 Hi everyone. I'm Kelly Delaney from the Drupal Association. I'm the Director of Development, and this is my co-host. Hi there, folks. I'm Nathan Roach, the Marketing Director at Accelerant. And we're your hosts for the show Beyond the Build, Stories of Drupal Impact, where we are highlighting incredible Drupal use cases by ambitious site builders and end users. And I will say, audience, Nathan and I had a little bit of a summer break, so here we're back and we're bringing the energy. But who do we have on the show today, Nathan? We're catching up. That's right. Well, we have Sean Keating from the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research and Jim Barnthouse from Speckby. So let's welcome them to the show. Hey, Sean. Hello. Talk about energy. You're about the right people. Good. It's nice to see you both. Sean, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. Do you mind telling us how long you've been at the foundation and what you do there? Sure. Yeah. I'm the VP of Digital Strategy at the foundation. I've been there for about 11 years. My main responsibilities are over our website and also some of our data systems. So, you know, platforms include Drupal, Salesforce, DOMO, some fundraising platforms, and the way they're all integrated with each other. Great. How about you, Jim? Could you tell us about yourself and your role at Speckby? Sure can. Yeah. My name is Jim Barnthouse. I'm VP of Sales and Marketing at Speckby. Speckby is a Drupal only agency and you probably know us from our blogs a lot of people do. I do know you're from, I read your latest, I don't know if it's your latest, but we were definitely sending the run around about Drupal Kong Pittsburgh. It was great. Yeah. Did you read that one? That was a good read. I actually wrote that one personally, so I'm pretty proud of it. Good. Thank you very much. It was good. Well, do you mind, so I first knew Jim and he told us about this project and how he works with the foundation. Do you mind going back a few years? You've been there a long time, Sean. How did you get hooked up and connected with Speckby for this project and all your projects? Sure. We started with Drupal before we started with Speckby. So that was around the summer of 2021. We completed a project where we migrated our old website onto a Drupal platform. So we completely redesigned, completely rebuilt, decided to go with Drupal as being the enabling technology. Later that year, we had some staffing changes that opened up some opportunities to work with different partners in the Drupal community. And that was when I put together an RFP really seeking out expert organizations that I think could work with my team and match my team's workflow. Also had a certain level of passion for the platform because, again, that matches the vibe for our organization. And we started there soon afterwards. We started on our first project, which was a microsite, and we've been doing different projects ever since. Great. And on your website, we see that the Michael J. Fox Foundation has raised a billion dollars for research programs to date. Can you help us understand the importance of this platform, how that plays into it? And maybe you could speak a little bit about how Drupal has helped to enable this. Sure. I mean, Drupal definitely has helped to enable our website. And our website is one of our biggest tools for accessing our community and building our community and growing our community. So a stable website, one with a clear information architecture, one that is sound as far as UX principles go, and one that also enables people to find and do the things that they're trying to do when they try to do it. All of that is very important to us. Some of those things were more challenging for us before we moved over to Drupal, mainly because we were on a content management system that was mostly homegrown and was showing its age. But all of those things became improved when we both redesigned and rebuilt the site on Drupal. I mean, Drupal specifically, I think, helps us, but in general, the rebuild was very important for us to really enhance our online mission. Oh, that's awesome. So we see that the foundation is really big into open source. You have open source everything from data repository software, some experimental data. Could you go into the, did you have that before you moved to Drupal anything in open source or is that new with Drupal? That's been something that's built over the last few years, and it's kind of been organically growing on both sides of our organization. So we have a side of our organization that I'm deeply embedded in, and then we have a research side of our organization. We work very closely, but in some cases, choices for these types of things kind of happen in parallel. On the research side, they are very strong proponents of open science, which is a variant of open source philosophy. That's about open access publications and open data repositories. And so they are very dedicated to operating with that type of availability and transparency and openness from the point of view of the side of our organization that is most involved in our technology choices. We have a mix. We have proprietary products. We have open products. It was not the front of my mind when I decided to go with Drupal that it needed to be open source, but I think what was in front of my mind was because it was open source. And what was in front of my mind was a large community accessible, giving us lots of opportunity to find the right developers versus small closed or even proprietary communities just bound to single companies that gave us very few opportunities to make changes to the site, to enhance our capabilities when we need it, to find staffing, and so forth. And I think all of that is a byproduct of it being open source. And so that