 So, thank you for coming. You've made it to the last session of the whole conference. I'm sure everyone's very tired. But I want to talk about why a culture of open source contribution is good for your business. If you're an agency owner, if you work within an organisation that uses Drupal, this is a good way for you to be able to come up with a plan to increase your contribution and drive your business as well. I've lost my speaker notes here, so I'm just going to freestyle. I'm Owen Lansbury. I co-founded a company called Previous Next in Australia. So I flew 32 hours from my house to Paris to come here to do a 20-minute talk. And I'm also a member of the Drupal Association Board. And a lot of these things that we've been talking about in terms of driving innovation is completely tied to the contribution that we can make to Drupal. So what I want to do in today's talk is very quickly talk about keeping Drupal competitive, why we would contribute to Drupal in the first place, and approaches that you can apply to your own organisation tomorrow after you've heard this talk. If you're not doing that already, we might have a little bit of time for Q&A, but I know there's a talk at 5.45, straight after this one. So I think importantly, with keeping Drupal competitive, we've now moved into a world where we're competing against the companies like Adobe. Adobe has their experienced manager platform. They spend $2.4 billion on research, development and marketing for Adobe Experience Manager. And the Drupal Association, we spend, well, we have $3.5 million as our budget for everything that we do. So 600 times smaller than Adobe, and yet we're competing head to head with them. So you might hear this talk that Drupal is declining, it's not being used so much anymore. But the good message I want to give you is that in the top 10,000 websites, Drupal is powering about 10% of those websites. And that's more than Adobe, KendiCo, Sitecore, Joomla, you name it, all of the other competitive CMSs combined. So Drupal is still in a very, very strong place in that enterprise place. And as we've heard in the Dries note and other talks, we're really making sure that Drupal maintains its relevance in that market. So I just talked about the competitive space there. I think importantly, what's happened in the last 10 years or so, so when we moved from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, a lot of the contribution that was being made to Drupal went from individuals just doing it as a bit of a hobby to people working within organisations and their companies sponsoring them to work on Drupal. So this has been a big change, and it's meant that we've just had to focus on how we can help organisations understand how they can support their staff contributing. So why does previous and next Drupal contribute to Drupal? We do it because it drives our business success. So we have nice reasons for contributing. We're doing good in the world. We're keeping the open web viable. But at the end of the day, if that doesn't make sense that I can keep my business running and pay my staff, then it's not a sustainable thing to do. So what we've spent a lot of time at previous next doing is really looking at what business value is Drupal contribution driving for us. And it's this notion that it's not just altruism, it's commercial reality of doing Drupal contributions. So importantly, when someone joins previous next, the first thing that they do is they have a handbook that we give them, and it says to them that contribution is a key part of your role with our company. And it's a key part of your professional development. So if someone's joined the company who hasn't been exposed to Drupal too much in the past, the thing that we do with them is that we use contribution as the way to show them Drupal coding standards, to interact with the community and to understand the deeper aspects of the software. So we don't have our own kind of onboarding process to help people understand Drupal, we use the contribution process to do that. For us, we're a very small company, 20 people in Australia, a long way from everywhere. And importantly, we can connect our staff with the Drupal world through Drupal contributions. So while we might just be working away on small projects in Australia, our staff have this connection into this amazing network of mentors and very experienced developers who they're learning on. And of course, that's driving their ongoing interest in using Drupal. The other part of working with a small agency is that you're generally doing a lot of the same work a lot of the time. So for us as previous, next, we work with a lot of government, a lot of universities, a lot of the work is quite repetitive. We're doing very similar things a lot of the time. But contribution gives our team an opportunity to scratch different itches that they're interested in. So I think a great example of that is we've had one of our developers build a module that's now used on 123,000 websites around the world, which is this incredible impact beyond what we could ever do as a company ourselves. And of course, that's allowing people to use free software for all of their projects too. So that's serving two purposes there. I think another thing that we've done as a company over the years is we've experimented with traditional forms of marketing. We've done Google AdWords. We've had expensive booths that's not Drupal conferences. And what we found is that the best leads that we have for projects is through personal connections and personal references. And that comes from people considering us to be Drupal experts. And so what we've really done with our marketing spend is direct that to coming to conferences like this, giving talks. A lot of our developers are talking about very complex Drupal contribution that they've done. And