed an architectural plan and began brainstorming how we would get the resources required to actually do what Dries told us to do. Always the first challenge. So that's where the European Commission comes in. Early last year, the European Commission partnered with the Drupal Association to find the first phase of this project. Let's take a look at the progress we've made this year in theory. This is going well. First time. Okay. Here's what we'll do. Come find me at the Drupal Association booth. I'll play the video for you. We'll talk about automatic updates. But what you would have missed, what you missed was Tim narrating a video about all the awesome work that's been done around automatic updates today. The good news is that phase one should be stable by the end of the year. This first phase of work supports Drupal seven and eight users who installed their sites by downloading an archive from Drupal.org. Phase one includes displaying Drupal PSAs directly in the admin panel, running automated readiness checks, and performing in-place updates. This phase does not support database updates, contrib projects, or composer-based site installs. Those features are on the roadmap for phase two. We want to thank all of the organizations and individuals who've contributed to phase one of this initiative. Let's look at a demo. Here you can see a Drupal eight site on version 8.7.4. So it's definitely out of date. Let's see what the automatic updates module can provide. If we go into the automatic updates configuration, you can see the PSA feature, which pulls public safety announcements from Drupal.org and displays them directly in the admin interface. These PSAs can also be automatically emailed to the site administrator as configured in the update manager. Next, we can run a readiness check to see if our site can be automatically updated safely. If the checks are unsuccessful, we might see a number of warnings and errors. These issues are most commonly caused by file permission problems or by patching core contrib modules and must be resolved before you can use automatic updates. The readiness checks are successful. We see a green message and can proceed with the update. Finally, we can see an experimental option to trigger the invoice update. Let's see what happens. In the background, the automatic updates module is getting an update package from Drupal.org, which contains all the file changes for this update, and it's overlaying them on the site. As we see here, that update was successful, and the site is now updated to version 8.7.8. Once the automatic updates module is stable, this initial work can help protect a large number of small to mid-sized Drupal sites, especially those on Drupal 7, but what's on the way in phase two? Phase two will add a system to create AB versions of a site, enabling us to build and robust support for composer, handle database updates, and to extend support to contributed projects. Phase two needs your help, so if you're interested in sponsoring this work, please reach out to us at the Drupal Association. So we'll hit the punchline one more time for emphasis. The automatic update module created for phase one will be stable by the end of the year. So just a few more notes before I go. DrupalCon is dedicated to creating a safe, inclusive, welcoming, and harassment-free conference experience for everyone. All attendees, speakers, trainers, sponsors, volunteer vendors, and even event staff at DrupalCon are required to abide by the DrupalCon Code of Conduct at the conference and at social events hosted by sponsors as well. If you witness or are subject to any unacceptable behavior, contact Rachel or Carly at the numbers on page 43 in the program book. You can also find their contact information on our signage or you can email conduct at association.drupal.org. For reference, the full code of conduct is included in your program book. We want to give you multiple ways to get involved, and that's contributing code, but even more. So you can find out how at Drupal.org getting involved. You can visit us at the booth to have conversations and we can sign you up immediately on the spot for a variety of opportunities. You can become an individual member, a supporting partner, or find a way to volunteer and get involved. Don't forget, immediately following the Drees note is our group photo. It'll be held just outside the G building at G Square. And before I go, I did want to say thank you for the very warm welcome to the Drupal community. I'm honored to be here. And now I will not stand in the way of the celebrity address that's coming. So I'll introduce Joe Weichs, the SVP of Worldwide Partnership and Sales at Acquia, to formally introduce Drees. How about that? There we go. All right. Excellent. Well, good morning. My name's Joe. Second time in Amsterdam for me. I think hopefully many of you were here in 2014. I think it's my 16th DrupalCon. So Drees, thank you for that and everybody. Thank you for that, for having me. Excited to be here and make the introduction that I think you're all waiting for. But a few things I want to share with you first. So we have a session that we hope you'll come and join us in discussion here. It's an important topic, generally, this idea of how do we create an ecosystem, a technology ecosystem that encourages more participation in Drupal, but also encourages whether it's existing people who are considering Drupal 8 and the future of Drupal or people who are perhaps for the first time considering Drupal, how they come and participate in this community and in this project. And so we're very committed to that. We made an important acquisition earlier this year called Cohesion and DX8. And so we'd very much like you to join us. Enjoy Craig for this discussion later on today, as you can see here about this topic. I also want to share with you something that we're very passionate about and that we believe is very important. I hope you agree, which is that we will continue to support this not-for-profit organization, Girls Who Code. And rather than give out church keys and swag and various bits and pieces as you come by our booth, importantly for us to contribute here is every time you come by the booth today and tomorrow and over the next few days, come and tell us who you are, get to know us, and we will make a contribution each time as you can see here. We'll donate money to this organization. It's important. We believe in it and we hope you do as well. And so do please come and help us support that charity in the way that we all can together. Importantly also, we have a party tonight. This is at Zoodpaul, which is very close by. It's about a five-minute walk and we'd love you to come and join us. Have some fun, meet people, share your stories, enjoy a drink, a little bite to eat, and generally connect with everybody this evening after what will have been a very, very busy day. This is close by. It's just, I think it's, as I say, about five-minute walk here and you're all welcome. So if you need more information about where there are some fliers that we have out in the main pavilion, we can tell you about it, but hopefully you can see details here. All right. So those are the things we wanted to share with you this morning. I have the pleasure of introducing your keynote speaker. And I was thinking, in fact, this morning, he said to me, he said, you've known me quite a while, and I have. I've known him about seven and a half, eight years, and we're thinking about what's the story I'm going to tell. And I have so many fun stories, but I'm not going to share one here. They're fun. I have plenty of them, and they're all good. So if you can come and find me later, I will share some, but nothing too embarrassing on stage here. So look, let please join me in welcoming our friend and our colleague, Dries. Let me to dance. That would be a bad idea. Maybe tonight at the party. Yeah, maybe, maybe. Anyway, it's good to be back in Amsterdam. I think it's a third time. We have a Drupal con in Amsterdam, which I think makes it the number one Drupal con city, which is pretty exciting. Yeah. What's also exciting for me is this is actually the first time that my kids and my parents are attending a Drupal con. So I know, yeah. You know, in all these years, and actually Drupal predates my kids, but in all these years, they haven't attended one. So I'm very excited to have them. Just so you know, they're really into getting stickers. So if you see them running around, my kids would love stickers. I'm not sure about my parents. They may, they may want stickers too, but you know, they speak for my parents. Anyway, we have a lot to cover. So I'm going to jump right in. The three big topics today that I want to talk about is one, I want to give you an update on Drupal 8.8, which is our next release. I want to talk a little bit about Drupal 9 and how ready we are for Drupal 9. And then I want to look forward and talk a little bit about