 Cool. Well, hello everyone. Good morning. My name is Tim Sears and I'm one of the owners and the technical director from Oxide Interactive in Canberra. We're almost 11 years old and we work mostly with federal government crafting digital products for Drupal and mobile. So just recently I had another birthday and I don't know maybe if I'm just reaching that age where I start to get a bit more reflective, but I was thinking back to how things used to be and was amazed at the difference between how things are now and how they used to be. And in one of these kind of flashback moments I thought back to school reports and I'm pretty sure if you've ever been to school you've had at some stage a school report. Anyhow, my friends and I, we used to actually compare school reports and there was always a whiff of rivalry in the air as we'd poll each other for who got what grade for which class. You know, we'd say, oh, what do you get for maths? Oh, well, what did you get for maths? And what did you get for science? And well, what did you get for science? Anyhow, one year one of my friends, he actually sat next to me in my maths class during that class for the year and we were in maths and he scoffed and he said, well, you wouldn't believe what our maths teacher wrote on my report card. He said, she wrote, Jeremy is easily distracted in maths. And I had to then fess up and say that, well, actually, sheepishly, she wrote on my report that Tim distracts others in maths and it didn't take much brain power to connect those two dots. Anyhow, as I mentioned, lots has changed since maths and I plead not guilty to that charge about distracting others. In fact, my disruption in maths was purely in an attempt to make maths more interesting for everyone and similarly, digital disruption has brought about changes to all kinds of different industries and organisations and people and I think that is most evident by the fact that we're now in what is being called the age of the customer and this is the now. It's a consumer centric customer obsessed age brought about because consumers now have a voice and it's quite a loud voice and this voice is demanding fantastic engaging experiences. So I'm super excited to be here this morning and to talk to you while you're still fresh in the morning and perhaps later in the day or tomorrow when you're a bit seedier about the rise of this age of experiences which is going to demand more from all of us and we'll look back to this in a minute. What I want to get across, I guess, is that as we look into the future, we need to redefine the role of content management and a content management system like Drupal and the way we use it. So to do that I'm going to take some trends and project them out to 2025 and build a picture about how Drupal can become the centrepiece of your digital engagement. So this is going to be a big picture conversation. There isn't going to be talk about any specific Drupal modules or techniques but I do want to make some suggestions for how Drupal could evolve as it adapts to this marketplace. So as I mentioned we're currently in what Forrester is calling the age of the customer. We expect more and we want to wait less and this is fantastic for us as consumers but for industry and government it means that the old way of doing things is over. It's fundamentally changed the way we deliver information, services and engage with the public and I feel that this is super relevant as we discuss the role of a CMS like Drupal as we move into the future. So let me give you a bit of an introduction as to how I feel this came about. It's brought about by two main components. The first of which is, as I mentioned, consumers now have a voice and it started with the disruption of some traditional services. For instance, social media disrupting something traditional like customer service. So don't just take my word for it. I think you know this on some level already. Think about how the disruption has changed the way you evaluate experiences for yourself. We're all now acutely aware of our experience, especially if it's a bad one. So in the past, if you've had a particular gripe you could have written a letter and licked a stamp and sent it off to the complaints department and it probably would have died there under a pile of other such angry letters. Well now, a bad review or a one-star rating is only a click or a tap away and there's your voice. So digital technologies, the big ones I'm talking about here is social, mobile, video and cloud have shifted the power away from big brands back to consumers giving them a voice. And I thought of an early example of this and this is actually an example of online video disrupting or online video and social media I guess disrupting a traditional service like customer service and it makes me think of a story about two brothers Dave and Don and they were in a band and they were about to start a tour of Nebraska. So they just touched down in Chicago and they were there in the plane waiting patiently to file off when one of the other passengers peered out the window and said, hang on a sec, it looks like they're throwing guitars out there. Well sure enough Dave's three and a half thousand dollar Taylor guitar was badly damaged and the airline United Airlines didn't want to help. They weren't going to pay for repairs. So Dave decided to do what Dave does best and he sat down and he wrote, recorded and filmed a song which he called United Breaks Guitars. You may have heard of it. The video went up on YouTube and after the first date it had 150,000 views and then 2 million and then 5 million and then 10 million and then 14 million and suddenly United does want to pay back the repairs for Dave's guitar and talk shows want to have Dave on their program and in fact Taylor starts sending Dave free guitars and asking him to use them in his future videos. So I feel this came about because of the consumerization of digital technologies and it caused a disruption to a