 Okay, thank you for coming. This session is wonderfully attended. I like to see that. I'm Rachel Lawson. I'm the Drupal Association's new community liaison. So I've been trying to get to speak to as many people here this week as possible. I've not managed to speak into half my friends here actually. Although I've been in the community for ten years, this is actually my first Drupal con North America. Anybody else first Drupal con North America? Oh wow! Cool, that's fantastic. Okay, so this is the Astrid session. We're going to do this differently this year. Historically we've had a very scrambled five minutes at the end of the Drees Note and people quickly... My fault. Historically my fault. Really? Because I go too long. Yeah, you do overrun. So what we wanted to do was something that actually we used to do apparently, even before I was in the Drupal community, and that is have a separate session for Astrid. Hopefully this works. I've got my Twitter. You've got your Twitter. Make sure there's Astrid's questions are there. Now I'm going to try and get around and actually get people to ask the question themselves and pass you the microphone and it needs to be quite close for them to be able to hear it and for us to record the session so that people know what question you have asked. So give us a moment to get to you. Okay, I was actually going to start with a question that I asked in Vienna last year. Myself. I was wearing a T-shirt. I was wearing a Drupalcon London T-shirt, which meant so much to me because it was my first Drupalcon Europe event and close to where I lived in London. Now I asked then what was your favourite T-shirt and what memories does it bring back Drees? I remember that question. I have a lot of T-shirts with Drupal stuff on them, like literally boxes and boxes and boxes. The little storage area in half of it is filled with Drupal T-shirts because I don't know, I get emotionally attached to them so I try to keep them. But I guess my favourite one is the one, is my very first Drupal T-shirt. That was from 2004. So I started Drupal in 2001. For the first three years I would just work on Drupal on my own. I didn't really talk to people about Drupal other than in an email mailing list but never really met people in person. So in 2004 I was doing a PhD at the time. One of my papers that I authored together with some colleagues was accepted at a conference with UPSLA. It's a famous computer science conference. It's where they first introduced object-oriented programming and key programming language concepts were introduced at UPSLA. So we had to travel there, it was in Vancouver, Vancouver, Canada. I don't know how it happened but somehow a few people in Vancouver that knew overcoming decided to put together the first Drupal Meetup. The first Drupal Meetup ever. It was pretty special. So they made a T-shirt. A bunch of people travelled from around the US to Vancouver. Neil Drum was there, Kieran Lull, Boris Mann, a whole bunch of people that we all got together and we were just coding in a hotel room, I remember. It was a lot of fun. We had our first ever Drupal T-shirts and I was like, wow, we knew. So I still have those T-shirts. Is it still fit? I don't know. I also have been to every Drupal con in the history of Drupal cons. I have every Drupal con T-shirt too, which every time I come home I put it aside in a special box. Maybe one day I'll hang them on the walls or something. I think it's like 32 or 33 T-shirts. Wow. So when we went off-mic in Vienna, you mentioned something that you'd received recently from that conference. What was that? That paper that we presented 10 years later won the most influential paper awards of that year. It was cited 160 times in other academic publications, so we got a ginormous trophy. So that's a good memory. It was a successful trip. It was a successful trip because on that trip we said, wow, this was a lot of fun. We should really do another meet-up. That's when I decided to organise Drupal con Antwerp or Belgium. Drupal con was a direct result from that meeting. We had a lot of fun and we said, let's all get together again. That's why it's a successful trip. It sounds fantastic. It sounds good memories. I'm going to try and move on to everybody else now I've had my say. I'm going to be asking people probably by their Twitter ID to see if they're in the room. I'm going to start with Avi Schwab. Is he here? If I head your way, you'll be able to ask your question. Thank you for this opportunity. It's a great space to have everybody here. I've basically spent all week talking to WordPress people about their amazing community organisation. One of the things I've learned today is that WordPress, specifically automatic, has eight full-time employees. Eight to ten? That specifically support their community events. That's including two or three developers. I was wondering how Drupal can work together to coordinate and work to build up our community events given the limited funding that the Drupal Association has, or where should we go in trying to support smaller local community events? It's a great question. I actually think it's a great idea what they do, because these first Duplicons actually organised them or helped organise them. It's a lot of work. It's always a lot more work than you expect it to be. I think having some sort of central service, for lack of a better term, that helps local camp organisers, I think it's a fantastic idea, because we could do a lot of different things. We could have a camp website out of the box so they don't have to build their websites from scratch. We can have all sorts of best practices out of the box. I could also provide consistency across the camps, as well as sort of a minimum bar of quality, let's say, because there are stories about some camps not being that great, and it literally turns people away from Drupal. There's an opportunity to make camps more scalable, easier and better quality, because we can all work together on raising the bar. Obviously we don't have the budget to hire eight people or ten people to do that. But I think it would be a good idea to make a start and to grow that kind of concept over time. I'm not sure, but I think what WordPress does is to also take either the entire profits or a share of the profits from these events. There's probably a way to make it sustainable, where the Drupal Association offers a service. Then