what comes once we release Drupal 9. You know, what should we be working on? So I'll be kind of diving into a little bit of product strategy for Drupal 9, if you will. So it should be pretty exciting. And so let's start with the Drupal 8.8 update. So as some of you may know, we've already cut an alpha release. So we're currently stabilizing 8.8. And our goal is to release Drupal 8.8 by December 4th. So it's about a month away, right? So, and I can tell you, and I'm going to walk you through all of it, but it's literally jam-packed with a lot of great new features. I don't think we've had this many new things in a release as 8.8. So I think it's a huge testament to some of the acceleration and contribution that we're seeing. So very, very exciting. So as a quick reminder, the way we're working on Drupal 8.8 is along these four strategic tracks, is what I call them, right? We're trying to get up to the mountain at the top of the mountain, the summit. And to get there, we are working on these four things. And for each of those four strategic tracks, we have a number of initiatives. And in total, we have 13 of these initiatives. So I'm not going to walk you through all of them right now, but I'm going to go track by track and give you a very quick update on some of the progress that we have been making. So let's start with the first track, which is all about making Drupal easier for both content creators and for side builders. All right? So the two initiatives that I'm going to highlight are media and the administration UI. Lots of great progress on media. Hopefully all of this will get finalized before 8.8. But I can tell you that media in Drupal is better than ever before. And so the best way for me to show you is by playing a very quick video. If you happen to see the media demo in Seattle, you remember that starting in Drupal 8.7, Drupal shipped with a media library that enables editors to create reusable media. Drupal 8.8 takes that a step further and allows you to easily embed media in a text field. In this animation, we are browsing the media in our library, selecting an image and embedding it in text. By default, the alternative text description for the image is inherited from the media library. But we can override it if it doesn't make sense in this context. And of course, just like when uploading images the old way without media library, it is possible to align and caption media, no matter if it's an image, a video or something else. Last but not least, we're able to do all of this using only the keyboard. Very exciting because I don't know if given these updates before, but the media initiative we've broken up in these chunks and you know, first we had to make some things better in core and then we were able to add a media library and now we've finally been able to do the integration with the wizarding. So if we complete this, it kind of wraps up the media initiative as we said we would do. So lots of great improvements. I can also say that Drupal has never looked better. So we have another initiative which is to redesign the administrative UI of Drupal. It's a project called Claro. It's the name of a theme that we've been developing and it really meant for content creators and site builders. It's on the back end of Drupal. So again, let me play you a video and show you some of the progress that we've made on the Claro project. The main goal of this project was to refresh the look and feel of the administrative UI so that Drupal will be perceived as a more modern platform. I'm going to start with the plain installation of the Umami demo installation profile. Here you can see how Drupal looks in its current state. Be for lots of feedback that the current Drupal administrative UI looks underwhelmed. This is for the most part due to the fact that this was designed 10 years ago back in 2009 and it has only received some minor updates since then. Next let's enable Claro, our new and upcoming administration team, and take a look at how much better things will be. So the first thing you will notice is that Claro uses much cooler color palette with more contrast. It looks more modern and is easier to use for people with visual impairments. In this project, we've decided to mainly focus on the visual look and feel of Drupal as well as accessibility. We are making only a limited number of functional changes. We've redesigned and implemented all of the components for basic certain duration and altering content on the site. We've done user testing on the designs and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. It makes a big difference to content creators and site builders who spend hours a day working in their Drupal site. The team has also focused on ensuring that the new team works well on all types of devices. We have automated tooling to help us test cross browser compatibility and responsive view modes. We've also increased the size of site controls such as buttons and feels to ensure that they are easy to use on mobile. Claro is also designed and built to support Windows icon just more out of the box. This is a type of assistive technology designed to help users with visual impairment. Here you can see how Claro looks like when viewed on Windows high contrast mode. Next, let's take a look at some of the accessibility improvements we've made. First, I'm going to navigate using a keyboard. This is often used by users with motor disabilities or visual impairment. We've ensured that there are always strong indicators for what the user is currently focusing on the page. We've also ensured that the focus isn't only indicated with color to make sure that users with color blindness can recognize the focus in fact. It's awesome. I love the detail to accessibility through to our commitment to make Drupal the most accessible CMS. All of this is experimental right now in 8.8. Hopefully, we can get it stable for Drupal 9, which should be a pretty amazing timing. All right. That's a very quick update on the first track. Let's move on to the next track. Before I do that, there are other items on this track, other initiatives on this track. We've also made great progress on those. I'm just not covering them today. I've covered them in the past and we'll hopefully cover them in the future. Lots of great progress on the workflow initiative. Also great progress on the layout builder initiative. They're actually expanding the scope of the layout builder to essentially layout everything, the whole page, not just sort of the node piece, if you will. Moving on to the next track, which is all about reducing the total cost of ownership for developers and site owners. There's a lot of initiatives on this track as well. Again, we made progress across the board. I'm going to cover a few of them real quick. The first initiative is the composer initiative. Lots of great progress in Seattle. A bunch of people somehow really, I don't know what to say here, but they really got moving on this initiative. I was telling Greg and actually Ryan too, I read every commit message and the number of commit messages around composer has gone through the roof. A big thank you to all of the contributors behind the composer initiative. Let me explain a little bit what composer is. Obviously, the goal, as you can read on the screen, is to make it really easy to not just install Drupal, but also update Drupal. That's important because in Drupal 8, we now use a lot of third-party libraries and it becomes hard to manage all of these libraries and to figure out which library you have to update when. Similarly, modules have dependencies on each other as well. If you need module A, you may have a dependency on module B and not just any version of module B, but a specific version like maybe version two. It's really composer's job to help you orchestrate all of these dependencies and do the updates for you. To date, our composer support wasn't awesome. Let's be honest, it wasn't good enough. Part of the challenge was that people needed to install some contributed modules or even build some custom code to really manage composer well. That has a couple of issues. Obviously, it's not as reliable because using composer isn't covered by the core testing process and the core release process. It was also hard because there isn't one official way to do things. There's a number of different ways to use composer that way. Last but not least, it wasn't properly or fully integrated with Drupal.org either. We couldn't take the full advantage of composer because we didn't have true semantic versioning. I'm not going to go into all of the details here, but we could do better. We made a plan on how to fix some of these things. Really, what we've done is we've moved some of these contributed capabilities into core. I made them better along the way, but the result is that you no longer need to install these contributed modules. The result is also that there's one clearly recommended way of using composer