traditional system like customer service and in turn this puts the power back in the hands of the consumer with these powerful tools that change the way we live. So this is part one to age of the customer and you can already see that in this world where that shift of power has taken place we need to perhaps start to have a think about the tools that we use to engage online. So in this world how does a CMS how does Drupal fit in? Well before I answer that I want to look at the second part to age of the customer. So because social mobile video and cloud because of those things we now have an expectation for better experiences. We engage with billion dollar companies every day in the palm of our hand for free. We spend our spare time on services like Facebook but then we don't get this same experience when we're applying for a visa or trying to submit our tax return. So let me explain this a little more using this diagram because I feel it's a big part of explaining where we are now and where we're heading. So in this diagram here this is kind of a self perpetuating cycle and I feel like it sums it up perfectly. So go through the first one on the left is exposure and this is exposure to a marginally more engaging or desirable experience. So for me I was thinking about example for this and I thought well for me this was when I could first open a bank account entirely online. Sure the process wasn't fantastic but I didn't have to go into a branch. I didn't have to dig up a thousand pieces of ID and best of all I didn't have to speak to anyone. Happened entirely online and it gave me some extra comforts such as cross referencing me with some other government services so I really felt like it knew who I was and overall I was quite impressed. So I've now been exposed to this marginally better experience. It's got me thinking. So the second part is appreciation. You grow to appreciate this experience and how it's improved your life. So for me because I work during business hours I can't go into a branch to do banking things. The fact that I can now do everything online means I can do it any place, any time and on my own terms. So I've kind of grown to appreciate that little love heart there. The third point is expectation. Appreciation turns to expectation for this in my other relationships. So now when I think about it I'm actually kind of frustrated when other services want me to do things like call up or just mail this in or send us a fax. I don't even know what a fax is. So this is appreciation turning to expectation and then the fourth part is this expectation then turns into demand. I find myself filtering now other services based on their capacity to do things online. If the website looks pretty ancient like it's from the 1990s then I find it's pretty much instantly discarded regardless of how good their terms are or how good their phone support is. So now because of the ease at which we communicate with our friends overseas or the way in which we can open an online bank account the expectation is now set of big corporations like airlines or even the government. And being a Canberra boy and getting most of our work from federal government this rings very true. You could simply swap age of the customer for age of the citizen and there's a bunch of research on this which is pretty clear cut. It says citizens no longer accept the shoulder shrug and age old excuse that well, governments just like that when service quality isn't as expected. Now there are many government organisations taking really good steps to embrace this technology and since we're here in Melbourne today I thought I'd have a little look at someone down here and I looked up the Victorian state government in their digital strategy and they seem to understand what I'm talking about here. They write that whilst the average customer will spend only a small fraction of their online time interacting with government increasingly their expectation is that government should provide an experience as efficient and seamless as that offered by their banks, utilities and favourite online stores. Part of their vision is as they say in their words to shift from disparate agency centric websites and use of social media to a new customer centric state where the digital presence is organised for and around citizens, businesses and communities. So that little snippet was in the government context sure but the same applies for enterprise as well because as we see the natural progression is that these things kind of start out in the consumer world and then they push into bigger enterprise and government. So this means us doing more. It means rethinking the way we do it and the tools we do it with. The challenge as Forrester says again in this context is to use digital disruption to our advantage keeping in step with empowered citizens. We've got to find ways to transform people's experiences embrace mobility and turn big data into fresh insights. Those that fail to do so are going to be quickly swallowed up by those that do. And we could have a little where are they now segment and have a think about some big companies in the recent history such as Nokia which in spite of owning 30% of the world's mobile patents are struggled to stay relevant. Or another one is Kodak who pretty much invented digital camera technology but failed to capitalise on it. So just to recap you can see that customers have a voice and they use it to demand better experiences and this is why we're already in this age of the citizen. It's relevant to all industries and government who have to engage digitally. So this change can't occur without a change to the tools we use to power it. And as we move into the future you'll see that Drupal must evolve and adapt. How do you rise to this high level of expectations? Well to give you a little taste test I see it looking something like this. Here Drupal sits as the centrepiece for people engaging with your organisation. It's the single touch point for many facets