the local organisers pay for that service. I don't know how that would work, but if you do it that way, I think maybe we can grow it over time. I think that would be really good for Drupal. The other thing that the Drupal Association could help with is sell sponsorships. Because there's companies that probably would pay a one-time fee to one organisation and then have their logos in all of the camps. That way the camps also don't have to do all the fundraising work. Maybe they specialize in raising money from their local ecosystem, but the Drupal Association can offer these services, provide some money, all that kind of stuff. I think it's a very interesting model. I think one of the big problems, if I can just add one more thing. It almost seems like we're in a chicken and egg situation now with trying to get there. WordPress has spent a lot of money and they're losing, but automatic, the commercial arm of WordPress is spending a lot of money into facilitating this organisation. As you said, we don't have anybody who's contributing that. In order to get this financial organisation, it really takes dedicated resources, significant resources to be able to deal with that. The DA does a lot and they do what they can, but I think there's still a lot of resistance from some local organisations because we're not sure proving the value of getting together is something that we haven't done yet. It's really important now, but you probably don't know is that we had our two-day board meeting, so every Drupal Association board gets together. To actually discuss this, I don't know if you knew that or not, a little bit. We agreed that we would investigate what we can do. There's a committee that's going to basically see if we can put together a proposal to start something like this, but it won't be eight or ten employees. We'll start small and we'll grow into something bigger. There's definitely a keen interest in making this happen. We'll see where we get. We're excited to see the proposal hopefully in a few months' time or I don't know when the proposal will come back. We've had a lot of camp organisers talking about this and we're happy to help. Thank you. Dries, I just want to follow up as an organizer. Maybe you can bring all of us organisers together and we can help you with a solution. We've been doing these camps for a long time, so maybe you guys should just come and ask us. We'll let you know. It's a great idea. We're talking to Gabor about Drupal Europe. One of the things they're trying to do is bring... I don't know if I'm misrepresenting it or not, but we're figuring out where the next Drupal Europe will be or the next Drupal Con Europe will be. We're trying to bring these organisers into Drupal Europe organisation so they can shadow the Drupal Europe organisers to get ready for next year. Not only could we bring them together in one location and share best practices, we can also help to mentor new organisers. Talk to a lot of people that have been organising Drupal camps and they've been doing it for eight years or seven years and they get tired and they want to pass it on to other people to organise. How do we keep doing that? Because these events are so important for Drupal. Fantastic. Do we have moving on to more technology matters? Sure. Kevin Reynon. I've gotten the answers to a lot of my questions, but let's just say that someone's responsible for a thousand Drupal sites in Drupal 7 currently. Like you? Maybe. We know the end of life date for Symphony 3 and the end of security support for that, which will end up flagging any Drupal 8 site for security violations in our environment. It's very difficult for us to jump through the hoops necessary to keep running that software. When are we going to know more specifically when the end of life of Drupal 7 will be and 8? That's a great question. I don't have a concrete answer on what that date will be, but we are discussing this and I think there is value in making sure we have a good answer so people can plan accordingly, especially if you have a thousand sites. You need a lot of advanced warning, let's say, or a long heads up to make sure you can prepare appropriately. So there is an issue right now that involves a number of people, including some of the core committers where this is being discussed, and it's kind of like a difficult issue because there's all these dependencies. We're still trying to finish initiatives. We're dependent on symphony, as you said, and they have their own release cycle and their own end-of-lifes. So we need to look at all these different dimensions to try and arrive to some sort of reasonable date that we can stick to. Plus we're also evaluating some potential tweaks to our own release schedule. So these need to be incorporated as well. So I wish I could give you a better answer, but we are... I know you wish I could do that too. That's fair. We're working through it. Right now there are different proposals in that issue. I'm not sure if you've seen that issue, maybe you have, but there are different proposals in that issue. I think the one that has the most momentum as it stands right now would be that the earliest date for Drupal 9 would be early 2020, I believe it was. So my issue is really... You're not leaving us a lot of time to figure out how to move forward. Because a lot of my core problems with D8 have been addressed, we can still move forward towards D8. But two years with the size of our infrastructure is not a whole lot of time. And so we have to start evaluating alternatives and coming up with plan Bs. For me that's difficult because I've been involved in Drupal for so long. You're kind of forcing my hand here because it's my job on the line. If our servers are flagged with security vulnerabilities, I have the option of continuing to run D7, which is what everyone's telling me. Don't worry individual vendors are going to come up with long-term support plans. That's not going to stop it from being flagged by Qolsys or RACNI or any of the services our security teams use. And I have to sign a piece of paper that says I personally take responsibility for the security of the server, which puts me in a really bad place. But you're on 7, you said, right? So one option is to migrate to 8. Apparently that's a funny topic. I must have missed something maybe, but one option is to get to 8 and then you should be supported for a long time. Maybe