 supported why and how that changes the community. Also changing a more general sense changes that I've been through and things that we've learned that I think I'm about to inform what we're doing, changes in technology, and as Cameron Lanyu says, that the most important thing about technology is how it changes us. First, just to put this into perspective, if you think about technology, it's not just about computers, you can think about, since we made the first tools, that was the technology at the time. John Maynod Smith gives us a thought experiment and says that if you imagine the whole of history from the first vertebrates through to now in a two hour film, the tool making map, so technology appears in the last minute of that film, and if you imagine the history of tool making maps, so like the story of technology, and if that was a two hour film, then the domestication of plants and animals has happened in the last half minute, and the printing press, the steam engine, the atomic bomb, the internet, all of that would happen in the last second, so really what that shows is that technology is basically just exploding and we are living in a time of constant change that basically we've never had before. So yeah, change, if I think about, if I think about change, just the change I've seen in my life, if I think about my first experiences on the internet in the mid 90s, it was before we had dialogue at home, I used to get a couple of hours a week at a train centre in the local town, so I used to collect as many floppy disks as I could find, go down there and download lots of demos and music mods and things, I don't know if everyone remembers these times, but you could get a lot of them for one megabyte floppy back then, very good. And then in 97 I built my first website that someone paid me to build, believably, if everyone remember frameset, if you don't remember it was like basically web components or Angular 2 in the 90s, and then I went to university later that year and they gave me some space so I started building the website, but the internet was very different back then, there was no Google, you couldn't search for things and have them delivered to you. You would look through directories of websites, or there would be web rings that collected together websites around certain topics, but every site was unique and different, and you could tell you were accessing someone else's computer, it was like you'd gone around to someone's house and let you in to have a look around, every site was unique and really personalised by a creator like this guy. He has a website. So I think about what my self back then, the first time I was using the internet, what I think of the internet today, and I imagine myself going back in time to try and explain to myself what we've done. I'd have to explain how we thought technology was going to be this time saving thing that made us all smarter, but actually it seemed like it was making us more dumb and actually we created loads more distractions so we're actually less productive. I'd have to explain how the internet was supposed to bring us all closer together in many ways, isolated us. And I'd have to explain how instead of every person creating a unique profile, we basically decided to sort of fit ourselves into these rigid templates that we put our personalities, our businesses into. I'd have to explain how we'd invented this word cloud to disguise the fact that we were using other people's computers to store all our personal information. And I'd have to explain how we'd basically become dependent on these corporate silos that basically hit behind this concept of cloud to collect data on every aspect of our lives and then use that data to manipulate what we see online to make billions of dollars. And this is one I find hard because I probably wouldn't have understood at the time if I went back and tried to explain to myself that basically one company would control retail online. I feel like, but what about this free open web that we've got? I don't think I'd be able to understand that. But I'd also be able to say that there were people who were working to make an independent alternative to the corporate web and I'd have to say that I was part of that. So another big change was me coming from Sheffield and moving down to London. In Sheffield I had hidden away from the dotcom boom and bust in academia doing research on semantics of object-oriented programming languages. But it was there that I first met Drupal. It was Drupal 4.3. I used it to build a community site for a group of DJs that I was part of and I really didn't do anything more than just install it and forget about it really. I didn't realise it was this community growing that would collaborate to build something so amazing. I learnt about co-operation later when I moved to London. I came down to London before I got a chance to head up the new media departments at an independent record label. At the time, iTunes was about to launch in the UK and I was about to learn about co-operation and I was also going to learn how to do a start-up. Because working in independent music, the digital music services were basically not playing fair. I joined the new media committee at the Association for Independent Music and together, collectively, the independent record labels could represent and get a fair deal from iTunes so we could get the same for independent artists that major labels would get to. That really taught me the power of independence collaborating. Then