with Drupal, the one way, which is really, really useful. Core itself can now employ composer best practices. We have full integration with Drupal.org thanks to the work and the collaboration with the Drupal Association. All of this will ship with 8.8, which is pretty tremendous progress. What you'll be able to do with Drupal 8.8 is literally update and install Drupal with one command. You can see the commands here on the screen. Not everybody might be ready to start using composer. That's okay, too. The old mechanism, if you will, using tar balls that you can download will continue to be supported. We're also working on adding composer support to these tar balls. What that means is that if you want to start with a tar ball and then in the future switch to composer, that will be easy to do. We're not there yet, but that's what the team is working on. Tremendous progress. A quick hand applause for the composer initiative. What's better than one-step upgrades? Zero-step upgrades. That's where the automatic updates initiative comes in. Heather already showed you a demo, so I'm not going to talk about it again, but thanks for the European Commission and all of the other people that helped with this. I personally think it's pretty magical to see this coming to life. I really do think it's one of the biggest things that's holding Drupal back. When I talk to people, the fact that it can be hard to upgrade Drupal means it's expensive sometimes to upgrade Drupal, which really doesn't make it a good choice for many organizations. I'm excited about the automatic updates initiative. I think we should keep working on it. We should figure out how to integrate it with the composer initiative and all of these things, but really good progress. We've also made a really good progress on the configuration management initiative. We've actually added some capabilities from contrib to core, just like with composer, which allows side builders or developers to exclude certain modules from their deployments, and not just the modules, but also the configuration that comes with these modules. That's really useful, for example, when you have a development stage in production environment. It allows you to exclude configuration or modules that aren't intended for production. That's all being done through an API. As a developer, you can use that API to get more fine grained and more precise about configuration. Really exciting as well. That's a very quick update on some of the progress on this strategic track. The last track is actually to keep Drupal relevant and impactful. We've already tackled the six-month feature releases. We're shipping on time, hopefully with 8.8, but certainly we shipped 8.7, 8.6, 8.5, all of the releases like clockwork. That was what that initiative was all about. The API first initiative is another important initiative. A lot of the world is moving to headless and decoupled architectures. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. That initiative has also, I should say, continued to make a lot of great progress. In my humble opinion, Drupal 8 is already one of the best headless solutions in the market and certainly the best adjacent API-based solution. With some of the progress that we've seen lately, Drupal 8 continues to be better and better and better at being a decoupled solution. A lot of that innovation is happening in the contributed module space, all the way from documentation improvements to what we call interactivity improvements to a visual explorer as well as performance improvements. I'm going to show you real quick some of the progress that we have made. First, we can auto-generate documentation from the code, which is really helpful for helping people figure out how to use the JSON API that ships with Drupal. Documentation looks great, I think. But again, what's better than having that kind of documentation is to really help people create these JSON API queries, if you will, through a visual tool. Today, that can be a little bit hard. For example, if you want to ask Drupal, what's in the orange box, you have to handcraft a URL like the one you can see in the black box. So obviously, that's not very intuitive for organizations or for people to do. And so we've worked on making that a lot easier. And so we built something which we call the JSON API Explorer and allows organizations or individuals to very quickly visually constrict these kinds of queries. So I have a video to play for this as well. I run a website for a local sports league. It's a decoupled React application using Drupal's JSON API as its backend API. One of the pages in the React front end needs to display all of the players who are members of a certain team. Drupal is great at modeling this kind of content. It makes for the ideal backend, especially because I can get that information from Drupal through its JSON API web service. To date, figuring out the exact structure of a query can be cumbersome. So we have been working on making this radically easier. Please meet the JSON API Explorer. Instead of having to craft JSON API queries manually, you can now use a visual in browser query builder. If you've used GraphQL in the past, this is something you might have used graphical for. The JSON API Explorer aims to fill this gap when using JSON API. A link on the JSON API configuration screen takes me directly to the Explorer. Here, I can easily start building my query by selecting the content type I want to include. Adding a relationship to the player's teams and filtering by a team ID and sorting by the player's last names. Each interaction with the Explorer has updated the query in the address bar at the top. When I'm happy with the results, I can copy and paste this query directly into my React code. What do you think? Very exciting progress. We're looking for more people to help with this. There's a lot of sort of visual improvements we can make to this. But starting to work, you know? It's pretty exciting. All right. So that's really, you know, that last track. Oh, actually, you forgot something. Sorry. We've also made a lot of performance improvements to JSON API. Just in the last, you know, few months. It's up to two times faster. And actually, for complex sites or complex, you know, use cases, it can be actually much faster than two times. Three times, four times, five times. It just depends. But what's maybe most interesting about this is that we found these performance improvements through real-world use cases. We're starting to see very large, you know, sites or applications use Drupal 8 with JSON API. And they're discovering all of these opportunities for improvement, which is great. And it's been especially great to see how the community has rallied around these bug reports and collaborated on making JSON API faster. So really good progress there as well. So as mentioned, that's the last track. So overall, I feel like we've been making a lot of great progress. And again, I haven't highlighted all of the initiatives. But, you know, we're really delivering on the things that we said we would deliver on, that we set out to deliver on. I feel like development is accelerating. It's actually backed up by some research I've done and posted on my site around how many people contribute to Drupal and how many organizations contribute to Drupal. It's at an all-time high. And you can see that in the sort of in the roadmap that we're working on. And so for me, this is something to be really proud of. And I think you should also be really proud, you know, of yourself for contributing to Drupal 8. And 8.8 specifically. This has been the work so far of 641 individual contributors. Pretty amazing number of people that helped build just 8.8. So big hands up for them. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, these organizations have been these individuals, I should say, have been sponsored by 243 organizations as well. So big applause for all the organizations too. All right. So, however, I did miss one of these items. Not sure if you caught it. But I didn't talk about the upgrade path to Drupal 9. And so I want to cover that real quick. All right. So that's the second part of my keynote. It's the Drupal 9 readiness. And just so you remember, I've said this before, but we are getting really close to the release of Drupal 9.0. We're literally only eight months out. All right. It's not that far out. And so I wanted to give you an update on that. First of all, we actually created the Drupal 9 branch. How many of you knew that? All right. Some people knew. Not all. But you can check out Drupal 9 alpha today. Contested. You know, we're updating it still. We're removing deprecated codes. I think we already updated it to the latest Symphony 4.4 release. But it's getting real. I hope you feel like it's getting real. Our commitment was to make the upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 very easy. The easiest one in the last decade. And so I wanted to show you how you could go about upgrading your site from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9. All right. So I'm going to use an example. Here's Johanna. She lives in the Netherlands. She is a dog groomer. And she has a website about dog grooming. But she's also a very skilled Drupal developer. And she has a fairly simple site. She has some contributed modules on the site. One of those modules, and I'll show that in a second, is the EU cookie compliance module to do these little pop-ups. You know, accept a cookie, which is obviously necessary for GDPR. And then she has one custom module. A module that she built herself for Drupal 8. All right. So let's see how she goes about upgrading her site to Drupal 9. There's basically four steps that she has to do. I'm going to walk you through all of these four steps real quick. The first step is to install the upgrade status module. You can see she's using Composer. Yeah. So she's just going to, you know, Composer required that module. And what you'll see happen is Composer will figure out all of the dependencies for this module and download them. You can see it uses a little bit of the Zen framework and some other stuff. And eventually, all of these pieces are automatically installed. All she has to do then is basically go to the Drupal admin UI and enable the module. All right. So she did that. The module is enabled. She's now ready to go. So installing that module is pretty easy with Composer. So next, she's actually going to use this module to scan both the Contributant module and her custom module and see if they're compatible with Drupal 9. And then she's going to figure out how to make them compatible. So I'll show you that as well. So here's the upgrade status module. As mentioned, she's starting with just the Contributant projects. She's going to scan them all. And so when you scan your modules, what happens in the background is basically some sort of code analysis looking for uses of deprecated code. And a module is ready to go to Drupal 9 if there's no deprecated code being used. It's pretty easy. The tool is designed to help you highlight where you may have incompatible code or deprecated code. In this case, this Cookie Compliance module is not ready. However, it said that there's an update available for the module. And so she's going to use Composer to update the module to the latest version. So she doesn't have to code or change any code. She just has to upgrade to the latest version. So you can see she's on 1.5 and she's going to 1.8. When she does that and she rescans the module, basically it's going to come back green and say, yep, you're now ready to upgrade to Drupal 9. All of your contributant modules are ready. Now she still has one custom module. It's a module that she uses to manage opening hours over dog rooming salon. Because it's a custom developed module, there's obviously not an update available. Nobody in the community is going to update that for her. So she needs to update that custom module herself. So I'm going to show you that as well. So this time she's going to select her custom projects in the upgrade status module. You can see two problems. One is a warning. One is an error. In this case, she's using a function Drupal set message and the error is telling her that function doesn't exist anymore or will stop to exist in Drupal 9. The documentation on Drupal.org tells her how to fix it. So in this case of documentation, tells her that that function was changed to a service. So she quickly changes that in her code. And as you can see, it's a simple change. It's a one line code change. After she does that, she saves her module and that should take care of that. The second thing she has to do is deal with this warning in yellow. So basically what this warning is telling her is that she has to declare her module to be compatible not just with 8 but also with Drupal 9, which is something new. To do so, she has to edit the info file, the .info file of her project. And basically at this, it says this module will work with 8 and Drupal 9 at the same time. The same code will work with both versions. And so after she made that change, she rescans her custom module and boom. Opening times now works with Drupal 9 as well. So that's pretty good, right? For those that don't like to use the UI of the upgrade status module, there's also command line tools. You can add those into your continuous development environments and all these things. But the point is the tools are ready today. The APIs are ready. The tools are ready. You can start doing this stuff today. So obviously the last step is she needs to update Drupal core to Drupal 9. So right now she's using 8.8 alpha 1. And she wants to switch to, you know, the development version of Drupal 9. And there are some instructions on Drupal.org that she can basically copy paste. She's going to do that here. And so basically what these instructions do is to sort of update the composer JSON files. Update all of the dependencies, the Drupal 9 needs. This is still a little bit complex. But actually in talking to Ryan and Greg, they're actually working on making these commands easier. So maybe by the end of the week could be a stretch goal. I don't know. Some of this could be even easier now. And obviously we're upgrading to an alpha version of 9, which is also a little bit special. But like here you can see composer figuring out all of the new dependencies that Drupal 9 has relative to 8 and taking care of updating that. And after it's done, she's basically on 9. So yeah. So it's great to, you know, start to, you know, see that come to life. Obviously, Johanna is a simple site, right? It's not super complex site. But she was able to do all of this in like 30 minutes or so. It wasn't a big job. I recognize a lot of sites have more modules, more custom code as well. And so it would take a little bit more time. But the principles, the concepts are the same. And my key point is that this is a huge, huge improvement compared to Drupal 7. And I can go into that a little bit more. Yeah. So we did some analysis of all of the contributed modules. And it turns out if we look at just the top 200, which is what most people use modules in the top 216 percent of those modules are already ready today, eight months before the Drupal 9 release, which we've never had before, frankly. Furthermore, half of the modules are very close to ready. And the way we measured that is they need fewer than 10 lines of code that needs to be changed for them to be ready. And then 34 percent of the modules, they need more than 10 lines of code to be changed. Now, if we look sort of, if we open that up and we look inside of what these changes are, we basically saw that a lot of these changes are easy. In fact, 29 percent of the changes you need to make are like this Drupal set message example that I just showed in Johanna's video. So literally a third is just simple one line changes specifically to Drupal set message. And then the 71 percent that's left, I bet you there's a lot more one line changes to it. So arguably, we could almost automate some of these changes and get a lot of modules ready in record time. So it'd be really interesting to see if we could automate some of this. Could be an interesting project to work on. Now, some changes will need a little bit more work than a one line change, but still a lot of it will be easy. And so the big difference between seven and eight and eight to nine, then from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, you needed to rewrite your modules. You couldn't start until Drupal 8 was released. And then you had to do it sort of in a big bank style. All of a sudden your module was ready and it would work or it wouldn't work. In Drupal 8 and going from 8 to 9, there's a lot of small updates you need to make, like the ones that I showed you. You can start today, eight months before we even released Drupal 9. And a lot of these updates can be incremental. Actually, you make them today, you can use those in eight. So you can actually test these changes already in production in a very incremental way. So big difference compared to the previous major release cycle. And so you can help now. As I mentioned, the tools are ready. The APIs are stable. And so please help us upgrade your modules, help update the contributed modules. You can also help work on Drupal 9. We have to remove deprecated code from 9 as well. And so that's an area where you can get involved as well. So overall, I would say the Drupal 9 readiness is progressing really well. You know, I believe it's going to be easy to upgrade. Try to show that to you with the Johanna video. And as I just mentioned, you can start today, but we obviously still have work to do as well. But I feel like things are really on track for our release target date of June 3rd of next year. So big applause, I think for all of the people that helped with this. It's easy to show those