there's a reason you can't go to 8 or don't want to. We'll discuss this more with the core committers and hopefully you have an answer soonish. But at least it's raised and that's the big deal that helps. I completely understand the concern. OK, we'll move on to another... Actually I might be able to understand this more myself. Mike Bainton? Oh, do you want to use the microphone there? Hello. So my question is essentially, so it's around the messaging on the new DiDotta homepage particularly, but also the overall messaging that we're sending out right now about what Drupal 8 is and who its target audience is. The new homepage says that right at the top it's for ambitious digital experiences and it promotes Drupal for developers, for marketing teams and for agencies. But given all of the recent initiatives especially that are around making Drupal easy, could we also just add in a little bit of messaging for classic Drupal site builders? What do you mean with a classic Drupal site builders? I mean people that are one person, two person shops that aren't developers. Speaking with those people this week, the feedback that I've been hearing is actually like, Drupal 8 totally works for them. In fact they like it better than Drupal 7, but it's only if they stumbled onto that by accident. If they look at the messaging they think that you would think that Drupal 8 is for the enterprise. And I feel like we're losing a large group of people that actually the software would work really well for only because of messaging. Actually well, I think you're right. If you look at the roadmap, a lot of the things we're doing helps everybody. Not just enterprise and non-enterprise. For me, I've said this in the past to me, ambitious digital doesn't mean enterprise. I know it's misunderstood. But I specifically chose not to use enterprise as a term because I don't agree with that. For me ambitious means could be a small start-up. But if the enterprise person started, that's trying to do something unique, something differentiated, then they need a platform. Drupal should be a great fit for them. But that's differentiated from more sort of cookie-cutter solutions. I don't think we're going to beat a weak sort of squarespace. Can I ask, because I thought that was very interesting, you had squarespace as a competitor that you mentioned at the keynote. Probably sending mixed messages there. That's a good fair point. But I wasn't trying to say we need to be like squarespace. The point that I was trying to make in my keynote is we need to look at our competitors broadly and look at what they're really good at. For example, I think squarespace is really good at page building. So I think we can look at squarespace for inspiration on how to make page building better. Because what they're doing I think is compelling on the low end, but also in the enterprise. Now, it doesn't mean we have to copy squarespace. We can do page building in a way that plays to our strengths, like structure content and these kinds of things. But from an experience point of view, I do think we can learn from those systems. Point well taken about not sending mixed messages there. I saw some people on Twitter saying, why do you compare Drupal with WordPress for the evaluator experience? Somebody pointed that out too. I'll be more careful, I guess. Thanks. Before you go, can I ask a question with my DA hat on of you? We spent some time building some personas and working out our little beans and so on and the words for marketers, evaluators and developers. Thinking that developers would be the people who would go there to get the code because that's what they're interested in, which is essentially what you're saying exactly what you would expect a site builder to do. Would there be better words that we could use in that jelly bean so that the one person, two person shops that you're talking about, people would know where to go? I'm sure there are. I just don't know them at the moment. So you're saying the developer one is the one that you intend to target, the people that I'm talking about. Because to me it very much does not right now. I see developers and I go Drupals for developers. And that's maybe not what so. Remember we were building something for people who don't know Drupal. This is coming to Drupal for the first time and they're looking for the things. So a site builder, who we call a site builder, is a quite unique word to a degree within our community. That's why I did not say site builder right now. I'm sure there's a way to express what you want. I just wanted to check because it's interesting to hear what you're saying and I want to take that back into the Drupal association and see if there's anything that we can do with that because that's really good feedback. We can probably talk about that. Yeah, I'd love to. Thank you. Guess what? My phone's just locked itself. Actually it's Tim Hennan here. He's asked a question. Okay, I'll ask it on his behalf. Sure. What is the most important thing that an individual consumer, not a content creator, can do to preserve the open web? Interesting question. So consumer being like a visitor, I guess. Yeah, a user of a website. I mean I think, probably like not use Facebook or something. Which is what I'm trying to do by the way. I don't know if you follow that. But there's a lot of things wrong with Facebook and one of them is that they're an aggregator. And so people read the web through Facebook. Same thing with Google. And there's actually research done. And for a lot of people that aren't as technology savvy as many or almost all of them in the room here, they found that for those people, Facebook was the web. Like if you ask them what is the web, they said Facebook. And so I think it just goes to show that there's a problem, right? Because what Facebook does is it aggregates all of this content and it decides what people get to read. And in the process, they're actually putting to answer your question. I think they're causing real stress on the open web or independent websites. So I would say go visit these websites versus reading that through Facebook and read it without an ad blocker, really. We need to support those people, those organisations that have websites. And so uninstall Facebook. Uninstall your ad blocker? That actually is a good point. I hadn't thought of that. Yeah, that's important. I think it is important because people