 Good morning! Ah! It's Wednesday. Okay. We're just going to wait for our presentation. And while we're waiting, I'll just introduce myself. I'm Megan Sanaki, the Associate Director of the Drupal Association. And my role here is to find all the money that we need as a community so we can fund community programs. And this is the Account Manager for Drupal businesses. I'm here to serve the Drupal community and the businesses within the community. So we are here today. It's really our love letter to you is to say how much we love you all and we're so thankful for everything that you're doing because if you didn't exist, we wouldn't have these jobs that we love. And we just want to tell you a little bit about what we do and share that. So Johanna and I both have about 15 years of sales experience. And we've worked in a lot of different kinds of companies where you have that real, you know, really quota-driven and you know, just very those always hustling for that next deal. And so we had like bosses like this. Then we came to the Drupal Association and we realized this is a totally different experience. Even though we're here to generate revenue for the community, it's really, it's not sales. We work with you and you're always so willing to contribute financially and so much of your time and so much energy. And it's just, it's just so awe-inspiring for us. It really kind of blows us away. And so what we've realized is that we're really not salespeople here. We want you to know that too. But really our role is to be a conduit. So we work closely with the Drupal Association staff and we talk with the community. You probably saw like my 15 surveys this year, but we have buffs and all these different ways that we can interact with you to hear what the needs are. And then we go out into the community and talk to like Drupal shops and oh gosh, just anyone that is, that makes up our community. And we say, this is the need. Can you help fund this? And we're always so amazed. The money always comes and we just funnel it right to where it needs to go. And so that's just a really powerful kind of situation for us. It's a sales with a purpose, really, and it just makes our life, just our jobs just so fulfilling. So about a little over a year ago, we listened to the community and the community said it's time to really make some significant improvements to Drupal.org. And the Drupal Association asked if we could come up with, you know, about just about 400,000 euro. And that way they could fund a Drupal.org technical team that could really focus on making the improvements that everybody wants. And so we kind of scratched your head and thought, well, how can we do this? We reached out to the business community. And we were just amazed that so many companies said, well, we are organization members, we pay 73 euro, but we want to give you more. So what can we do here? So we had a lot of interviews and talked to a lot of businesses. And we came up with the Supporting Partner Program, which is for Drupal businesses who want to help fund Drupal.org, the Drupal.org tech team, and also find some ways to communicate with the community about some of their thought leadership. And so we are just so thankful to have all these supporting partners that have joined. And Johanna has been working on this program. So this list is going to start getting bigger and bigger, but we already have over 150,000 euros that have come in to go towards this Drupal.org technical team. And I just love the fact that we are already starting to hire. We're looking for a CTO now for that team. And we already have Todd Tiana and Neil Drum. And so there's just going to be more and more acceleration of this effort because of our supporting partners. So that program's been just really great. And now we are trying to expand the way that we bring in revenue to fund these types of community programs. So we went back to the community and started listening. How else can we help you? And we heard from many different groups that they'd like to learn about the tools and third-party software that can help them build even better Drupal sites. So we went out to our different companies like this that we've worked with that have sponsored DrupalCon in the past. So like Lingo Tech and Sugar CRM and JetBrains, Cloud Troopers and said, well, how can we have you further engage with our community to educate and also help us fund Drupal.org? And the answer was, is create a partner program so that they can pay to join and know that that money is coming to the community. And then they can use different communication channels that the Drupal Association has for anyone who opts in for their educational content. And so that has just been launched this week. And we're so excited to have our first partners join. And this program is, I think, going to really take off. Because what we're finding, especially with these first partners, is that our community is, while it's also made up of individuals, there's just so many diverse groups that make up the community. And these technology companies want to be part of our community. They want to see Drupal succeed and they want to invest in that and they want to be a part of it. So they too are really coming in because they want to be part of this community. Because what can I say, we're irresistible, right? So at the end of the day, we are here to say thank you. Thank you for allowing us this opportunity to serve you. And we just love everything that you're doing. So keep it up. Keep telling us what your needs are so that we can go back out and make sure that's all funded. Okay, well, that is who we are. Let me just kick things off so if we can move to another group I want to thank, which is our board of directors. They give a lot of time. They advise me and the rest of the staff to make sure that we're hearing the community and really have a strategic direction for solving the community needs. So big thanks to all of them. And also if you're looking for a way to contribute, we are running a membership campaign. So it's about 23 Euro. And every Euro counts for making make things go. So that funds Drupal.org hosting. It funds our community grants, our Drupalcon scholarships. And you know, it's just gonna keep funding more and more. So I hope you'll consider that as an option. I don't know why I'm looking up there when it's right here. So anyhow, so I just wanted to also remind you that there's lots of different ways to connect with the community while you're here. Make sure you check out the birds of a feather. There's all kinds of great groups meeting and talking about really interesting topics. So you can go in the site, check that out. Obviously, there's something called Twitter and Facebook. You might have heard of it. And you can follow along there. And as you're watching a speaker, you can you can tweet out your thoughts or you can follow what other people are saying. In a little bit, Lisa Welchman is going to be coming on stage and there's gonna be a Q&A session. And if you would like to pose questions, use hashtag DC Lisa. And of course, we're all here to accelerate the project. And that's what the sprints are all about on Friday. And if you have not participated in a sprint, please go meet the sprint mentors. They're amazing. They're here to help you. They're going to get you through that process. And you can meet them up by in the expo hall area. They're right next to the Drupal Association booth. And of course, what's a Drupal con without evening activities? And there's so many great things to choose from. And I love how the community is always willing to put these events together for you. So check those out and also make sure you go to trivia night on Thursday. Okay, just a few pro tips, help make today run real smoothly. In case you haven't got on the internet yet, we have a passcode to get on. But I have a feeling you figured that out already. And of course, just be mindful that you don't have five devices going all at once because we need to really watch the bandwidth. After you attend a session, be sure to fill out your evaluation forms. This is how we improve. So we really want to hear from you. And of course, we're a very respectful community. And we have a code of conduct that we have to make