of your organisation. So we aren't talking anymore just about a simple container for content anymore. Instead Drupal is connecting multiple front ends it is the gateway for uploadable information and it's the conduit between a bunch of different systems that store your data and analyse your data and so on. So we're going to come back to this in a moment but in the meantime perhaps we should exchange the term content management for another term which is gaining momentum now which is experience management. Alright so I've painted a quick picture of how this middle point is where I feel middle point for engagement is where I feel Drupal fits in but as the name suggests that I promised you some future talk so let's have a look at how this concept might extend over the next 10 years. Alright it's worth pointing out that for this future internet that I discussed today there isn't going to be a big reveal there's not any talk of jet packs or flying cars. The future that I'm going to paint of the internet of tomorrow is focused on the predictions that I feel are aligned with where Drupal will be adding value to enterprise and government. So perhaps maybe future versions of Drupal will be in your flying car but not in the next 10 years. So following the predictions for 2025 that are floating around today there is a common thread. There's a bunch of things that industry folk tend to agree on no matter which sort of angle you're taking. So in particular those two things are one we're going to be much more connected and two we're going to be uploading significantly more information. These predictions are pretty much no-brainers. They're enough but I'm going to focus on these two because as I mentioned I feel that they're the best two that relate to Drupal. And my focus here is how we can use the future internet and Drupal to better engage with the public. Now I recognise that there are risks that need to be managed in all of this sure I don't want to just gloss over those but that said I am just going to stick to the upbeat picture of the internet and the parts that I guess I'm looking forward to to avoid these discussions around dystopian futures and moral panic. So this time last year I was in the US for a conference called South by Southwest which was a fantastic conference and there was a big gathering of industry leaders who get together to talk about their visions for the future and the challenges that they face and if you're looking for a place to start to get a feel for these new experiences then South by Southwest is a fantastic place to start. For example, many years ago now but this was the very place that Twitter was first launched. Now one of the strongest themes at South by Southwest last year was that the openness of the internet is under threat due to concerns around privacy and trust and there was a big push many angles around that and again I think that this just confirms this idea that we're heading into a time where we'll be connected like never before and uploading significantly more hence why these concerns are becoming louder and louder. So these concerns are big and valid definitely but perhaps a topic for another talk. So let's dive in instead into these two likely extensions of how we'll use the internet today as a way to frame I guess the predictions in this field. So how we're all going to be connected and then what happens with this information that's going to be uploaded all with a sense, all with a purpose I guess to get a sense for how Drupal fits into the picture. Alright. So it's a safe bet that over the next 10 years the internet is only going to make us more connected. Most future scenarios expect that the internet will grow and reach billions more people. Now sure this is an obvious trend but I think that the impact is massive. When looking at predictions for future internet the general consensus is that countries that already have open access to the internet will benefit from things like the strengthening of global connectedness increased innovation development education. Over the next 10 years these benefits though will be felt even more by countries being connected for the first time. The most profound global impact will be the revolution of education connecting the brightest minds and people of shared interests and this scenario like many of the other scenarios that I'm talking about today was highlighted by a recent study of the future of the internet by Pew Research and Elon University and it canvassed 2,500 experts including futurists, business leaders, academics, developers. So the biggest impact on the world will be universal access to all human knowledge and Hal from this quote here goes on to say that the smartest person in the world will currently well be stuck behind a plow in India or China enabling that person and the millions like him or her will have a profound impact on the development of the human race. It's pretty intense and this reminded me of an example a story from a movie actually. If you've seen the movie Good Will Hunting they may have a sort of foggy memory of a story that they tell in there about an Indian mathematician called Ramanujan. It's a true story and it's actually pretty incredible. So Ramanujan with almost no formal training made huge contributions extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis and number theory. He was born in India in 1887 and had no access to the larger mathematical community. He was introduced to formal mathematics at age 10 and was given books on advanced trigonometry that he'd mastered by 12 even producing some of his own theorems. At 25 he had attempted to contact a bunch of different English mathematicians but on all his attempts his papers had been sent back without any comment. Anyhow Ramanujan continued he persisted until eventually he was invited over to Cambridge. Ramanujan contributed brilliant knowledge to the field before his passing at a very young age of 32. So Ramanujan was regarded as a mathematical