are trying to build businesses and websites that provide value and great content. If you don't support them somehow, then you hurt them, right? And a lot of them have to go to Facebook because that's where the reach is too. And so it's like this interesting situation where they have to rely on Facebook to get visitors and if they don't use Facebook, they get basically punished. And then if people don't use Facebook and they use ad blockers, they're making it worse. That makes sense. Can I just say I left Facebook two years ago? Yeah, very good. Okay, moving on. Okay, do we have Alana Burke here? Ah, now Alana's got a whole string here which I'm hoping that she'll be able to shorten slightly. Otherwise you could be here for the rest of the week. Try to put things together and ask something between them. Can I squeeze? Okay, so I know we've heard a lot from you about being passionate about diversity and inclusion efforts. And I certainly believe you, but I think that we don't see a lot of that come through in your blog or on Twitter or really throughout the year. We hear a little bit about it at the keynote here and there. But I think we'd really like to hear more about that. And I think if you could do things like put more out there when you're personally tweeting or blogging or just retweeting things about diversity and inclusion or from the diversity and inclusion working group or just making strong statements about what you do and don't believe in, I think that that would really go a long way towards telling the community what, and this also goes along with making the values and principles statement. I think hearing it from you and not just from the diversity and inclusion group or from other people in the community, I think it would really go a long way towards making that I think more clear as to what is and isn't accepted in the community and what you do and do and don't support because so many people listen to you as the leader of our community. So I guess part of, not just a suggestion, but part of my question is why don't you engage more in diversity and inclusion things online when I know that you know that they're happening. Yup. Yup, sorry. Were you done asking the question or not? Yeah. Sorry, it didn't mean to cut you off if you weren't. No, well, thanks for that feedback. First of all, it's very important to me, this topic. Diversity is very, very important and we have to do better too, frankly, as a community. I don't think we are where we want to be with these things and so I'm happy to show more leadership there. I don't know what else to say immediately. Maybe I haven't done enough talking about it, maybe I haven't done enough tweeting about it, but I can certainly do more and I certainly want to lead by example. I'm going to take you up on that and I'll do more. We have my promise. I guess the other half of my question is is there anything that we specifically, as the Diversity and Inclusion Working Group, can do to make that easier for you? If we can open a line of communication or anything, let us know what we can do to communicate to you or let you know what would be helpful. Just let us know we're here. Yeah, let me think about that. I'd love help for sure. I will admit that while I think this is very important to do, I'm also not like the expert on this topic, right? So I'm learning as well about how to best communicate about these things and I want to set a great example because I'm passionate about it. So as long as we can work on these things together, I'm very happy to do that. Awesome, well, we are here. Well, thank you. I will say I have made mistakes in the past. I remember I think one of my keynotes in 2009, I think it was in Copenhagen. I made a comment in my keynot which was Sexist. I wasn't thoughtful about it. I forgot all the details, but the community's reaction was fairly aggressive last day. That actually did shut me down for a while. So I think what's important is to call people out, but to do so in a way that also allows people to learn from their mistakes without being hurt in the process. Does that make sense? That's an interesting balance, I would say, between educating people that make mistakes without alienating them. This is a long time ago. I'm not trying to use it as an excuse or anything, but I think it's important for us as a community to understand that people will make mistakes and then when they do, to provide an environment where they can get better without being at the right word. Sometimes it's tough to make mistakes, so people need to feel like when they do make a mistake, they can recover from that. I'm struggling to find the right words here, but hopefully the intent comes across. Thanks, Trace. I've been passed a question by someone to ask on the behalf. With content and relational management, being one of the top reasons people choose Drupal, if we focus too much on catching up or passing other projects in other feature areas, do we risk losing our best advantage? When you say relational management, is that... I think we're talking about the fact that we can structure data very well or structure content. Well, I think to win as a project, you need to have clear differentiators. The node system and views, that's always been a key differentiator for us and the reason why Drupal was successful and we need to keep that. We need to double down on those things. The things that make us good, we need to double down on them. I feel like we've been doing that actually with Drupal 8. The entity system and moving views to core and all of these things. At the same time, we also need to make sure that table stakes features are there. Sorry, for better or worse, we do have some missing table stake features. A part of what we're doing there is catching up. I think it's really important. A good analogy is actually going to a restaurant. People go to a restaurant to expect clean tables. If you don't have clean tables, people aren't going to come back. But nobody goes to a restaurant because there are clean tables. That's a little bit the analogy here. We need to have good media management. We need to have good layout building and all of these things because that's the equivalent of having clean tables. That's expected today. We need to absolutely focus on that because if you don't have the clean tables, nothing else matters. We're working hard and filling those gaps. On top of that, you