so now we have quite an established process where our team will work on something that's related to contribution. They'll write blog posts about that. Many of you might have read previous next blog posts to help you do something yourself, hopefully. And then we'll come and talk at conferences about what we've done. And this builds a reputation for us as a small company that is way beyond what we are in terms of size and also in terms of our impact on the Drupal project. And we found that's been a very big driver of our success is to have that reputation. The Certified Partner Program that's been established in the last couple of years has also been important for us. So full disclosure as a member of the Drupal Association Board, it's something that I helped develop out of DrupalCon Amsterdam about four years ago, just before COVID hit. And the intention there was to ensure that companies who are contributing are given the exposure that they deserve in the community, but also with commercial vendors. And so we've had quite a slow start with that. We had a lot of different priorities through COVID. But now the focus is shifting back to that program. And there's been a couple of talks through the conference here about what we're going to be doing with that program in the future. But importantly for us as a company, being a certified partner is very important when we're going into a big client pitch. And we can say that we are Australia's only Platinum certified Drupal partner. And that gives us a lot of credence with potential clients. And it is the type of thing that clients do pay a lot of attention to if you say, yeah, we're one of the top certified partners in the world. And we do all of this contribution for the Drupal project that makes us experts in the product as well. So if your organization is not part of the certified partner program, I'd encourage you to check that out. And there will be some developments around that in the next few months in terms of putting even more focus on the contribution side of things, not just the fee that you pay to be part of that program. And we're also making it fairer in terms of smaller companies are paying proportional fees in terms of their company size as opposed to these flat fees where a company of 20 people is paying the same fee as a pantheon or an aquaero or someone like that. So really importantly for us is employee retention. So the biggest cost that you'll often have as a small agency is hiring new people. Someone might have been with you for three years or so. They quit. You have a three month gap where you're not doing work because you don't have a staff member and then maybe you're spending $25,000, $30,000 to a recruitment firm to get a new person. So there's a big cost in that. There's a big cost in lost IP when people are leaving a company. And so what we've really focused on is what can we be doing to retain our staff as long as possible because a long term team that's worked together for a long time has a lot of value for the business in terms of the efficiency and the productivity and all of those things. So we've got to a point now where our average tenure for a staff member is seven years across a team of 20. And that's about triple the average for a big tech firm. So I think a couple of companies like Metta and Apple, the average length of 10 years, about 12 months. And this has been largely due to the contribution program that we do have and making people feel that they're doing something that's much bigger than what we just do as a company. So in terms of what we actually do for our open source contribution approach, these are the things that you could maybe adopt yourself. And the first thing that we adopted a long time ago, when we first formed the company back in 2009, we'd heard that Google have this concept of 20% of your time can be towards professional development and personal development and working on ideas that you wouldn't otherwise be working on in your normal role. And of course, there's stories of a lot of Google's best products came from that. There's also a funny quote from Marisa Mayer, who was a senior Google employee who said, our 20% secret is that it's actually more like 120%. And so what we've tried to do is ensure that we don't have people just moving into overtime and working on weekends to do their contribution that's built into how we schedule them on projects. So everyone on the team, they're only scheduled on projects 80% of their time and that ensures that there is that 20% there if they need to use it. Of course, we are pragmatic as well. So if there's a big project that has priority, then that work will be done first. And what we've found is that the contribution time, it balances out over the years. So there might be a gap between projects and people have a whole week to work on things or just bits and pieces of spare time. And then we've also done things like we have a quarterly hack day where the whole team is all working remotely from each other. But we have this dedicated day once per quarter where they're all working on contribution in some form or another. And a lot of those things then feed back into our company as tools that we can use or take to clients as well. Direct sponsorship is an interesting thing as well. So while we're paying people for their employment with that 20% time, we've also adopted a model of sponsoring core contributors as well. So there's a woman in New Zealand that we pay 40 hours a month. And you might have seen her on www.dripple.org as quiet one. She's one of the core committers now. And that just guarantees that we have a steady flow of contribution happening. And that ensures for our certified partner program that we're getting those contribution credits to keep our status high. The cost of that, hey, it's about the same as sponsoring a Drupalcon