genius and achieved great things for mathematics some of which we've only I guess really been able to understand in more recent history. He was mostly self-taught and in fact some of his theories were wrong. Well they were different to the accepted theory of the time. Imagine what his legacy could have been if he had been taught the accepted theory of the time. I think the part that I find most incredible about this story is not where he was born and not where he went to school but that he was an incredible independent mind that was hungry for connection. So forget what you know about augmented reality and wearables. Imagine what we'll be able to create with more people like Ramanujan and millions more bright people connected collaborating and standing on the shoulders of giants. Hyperconnectivity isn't just about people. We've looked at people being connected but it's not just about people. Experts predict that tens of billions of devices will be connected to the internet over the next decade. Depending which analyst firm you ask the prediction can range between a cool 25 to 70 billion devices connected in the next five years alone and this is excluding devices such as mobiles, tablets, PCs. Cool, so that's massive but let's just take a step back from that for a minute. So if you just cast your mind back to the model I was talking about earlier with experience management I want to take this idea of multiple front ends or engagement points and extend it into this future of billions more people and tens of billions more devices. So what happens in this future where suddenly the web browser starts to fade away? Ten years into the future there will be even more new interfaces that people will use to access and upload information and these new devices are going to need to get their information their data from somewhere. So I think thinking about content management for websites and mobile like we do now would definitely be a thing of the past. Managing customer experiences across all these different interfaces will be the challenge of the future. So when I first started using computers it was in the form of the shared family PC and over time I progressed to having my own PC and then of course there was the obligatory Nokia 33 something and fast forward to today and I have a new phone probably more capable than that original family PC but I also have other devices such as tablet, laptop, computer at home, computer at work. The cloud however I feel has largely unshackled me from being tied to any one particular device. I can pick up my emails, documents, music, whatever else I want to do from any one of these devices wherever I am. Cool, so thinking about that and thanks to Moore's Law in the near future we might see a convergence of all these devices into a single smartphone with growing popularity in what we'll call dumb screens. So your phone will be the computing power to replace all these devices such as your PC and your laptop and then your screens such as TV and surfaces and who knows what else will just be displays for this phone. Now that expectation loop that I mentioned earlier will come into play here again because as our experience with technology continues to improve people are going to expect that sort of experience as they interact with everyone government enterprise all in a similar way perhaps through our internet fridge. Now I'm realistic in that I understand the future isn't going to be some sort of grand utopia with seven billion people holding hands and wearing Google Glass but I also believe that future internet isn't going to cause the end of the world. Any advancement of technology can impact the world in both positive and negative ways as the world becomes more connected and people trade convenience and perceived gains over some of those privacy concerns a small percentage of people will continue to seek to do harm but let's focus on the good parts of human nature today as well as the ecosystem that amplifies their potential. Alright so taking all that in fast forward ten years from now and Australia is part of this hyper-connected world let's assume that this thriving ecosystem continues and we can all contribute information from our mobiles and other devices let's build on that with the tens of billions of other things that will be connected to the internet. Some experts predict that the worldwide volume of data is doubling every two years over the next two years alone we'll move from creating six zettabytes of data to 13 zettabytes of data and in case you're not up with what a zettabyte is because we don't get them in thumb drives just yet a zettabyte is a billion terabytes so it's pretty massive but regardless of that number I think we can agree that it's a lot and that it's just going to get bigger. You may remember having to physically go somewhere to get on the internet or dial in to the internet well this is a really nice idea information sharing will become effortless and invisible like electricity instead of being on the internet you'll just be we all know this network future will have an immense amount of information and I think that this really is something that the world doesn't yet know how to comprehend as a consumer of information if we think about it from that perspective for a moment it's going to become increasingly more challenging for us to find meaningful information that is what we want and when we want it one big concern is that we'll go into this age of information overload and in that it's the trouble I guess is the influence of misinformation so this could very well be people who don't have the skills to question and understand the motives of their sources it could just be people seeking out and finding what confirms their own views which may be erroneous or slanted or incomplete and it all may do more to polarise people than help it provides and again this is not a new problem sure but in this hyper-connected world where everyone's voice cannot reach tens of people but