sure everyone understands just how to behave. Although I'm sure you already do. But if something doesn't feel right to you, we have a place for you to go to report what what you witnessed or what happened. But you can also come to us. We're really approachable. But we're all here just to make sure we have a great educational collaborative week. And of course, if you see a volunteer like Petra or staff members or board members, please be sure to thank them because they have put their heart and souls in making this week happen. And it takes a lot a lot of effort. So just you know, hug them if you see them because they're kind of tired now. And of course, I want to give a special thank you to our sponsors. You know, our sponsors are this business community that they're not just driving Drupal adoption in the marketplace. They're funding a lot of our community programs from sprints and camps. And they are contributing code back and letting their staff spend time on the project. And so they're just like this amazing powerhouse. And I feel so fortunate to be able to serve all of them. And also, their sponsorship is helping keeping helping to keep the ticket price low. So make sure you hug a sponsor too. And of course, we have our supporting partners. And then we also have our technology partners that we want to thank. And then last but not least, we have our media sponsors that have helped us get the word out. We are having one of our largest Drupal cons and it's just going to keep growing because of these amazing partners that we have created over the year. So thank you to our media partners, our media sponsors. And now I would like to introduce Brian House from aquia. Okay, I'll shake your hand. That's all cold. So my name is Brian House. I am vice president of product marketing at aquia. Hope you guys are all having a good time in Prague. I keep realizing that nine o'clock gets earlier and earlier, each day of the week. So I'm here to talk a little bit about some of the new products that we have at aquia and want to give you an opportunity to come try them. So we're really proud of a product that we launched just last week called aquia cloud free. It's a free development sandbox that has no credit card required, no expiration dates, no contracts for you to help start playing with aquia cloud and build your development environments. It's a developer sandbox that you can use for whatever you need to do. You can use all of our continuous integration workflow tools, you can run any Drupal distribution, you could even kick the tires on Drupal 8. But it's some really, really powerful tool. And so we've got a free offer that you can use at any time to start your development processes. We've also redesigned the aquia network. So we've got a lot of new cool tools in there and a complete UI redesign. So a lot of it from feedback from you some sessions we run here at Drupalcon to get your input on the product. So I encourage you to check that out as well. Stop by the aquia booth, you can sign up for aquia cloud free and you can get a free Drupalcon Prague t-shirt while supplies last I'm sure we'll run out. So I encourage you to come by and say hello and you can even hug one of one of the Aquians here. It's my privilege to introduce today's keynote speaker. The past 18 years, Lisa Welchman has supported a variety of organizations to help them stabilize complex multi stakeholder digital operations. My phone's not cooperating through the implementation of sound digital governance practices. She's a global thought leader on digital strategy and digital governance and Lisa helps organizations deliver big picture strategies for managing large complex digital properties and digital teams. Something I think we're all familiar with here in the Drupal community and a lot of with the clients that we talk to work with all the time. Prior to to being involved in digital strategy and governance, Lisa worked in television and she's currently writing a book managing chaos digital governance by design that will be published at the beginning of the new year. So without further ado, please welcome Lisa Welchman. Thanks a lot. Hey, everybody. How are you doing? Hope you're doing okay. Get a meander over here and put my water down. So I got to tell you, I'm excited and fascinated to be here. There's a lot of different reasons why. There's some practical reasons. One is I've built two websites on top of Drupal, believe it or not, my business website itself and also digital governance journal, which please don't go look at it because I can't remember the last time I posted an article. But if I did, it would be really easy because of Drupal, right? So but it's funny. Drupal really tickles me and I'll tell you a story why I'll give you a little bit about my background and who I am. I got into websites in 1995 when my son was born. My son just left to go to university. So this gives you the span of time in which I've been doing this. And I was at home on maternity leave taking care of my son and I was bored. So a friend of mine from high school who is Dave McClure. I don't know if you guys know 500 startups. It's a starter angel investing firm sent me a 14 for modem and an HTML book. No, he didn't send me cute baby clothes or anything like that. He sent me a 14 for modem. Now he was kind of dead on because while I'm not a developer, I was a philosophy major and I was really, really interested in symbolic logic. So I studied a lot of symbolic logic. So although I'm not of you, I sort of think like you. And he knew that. So he gave me this book and he said, look, if you learn how to do this, I was living in New York City. If you learn how to do this, I'll give you a job, come out to Silicon Valley, you can stay at home, take care of your baby and code pages for this company called Netscape. I was like, okay, sure. So I did that and I moved out to California. And I did that for a while and we did some really kind of interesting things early on at that time. I remember at Aslan computing, which was Dave's first startup, we built this product called ready intranet go. And it was a web server that you could install that you turn it on and you could fill out these forms. And it would make an intranet for you. Big deal, right? Except this was like 1996. So we thought we were super cool, we were like making these tools, you could build things on the fly. So after that, when I decided that staying home with my kid wasn't really as interesting as I thought it was going to be, I went out and got a full time job. And my first job was at Cisco systems. And they hired me to manage their product pages. Right? So this was my job. Cisco was really early having all of its technical documentation online. So when I arrived there, there was maybe already 250, 300,000 web pages, which in 96, 97, that was a big website. They were really early on e-commerce and a lot of other things as well. And they had built this system where you could take a quark document, right? Drop it down this system and it would convert it into HTML and automatically post it and index pages on the intranet. Right? Brilliant. Well, brilliant for that time, right? It could also burn the same information onto CD-ROMs. That's really cute, right? Which they sent out with all their products so that you could have your technical documentation. So you could have your technical documentation on the intranet on CD-ROM. And the other obvious place was you wanted to be able to have it online and also product information online, information about the technical specs of the product. So my job was to take the pages that were on the intranet and post them to the intranet. Now the reason why they didn't get automatically published was because the intranet had a different look and feel, right? And they hadn't quite figured out how to make that conversion. So I basically had to sort of monkey cut and paste information into various templates and post these pages all day. So it took me about two weeks before I wrote a macro because it was kind of boring and thought there's got to be a better way. So I started this big project called auto-publish, right? And the idea was let's make them publish this stuff to the web. It took six months to convince management that it was a