do need to have something differentiated. People go to a restaurant because there's a great chef that makes really good foods or something. We need to work on those things. I think API First is a great example of that. The stuff we're doing there, I think that's stuff that gives us differentiation. I think the whole entity system and our structured data approach is still something that is relatively unmatched to be honest by other content management systems. But it kind of goes to waste a little bit because we don't have the ease of use that people have come to expect. We should definitely do all these things. I know it's easy to say and a lot of work to do all of these things, but we kind of have to. Fantastic. One day I'll take you to my favourite Indian restaurant in Bradford in the UK. Chips, mellamine tables, broken chairs. It's amazing. Cheap too. Do we have maths A, B in the audience? Bit it because I like his question. I wish Tim Lennon was here again. Or maybe some of the other Drupal Association engineering team. When will Drupal move over to GitHub so we can use pull requests? I think it will make contributing easier. That's an easy question. Neil is going to answer it. I was so happy Neil would come up. I can try to answer it, but you go first, Neil. GetLab is the one that's currently looking like the frontrunner. We did a session on it yesterday, I think, or maybe a couple of days ago, so there's a whole recording of that and that has all the details. We have a proof of concept of the first phase of that. We have the other 20% of the project, all the details, making sure all the user names fit and to get labs, user name restrictions, they're different than the ones we have. Making sure everyone can still access their account and everything works. We're a natural team, so when it's ready, hopefully before the next Drupal Europe. By the way, remember the Neil that I talked about in the opening? That's that Neil. I always used to think he was a Drupal developer and then I sat down with Neil and I thought, I'm really not. I can add a little bit more colour because people, we've looked at all these systems because we want to modernise some of our development tools, but actually what we've learnt is that we've actually have some of the best tools and you may not believe it, but as we started looking at all these other solutions, we found out they don't have anything close to what we have. Sure, we don't have pull requests and they have pull requests, but we have all these other things which nobody else has ever had to build because they don't have a collaborative open source project as large as Drupal. When we started talking to GitLab as an example, they said, wow, I can believe you guys have all this and we want to implement some of this because this is really a state of the art. You may not believe me when I say these things, but it's sort of true. We've been working since with those organisations including GitHub and GitLab to see if they're actually willing to advance their software to meet our needs and they've been sufficiently inspired by how we do things that they've been slowly, but certainly they've been doing this. Hopefully at some point, we can switch to those tools like GitLab and that would make a lot of sense for us because we would get out of the business of building our own and we could reapply the people that are working on these tools to work on more strategic things, maybe the stuff we talked about, like how can we help camps with a website, these kinds of things. That's been an active project and it's been a little bit slow because we're actually dependent on these organisations advancing their software. Thank you. The next question is going to be Christoph Bridat and I'm going to tell him which one to ask and I think it's fair to ask, what's your favourite website? Mike. My question is an open question. It's my first group icon in the US and I've met a lot of very inspiring people, very good conversations and I was wondering, what was your favourite moment? What was your favourite moment? Of this conference? Of this conference, if you had one of those, of which I've had a couple. Let's see. I had a bunch of interesting favourite moments in a way. I had several people come up to me and said, you know what, my significant other has type 1 diabetes. I was really inspired by that video. I was very small interactions with these people but that was actually touching to me. These people were really inspired by some of that in the keynotes. Sort of at a higher level, I feel a lot of validation and maybe people give me filtered feedback, I don't know, but I feel a lot of validation about the things we're currently working on. A lot of people have come up to me and said, yeah, we're working on the right things from the page builder, to media management, to the JavaScript modernisation, to the new initiatives that I announced, around composer, as an example, or config management, to focusing on the evaluator experience and the documentation to marketing. I had a lot of validation which is great because it gives at least me more confidence and I'm sure many other people more confidence to really double down and try and go faster in a way because, yeah, I don't know. To me that's one of my bigger takeaways, maybe not my favourite moment, but yeah, that was great to hear and feel from people. So I don't know if it resonates with others here, but I had a lot of conversations I've been doing these roundtables that Rachel is helping to facilitate. So we had a roundtable with Drupal users, we had a roundtable with Drupal agency owners, Drupal shop owners. We had a roundtable with community members interested in governance, as an example, but the first two groups was a lot about features functionality. We asked them, what do you need to see Drupal accelerate or to make your business more successful? And the things that they asked for were the things that we had talked about in the keynote. So that was great to hear. Cool, thank you. I've got another question from the floor, and much as I hear, hearing my sound of my own voice, near this speaker, is Drupal 7 dead? Releases have significantly slowed down in the last year, but Drupal 7, on Drupal 9's other thing, but Drupal 8 you were showing was moving. Yeah, Drupal 7 isn't dead. I mean, most of the Drupal sites are running on Drupal 7, but I think a lot of the innovation