videos and make it all magically work. I can tell you there's a lot of hard work, a lot of diligence that goes into making it that easy. So let's not take that for granted. So the 30s of my keynote is to really talk a little bit more about sort of the Drupal 9 product strategy. If you think about Drupal 9 development is going to start soon, what should we be working on? It's a big question. And so I wanted to share some initial thoughts with you with the goal to collaborate on finalizing them. But again, if you look at the mountain that we just climbed, we're almost at the summit. We're not quite there yet. But again, as I mentioned, we're actually working on all these initiatives and making great progress. It's pretty amazing to think we're going to get these things done. And so obviously behind this mountain will be another mountain. And so this will be the Drupal 9 mountain. And we need to, you know, just like we did with Drupal 8, we need to define these strategic tracks. And for each of the strategic tracks, we need to figure out what are some of the initiatives that we want to put on there, right? And so that's an exercise that we need to do. And maybe we can change to a different, you know, doesn't have to be a mountain, but we can try and come up with a different thing to keep it fresh. But for now I'm going to use a mountain analogy. And so I want to talk a little bit about how we're going to define these things, all right? So today what I'd like to do is actually propose strategic tracks. And the goal would be to discuss them and refine them over the next six months, right? So this is my recommendation for tracks. And I'd love your feedback and we can tweak them. But we should then refine them relatively soon. And then secondly, I want to launch a process, a community process to help us identify, let's say, the first 10 initiatives, all right? So in the past, it's been a while, so you may not remember, especially if you're new, but I've done these surveys and, you know, 3,000 people, 4,000 people would answer these surveys and we would gather all of this data and we would then use the data to get to initiatives, right? And so we'll be doing similar things. So be assured there will be opportunities, plenty of opportunities for discussion and input, all of these things. But I want to get us started so that we're ready by the time we're ready to start working on Drupal night, okay? All right. So the first track that I'd like to propose has anything to do with this notion, like we're all being asked to do more with less. And this is something that I hear a lot when I meet with Drupal users. You know, they wanted to be more efficient. They wanted to be less costly to build and run Drupal sites. So that is sort of captured by this notion. This track in my mind is actually a continuation of a track that we had and where we have some initiatives that aren't completely done, right? And so what I'm proposing is we basically bring back this track and change the name a little bit to reduce costs and efforts. And I'm sort of tentatively putting, you know, automated update and configuration management on that track because we're still working on them and we may not get them done by Drupal night, right? So if they're not done, I think they're that important that we should keep working on them. Then the question is what other things can we do? And again, I'm not making recommendations here, but I just want to give you a couple of examples of things that maybe we do do, right? Like maybe we keep working on composer improvements. Maybe for a long time we've talked about reusable component libraries to help accelerate certain things. Some people have said, you know what? Our developers love symphony so much, it would be great if Drupal was more symphony-like versus sort of in between. That would help us save a lot of onboarding time. Other people have suggested maybe Drush should be in core or a Drush light kind of solution should be in core. That would help as well. So I don't know what all of the ideas are, but start thinking about some ideas. And then we'll find a way to aggregate them and vote on them or discuss them. So that in my mind is really important. The second track in my opinion should be around ease of use. Just like every morning the sun comes up, we know that is true and that will hopefully forever be true. Similarly, we do know that ease of use will always matter and in fact it's starting to matter more and more and more, right? And Jeff Bezos has a great saying that I really personally love. You know in an interview he once was asked, so how do you do strategy at Amazon? How do you decide what to invest in? And he said, well most people try to bet on things that may happen in the future, right? And they try to sort of escape where the puck is going. But at Amazon we actually love to invest in things that we know will never change. That's kind of the opposite idea. And so in the case of Amazon it's like, you know, they know that people want faster and faster shipping and cheaper and cheaper shipping costs. And so they're investing billions of dollars trying to minimize those things because they'll be true forever. And if they invest in it, they know that that investment is going to pay off. And in my mind this is one of those things. We know that in 10 years, we know that in 20 years ease of use is going to matter. And so it's worth investing in. And so one of the things that we did actually at Acquia is we did a survey and we talked to a whole bunch of people both through a survey as well as through, you know, interviews. And so these people are people that use content management systems. Some of them have used WordPress, Adobe, Sitecore, Drupal. They have a variety of different levels of experience. And we asked them simple questions like how would you rate that CMS that you have experienced with? Would you say it's modern or outdated? Would you say it's a premium CMS or does it feel like it's a basic CMS? Is it empowering to you or is it constraining to you, right, to get the idea? And so we gathered all of that data and what we found for Drupal, which hopefully won't shock anyone, is that beginners don't really love Drupal, right? So you can see it's barely positive. Beginners think Drupal is very confusing. Look at how unclear Drupal is. It's almost all the way to the bottom. And as a result, they wouldn't really recommend it to their friends or their family or their colleagues. But I think as we also know, is that as people get more and more experience with Drupal, they start to love it more and more. Look at this. Intermediate users are really starting to like, wow, this thing is pretty cool. And then eventually experts, we get really high marks, right? And so this speaks to the learning curve that we have around, you know, Drupal being hard to use for beginners. But then once you're an expert, like probably many of you in the room, you really love it and you couldn't think about using anything else. And so funny enough, if we compare that with some of the other CMSs, because again, we didn't have just Drupal users in our research, but we had WordPress people. And so in the case of WordPress, it looks very different. It's almost going down, right? So beginners love it. And as they become more and more experts, they're like, yeah, I don't know. It's not as cool as it used to be as a beginner. And you see similar patterns with other CMSs. You know, this is Adobe. Their CMS is called Experience Manager. So yeah, not a lot of experts that love it. But again, beginners think it's pretty cool, right? Pretty high. But then it kind of goes down as people become more experts. And same thing really with Sitecore. Also a downward slope, roughly the same idea. And so it's really interesting if you look at Drupal versus everything else. It's like we're going the opposite direction. Like everybody else is going down. We're kind of going up. Yeah. So you clap. And that's great. But this is good news and bad news. I mean, the good news is, you know, experts love Drupal, but the bad news is obviously we lose a lot of people early on. Like think about it, we get two million unique visitors to Drupal.org. That's a crazy number. Every other CMS, you know, company or project would literally kill to get that kind of traffic. But we're unable to convert those people into experts because it's such a hard experience. And so the opportunity that we have, in my opinion, is to make Drupal really easy for beginners, right? We really need to work on moving that curve up on the beginner side. And hopefully we can keep it, you know, horizontal. We don't want to jeopardize the expert experience, but we want to get the beginners up and running faster. And I think I really do believe that would be game changing for us. It would help us recruit. It would help us get more customers. So I feel very passionate about that. Been thinking a little bit about what success