worthy project to do. It probably took a year to spec it out with the guys in IT, and they were all guys at that time, right? And figure out how it was going to get done because this was kind of rocket science. And then it probably took another good nine months to actually execute it and do the migration, which involved a lot of broken links staying up late at night, all so that we could render one piece of content down to another channel with a different bunch of wrappers. So that was my job. It took a long time to do that. So now, when I have my own website that's running on Drupal, I get kind of excited because for you all, you're thinking that's a no-brainer, right? That's absolutely no problem to do right now. So in that way, I'm really grateful. I would have been more grateful if you'd been around in 96 or 97. So I didn't have to do that job. But so I have this relationship to web content management and subsequently we implemented these large proprietary systems at Cisco Systems and I worked a lot in that field. So while my way of working now is really more about digital governance, I have a background in content management and I'm really interested in it. And I'm really interested in you all. I'm a little daunted by you, right? You're different than the people I usually talk to. I'm usually not talking to this sort of community. I'm usually talking to an organization, right? That's having problems. An organization that's fighting about ownership of websites. For those of you guys who work with folks or work inside organizations like that, you've seen it. You got IT over here. You got marketing communications over there, right? And it's like, I own the look and feel. I own the tools. Well, the website's really a software platform. No, the website's a communications vehicle. Well, the reality is it's both of those. But there's this dance in this tug of war that takes place back and forth and can be interesting. So that's really the problem that I deal with and I help solve. And what I want to talk to you guys about today is this kind of paradox that you have going as a community. So I'm going to step a little bit out of bounds, right? So you all are a growing community, right? Things change as things get bigger and bigger. So how are you going to make sure that you're able to maintain yourself, right? I know for sure that you guys care about your community. It's really obvious. It's right out front there. In fact, the community of people and the folks working are in some ways articulated as being more important than the actual code. Now, I wouldn't probably believe that if I went by your behavior. When I found out that I was going to be talking to you guys, I kind of lurked around your community for the past few months. And you guys talk about people and how you care about people. But you talk more about code and you lean into that a little bit more. It's more vigorous. So I want to challenge you on that a little bit today and I want to offer to you some of the framework that I use to help people figure out how to govern things as they grow and evolve. So I don't really have any solutions for you all, right? But hopefully I'll be able to give you a framework and a way to think about things so that you all can start to have a real conversation about how you're going to maintain this fabulous community and keep your core values as you grow. So I call this presentation the paradox of open growth. So why do I think that this is a paradox? So there's two sides to this. There's open, right, which means everyone and anything, right? There's no parameters. There's no limits to what it is that you think that you can do or who can do it, right? If I decided that I wanted to contribute, I would be able to contribute in another way. But for me, the paradox in that is that countered against that openness is this aspect of growth. And growth requires controls. That is a statement that I tried to say a lot of softer ways to you all, to this particular community. I tied a fudge around it, but it's true. And so I want to kind of spend a little bit of time talking about how do you get a balance between these two things? Openness and control. Because the idea is you don't want to grow crazy. You know, I don't know how many of you all are gardening or into gardening and plants, but you know, you got to prune them back sometimes. Just let things go. They kind of string out and they tap out. So we don't want that to happen to this community. So how do we strike a balance between those sorts of things? How much is too much and how much is not? So I'm going to talk to you now kind of about governance and what inspires me about governance. And it starts with this kind of giant fungus. So I don't know how many of you all heard in the news. It was maybe a bit US centric, but I think scientists around the world really cared about it. Maybe it was 2007, 2008, they discovered this giant four mile wide giant fungus in of all places, Oregon. Where else would a giant fungus be, but in Oregon, right? So you could dig around and they found out that it was actually genetically similar around all these sorts of things. And I had been doing governance work for a while then. And I just sort of had this kind of like apple on the head Eureka moment that was, wow, it's kind of like governance and websites and digital there and the people who work on them. They're like a giant fungus, right? Except there's all sorts of similarities about it, right? It's got range. It grows. It has a mind of its own, right? It's opportunistic. It takes advantage of things. These all these things sound like you all. It also sounds like the websites that people build. The only problem is, usually when these things grow, unlike the fungus where you could go and dig up a piece of fungus over here and then drive a while and dig up another piece of fungus, unlike the fungus for most large communities and for most around digital and large digital presences. If you dig up a piece of website over here and look at it and dig up a piece of website over there, it may look nothing like the other piece, right? So how do you grow something to be big and maintain its integrity and maintain its identity? That's a challenge. And it's not something that you can do accidentally. So this article in Scientific American Magazine pointed me in the right direction, right? It said that it was a combination of good genes and a stable environment, right? That allowed this fungus to get so big. That totally makes sense, doesn't it? So what does that mean for you all, right? Good genes, standard space framework. So I'm clicking online and I'm looking at the Drupal site and I'm looking at all these rules and regulations that you all have around code for a very open community. You're very specific about things and I'm sure for those of you all who are in it, it's kind of a mess, right? From the outside, it looks like you have expressed some clear things, particularly compared to the things that you've expressed about people in the community. And the people and community piece is the stable environment, right? And that's the piece I'm going to lean on today, right? I'm not a development expert, but I am an expert in people systems, right? And if you want something to grow big, you have to pay as much attention to that people system as you pay attention to lines of code and how they interact together. Now up until now, what you've been doing has allowed you to grow to be this big and continuing to grow, right? And getting sponsorships. I mean it's kind of amazing that's happened and to still be recognized as a Drupal community globally, right? But we want to make sure that that continues in the future. And I'm not entirely sure that you're doing the things that you need to have that happen. Again, I'm stepping a little bit out of line because I'm not really in your community. But I'm lurking and I'm looking inside. And so I'd like to help and maybe give you some tips on that, right? So let's just step into some definitions so you guys know what I'm talking about when I'm talking about governance, right? So I don't really care about so much about the substance of your principles, the substance of your standards, the substance of your policy. When I'm helping