has shifted to Drupal 8, which is an important difference. Drupal 7 is mature, stable, reliable, and people are using it. People are still launching new websites on Drupal 7 too, and that's totally fine. That's why we provide support for Drupal 7. So yeah, it's not dead, but I don't have the good data here, but I would imagine most of the activity in the issue queues and git is all around Drupal 8 right now versus Drupal 7. That's true. I know, it's all I've ever worked on. Okay, is Joe Schindler here? Joe Schindler? No? Oh, okay. So Joe asked, the new values and principles need some additional work to more accurately reflect the community's concerns, etc. and grow them. How do you plan to address this? Yeah, that's a good question. So, let's see. Where do I start? Maybe I'll talk a little bit about the process and then the path forward? Yeah. I can go way back, but let's say I start about recent events. We got together with a group in December that included core committer and somebody from the community working group, Megan from the DA and some others, and we looked at some of the community feedback and out of that came a recommendation or a decision for me to try and capture the values and the principles of the project. So that was in December 2017 and so since then I've been working on trying to capture some of these things. And as I mentioned in my keynote, that was really hard work. Because it's kind of difficult to take all of the learnings and all of the best practices that we have developed over all the years and to summarize them in a set of values and principles. And so I did a lot of writing, rewriting, at some point I think I had 24 principles threw away half of them. I ran things by other people along the way as well and so I got some feedback along the way and ended up with five values and eleven principles. And I wasn't necessarily finished with them because I knew I wanted to open it up to the community and make it collaborative, but I wanted to put the first stake in the ground but I arrived at a point where I felt good enough about them. For me they captured some of my fundamental truths around Drupal, things that I've learned over 17 years and things that I've seen work for 17 years. In terms of how we work together how we make decisions, these kinds of things. I wanted to talk about it in my keynotes and that's why I decided to publish them just before the keynotes with the goal to move forward with a collaborative process. And so I know they're not perfect and I think there was some feedback on principle eight which is the one around diversity and it's a very difficult principle to get right and as I said I'm not necessarily the expert on this principle and so I do need help and we need to work on something that we can all stand behind too. And so it was the right point to open it up to discuss it and to move them forward. So the way I think about this document is that the release of this alpha version is a milestone but that we'll be working on this document for many many years to come. It will be a living document that we update that we strengthen that we make more of us. I'm sure there's things that we've missed or that I've missed that needs to be but I'm not native English either so I'm sure a lot of the words that I chose may not accurately reflect or might be interpreted differently in English or might be difficult to translate in other languages so there's a lot of tweaking and evolving we can do and so we actually met about it earlier today as well and we discussed what's the best next step to move this document forward and I shared that I don't want to be the single owner of this document. I just wanted to get it started to plan the seat if you will and so as a next step we're going to try and put together a working group if you will, a committee of people that represents let's call it a diverse committee of people with different interests so to speak that can actually take it from here and carry it forward so my next step is to put together a charter for this group just like we have charters for the other groups and so once the charter is in place and you'll all be able to give feedback on the charter then we'll have to appoint some people to the group and then hopefully we can start incorporating a lot of the feedback and make the principles more robust and so what we announced was sort of a starting point and hopefully a foundation for more work to be done on top of so I'm personally excited about it I think it's going to help a lot of people in the community and I hope we can also start to really live this document there's no point having them sit somewhere on the website when we don't actually can use them in practice but so far I'm actually, despite some of the mixed feedback on some of the principles I've been really encouraged by some of the other feedback somebody came to me actually yesterday and said you know sometimes I've been too harsh on Twitter and you know one of the principles is you know seek to understand first and that person had learnt over time that maybe you shouldn't kind of jump on another person when you disagree and so the person told me that that personal learning was reflected in that principle and that having a principle could maybe have accelerated that learning right so it's a great little anecdote that the principles could be very useful absolutely, yeah I'm really looking forward to getting involved in helping get that message out and communicating what we're going to be doing with that I did learn today as well that apparently there is no word for governance in Icelandic tell me if I'm right I'm sure that's what you said which is ironic because isn't it the place with the oldest government in the world or something we have different words yeah we have different words yeah that's true, I don't know what I've done to my phone now okay is Tony Lagrone in the audience hey oh do you want to use the mic I like your shirt I've almost the same shirt I was wondering because I started with Drupal Rhaida's Drupal 7 was getting launched and I was wondering if you created it from the beginning as a modular system and community oriented or did you like get into that over time out of necessity maybe no it's pretty much from the beginning yeah so how do I tell this story so when I started working on Drupal there wasn't a whole lot of you know content management systems out there that