I came back to, that turned into a start-up kind of accidentally. It turned out that we built for the record label and other people wanted to use it so we kind of accidentally did a start-up and then after that I went freelance and found Drupal again. And again found this community of independence or collaborating so for me it was an actual fit. I want to talk a bit about change outside of that because when I first moved to London I lived in Doulston and going back there now it's a completely different place. As you can see it's now a lot of posh flats and it's mainly inhabited by ghosts. I got more immediate experience of this process of change, this process of gentrification when I lived in Brixton, I lived there for several years. It had already went on its way to gentrification when I moved there. It wasn't the 24-hour crack supermarket that it used to be. But it still had its edgy bits and there were still areas you'd avoid. But the process of gentrification, Brixton was a classic example of this. First the artists and dropouts from mainstream society moved there. And I lived between two squads of basic artist communities so I could see and witness this around me. Basically that starts to reduce the perceived risks and then the typical pattern then is that things like these roads start to pop up as the risks. The area starts to become safer. In the article I got this image from a photo piece about Brixton gentrification. The author said that one day all that will be left will be a carefully packaged Brixton experience and not the living culture and people who made the place unique in the first place. And in another article Writer Brett Scott talks about gentrification and says that as the perceived dangers that keep the property developers away erodes the exotic becomes safe, interesting, cool and not threatening. And it says like a tiger being transformed into a zoo animal and a picture and then a tiger for interest wearing cocktail parties. Something feels gentrified when this shallow aesthetic of a tiger takes over from the authentic lived experience of a tiger. I really like that idea. Basically both those quotes showing that it's the gentrification that retains the essence of the thing, what kind of loses what made it, the quality that made it what it was. So I switched to thinking about through the ball and how that's changed over the years. But to put it into context like how Drupal came around in 2001. The web was a very different place back then. Geositters was kind of past its peak. My space had yet to arrive. Geositters, that basically lost popularity. Geositters basically you could get a profile on there, you had full complete control to do whatever you wanted to it. Then Geositters got replaced with things like LiveJournal, Friendster, which then became the sort of blogger of MySpace. You see the options for customisation and options for control reducing and eventually we get to Facebook where we have quite a rigid defined template. But Drupal persisted through all of these changes, everything that was changing on the web and from message board to hackable platform and now to enterprise CMS. So you can think that the original artist that came and started to sort of pioneer the area with the political activists that launched the first Drupal company, Civic Spaces, that led to NGOs, charities and then that sort of makes the place accessible. Then the sort of media companies move in with the likes of MTV and it starts to look interesting and cool and not interesting. Then we get the white house and the enterprise clients. There's obviously big changes and we have to think about how that affects us as a community. At the same time Drupal has gone through massive changes and Drupal obviously built on PHP. So we have to take into account how PHP has changed. You know Rasmus talks about the beginnings of PHP and how no one uses it, how it was supposed to be used. It was basically like a wrapper around some C that you could access from your web pages. But as no one wanted to write C code, more functionality was put into PHP. This was what people can slide off PHP a little bit for some of the inconsistencies people complained about. A lot of that comes from the fact that it was just wrapping C libraries and different C libraries had different conventions so those inconsistencies appeared in PHP. So if you look into strings and arrays, in particular context PHP is consistent. But then actually we through the years that Drupal innovated because Drupal had to come up with concepts to do what it needed to do. Because PHP didn't support a lot of the things like extensibility that Drupal wanted. So we innovated things with using naming conventions to deal with night namespacing issues and modules and things like that. So a lot of those Drupalisms, the things that people complained about Drupal actually came about as innovations that meant that we could achieve what we wanted to achieve. And then we think about how that's changed now because you kind of have to forget everything you know about PHP and relearn it. The PHP world now is totally different. PHP is a proper language. It's a fast scripting language. PHP 7 in benchmarks outperformed pretty much everything else except go for doing like webby related things. Faster than for most common web kind of things faster than Node.js. So we really have to start taking PHP seriously. And also then we've got the ecosystem that's come up around it. And you know Drupal 8 is part of that but it's only