people with a digital governance framework or with a governing framework, whether it's mobile, social, for the team, whatever the case may be, I'm really helping them decide who decides, right? So it's actually very thin. It's a very, very thin later. It's not saying here's exactly how we do here in the specifications. It's how do you arrive at those decisions? Most of the time when people are debating about things, they're not really arguing about the substance. They're arguing about who gets to decide at the end of the day. Now, if you're in a consensus based decision making forum, that can be challenging. And so if you're in an open community, you have to be even more intentional about understanding how you make decisions. And that doesn't mean you have to be closed about it. Just means you have to be really clear. If you're in a command and control environment, like a military environment, it's kind of clear. It's kind of prescribed into the org structure how decisions get made, right? So you don't really have to think about it too much. But when you're in an open collaborative community, you have to be even more clear, even if it's that we use consensus based decision, right? You have to be more clear about that, right? So deciding how you decide and deciding who decides all these decision making mechanisms, right? So I used to be cool until I started doing governance stuff. I started out of voice opera major and somewhere along the line, I switched to philosophy and got into philosophy of science. And then it went down that symbolic logic route. And it just turned bad. But anyhow, and now, now I actually do governance for a living. This is not a date starter. It's not a date lengthener. And it doesn't cause repeat dates, right? So I'm always trying to explain to people that it's really not as bad as it seems, right? There's all kinds of reasons why people don't like governance. The main reason is because it makes them feel like they're a robot, right? It takes away their freedom. One of the things about people is we like to be free. We like to feel like we can do what we want to do. We want to be self actualized, right? I want to do that. I do that through talking about governance, which is weird. But so what, right? You guys too, from working in the Drupal community, you have hobbies, you have things that you do. So I want to convince you that it doesn't have to be like this, right? This isn't going to turn you into a robot, right? First of all, as you all know, there's a lot of governance around us already, right? There's the governance of the internet. I mean, without any of this, we just wouldn't be sitting here. I'm on this really interesting list. I wish I could remember the name of it, but it's the Internet Society, ISOC, right? And so I'm working on this great list where all these giants who are debating about internet protocols, right? And what we ought to do, and they're talking about all of this stuff going on with Snowden and privacy and all of that sort of thing and really having these debates. I mean, Vint Cerf is on this list. I'm on this email list and it's completely open and transparent. And it's like this amazing conversation happening in front of me, like historical conversation. And it's absolutely fabulous. People are very intensely governing the internet, right? People have mixed feelings about the UN's involvement in the governance of the internet, but they have actively talked about internet access as being a human right, right? So there's two pieces of it. You've got the internet society and the people who care about the platform and the protocols, but you also have this people component. What does this technology mean to human beings? How are we going to use it? What are we going to do with it, right? And then there's this stuff that we know there's governing of the web, right? W3C, we're all over it, right? Nobody in here would have a job without the W3C. It's just as simple as that, right? It had to happen and it had to be that way. Standardization is what allows us to do the work that we do. Tim Berners-Lee started the World Wide Web Foundation, which has more human component to it, which is talking about how come most of the people around the world don't even have internet connectivity? Can we even the playing field, the human aspects of it? Are we pushing that? So there's governing the web as well and as you can see there's two pieces to that. There's a platform piece and there's a human piece, right? So there's always this moral agenda that goes along. There's always this community and people piece. There's always this value system that comes along when we are moving new technologies and I think that's where you all are and you have strong values. You have great values, right? I wouldn't criticize them. They're fabulous. They're effective. You've grown, right? But what we really want to wonder about is how can we sustain them over time, right? What are you going to do? So to make you seem like I'm cooler than I am, right? Because I don't want to be just the W3C. I want to talk about other things that have standards that are cool, haiku, right? So very, very controlled framework, right? That explodes amazing amounts of creativity and of this very, very evocative standards-based framework. One of the readers for my book manuscript was Peter Morville who wrote Information Architecture for the World Ride Web and he wrote, he kind of hooked me into this one because I was talking about how standards enable collaboration and standards allow you to grow and do interesting things. And he pointed out to me this example of haiku. This is an example of how if you control something at one level it allows for creativity at the next level, right? So there's kind of this visceral organic thing that happens in there. Music has rules, right? So this is one of those, you know, I told you I started out of voice opera major and I'm in Prague which is amazing because one of my specialties was singing Mozart. So the idea of what were the debuts here, Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro, I think. But you know, just great, beautiful arias I love to sing them. And every now and then you guys find another Bach something. I don't know if there's somebody like fake writing them in a corner and like putting them under bricks or whatever in buildings but you always find something another. And the only reason why we can still play it is because of standards. Music notation is a tremendous amount of creativity. And even if you want to veer away from classical music and move to something like jazz, which is an example people say, well, that's free. And it's like, well, it seems like it's free because you can improvise, which is largely what you're doing in this community improvising. But improvisation comes out of a tonal framework, right? Yeah, you can have free jazz. So let's just push free jazz aside for a second. I'm not being a snob. But most of the time when you have a jazz trio, they have a lead sheet. It has chord changes on it, right? And all of the chord changes are being followed. And they're improvising over this grid of tonality. So it seems like it's free, but it's not. It's operating over a standards-based framework. Excuse me, obvious things. Nature has rules, right? How many things do you see in nature that render themselves out in this like fractal type way? Beautiful things that look the same. You look at the earth from the top, the way tributaries come out of rivers, right? You blow up things. It's really quite fascinating. And then there's the ultimate and all things of nature, which is us, right? We operate on a standards-based framework. So there are all these things that make standards actually natural. And I would almost venture to say that they're essential and necessary, which is hence the title of my book, Managing Chaos. I think when you don't have standards, you just get chaos, right, in the absence of them. So every time we have a new technology and we adopt something, we kind of react in this way. We put in norms and regulations. But we also have these kind of sort of interesting reactions, right? So if we're speaking its language, right? It's an issue here. I'm an American. I only speak English. Although I