were open source there was things like PHP, Nuke and the kind of stuff and frankly they were kind of like a shit show like they weren't great in terms of I mean they had a lot of adoption a lot of users but I was a computer science student and so you know I had learned in school like what good architecture is and I was also involved with Linux I was a contributor to the Linux project and Linux used a modular architecture and so when I started Drupal I was like yeah of course we need to make this modular just like Linux because I was using Linux at the time too and so to me it was kind of like a no brainer I guess and I felt like there was an opportunity to build something that was a better architect that than some of the leading competitors at the time Did you start out working with other people or did you do it alone at the beginning? It was just me yeah yeah I started on my own like I think most people probably know the story but I originally was planning to spend a couple nights building a message board for my dorm and a PHP and my SQL were just released or were relatively new technologies before that I was working with Perl and writing stuff to files you know and Tickle CK I think it was that kind of stuff and I'm like wow a database and PHP and let me just mess around with that for a couple days and that turned into like you know 17 plus years and so yeah I started it on my own here we are I thought I was bad for getting distracted it's funny because I never expected this right? Like I never had or at least in the first years there was no master plan like I just was doing what I was doing having fun and in many ways I feel like an accidental leader too for this project like I didn't wake up one day and I'm like I'm going to build this CMS and hundreds of thousands of people are going to use it so it kind of happens yeah you're welcome Thanks another one from the floor why do you think many Drupal sites are hesitant to update their site? How can we make it easier for them? Update their sites in like upgrades it doesn't say whether it's a major or a minor upgrade actually let's assume minor yeah so it's an interesting question the reason is because we do add new features to minors which is a great thing to do it does introduce some complexity sometimes or sometimes these new features compete with contributed modules it's not always an upgrade path historically so you know that's been a challenge I mean not every organization has the resources to do that right and so we've been trying to evolve our release process and become more careful about breaking these kinds of things and providing upgrade paths from contributed modules to core so we've learned a lot and we're making it better and better and I think that's probably one of the reasons why there is some resistance now I think I'll keep getting better at that good thank you sorry I'm trying to catch you I was hoping you'd talk longer okay I did have another one I've got so many questions that are mixed in with people's comments now that I can't read the questions okay so there is one here I need to read it all sorry if this has already been asked I don't think it has actually this is slightly different in a conversation yesterday someone mentioned that the new conduct guidelines which I assume is the Drupal Karnac code of conduct from what I'm reading talked about explicit toxic behaviors being wrong but as we know many of the things that promote inequality are systemic and deal with systems of beliefs that reinforce people as inferior I've met plenty of polite racists transphobbes and sexists yeah I've met a couple too will Drupals evolving conduct guidelines also state that toxic beliefs are not welcome in our conduct in our community yeah it's a good question this is where you know I'm going to defer the answer to this working group right I think it's a very complex topic complex answer and I can't pretend to be the expert that knows the answer right right here so we're going to create this committee we're going to invite people with different viewpoints to this committee too because there's people with different viewpoints on this topic as well as experts frankly that have spent much or some of their professional career on these issues to figure out what the best path forward is for us because I think we can all agree that certain behaviors are completely off limits right but then it quickly becomes like this grey area where it gets a lot more difficult and so how it's you know it's about how do you manage like the difficult cases you know where we need to find the right approach frankly because otherwise things could go bad so I'm going to so Nicky Stevens has made a very good observation of the questions that have been asked and I'm going to turn it into a question if that's okay Nicky are you here yeah okay I hope you're okay with this question so Nicky have noticed that she's glad to see a room full for this session Astris at Drupalcon but disappointed that nearly all of the selected questions believe me you think others were written by men really I didn't notice what can we do in future to ensure that doesn't happen that's my bit of question at the end what can we do to ensure that we get more questions and choose questions that are how should we say wider variety and diverse people yeah that's a good question I mean I'm not picking the questions I haven't even I haven't even heard the questions before I haven't even noticed that I'm glad that Nicky pointed it out I don't think you're purposely picking questions from male right I know you well enough that so I don't know like we could add more well we should invite more people to ask questions absolutely and if we want to do we can have a better process for selecting the questions so we have you know more diversity in them so yeah it would have been nice if we'd have had more people asking their questions earlier in the week that was a very subtle hint they all came in today thanks for raising that it's good we should always try to do better on these things yeah it's a good point actually now it's been pointed out to me I feel terrible about it actually and yeah we need to change that this is where we iterate to get better may I just briefly do a follow up on that one I'm wondering if the person that asks the question has any insights as to why that might be the case do we have just a minute for is she comfortable