would mean if we did this. And in my mind, success would mean, as you can see on the screen, like somebody can have a great idea, like, oh, I want to build this. And it can go from idea to discovering Drupal to deploying an implementation of that idea in record time. Today, that's really hard. We just think about, like, oh, I have to build a theme for my site. Great. That's a month of work, right? It's hard. And in other, you know, WordPress, as an example, they have a marketplace of themes. You can get a theme in probably an hour or a couple of hours, right? So think about all of the differences between what we do and what some of the other projects do. And that was just one example. But so, long story short, what I propose is that the second track is all about prioritizing the beginner experience. And it's an explicit choice if we choose the beginner experience. It means that we don't always focus on the expert experience, right? And again, there's a lot of different things we can do. And again, we will, you know, work on all of these ideas together, but things like guided tours. We've also heard over and over again that the terminology in Drupal is really hard. When you talk to beginners, they think about content and components. But we talk about nodes and entities and blocks. Like, simple things like that can make a big difference, you know, in sort of the mental model. I mentioned the marketplace of themes, continuing to invest in the work that the layout builder team is doing, more whizzy week, more no code, low code kind of things, making it easier to try Drupal. We made a lot of great progress there, but there's more we can do. One interesting suggestion was a separation of journeys by role. It's something that has come back over and over again in the last 10 to 15 years. And the idea is that today, if you're a content creator, you're kind of launched into the same experience as a side builder. But really, you're doing very different things. And so is there a better way to separate sort of the roles of these two personas when it makes sense to? Obviously, install profiles could give quicker starting points as well. And so I'm sure there's lots of other ideas. We have actually already started working on one, which I think will be really important for the beginners, which is a new front end theme, which is different from Claro, because Claro is a back end theme. It's for the administrator. The front end theme is basically a replacement for Bartek, which Drupal ships with today. And it's often the first experience that people get when you install Drupal and you don't choose Umami today, you get Bartek often, right? And it looks a little bit dated. And so I forgot when it was, but like several months ago, we had a meeting and people started brainstorming like, how could we create a new front end theme for Drupal? And the people at Lullabot had really sort of rallied around that. And they've been starting to work on a new theme. It's called Olivero. And I'm going to give you a quick preview of the upcoming Olivero theme. And hopefully maybe we can ship it with Drupal 9. And Drupal 9, we then ship it with a new back end theme and a new front end theme. And then we'll be pretty amazing. So here's a little video. Our goal is for Olivero to be the new default theme for Drupal 9. But wait, why design a new default theme for Drupal? Bartek was a great theme for Drupal, but as time went by, the web changed and Bartek's design stayed the same. Bartek slowly began to feel dated. It used outdated graphical elements such as gradients and drop shadows that made it feel heavy. This can often lead to a negative perception of Drupal when people knew to it do their first install. We want to ensure that when people install Drupal, they're immediately impressed not only by the power and versatility of it, but also by the look and feel. What should the new theme look like? To answer that question, we worked with stakeholders to help establish a visual language. We created an exercise in which each stakeholder could pinpoint on a scale of how they felt the new theme should look and feel. Once the exercise was completed, we had a list of additives that we could use to help guide us through the design process. From there, we were able to establish more formal design principles that we could reflect in the overall design. The principles we established were simple, modern, focused, and flexible. Our current theme, Bartek, was named after Gene Bartek, one of the original programmers for the ENIAC computer. Earlier this year, the Drupal community mourned the passing of Rachel Oliveiro, and we have named this new theme in her honor. Rachel touched many people in both the Drupal and accessibility communities. She worked at the National Federation of the Blind, and she was committed to making technology accessible to all people. We chose the name Oliveiro not just because we have made accessibility a top priority, but also because we aspire to develop this new theme in our community in a manner that is consistent with the qualities that Rachel embodied, including patience, generosity, and inclusivity. So that's Oliveiro. We hope that you're as excited about it as we are. We couldn't be here in person, although we will be at Drupal County, Minneapolis in May. But we need your help sooner than that. Please comment on the issue below and let us know your thoughts. We also need help with actual development. We're in the D9-theme channel in Drupal Slack, and we hope to hear from you soon. Till then. Bye. Awesome. Yeah. I think it looks fantastic, and it would be great if you could ship it with Drupal 9, don't you think? Yeah. It would give it a fresh look out of the gate. That would be awesome. So a big thank you to the Lollabot team for making that happen. Let's see. All right. So moving on to the next track, which is actually track three, which I believe should be about the open web. And I recognize it's something that I'm personally very passionate about. But the reason I'm so passionate about that is because as you may know, as you probably know, one out of 40 websites in the world run on Drupal. It's a lot of websites, right? And so I feel that with that comes a great responsibility and actually a power that we have that very few others have, where we can drive, you know, a part of the future of the web. And we should think carefully about what we want to do with that. You may know that today about 60% of the world is on the internet. And that in just a few years, the entire world will be on the internet. It will probably be driven by satellite internet. People probably will have 100 gigabit connections because of that. And they may be launching Drupal sites from their phones. I don't know exactly how it all will work, but I do know that about 4 billion new people will come online and will come online very quickly. And as I mentioned, I feel like we have a responsibility to, you know, keep the web open, you know, to keep it accessible, to keep it secure, to keep it private, or at least privacy compliant to make sure everybody can benefit of the open web. And, you know, that's a big responsibility. So my recommendation would be that that would be the third track up the Drupal 9 mountain. There's a lot of things we could do as well here. A lot of different initiatives. Obviously, things around GDPR and privacy. Making that better out of the box. Again, accessibility, which hopefully you saw today, has been a big theme for us, but it's work that's never done. Making Drupal light or fast out of the box. You know, I think it's really important for those that do not have fast internet, which hopefully everybody will have fast internet one day, but that day isn't here tomorrow. We could think about how we make our HTML even more semantic. Obviously, we use HTML5 today, but there's things like microformats, microformats 2 specifically, which add another layer of semantic metadata to HTML, which could really help as well. And then there's all sorts of new protocols, like web mention. I don't know if you know this, but it's a W3C protocol, which really helps you build sort of a distributed social web. Again, I'm not suggesting that's necessarily what we do, but there are certainly things that we can take from ideas and standards that relatively few people implement to making those things mainstream. I mean, if one out of 40 websites uses these things, you can really start driving adoption of some of these important technologies. That's essentially the recommendation to really think about what we can do to drive the open web. It's something that we can uniquely do, I think, as Drupal as an open source project. There's very few other, especially proprietary CMSs that probably won't do this, and nor do they have the scale to have a big impact. So Track 4 is about the explosion of content and data. As I mentioned, we'll have 4 billion extra people, so you can imagine these people will