was telling someone earlier, because I was saying opera and because I travel a lot, I can also speak opera German, opera French, opera Italian, opera Spanish. And I can also speak flight instruction Italian, flight instruction German, frightened. So I can pull together a sentence that says something like, I love you because your chair is in the upright and locked position. Or I can say, oh no, I'm going to die because the oxygen mass has dropped from that. Those are the things that I can say in other languages. But in any case, language has protocols, right? So we have them. We use them all the time. Moveable type, crazy QWERTY keyboard. You know, I wish they had done that one differently. But let's not go down that board. But it's too late now, right? It's a whole other talk. It's too late after a while to change some stuff, even though you find out it doesn't make any sense. Things like, remember we did usability testing when I was at Cisco. And clearly, right-hand side global navigation scored higher than left-side global navigation. Because for most people, our right-handed, I know that's a bias, right? But it would be great if it could flip. You could decide, right? But designers wouldn't like that. The little scroll was already there for the browser. You were right there. But no, it had already been established that you put the global navigation on the left-hand side. So that's how it worked. Here's another thing that happens every time we adopt new technologies and handle new technologies, is that we get really fanciful about this. So if you think this was 1915, we're just about getting there right now. Am I right? Just about right now we're getting here. Now, whether or not you think that's a good idea or not, we don't know. But I read in the newspaper the other day that some public library had just opened for the first time with no books. And I thought of this quote. And I thought, oh, that's happening finally, 100 years later. So we tend to dream really big. And you all dream really big in this community, which makes a lot of sense. We also fear change. And I think one of the things that happens as you start to grow and things start to expand is you fear change. That's a human reaction. You know how you do things. You like your job. You work the way that you work. And you don't want things to change about it. But sometimes you do have to change those things and move beyond that fear in order to make things bigger and better. The other thing that we happen is that we regulate things. I want to talk about that because regulation is OK, but it's the way that we get to the regulation. It's reactive regulation. It's not proactive regulation. So you all have your issues, I'm sure, but you're not in crisis. That means you're well positioned to make good decisions. Once you're in crisis, you start to react. You're not making as good decisions as you could otherwise. So here's another thing about standards and norms. When you deviate from them, weird things start to happen. Sometimes it's kind of cool. How many of you all would eat that strawberry? I'd eat it. How many of you wouldn't eat this strawberry? How many of you aren't listening to me? How many of you don't like strawberries? Oh, my god. Is that possible? I don't think I've never met. I'm enough to talk to you. I don't think I've met anybody who doesn't like strawberries. But sometimes deviations from norms are interesting. Sometimes they make interesting things, right? You're like, oh, OK, I like that. That's really cool. I have an art collection. I love to collect art, right? Sometimes it's not. I had a cancer scare last year. That's a cancer cell. It might look beautiful, right? But that's kind of a deviation from a norm that we don't really like, right? Sometimes it's just annoying. How many dongles does a girl need? But that's enough of that. Sometimes governing dynamics of things and norms can get so crazy that you can't do anything that makes any sense. It just gets so, there's like no good decision. You don't really know what to do. We see that a lot politically in the world today. It's like things can be so messed up. It's like, I don't know if you do this. It's not good if you don't. So it's hard to weigh. And when that an organization has actually gotten to this stasis, they've hit in the wall, right? Where you can't really go anywhere. You can't really do anything. You don't know what to do and your challenge and you're at a standstill. You all aren't there, right? Doesn't seem like you're going there. But let me tell you, you can get there if you don't pay attention and mentor and nourish your community and keep it moving and do some of the hard things around governing that maybe aren't as fun as some of the code development exercises. People kind of like to turn their head away from these sorts of things because it's just challenging. I mean, you're dealing with human beings. You're dealing with folks feelings. You're dealing with jobs. It's really, really hard to work through those issues. But you've got to do it. And some of you may not be the most inclined to deal with human issues, right? So when you hit this wall, what you have to do is go back to finding your core. You know? And what is this community's core? From what I can see, you've got this framework that you're developing and you have, oops, and you have your people. Those are the two big components of it. And I think you can work some on the people piece of it, how you're interacting, how you're working with each other, how you're making decisions from a governance perspective. I think there's a lot of really good energy in the room. So when things grow and you have a big community of people, what's actually happening? So this happens all the time. So you start something new. You launch it, right? You go at it. At this point, you probably don't really want to govern too much because you're innovating, right? So you don't want to stop anything while you're working on it, right? Then you go through this really organic growth phase, right, where things are just blossoming. Everybody's really exciting. This is the type of job that we want to have. For those of us who got involved in the web, the commercial web early on in the 90s, right? It was so exciting. I mean, when I worked at Cisco, some of the stuff we tried was ridiculous, right? I mean, we tried, I mean, developing on the live server, just like messing stuff up all day long. It was really fun and nobody really cared. I mean, I remember one time I erased the Cisco.com English home page and replaced it with the Japanese one by accident. And that meant that we thought it was really funny and we went out for a beer after work, right? I mean, like, it just wouldn't it just wouldn't happen like now. So if you can get a job or work in some area where there's a lot of organic growth, there's just all this opportunity to do fun things. But then at some point, it starts to become less fun. There's some tipping point that happens. The critical mass gets so big where you're realizing, OK, I have this great idea for something. I'm just banging my head against the wall, right? I'm trying to get it done, but I got to ask this person and this person and they're arguing with me about whether or not it should be this or who's allowed to make decisions. When that bell goes off, when that red light turns on, that's when you need to start paying attention and realize it's probably not about what you're making, but about how the people who are working together, how they're doing it and you need to pay attention to it. At that point, you really need to start thinking solidly about governance, right? And from there, you can move back into basic management into responsive. Now, here's the deal and I would really love for you all to prove me wrong and I mean that with complete sincerity. I think what generally tends to happen is after you go from basic management to responsive, you never really kind of get back to that organic phase, right? It kind of starts to harden and turn into a commodity, get product ties, right? It's just a mature level and it starts to get rigid. It turns sort of into a machine. It would be really great if you could show everyone why that doesn't happen, why you can create a