speaking about that if Nikki is happy to speak I'm more than happy to hear the Drupal diversity group meets every Thursday in Slack and I don't want to take time away from Dries's Q&A because I think it's really wonderful that we're spending a whole hour together doing it so you're welcome to come to those meetings Dries you're always invited to come to those meetings and we can figure out together how to change the representation of the voices in the room thanks Nikki actually that is the last bit because we've got a question to you the whole audience we're going to do it by hand so Astries we've changed it a little bit and I think we can keep changing it for the future so when we come back next year in not saying I've been so close to it when you wouldn't believe I'm not used to having that knowledge when we come back I'm not saying it either I'm going to make sure now that I don't say it now when we come back I want to keep iterating Astries as well so how we select questions in advance so that we can think about the diversity of the questions askers and that type of thing I also would like to know what your feelings are as to this is going to sound strange but who should be on the stage for ask Dries now we've done it this year with just Dries but maybe it should be a panel one of the things that I was thinking of maybe it should include Megan so that you can get some DA knowledge maybe we could have one of the people from the octo team and maybe we could have a random member of the attendees we'll pick it random maybe something like that, maybe a panel and I just want to get an idea of whether that would be something that you would prefer so if I say I would prefer to stick your hand up oh less than I thought you'd rather just make Dries stay on the spot all by himself you cruel people I don't mind that's fine I just wanted to find out if it was interesting absolutely we can oh go on one more comment I like the panel approach this is my first time my name is John I work for the government 30 days ago they said you're now managing content management on our Drupal site our contractors are leaving in about 18 months so Panic said in the first thing I did I grabbed a 8 spent a couple of nights trying to load it on my system at home and then I come here and I've met a lot of nice people the master here I haven't ran into him in the hallway at all but the other question that was asked by the young lady back there is at GSA that every time there's someone at any of our audience says how can we get more and more ladies in government in government management well it starts with them they've got to challenge the group as a whole to get them I'm sitting in the hallway today out here on three and I'm counting the different people the different entities that walk down the hall and about 15 men go by two women, two ladies and I'm sitting there saying what's wrong with this at GSA currently and it's so but going back to question I like the panel but I also think some of the new people that come in ought to be put on the panel and ask what they thought thank you I'd like to follow up I mean that ended okay I think having more voices more diverse voices present on the panel would be great that we should let Dries off the hook I just took I wanted to address the part you made about that it be the underrepresented minorities job to kind of lift them up by their pull up by their bootstraps I think it's all of our jobs to do I think it's the people who I don't think it's a little bit of both I think it's exactly the people in power and the people with the privilege and the position and the voice to do this work for everyone else and I don't think it's fair to blame them for their predicament you know like you can't blame it on the pipeline can't blame it on whatever like all those strong men throw it out just you know put in the time and the effort to help everyone else thank you I actually saw you in the hallway and I wanted to say hello and I told you chickened out and walked the other way so my name is Teran I work for a local government in Texas two things the question that Nikki asked earlier I actually did ask one of the questions anonymously just because it was much more comfortable for me to do it that way I do want to point out that coming here to Drupal Con I feel like very comfortable like I feel safer here than I would at like most tech places so I just want to thank you all for that um thank you for saying that you know there's still sometimes undercurrents where you want to ask a question that might be challenging to how some people feel about it and I am like a 5'10 black woman with like purple hair so it's not like nobody's going to know that it was me that asked it so that's there but I don't know how many other women did ask questions anonymously so I didn't come up to the microphone the reason why I got up was the the part that the gentleman spoke earlier asking about why we like why women basically saying that we needed to get up and you know do things and the lean in thing which kind of frustrates me you didn't say lean in but for me knowing that where I am right now I still do have challenges that go on but a lot of the things that have helped me to get where I am you know I do have privileges I grew up middle class I have a college education but it was the people that were around me and supporting me and especially the men that pushed for me to be included the people that are not people of color that pushed to have me included and invited me places and gave me opportunities so you know I volunteer with black girls code and we can do all that we can to the kids that you matter you belong here because I know growing up I was told by lots of people that black women well black people and women did not do tech but having other people that are not in your in group support you and not just like say you know we support you but do things that include you that is super meaningful and it has a lot more weight when you know if you're a white dude you see somebody in your peer group bringing this person in that has a lot more than me knocking on the door and saying please let me in so thank you thank you can I just say it's a really amazing woman who set up halfway through this session that anonymous thing so thank you Sally I think we need to call it a day there I'm sorry but thank you so much for this and we will do it again next year put