tens of millions of people the problem is magnified and I was thinking about an example which is a little bit old now but the CSIRO developed a social media monitoring tool called VISI and the Department of Human Services actually used VISI to prioritise their efforts to prevent the spread of misinformation on social media exactly what we're talking about so what they did is they used public data from social media networks and what VISI does is it first establishes a baseline of conversations kind of these normal discussions it then monitors those discussions and can alert staff to any changes that require attention and this is a fantastic way to monitor and prevent the spread of misinformation the vision for experience management is that these technologies could be neatly integrated with the engagement layer imagine using technologies to help prioritise or promote information in your digital channels based on what the public is already talking about over the next 10 years there'll be even more amazing solutions and technologies to help us find meaning in the age of information overload but it's not just about computers I guess in this vision for 2025 we're in a world where citizens are actually motivated for more digital engagement billions more people are connected and already uploading troves of information the opportunity then in this space is for us to tap into this environment of connected people with all their mobiles and sensors and things as well as their willingness to contribute and engage at any hour of the day so I'm talking here about crowd sourcing which is not a new concept but it's never been easier to get your digital products online for public engagement to solicit ideas or even volunteer labouring and a project of this was one we had some thing to do with in the early early days it was about 2008 and the National Library of Australia had launched a crowd sourcing tool as part of its newspaper digitisation project now this project is pretty intense because the library aims to digitise every single newspaper in Australian history the problem at the moment though is that these are just scans of micro fish you can go into the library and look at these things they scan those to get them in digital form but because they're just scans of these images well they're not easily searchable so what they did is they originally outsourced the OCR offshore and millions and millions of pages got processed however the OCR translated text was pretty low quality so they launched a website with the ability for people to correct the text line by line but you kind of think that maybe a project that involved people translating scans of really old newspapers line by line maybe hard to get people to participate in well I had a look the other day and since launching the person who is at the top of the leaderboard has corrected over 3 million lines of text which is huge the collective wisdom of the crowd could be that extra brain power that you need to help describe organise or translate your information making it much easier for others to find the meaningful parts in the future and the best part is that in our experience the capturing of structured data from the public is something that Drupal actually handles really well so from the age of the consumer we've taken the trend in experience management and extended it to a possible future in 2025 this is a likely scenario where people and things of the world are all really hyper connected and information publishing is accelerating to such a speed that we're all going to have to find new ways of making sense of it all we can expect more connected people this revolution of education connecting the world's brightest minds connected things new devices and tonnes more interfaces changing the way we communicate and interact and of course our participation online is naturally only going to increase as it becomes ubiquitous and beyond the browser but we start to navigate into these murky waters of information overload so I've hinted at a couple of emerging technologies in analytics as well as good old school crowd sourcing as a possible way to find meaning in the age of information overload now I spoke in the beginning that in many ways the experience now trumps the content if at least another 25 billion devices are going to come online in the next five years it's a fact I think that we can agree on that subpar experiences are going to receive little tolerance this is going to in turn demand more from us in every sector we're being asked to do more and more and rise to expectations set online by services that are pouring millions of dollars every day into fine-tuning their effort back in Canberra definitely we're faced with this more and more on how we can do more with less so where does Drupal fit into this is it even the right tool for the job or is it just an old idea that's going to fade away as the web browser itself disappears well the good news is is that there are some key parts of Drupal that are going to help you start down this path and as I described in the beginning I feel Drupal can sit as the centerpiece to your online engagement so let's have a quick look at some of the places where this shines already and some of the places where it's showing promise cool so today I really hope that you get along and see a bunch of talks that are going to give you some ideas and tips on how you can optimize your site how you can add more features how you can work better together and the force of the Drupal community is not something to be taken lightly or for granted in my experience not only is there tons of great knowledge to lean on but often that piece of code that you're thinking about writing has already started it and instead it's up to you to take it and build on it and improve it and share it rather than starting from scratch and this is a big part that's going to help us do more it's worth mentioning as well another kind of example in this space within government which