circular process that allows you to have organic growth and innovation and basic management and responsiveness in a cycle, right? That's what's so great about this open community and communities like yours is how can we do this? How can you change the paradigm? Now, in a top-down hierarchical global company that I might be working with, their CEO's probably not interested in doing that, so they're not going to challenge me to do that. But you guys are probably interested in doing that. You probably don't want to become heavily productized and commoditized. You want to stay organic. You're going to have to do that intentionally. It's not going to happen accidentally despite your best intentions, right? You have to pay very close attention to what you're doing. If you don't, what you're going to find is that you're just going to stumble into these governing frameworks that don't make any sense for you, right? Because you'll be reacting. This event happens, so let's do this. That event happens, so let's do that, right? You don't want to do that. You'll be really intentional about it, and I hate to use a word but brave, right? Be brave. If you love this community, be brave enough to stand up for it, right? If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, but it's not easy. So we stumble in these models because we don't like to control people. We think by not really being proactive about governance that we're being nice, that we're being collaborative, which might be really true and good early on, but later on, it doesn't mean that, right? Later on, it just means you're being evasive, and you don't really want to control people and you're uncomfortable with that. So what should you do? These are just some things that I think maybe you could do that would be helpful, things to think about, general governing framework things. So really simple. I'm gonna talk about one for a fairly long time and the other one shortly. Reasserting your core and figuring out how you govern now, right? So asserting your core means holding close to you and with integrity your values and culture. Governing is how do we keep that now? It was different, you know, even three years ago, right? But how do you keep it now that you're bigger? That's gonna be a different series of activities. So keep your core, right? Reassert your core and figure how you do that now and the one, the one is protect the field and I'll tell you about what I mean about that later. It's the first one. That's really all about governance. So I mentioned earlier that when I work with organizations a lot of times they're talking, they're fighting about things back and forth and back and forth and back and forth about who owns things. Nobody owns anything, right? And everybody owns everything, right? Governance is about stewardship. It's about taking care of something. I was working with a university once and they were talking about ownership and I was like, does the guy who cuts the lawn own the lawn? No, right? Does the person mopping the floor own the floor? Does the person sitting in the office own? No, no one owns everything. Everyone is a steward and it's a system that you work in and understanding what proper stewardship is and is important. So there's four things that I always think about when I'm thinking about governance and figuring out how you're gonna decide how you're gonna decide. I look at the team. I look at how you decide about strategy. I look at how you decide about policy and how you decide about standards. So the first thing is teams. How do you work together? Big teams and little teams, right? You guys have both big teams and little teams. They're different. So if we hark back to the example I gave you earlier about music, you have classical music. Let's say symphonies. I love symphony, symphony orchestra. I have seasoned tickets. But I also really love jazz. I play the piano and I sing. And I was gonna do that today, but they didn't let me. I know, I'm kidding. But I would sing. I had to sing the other night. I was talking to somebody. They wouldn't, it was like doing a warmup thing and I was trying to get them to pay attention to me and they're saying, excuse me, excuse me, it didn't work. But then I just started singing like nursery rhyme songs and they stopped. So it was kind of effective. But, so let's think about those two extremes, right? Symphony orchestra, does it make good music? Yes. Does it make you feel good? Yes. Can it make you cry? Yes. Can it make you feel bad? Yes. It's very evocative. Jazz, same thing. Make you cry, make you laugh, be surprising, all of those sorts of things. Both have a great result. But you think about the teams behind each of them and the processes that they use, it's very, very different. So probably early on in the community, when it was small, like a jazz trio, three people, you get ready for a performance. You get together with the other musicians, maybe. Maybe you have lead sheets or maybe you know the chord changes in your head already, right? You know them forever. You decide what key you're gonna play in. You might discuss a few other things and then you just start playing. If you mess up, you look at each other and laugh and you keep going, right? That's jazz. Doesn't work like that with a symphony orchestra. Could you imagine if you just plopped it down? They have whole rehearsals. This introduction, going into this part, stopping and starting, breaking it down. They have sectional rehearsals, right? So different sections of the orchestra can practice, right? It's a completely different mechanism. Most of them, both of them are doing great things. But one of them's a big team and one of them's a little team, right? So it doesn't mean big teams are bad, little teams are good. But you need to figure out where you are on that spectrum. Or do you have both? And how do you work together? And what do you have to do to make sure that what you're creating does what you want it to do? In this case, make great music. Whatever kind of music that may be. Do you make jazz? Do you make more highly structured music? Is it free jazz? Is that what you're doing? Is it just make it up? Is that your value? You have to figure out what those things are and build the right team around that. The other piece is strategy, right? So strategy for me is really just doing something on purpose. Now in a community like this and for a lot of organizations, they sort of think they know what they're doing. But when you really press them, they don't. So what are you actually trying to do? What are your guiding principles? Tell me qualitatively what you're trying to achieve and quantitatively what you're trying to achieve. Now for you all, you win on a number of different levels. As far as guiding principles and values go, they're just all over the place. You can Google them, you can find them. I've read six or seven different things where you all talk about the value of your community and what you wanna do and achieve. They're things that you wanna do and achieve in terms of supporting the platform and growing and evolving the platform, right? That makes sense as well. So I think strategically you guys are saying a lot of things that are really important but the question is who's creating those goals? Does it come out of the community? How does it come out of the community? That's more important to know how you do that nail that you're big than it was before. Things could just spontaneously happen but if that continues to happen, you'll probably have this cacophony and what you'll do is you'll hit the stasis point, that guy that hitting the wall point where you're trying to do stuff and you can't do anything and that's not what you want. So you might have to like suck it up a little bit, right? And be a little bit more targeted about who's making these decisions and how you're making these decisions strategically inside. The other is police's policy and I almost took this slide out because I thought you guys might throw eggs at me. I started talking about managing risk. So maximizing the good and minimizing the bad, right? So there are things that people are not allowed to do in this community and there are things that people must do. That's really all that policy is. In a corporate