each year. So it's again a great way of us directing marketing spend into contribution rather than just spending on normal types of marketing. And then project-based contribution is important for us as well. So in all the projects that we're working on, our clients understand that they're paying for us to push code back into www.drupalcon.org. If we're patching modules or creating new modules, there's an understanding there from the start. Importantly for those end users and our clients, they get credited for that as well. So a great example is one of our big government clients. They have quite a big internal Drupal team now. And one of the key things they use in their recruitment is that they're a good Drupal citizen and helping the project through their sponsorship of contribution. And that then helps them hire good Drupal developers because, hey, you want to work for someone that's part of the community. Events and volunteering, like I said, having our team come to conferences is really important both to drive our expert marketing, but also to connect with the community as well. And we also use our local event in Australia, Drupal South, as an opportunity to get the whole team together once a year. We started off as being quite remote from each other before COVID, and now since COVID, we're totally remote from each other. So having those events to come together and see each other is really key. And also just the notion of getting involved in the community has been very important for a lot of our team members. So we have team members who are track chairs for our local conferences who just come and help do the badges and people that aren't coders are playing those roles as well. And again, it makes them feel that they're part of something bigger. And then community leadership. So for myself, I don't come from a coding background. I have some business experience that might be helpful to the Drupal community. And so I've been able to come into roles like on the Drupal Association Board or conference organising. And those types of things where we're helping drive the project forward by spreading the word about Drupal and hopefully bettering the project overall. And where are we? And then cold hard cash. So we still sponsor events and that plays a part in the mix in terms of our overall contribution. So what I want us to do at the end here is just to look at the total cost of contribution to us as a business. So this is something that a business owner would ask first is how much is this going to cost us. And it's not something that I really pay too much attention to. I've got a general idea of how much we spend each year. But it's not something I'm monitoring each month. We have it in our budget at the beginning of each year as well. And so looking at it recently, I broke it down as that 20% contribution time is around $100,000 in wages that we're paying for that time. Obviously at the cost, not the opportunity cost if we had them working on client projects. Our direct sponsorship and donations to the Drupal Association is about 50,000. Sending all of our team to conferences is another 50,000. And I'm sure there's another 50,000 that I have encountered there. But the point that I want to make is that's about 5% of our gross revenue as a company. And that's what well below what a normal company would spend on traditional forms of marketing. It's all tax deductible as a business expense. And we're not dealing with a separate marketing budget on top of that. And I think importantly for your own organisation that's the case of just sitting down and saying, okay, what makes sense? What can we start with? Where might we see the best results early on? Is it around marketing? Is it around employee retention? Is it about building the professional development skills of our team? And so I'll just finish in terms of how you can get started. The first thing is to define the policies at a business leadership level. So if you're an agency owner or a manager within a large organisation, define your policies. Do you give people contribution time as part of their paid hours? Are you directing budget towards having people attend conferences, et cetera, et cetera? Set some budgets, like I said. We do that at the beginning of each year. What we think it will cost us. And that then helps us not worry too much. As long as the business is doing well, we know we can spend that money. And then the final thing is connect with your community. So really importantly, if you're reliant on Drupal, then you will get the best value out of using Drupal by connecting with the community and contributing. And we've seen a lot of companies kind of come into the Drupal world in our local market. They might build one or two websites. They haven't connected into the community. And they just disappear within a couple of years because they haven't built that deep expertise in the platform and they move on to the next shiny thing. But for us we've had 15 years of fantastic business using Drupal. And what I've talked through today is the reason that we've been successful, I think, to a large extent. So I think we're just on time. I don't know who's keeping track of time. Is the next speaker here? Yep. Does anyone have any quick questions up back there? I'll repeat the question too for the mic. Yeah, so we just consider everything that we're doing around this as marketing to a certain extent. Yeah. Yeah, so we did do quite a lot of booths at general tech conferences and spending a lot of money around that. And then realised, okay, the $10,000 we just spent, maybe that could be directed to sending people to a conference to talk and building our reputation that way. So I'll maybe be around. If you want to find me, just Google Owen Lansbury, you'll find a way to contact me. I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you.