you've no doubt heard about called GovCMS and that aims to consolidate many of their content rich template-based websites to a single Drupal platform for this very reason and there's a bunch of objectives that primary ones are that they're seeking to utilize open source to share artifacts between agencies and the community to deliver cost savings to agencies through coordinating government activities and of course benefit from those economies of scale so I guess I feel that open source has a big part to play in the future of the internet so I don't think that the whole world is going to become open source but the community driven nature of Drupal embodies many of these characteristics which I've described today in fact I guess if you think about it open source in a way is kind of like a mini little disruption in itself where it's democratizing many parts of technical innovation so little start-ups can now create world-class software and one that springs to mind is Instagram which built up a service that had 14 million users at the time it had terabytes of images and only I think three engineers at the time that they were bought out so when talking about experience management it's certainly not a software solution that can be purchased plugged in and switched on there's no single piece of software I feel because we're combining now not only the digital world but the physical world together all wrapped up in one and so this is going to require the tools that we use to acknowledge this ecosystem and this is very much in line with trends we see today such as apps being discrete components or cloud as well which is giving us the building blocks to assemble together in our own way to build entirely new systems as I've discussed Drupal will be the conduit between devices, systems and users Dries, the founder of Drupal himself has said that Drupal's biggest challenge going forward is to create a user experience that gets out of the way of users and lets users go about their business regardless of how simple or complex their task is the next version of Drupal which we heard about this morning and is another hot topic for today contains a number of initiatives which I feel really help enable this so definitely get along and hear more about these initiatives from the various community leaders that are here today so myself and our engineers feel that the big steps forward are going to be well it's a bunch of things but I'm just going to talk about three real quick the first one is definitely going to be mobile so this mobile initiative I guess is with the main aim of working out of the box rather than how it's been in the past something that you have to bolt on it's not something that you have to fight against it's not only a front end challenge but it also includes performance improvements so mobile's will see less bandwidth usage things like that and think back to all those interfaces that we spoke about before second, multilingual this initiative we heard this morning it aims to make Drupal better handle internationalisation which is important I think in a world not limited by geography and the third is web services and this is the way that Drupal can communicate with all these other interfaces while sitting in the background this represents most closely I think this description of Drupal it's the conduit between different devices systems and users and it's utilising insights and analytics from other systems to help you present your information but it's also collecting information from users and feeding that back into other systems so these and a bunch more things are going to be the things that make up the core of Drupal meaning that it's part of its nature rather than bolted on or that you have to fight against and Drupal itself will then start to lean more naturally in these directions which is what you need to do so as well so I'll just give you one more quick example and then we'll wrap up so example of this was a project we were involved in with the National Museum and moving their collection online and this data is stored across multiple systems and indexed by other systems and we don't need to reinvent those wheels I guess rather we lean on them and looking and searching this all then feeds into a rich front end that you can use without page refreshers the result is an experience that lets you discover information Drupal will come into play again in the future as we start to collect information from users and enrich that data even further or perhaps build out mobile apps that will sit on top of it as well and you can see that this I guess has kind of happened to that front man so I've talked about how content management is becoming experience management we're driven by the age of the consumer where we want more and want to weight less and this idea has been extended forward to 2025 to a hyper-connected future where people and things are uploading like crazy adding to the age of information overload as well we are the last generation that will remember life before the internet our experience has given us a fairly unique perspective on the changes we've seen over the last decade and the incredible upside and in this room we're also privileged enough to be the creators of the digital world I'm sure we all understand how great it is to be able to find an answer for pretty much anything online and with the help of passionate communities like the Drupal community we can learn almost anything there has never been a better time for learning and contributing to the web and as I mentioned it's also a great time to be a consumer so I want to end with a quote from Robert Cannon who incorporates a quote from Alan Kay the good news is that the technology that promises to turn our world on its head is also the technology with which we can build our new world it offers an unbridled ability to collaborate share and interact the best way to predict the future is to invent it it is a very good time to start inventing the future thank you