situation, it can get into regulation and all sorts of other things as well and probably in your situation, it can get into regulatory things if you look at the admin side of the Drupal community. Certain things you're allowed to do that are within the law and not within the law but you really need to be clear about who gets to make these policy decisions, right? Who gets to decide where the next office is? Who gets to decide whether or not... Oh, I don't know. You can think of a million different things but I don't wanna be too... I don't wanna aggravate you guys too much. It's a lot of different policy concerns that you all could work with and determine and managing the risk both on the platform and in the community. And my concern is mostly with the community. How do you manage the risk of this community? You wanna keep it together. How do you treat each other? You have code of conduct and certain ethical values but I think maybe shying away a little bit from some of the harder pieces about how you make decisions because it's tough because you wanna be collaborative and these are people you know and like. Standards, y'all are all about standards when it comes to the platform. I'm sure you've got some issues there as well but how do you create a standards-based framework when there's not this kind of hierarchy of top-down leadership? How do you decide who gets to decide about what gets done and what doesn't get done? I think that's usually, you know, more of the problem for some people is what doesn't get done. So what are your standards for doing these things together and who decides what those things are? This is an interesting picture. This is a, you know, I looked it up because on Wikipedia, because Wikipedia knows everything. I looked it up because I wasn't sure if it was the case. We have this thing in the U.S. called shape note singing. Right, so it's basically instead of a regular music notation, the little circle part of the musical note is a shape. So it's a triangle or a diamond or a square and based on what the shape of that is, it's a different degree of the scale. Right, so it's for people who don't really know how to read music and time signatures can do shape note singing and it happens out in a lot of the, in Appalachia and the country in the south and there's this whole set of music. But people get together and anybody can stand up in the middle with the book and lead and everybody sings and everybody can do it because they're standards. Right, people come and they have these meetings and they all meet together and they sing and then they share a meal afterwards. The next time somebody else can get up and anyone can do that. So it's a loose standards framework but it's still a standards about how they're performing and how they're making decisions. So that one's that. So this last piece is one that's near and dear to my heart and I put it last on purpose and it's about protecting the field. So I brought up these organizations earlier. This is our field and one of the things that people do that doesn't get me emotional but it gets me a little charged up and annoyed. I'll be 50 next year. So I'm just old enough that I actually had a career or pre-web like an adult career or pre-web and I'm looking at some of you all and saying that's true for some of you and not true for some of the other ones of you. So I really appreciate the internet, right? But one of the things that I've noticed is there are a lot of people who don't. You take it for granted, right? And you talk about what's happening in internet governance and web governance as if it's other people doing things to you and other people doing things to us, right? That's not what's happening. It is really our job to protect the field, right? We have got to take care of this ecosystem. Your value system is absolutely fantastic, right? And perfect for taking care of this. So these things participating in the W3C, participating in the World Wide Web Foundation, right? The internet society. You need to be involved in these conversations. Far too often, I see people having a reaction to decisions that get made as if they weren't somehow able to be part of the decision-making process, right? You are all able to be part of the decision-making process. If you're doing what you're doing and you're at this conference, you are able to contribute, right? To making sure that certain things happen. A couple weeks ago, they announced the web we want. Did you all see this? Celebrating free and open universal web? That's not gonna happen if we don't make it happen. It's not gonna stay free and open if we don't keep it free and open. So this is a small grants program that people can apply for to make sure that we're keeping the web free and open. And I would really encourage you all to do this because the work that you all are doing isn't really gonna make any difference if the web's not open. I mean, it'll just, in my mind, sort of be all for nothing, right? So it is our job to protect the field that we work in, the ground that we work on. So don't just sit back and go down your coding silo or whatever, put your head up from time to time and contribute. You're smart, you know how it works, you have appropriate values that can help support that. So it's really important that that gets done. I'm passionate about that. And I really want you all to do that. If not for yourself, if not for your kids, then do it for me because you like me. So the last thing that I'm gonna say is about complacency. And it's another paradox. So doing nothing is actually doing something. So think in your head right now of some sticky problem that you all, you're dealing with within the Drupal community, whatever it may be in your context and whether or not you're actually actively leaning forward and trying to solve that problem or if you're leaning back and saying, I'm just not, I don't wanna deal with it, right? That's not really good, right? And it actually is a decision. It's a decision to do nothing. The decision to shy away from maybe emerging governance concerns that you all might have is an actual decision, right? Everything's moving, everything's changing. There's no such thing as doing nothing. So keep that in mind, protect what you have. Do your best work, be nice to other people, protect our field, make things better and not worse, forgive other people's mistakes. Just basically be good. You all are absolutely phenomenal. It's an honor to talk to you. It's an honor to be in a community that cares this much about each other and the work that they do, and thank you. Lisa, thank you. Thank you very much. You're welcome. I had to run down there. I'm sorry, I- Analyzing all the tweets that people- I ended five minutes early, I'm sorry. But some interesting tweets came in. A bunch of you are thinking in exactly the same direction and it'll show in the questions. Oh, okay. We've heard, just to get the Q&A started, we've heard about the dues, but are there any don'ts? And then very Drupal specific, what do you perceive to be our biggest weakness at the moment regarding governance? I think, well, there are a few don'ts. I'll say that the general don't is don't over govern. So I just spent all this time talking about governance, governance is great. I don't think you guys have that problem, but- Don't over govern, because it can stifle innovation. There's really an appropriateness for it and you really want to make sure that you find that moment of tightness, right? You find that moment where it's like, this isn't working anymore and that's the moment when you have to do it. When it's free and it's easy and it's happening, you need to keep that going. The other thing that you don't want to do, and that is you don't want to discriminate, right? So for someone like me, I don't mean women and people with brown skins like me and all of that, I'm not talking about that, although don't do that either, right? Mm-hmm. I'm not saying do do that, I don't do that either, but don't discriminate. So when I, from the outside, so I'm geeky in my head, right? But I do this management consulting function. It's very a lot about communications, talking with marketing and IT folks, but one of the things that happens is from the outside looking at the community, is it seems like it's really just for people who are developers, right? And I think there's probably other skill sets that could help from a user of your product, right? That could help make the product better where you could be more inclusive, but the culture isn't really, isn't really there. So when you're thinking about governing, think about how you can include other people who maybe aren't in that kind of core first wave and make an environment that's good for them. That's triple specific, or you've been scoping out to the community the last couple of months you mentioned. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I'm just saying from my experience of looking at it, it doesn't feel inviting to everyone. And so you might wanna make sure that you do that. Or if you don't wanna invite everyone, you're doing a great job, right? So one of those two things, that might be the case. So it's all about your strategy and your intent. If that's your strategy, you're winning. That leads me to the next point that actually some folks came up with because we are bringing together two different types of people. We're bringing hardcore techies, the guys that hack code all the time. But we're also bringing together- Guys and gals. Yeah, sorry, I apologize, I'm sorry, correct there. So we have those on one side. We also bring together the creative folks, the UX, the artists, frontend people, two extremes. So is there a specific challenge in bringing these two extremes together? Is there something that we- Sure, I mean, here's the deal about that. Thank you, someone said they're not extremes. They're different. So here's the thing. You can't think about it like a hierarchy in the skills system. You have to think of it as an ecosystem, right? So what's more important? Water or air, water or earth, right? So asking about those questions makes it seem like one of those things shouldn't be there and one of those things should take primacy. And I think that that's really not the case. The reality is that anything that you're doing on the web or anything related to digital is gonna require a full range of skill sets. When we help people with their standards piece, we go all the way from graphic design interface, editorial. Then we have this interesting category which is publishing mechanisms. And those are the interesting parts like taxonomy, metadata. God bless you on metadata. Okay, just, I can't tell you. I mean, I know that's a complete aside but I meant to say that earlier. I mean, I've been screaming about metadata since like 1995, but anyhow, thumbs up. So that's really good. And then it goes all the way over to the technical aspects of it. None of those things are more important than the other. So you need to make sure that you're able to kind of integrate and bring them together. And that goes back to the kind of, is the culture open to those ideas? Or do you have blinders on? You know, or you kind of siloed down your own silo and this is how it's gonna be. So you wanna make sure that you're open to those things because it's only gonna make it better. I mean, user interface is good, not great, right? So there are lots of different things that could be helpful in that area. Then a very specific question. How do you mediate between, or how do you mediate differences if the who and the how is in question because there's so much growth because there's so much change? Ask me that again. So how do you mediate the differences of opinion? Forgot that word, sorry. When the how and the who's in question is in question as the community grows. Well, that really is kind of the heartbeat of governance decisions because it's always like that. Like change is always constant, right? Whether or not you're developing on this platform or extending and evolving the platform or whether or not you're managing a website, change is always constant. So there's nothing new about that, right? It's a truth that it's gonna be there, right? So the point is to not focus on each individual decision point. The point is to pull off of it with governance and decide who gets to decide, right? And how you decide. So for example, I worked with an organization once that had consensus-based decision-making, right? I told them to not do that. The reason why, sounds good, right? Consensus sounds good, sounds collaborative and good. The reason was everybody around the table wasn't equally smart, right? So you had people who had no business making decisions about things, making decisions about things. So they just hit the stalemate and they were blocking on and on and on. So what you wanna do is understand how decisions get made and make sure that you have a firm mechanism for providing input, right? Most people don't really care whether or not they're making the decision. They care whether or not they were heard, right? So did you hear what I said before that decision was made? And that's hard in a community like this, where it's very, very open. But being very clear about how decisions get made and who or what group or how that functions keeps that from being, because if you don't, if you don't understand that meta aspect of decision-making, then every time you have to make a decision, you have a knock down drag out. I mean, it's just every single time. And it just doesn't scale and you won't be able to scale and you won't be able to make decisions, right? So I hope that makes sense. It does, yeah, thank you. Okay. Quite early in your presentation, someone came up with the question, very European, it probably was a guy from Europe. You are from the United States, right? I am. So isn't governance different in the United States as governance in Europe with all its languages, its multicultural area? There's a couple of things I can say about that. One of them is practical and the other one is cultural. So governance tends to follow the way people govern and even if it's unintentional, you're always governing. You're either governing well or poorly in a structured way or an unstructured way, but you're governing one way or another, right? So it always follows the culture, right? So if you have an organized culture, right? You probably are more inclined in a more patient culture. You're more inclined, that wouldn't be the US. You would probably be inclined to governing things, right? If you are more reactive, then you might not be, right? So there are a lot of differences in the way things work. We were talking earlier about how, for instance, the UK and the US and the governmental arena, they govern very different around digital. It's very diverse in the US. It can make things very difficult, but that's how we are. Complete independence no matter what. The UK, they've consolidated it down to this one governmental website that's very user-centered. And so that requires a certain level of governance that's culturally appropriate and okay. So that's kind of the cultural piece of it. It's the same with companies and businesses, right? Depending on how that works, it's gonna be different. The practical component of it is, in a multilingual environment, you must be more organized, just automatically. So if you have to do something in more than one language... But it's more difficult, right? Right, well, I don't know if it's more difficult. It depends on what you find easy, right? So you have to be more thorough, right? And you have to, you know, if you know you're doing translation management into three different languages and the content has to be aligned, right? It has to be the same. There's just a certain amount of structure and mechanism and governing, or particularly around content that you're gonna have to deal with, that if you're only using one language, right, you're not gonna have to do. So if you are forced to do something in a multilingual way, it will probably mature you from a governance perspective faster. Now, that said, it could also just mean you have a disaster site if you're not doing it well. It could just really be a super mess. I've seen those as well. And we don't want that. Probably we won't have that because we're Drupal, right? Lisa, thank you, thank you, thank you very much. That's a true question. Okay. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. That wraps it up. Great, wonderful.