create a lot of content that needs to be managed, but possibly even bigger is a massive growth in devices. Internet of Things devices, phones, tablets, all of these things. So today, it's estimated that there's about 20 billion devices, which is quite a lot, but in the future, the predictions are there will be 300 billion devices, which is basically changing everything. We go from a world where there's a lot of content to a world where there's a lot of data and knowledge, instant knowledge, about all sorts of things by connecting all of these devices. What it means for us is that we go from a browser-only world where content is manually entered in Drupal and pushed to HTML, typical websites, to a world where content needs to enter Drupal in 10 different ways and leave Drupal in 12 different ways, and we need to do that at a different scale. So it's a world where we need to be really good at structured data, really good at structured data, and we need to manage more diverse data as well, not just press releases and blog posts. And we should also think about how do we manage a lot more data, because there will be a lot more data, and then how do we make it really easy to integrate with all sorts of different platforms, where it's marketing technologies, do devices, you name it. And we're starting to see that already, like here's an example of a digital kiosk in New York, in the subway in New York, and they actually power these kiosks with Drupal. So they mounted devices on every metro in New York, and those subways or trains, I should say, they basically share that information with a Drupal site. The Drupal site aggregates the information and then powers these screens, I basically say the next train will arrive in two minutes. It's a great example of Drupal evolving from traditional web content management system to sort of a bigger platform, and I think I think that's pretty interesting. So in my mind, the way I think about that is we need to evolve from being a content repository, and we're a great content repository today, to an even better content repository, and think about how we can actually capture maybe different kinds of data too, maybe more binary data, and then how do we become really good at integrations between Drupal and other things. So my recommendation would be that that would be the fourth track, which is to be the best structured data engine. There's lots of ideas here on how to, you know, what we could do. There are actually two pages of ideas, I think, but obviously privacy will remain very important when you evolve that data, but also think about a native dem, like digital asset management, like today people have a different digital asset management system, and it's, I don't know if it makes sense to manage users and permissions in a different tool, and I don't know, I feel like there's an opportunity to bring more data into Drupal. Data security, maybe we need to expand beyond JSON API to support GraphQL and other things. How do we make the content creation piece of Drupal even better? How can we have SDKs and integrations with different frameworks, React, Vue, all of these things, right? So again, content ingestion, if you think about like, let's say every Drupal site has two million pieces of data, but tools we want to make it easier to manage all of that data. Would we use the tools that we have today, or would we try and use and build different tools? So lots of ideas here. We'll figure them out, assuming we like those tracks. So these are the four tracks. I think if we do implement those tracks, we figure out the right things to do. I think it would be great for Drupal. Drupal will be cheaper and simpler to build with, which is something that I hear a lot. I'm talking to users. Drupal will be loved by beginners, which I think is really important, and still loved by experts. I think Drupal could promote an open independent web that serves all people, all the people in the world. And last but not least, I think it means that by being a great structured data engine, we'll be ready for a future where there could be a lot more data and a lot more integration. So that's my current thinking. I'd love your feedback. You can share it with me in the next few days, but again, we'll have a structured process to collecting some feedback. So the last piece I wanted to talk about is we can have the best product strategy in the world, but speed and time matters. We're not going to be the only content management system that's trying to get to this world. And so the way we can accelerate ourselves, bring more people into the Drupal community will be really important as well, because I think of the Drupal 9 mountain as maybe being bigger than the Drupal 8 mountain, and so we might need more people to climb it. And so the big question is how do we climb faster? How do we go further together? And so there's a lot of things that we can do. Obviously, diversity is really important. Something that I talked about in my previous keynote that helps a lot in building great solutions. We can make our processes better. People sometimes complain. It's hard to do things. We can have better tooling, which is something that the Drupal Association has been working on really hard to get better tooling. We want to attract more volunteers, but we also need more paid contributors, sponsored contributors. And today that's the thing that I want to highlight real quick before I wrap it up. And so I literally spent my summer reading books and papers, and it ended up in like a very long blog post that I wrote, probably my longest blog post ever. It was called Balancing Makers and Takers in Order to Sustain Open Source. You can go read about it, but it's long. But essentially the point is there's two things we should be focused on. Like how can we encourage what I call takers to become makers? Like how do we encourage those capable of giving back but aren't giving back to give back? Right? So that's takers turning them into makers. And then once we have makers, like many of you in this room, how do we promote them? How do we encourage them to even contribute back even more? And I won't go into the details here, but I did talk to a few people in our community on how to make that happen. And so I wanted to play a couple of quick videos and talk to it a little bit and then tell you what we're going to do about this. All right. So how do we turn takers into makers? Well, I talked to Betty and here's what she had to say. In 2007 and my first contribution to Drupal was in 2014. So it took me seven years to start participating and understanding that there's a community behind Drupal. Before that, I was just using the software because I like the technology and I liked Drupal and I was working with it, but I didn't have a clue how to do it. So I attended an event in Frankfurt and then I actually realized that there was a community behind Drupal and that I could actually take part of that. But that took also a long time until I figured out how I can participate as being a non-coder in the community. How can I help? It's a very short snippet of we had a great one hour conversation and I'll post a longer version of this, you know, conversation interview on my blog, but I thought this snippet was really telling, right? Like, you know, think about Betty and, you know, Onex Internet. Like, they're top contributors today, but it took her, like, what, seven years or something to figure out that she could actually contribute. It's kind of crazy. And so it's something that we need to fix because if we can reduce that significantly, we'll hopefully get a lot more people to contribute, right? And I think that's really important. The second piece is about once we have a maker, an organization that sponsors, how do we promote them? And I think it's really important that we promote them because if you think about it this way, let's say there's a $100,000 Drupal project. Right? So let's say a taker wins the project. The outcome of the project is a Drupal site. That's great for Drupal. Promotes Drupal. Maybe that taker will also make a donation to the Drupal Association that goes towards DrupalCon. Let's call it $1,000 that goes to DrupalCon. That's great, but if we make sure that the maker wins the project, we get all of these additional things. We get the same Drupal site, maybe even implemented better because they know how to build Drupal sites because they helped build Drupal. We may still get the same contribution, but maybe along the way they fixed some bugs, implemented some new features that were required. They started contributing to Core. Maybe they even helped organize an event and baddies firm is a great example of that. That's how they would tackle this project. So as a community, we have a huge advantage in driving potential users and customers of Drupal to makers because the return of that investment that I call it like a community return on investment because I haven't figured