part was really very important to me when we said, no, it really should be on Drupal. Sean, I have a follow-up question for that. Did you run into any resistance from internal folks who maybe didn't? It sounds like they all knew about open science. And so was that an easy conversion and argument to make when you started doing Drupal on open source things? Yeah, I mean, going back a couple of years, maybe there was a little bit of pushback, but the pushback came more from some of the technical partners and consultancies that we were working with at the time that simply didn't have an exposure to Drupal. They were suggesting, again, other proprietary CMSs. There was a bit of an investment that we had with a different platform even a few years earlier than that. So there wasn't a full push against the concept of open source or the idea that open source was a problem in a way that other platforms couldn't be a problem. As a matter of fact, I actually think it's very much the opposite. But there was a little pushback of sort of like, okay, well, why do we want to do this, right? Why do we want to go with a platform that's been around for so long? Don't we want to be cutting edge so forth and so on? And so I did have to push back a little bit against that. And ultimately the argument of we're not a software house. We don't have the resources to have a full staff of web developers. We're going to have to interface with the community. We want to do things quick. We want to do things agile. We want to get the most functionality out of our investment as possible. Really, we're going to need to go with a platform that has that type of footprint. So that one, that really convinced anybody who was doubting. So this passion for open source is really what led to Drupal being adopted as your platform of choice. But there are other open source platforms. Did you consider any open source alternatives to Drupal? No, at the time I didn't. I was involved in a Drupal project from a position I was in, not with the foundation before this. That was for a publishing company that I worked for for a while. And so, you know, I knew of a lot of the things that we're talking about just kind of out of the box. I was really waiting for an opportunity to move us to Drupal to tell you the truth. And it came up. So no, I didn't I didn't investigate other open source ones. Again, maybe I don't know enough about the marketplace. Drupal was kind of what I was looking for. And that was, you know, that was the direction we went with. So, man, who knows what he wants. Exactly. It's something you can trust, you know? Yeah. Right. That's all I get at. Wallowing and ignorance. I like it for any end user audience that's considering Drupal. There you go. Maybe you just don't need to look at another open source alternative. Yeah. Yeah. Just trust us. Trust us. I mean, to be fair, I think I was involved not at the same level. Of that type of evaluation at the previous company. And there I didn't have as a big of a voice in choosing the platform. Drupal was chosen by a number of other people that I worked with. So we did there go through the evaluation of other types of platforms, both opened and closed source. So by the time I arrived at the foundation, I was already know this is this is the direction we should go with. Awesome. So Jim, how when they approached you with this, they had already been on Drupal. Do you mind telling us a little bit about the project that you're working on right now? Yeah. Right now the project we're working on and this is not not totally launched yet, right? So we're pretty close. But the the this is really the first step towards the Michael J. Fox Foundation having users be able to sign in and start interacting with the website from beyond just going to find information that may be coming back later. It's really a bookmarking tool right now with a complete login system and menu system and in folders and a way to be able to there's a lot of information on the Michael J. Fox Foundation website and to be able to save some of those articles for later, we believe is a big step forward to having people coming back more often in this, like I said, this is the first step. There's there's more stuff to come from this that we that that I guess is some future thinking, right, Sean? Yeah, it's definitely something that we're just starting with giving people the ability to create profiles on our website, not really looking to gate the website in any way. We want to make sure that people get any information they're looking for, but finding ways to give a more personalized experience, finding ways for us to understand more about how people are coming to our website, what information they're looking for and ultimately trying to improve their overall experience when they're on our site. Yeah, and this and then I got to say the the think the hardest part about this project was that we just didn't nothing existed already on the Michael J. Fox Foundation that was like this, but we still had to follow those same brand guidelines and we wanted the feel to feel natural to what the rest of the site was. We went through a UX design process that I was really, really happy with. It I think it's I think it's going to make it very easy and accessible that Drupal does play a part in all of that sort of stuff. So we're appreciative of the platform, especially as a Drupal only company, we're appreciative of Drupal, but the ability for it to be able to be molded into the kind of user experience that we're really looking for at Michael J. Fox Foundation is really key. Now you mentioned that there's this functionality that you're building in order to save content types so that you can come back later. So you're really looking to increase engagement on the platform. You're looking to engage your audience to