out a better word is way better if the maker gets the project. Drupal benefits, Drupal accelerates in a way that it wouldn't when the project goes to a taker. That's why we as a community should really think about how do we promote makers and then incentivize takers to become makers because they want to get the same benefits. That's what my blog is all about and it's long, but I encourage you to read it if you have thoughts about it or maybe disagree with it. I'd love to have that conversation. But the impact of doing these two things could be massive. Imagine having 10 more Pfizer's. They've driven so much in Drupal or imagine having 20 centeros, the people behind e-commerce. It's entirely possible to have that, but we need to help those organizations be successful with Drupal. It will lead to more contribution, more diverse contribution, more meaningful or deep contribution on the things that are really hard to fix and it will be healthier for a lot of the contributors as well because when you get paid to work on core or to work on Drupal in general, not just core. It will be healthier and more sustainable for people. I asked another maker, Tiffany Ferris, from Palantir. Again, has been contributing for 10 plus years to Drupal, doing many kinds of contribution, not just code contribution, but event organizing, serving on the boards, all of these things. I asked her, here's a top maker, what would cause you to contribute a lot more? What would double your contribution? Here's what she said. When I think about what would encourage a company like Palantir to increase our contribution, and I don't just mean a marginal increase. I mean an order of magnitude increase. I think we would be looking at creating a centralized system that brought into alignment the interests of an organization or a company like mine, as well as the community and the project. What are those needs, creating that alignment and then creating opportunities that truly advantaged those who made those significant contributions in a long-term capacity? I think that some of the hardest work, some of the most important work, some of the most urgent work that happens in Drupal has the least visibility and has the least external value placed on it in our current system. That over time deteriorates and dilutes the impact of making really deep contributions to Drupal and incentivizes very superficial ones, as well as indirect ones that are based around marketing or share. But I think if we're looking at what it takes for Drupal to go from 40 contributors to 400 full-time significant contributors, it would really evolve around creating that competitive advantage for those firms that are really engaged in underwriting that success and underwriting that transformation of how we invest in the project and the product. That's Tiffany. Again, we had a long conversation about this and I'll probably post a longer version of the interview on my blog as well, because it's really interesting to see how organizations think about what would it take to really double-triple, quadruple their commitment and investment in Drupal. I think figuring that out is a way we go from 40 to 400 full-time contributors, which would be pretty interesting for Drupal. So we're almost done. But essentially the way I think about this, and I really spent a lot of time trying to simplify this, but there's really two reasons why organizations do not contribute to Drupal. One, they can't, meaning they're not capable of contributing. There's a variety of reasons why they may not be capable. And two, sorry, is they want. So they're not motivated. They're not incentivized to contribute. And so what do we do about it? Well, if they can contribute, we can help them contribute. We may not be able to help solve every problem, but we can definitely train them. Like we can train them on how to contribute. That could overcome some of the reasons why they cannot contribute. But if they're totally capable of contributing, which I would argue is probably most of the people in this room, most of the organizations in the Drupal world are probably capable of contributing, but may not be contributing. So we need to motivate them, for example, through better incentives for contribution. So if you boil it down to these two things, I think it's pretty simple, aligns very well with the makers and the takers concept. And so we've had a lot of conversations about this with the Drupal Association as well and can tell you that the Drupal Association is very serious by growing the Drupal community and the Drupal project and the contributors in a way that's healthy and sustainable and also rewarding for those that actually contribute. And so I'd like to welcome back Heather on stage real quick to talk a little bit more about that. Thank you. So effectively recognizing all forms of contribution is an issue across all of open source. Though Drupal has been a few steps ahead often, if not always in trying to make this happen. We're putting together a community recognition program and we've asked Mike Layham to spearhead that for us and we want to give you the opportunity to hear more about it in Mike's words. We've seen healthy conversation lately about how contributions to Drupal are measured and recognized in our community and about how we can incentivize more people and companies to become contributors. One of the encouraging things about the conversation is that we're talking about improving something our community is already doing. What Drupal does today to recognize contributors is an example for other communities, but we believe we can do even better. For example, it's clear that we need to make it easier for non-code contributors to be credited for their work. Project managers, committee members, event organizers and sponsors, all of these and more are important to the health of Drupal. While we have some initial ideas on how to improve our contribution metrics, we're eager to hear from more voices in the community. This is why we're establishing a committee to govern the contribution credit algorithm. This isn't a one and done initiative. Fostering and recognizing the community contribution will be a long-term iterative process. If you'd like to help shape this work, I hope you'll nominate yourself to join the committee or simply share your feedback with us. So we'll hope that you take a moment to go here and to help us figure out the community recognition program specifics. But as Dries said, we're committed to making this happen, and we hope that you'll join us along the way. And I got the video to work. Thank you. I think Mike said it well. We're already leading. Actually, there's a lot of other projects that approach me, and I'm sure others as well. You guys are so advanced relative to the credit system and how you are able to get so many people contributing to Drupal. But I think it's really important for us to figure out the next steps as well, and obviously very excited that the Drupal Association is going to work on this because and I think we should all really care about the longevity and the sustainability of Drupal, and open source in general. And in my mind, obviously the technical or product roadmap is great, and we should focus on that as well. But figuring out this piece of our project, you know, not just for Drupal, but again for open source in general, in my mind is actually one of the most important things that we could be working on. So very excited that we're going to work on that. So to wrap up my keynote, you know, lots of exciting things happening. Obviously Drupal 8.8, I've shown you bits and pieces of it, but it's jam packed with new features. It's coming out soon. It's a month away. Drupal 9 is just around the corner. Please start thinking about Drupal 9. Help us update modules. A lot of the things you can do there are things a lot of people can help with, and I showed you some. But let's make sure Drupal 9 is ready on time and that it's easy for organizations to migrate to. Let's collaborate on the product strategy on the new Drupal 9 mountain and what should we be working on so that we optimize the impact that Drupal 9 can have. And then, you know, let's figure out how we can go faster and further as a community by bringing in more contributors as well as corporate sponsors. So that's my keynote. I thank you. Tomorrow there is also a Q&A. I think it's tomorrow at 11 or 10. So if you have questions, you can ask me your questions then. But thanks for listening and have a great Drupal Con. One more quick note before you go. You may have noticed that it's almost 10.30 and you're panicking about getting to your session. We have pushed the 10.30 session back to 10.45 so that you don't miss anything. You still have time to do the group photo immediately after this. We'll head straight outside. You can find specifics about the schedule online. After lunch, everything will be back on track. So thanks and have a great Drupal Con.