evangelize them and really to be a source of information that they're returning to. Have you seen the engagement on the platform increase since you started developing changes or is this this has yet to be put out as a feature? Yeah, we're in the middle of development of that. So that should launch by the end of October. We're we're well along. We've we've obviously worked very closely with spec B on the designs and we're evaluating prototypes right now. But that that's that's coming. They're they're actually working on two separate features for us. One of them is is that one and the other one is making searching Parkinson's research papers easier on our site. They're working on a they're working on a basically a front end and a an experience. So specific Parkinson's papers can be found again. This is just for researchers, but that's a that's a huge thing for us to that spec B is helping us with. I think you're highlighting that the audience is diverse. You're not just looking at engaging, you know, donors, but also being able to serve researchers with useful information. Would you say the audience of your platform is split in a certain way between different personas? Yeah, absolutely. We we serve a lot of different constituencies within the Parkinson's community. Obviously, a very large one of those are people who want to be donors, people who are patients, people who are supporters, family members, caregivers, and then we also serve very strongly because it's very core to our mission. The community of academic and industry researchers looking for cures and treatments to Parkinson's disease. And so they are two significantly different personas and that's that's always kind of a challenge. How do we direct one group in one direction and another group in the other direction? I think that that's something that we're we're always being careful of and we're always dedicating development resources and thoughts to both sides of that. And with the disease, honestly, you probably have a lot of crossover, but there's a lot of caregivers and patients who are looking in the research user. So the interface almost needs to work for both audiences. Yeah, absolutely. And and I will argue sometimes that when we inside the Foundation talk about researchers, we're talking about professionals in the field. When a when a person on the outside talks about researchers, they may consider themselves a researcher and they may understand research to be what they're doing, but they might only be a patient or a family member. And so we do leave these tools open to both sides. We don't try to assume no, this is only for a research audience. This is only for a patient audience. We don't we don't make divisions around that kind of like I said before, we're not looking to gate the experience, but we are always trying to find ways to guide people to what they're truly seeking, what they truly need in in a in an easy as possible way. Right. And I just have a question for for both of you actually and maybe we could start with Sean. How is your involvement in the open source community? How has this impacted your career and and also your personal growth? Both of you are open source enthusiasts and I'd love to hear from both of you on how involvement in open source communities, how that's shaped you or how that's helped. Sure. I mean, I I know open source principles. I'm aware of them. I've been I've been involved in technology for for decades. I don't know if I ever considered myself part of one community or the other at least until this project and least until reaching out to organizations like spec B and some of the others that we work with. But I do think from that point forward, again, it's it's given me personally, our organization also access to a wealth of of of knowledge that I really was not able to access from just working with specific companies or specific consultants that only worked with, you know, very proprietary products. And so I think it's expanded the scope of what I feel myself and my team are able to do at our organization. And again, like I said, we're we're not a software development house. Our main mission is not to produce better software. And so we're always trying to find ways to do the most with the resources that we have. And I think going in an open source direction going with Drupal the decisions we've made around our website, especially since we relaunched have really facilitated that in a way that just was not possible with what we were doing before that. Great. Yeah. And for spec B, I think I think for me personally, the thing I'm most proud of is is how often we're contributors to to Drupal. It's there's anybody if there's any time we don't really have that much time that's that's that's just available for whatever, but anytime that developer has has time in their day, whether they're done, they've got an extra hour here or there, we try to contribute to Drupal and we actually internally have concepts for who contributed the most. It's really important for us to be able to contribute back to drag back to the community or even developing some of our own stuff. It's it's an exciting time to be part of Drupal because we're seeing that growth everywhere. I mean, quick story. The you know, with the spec B hasn't always been involved in like government type projects. I know they're out there for Drupal. It's pretty popular, but the just suddenly out of just the last six months to a year, we're getting contacted by government organizations like crazy who were on something proprietary like like Michael J Fox Foundation or something just older and and we're ready to move in. It's Drupal is the the name of the game right now for that. And it seems like they're just it's I see the movements in the world happening just for day to day life. So the Michael J Fox Foundation having the open science and open source commitment in their company, it's great that you did match up with spec B because I know spec B through Drupal Association and just what you said their certified partners meaning they contributed code a lot. And so with that said from any listeners out there, I wanted to ask Sean when you were evaluating agencies to go with, was there a certain criteria that spec being matched or that you had specifically looking out there? Sure, absolutely. And just for full disclosure, spec B is not the only organization that we're working with to maintain maintain our Drupal site spec B is a great partner. We're expanding our relationship with them, but we also work with the company Lullabot on our maintenance level tasks and you know, and they're a very important part of this too. But spec B is right now definitely our go to organization for when we're working on projects when we're adding features and functionality to the website and and it's been a really great partnership. The criteria I put together when we started sourcing different Drupal focused organizations is first and foremost, I wanted a company. I wanted a group that focused on Drupal software, the Drupal community. They were making significant contributions to Drupal core and modules. I really I put that into our RFP. That was important to me. I didn't want an organization that may be strong, but didn't have a commitment to Drupal to the extent that you know spec B does. It really is their focus, right? So that was that was right on top after that. I really wanted a group with or a company with strong local project management. I'm okay with outsourcing and overseas resources and I think that they do really great work. But I do think that when there's a disconnect between an overseas group and the customer, things can go awry. Things can not be communicated properly. And so I really needed a group that I felt confident really had that model down pat. And and and like I said, I really think spec B is one of those companies. And then I also wanted there were a couple of other things. I also wanted a consistent technology team that was accessible. I didn't want to feel like I was putting requests into a black box and then software came out of it. I wanted to have the opportunity not to not to manage their development cycle, but to access it if we really needed to have a conversation. And then, you know, I wanted the same thing with the leadership of these companies. Again, it's it's not our practice to be constantly communicating with developers constantly communicating with the CEO. Nevertheless, though, I didn't want them to be invisible. I wanted to meet them know them interact with them if I felt I needed to and and have them, you know, know us as a client. So that was all very important. And then beyond that, good references. I wanted to hear some stories about what happens when things go wrong and see what's that because we all know things go wrong all the time. And and so I want to know how an organization that I'm working with handles that. And again, these were the types of things that were all coming through gold stars for spec B. You know what led me in the first place to even discover them was doing some research in the Drupal community. Looking at information was out there. A lot of web searches, a lot of considerations on how the company presents itself. Jim's blogs posts are a huge advantage, right? It's very different website and saying, hey, we're great and me taking your word for it or me actually being able to kind of, you know, scrutinize what's really going on there through how they're representing themselves. So so they were very, very strong in that Lullabot also very strong in that. And we decided at the time our best choice was not to limit ourselves to one partner. We don't want to put all our eggs in one basket, but to make decisions really based around the principles that I'm talking about. And I think we made some good ones. Yeah, that is first of all really nice to say, Sean, but also you nailed you nailed what our podcast is about, which is which is effing up. So occasionally, yeah, the specky podcast we do one about about those mistakes and and learning from them. And that is I think that's a key thing because I think what makes us work so well, Sean, is that there's trust and trust is nearly one of the most important pieces of this because you need to be able to trust that that we're going to take things seriously or that we're going to take your requirements and really think through them and not just cut corners because then it the output suffers even though we might have gotten all the requirements on the output suffers in the end either from, you know, maybe it makes Lullaby hard. It makes it harder for Lullaby to maintain it because it's not it's not properly put together. So there's that that kind of stuff builds over time. But yeah, we certainly appreciate everything that Sean and Michael J. Fox Foundation doesn't and I am a huge supporter of Michael J. Fox Foundation for so many reasons. And I every day I'm proud to be working with them. And if anyone asked who are who are client as I always say the first one I always say is Michael J. Fox Foundation shot knows that because I bring it up every time. Great. I think I think we had a question about what advice you would offer to nonprofits or organizations looking to leverage the Drupal community for support and collaboration. You talked a little bit about the evaluation process shown that you went through selecting spec B and Lullaby as well. What advice would you give to nonprofits or orgs who are looking to, you know, start up a Drupal engagement? Where do they begin? What resources are available? What helped you? The only advice I can really give is just the way I go about things. And and that is to familiarize yourself with the community in the marketplace as much as possible even before you start reaching out to organizations. Don't don't start conversations with salespeople start conversations with yourself. What do you really need? What do you need now? What do you need in the long term? What is your organization need? And so, you know, go into it knowing something about knowing something about again the community, the market, whatever technology that you're you're choosing, be well informed before you start making those calls, right? Beyond that, like I said before, look for organizations that you feel strongly match the way you work, your team works. They're going to they're going to work in. We happen to work agile in an agile cycles. We're not a hundred percent in lockstep with with Jim's group, but still they're still we operate with a with an idea of quick changes and small iterations and an innovation. And I think, you know, Spec B is representative of a company that really does that if we worked with an organization that was that was very, very strict and had all of the needs and everything spelled out a hundred percent beforehand before proceeding on a project. I don't know if that would work well with how our organization works. So look for an organization that matches that matches the way your organization works. And also don't make decisions entirely based around cost, especially with software of this type. I mean, open soft software is free, right? That's got to be that's got to be the best choice. No, you know, the the real cost isn't some of the things that we're talking about in actually building and actually and actually configuring, iterating, supporting over time. Understand the true costs of those things and understand the true difference with working with one organization that, for example, might have one cost structure based around how they source their engineering staff versus another organization, which has a different cross structure based around how they source their staff, you know, understand that it's not just simply a $60 an hour versus a $200 an hour conversation. Understand what those costs go into and make your decision on the understanding, not necessarily on the bottom line number. So and that's about it. That's that's generally how I look at working with most outside organizations, whether they be proprietary vendors or whether they are involved in the open source community. It's it's really around principles like that. Don't don't go in uninformed. Great advice. That's good to add to that. If you're evaluating looking for an organization like specb that does contribute Drupal.org is a good place to go that specb is listed and to find some other organizations. That's a good ones. Awesome. Great. Great. I think I just have if I may, I just had one more question for Jim. You mentioned that specb is all in on Drupal. That's what we do. That's all we do. Why? I mean, beyond the idea that Drupal is a platform that we just love and that that that we are invested in and is well supported by other by other organizations. I mean, that's, you know, we're the only player in the game. That's, you know, how do you really, I guess the commercial nature of everybody competing to do something better is that's that's part of the open source community, right? Beyond that, for us, I think the reality is that when you specialize in something, you know, they always I don't want to say the riches are the niches because that's not what it's about. But it's got the same type of dynamic here. When you can only focus on one thing, when we're bringing in people who are junior developers and training them from, from, you know, maybe a couple of years out of school and they're only learning Drupal and best practices Drupal. That's the key, right? If you can learn if you if we're teaching best practices Drupal, we're developing people who also brought to love Drupal and will be hopefully one day, even if they're not with specb wonderful contributors. But we're building this community not only with the rest of the world, but also internally. So we think of it as a little bit as a little internal open source community that is that that's our own little engine. But if we brought in other other other platforms or other focuses, I've been in I've worked at agencies that do that before. I think you lose that focus and that drive and I think it creates bad habits for some developers when when that happens, but if they start playing another in other CMS, it's just because Drupal has such a way to be built and especially of the last last few years. We see it all the time and not to say that anybody is doing bad work out there that does multiple types of of CMSs, but you know, there's a lot of a lot of shops out there that that are having trouble finding some developers and and so they just choose one way or the other. No, I think in the end of what's happening is that you're getting this a lot of Drupal focus agencies and a lot of the other CMSs focus going the other way. So the ones that kind of dabble in everything. I don't know if that's the world we live in anymore, but I and I'm going off on tangents, Nathan. So I'll call this off. Hey, I think that's we we wanted to learn a little bit about why this distinct focus. I think you answered that. You answered that well. So great. Yeah. Yeah. And we thank you. I mean, spec B, we love working with you. Thank you for your contribution and for introducing us to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's research. It was good to meet you, Sean, and see you again, Jim. That's very proud. Thanks, Kelly. Thanks, Sean. Thanks so much. Thanks, Nathan. Thanks, Jim. All right. And if you the audience would like to be on the show, email me at partnerships at association dot Drupal dot org.