part of the whole ecosystem of symphony that you know all these libraries and stuff that's available through packages. So it's yeah it's a great time to be doing PHP and Drupal. But bear in mind all those changes. How has that changed Drupal the user base and the communities? How have we changed? Because we've extracted by those people in the back. Yeah we've come a long way from the early days of activism. And that means that over the time the kind of things that we've made gains from that. If you think about the urban regeneration part that happens in gentrification you can look at the kind of topics that have been talked about at conferences over the years. And kind of get an idea of how the community is developed with things like configuration management, better development workflows, testing and better tooling. These are all things that we've developed and we all benefit from. But there's always going to be some people who see the other side of the gentrification process. What makes it controversial? And that's the sort of social cleansing aspect. So yeah, who loses out? Do the original crash ridge users on their own like lower end hardware they struggle with hosting it themselves? There's Drupal as a platform as a service offerings but they can be quite complex and pricey for those individuals, smaller organisations and gratuitous organisations. So we find that they've kind of moved over to places like Squarespace where you can quite easily build your own website. That brings its own problems because you realise you've outgrown something like Squarespace which is not really a CMS, it's a page builder. And you realise you've outgrown that when it's too late and it's quite hard to manage. I think it's important that we think about how we support those users. Thomas Cork on post of the link to QCAP theory of digital activism on my blog. He asked how easy is it to build a site to share catpages in Drupal? The easier that is, the better we'll be able to bring grassroots back into the fold. The idea is that people are more interested in looking at pictures of cats and activism. Activists and people campaigning and people making positive change in the world should use those platforms where people are rather than developing themselves. I think what I'm saying is that we know we develop that platform and everyone benefits. Breff Scott, I mentioned earlier, says, do you abandon the form, leave it to the yupiz and head to the next wild frontier? Or do you attempt to break the cycle, deface the estate agent's signs and pick it outside the wine bar? Or, that's two options, there is another option. Buckminster Fuller says, you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. So, you think about Drupal, there's the proceeds of Drupal's success come back into the community. We need to be using that to do good, to support people making positive change in the world. I want to be proud to be able to say, I do Drupal. For me, that means I'm part of something that there's a community collaborating to build something that is a tool for people making positive change. But also, as I talked about earlier, the changes in the web and the loss of that open web and the move towards the corporate silos. I think we need to think about Drupal as a tool to support and build that open web, that independent alternative to the corporate web. Chris Anderson says, if the last 10 years have been about discovering new social and innovation models on the web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world. So, this gives us another way to think about the changes. Rather than seeing the enterprises coming towards us, is this us going to them? Is this us taking our practices into those? In the keynote this morning, there was talk of this idea of developer anarchy and enterprises adopting open source ways of thinking. So, maybe we are turning it on its head and maybe the enterprises could get de-genrified if that's even what I'm trying to explain. So, I've got some ideas of what we can do. But before we start to make things better, we have to start making things worse. I have to apologise because I know in the past I've done some things that have made the internet worse. But I've chosen now not to do that. Never again will I let a video auto-play. I'm not going to do another carousel. I'm not going to do any social logging maybe, but there has to be an alternative as well to using a silo identity. I made this point that it was the developers that built this stuff that breaks the web. It's not just this, it's the things like the modal, the pop-ups. I mentioned the carousels, drop-down menus, all of these horrible things that break the experience on the open web. By reducing the experience on the web, we push people to the silos. So, we need to stop making the web worse, is what I'm saying. We developers, this is our thing, we're building this. Someone said to me, you can't blame the developers, it's the adults people or the business people asking for this. But they're not going to build it. If the developers stop building it, then it doesn't exist. We need to basically take responsibility. We need to stand up and say why these things are all a bad idea. We need to take responsibility and offer alternatives and come up with new solutions of achieving the same thing. So, all of these small little things might add up, basically. I came up with this idea of the retro-grain clause. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm going to try and squeeze this into my contract somehow. If you can't read the small print, I'll read it for you. It says that the client will not force the developer to produce any feature that the developer believes degrades the experience of the web, interferes with expected browser functionality or damages accessibility. Such features include, but are not limited to, modals, drop-down menus, carousels, auto-playing videos, intrusive advertising, multi-part articles, scroll hijacking and welcome screens. We know how to stop making the web worse. We just have to stop doing this shit. How do we make it better? We need to look at the silos and the functionality that they have, and we need to replicate that, but better. We can do that within the Drupal community, within the wider web development community. We can look at features that they have and implement them in a more open and interoperable way. The backlink, for example, this is a feature that all the silos implement. If someone links to you, if someone mentions you, you get a notification. This is what makes the silos so sticky. We can have that now on the open web as well. This is an actual working draft thing. It's a standard. We can start implementing this and start using it. We can have that functionality, but in an interoperable way. The other thing is the silos have this kind of omnipresence. We can have that too, in micro book. You can imagine being on your friend's website, looking at their photographs on their website, and leaving a comment. That comment, they're posted back to your website, so you host that comment, it's your comment. This, again, is another working draft standard. These standards, they're not just people sat around talking about standards, wouldn't this be nice? This is a movement, it's in the web, and it's happening. There are services, there's a service like Bridgy, which allows you to easily use this. It's gone from development leader stage, it's getting into journalists and blogger stage, because there's now a really good WordPress module that supports this. But there's a plan for how this spreads to the wider open web. Before it's about choice, because we have a choice about what we build, we're building a web. We value the open web, as opposed to the closed off, siloed web. We need choice, because anything other than choice limits our options. Anything other than choice limits what we can do. I don't want to have to install WhatsApp or Slack to be able to communicate with you. Now I want to use email, it doesn't matter, we've all got a different system, but we talk to each other. I don't want to use Facebook, I don't want to follow you on Facebook to see what you want to. I want to follow you on your website, where I can see your personality or your brand shine through. Most of all, I love the web and I think it's got the power to change the world. I think we're seeing that happen, but not in the way that Silicon Valley sees it. Our future, I think our independence, you know, democracy depend on having choice and options. So we need the wild open web. So yeah, we have a choice. Let's stop making it worse and stop making it better. Thanks for mentioning the microphone if people are interested in how we can get that functionality on our sites. So yeah, any questions? Any opinions? Anyone disagree? When you suggested using... I imagine you have a client who wants to build a series of horrible web features. Have you successfully... I just want you to build something that's horrible and what do you use to do that? This is all relatively new thinking. I recently have walked away from a project where it was very dangerous and I just didn't think it was worth getting involved in doing that. I think there's enough options to do, good work that we can't have a choice about what we're doing at home. So I agree with the idea, but the thing is that I think we should be a worse world, not only of the technology, not falling into very technological terms. Because if you think like in the web in the 90s for instance, I was thinking to the manifesto for independence. So we're thinking we have internet, this is going to post the decentralisation, this is going to create power people because it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter in yender, it doesn't matter in race, it doesn't matter in what we ended up actually, it's the only way around. That's it. So there is this kind of technology-saping society of the only way around. So I see it more as the kind of this, okay, both obviously technology and opportunities, and we have things, you know, how this seems to be completely. But I think we have to be aware as well of the social aspect, because if nobody will make the same mistakes, it cannot come in this way. I agree, and I think that actually, you know, you make a very good point about opportunities for everyone. But what we find is that in systems where everyone is kind of put in and segmented quite easily, there are things like algorithmic cruelty where people get discriminated by algorithms. And so, yeah, I mean, there's fully supports what you're saying. But you know, further on what you're saying, I think about, you know, not making it worse is one thing, and we, yeah, we do know how to do that, and you know, we can at least have that intention. And this, you know, making it better, this is, you know, it's not something that everyone's going to fully adopt as a process to doing this, and we have to get those people who are, you know, the bloggers, journalists, they're going to benefit me, you know, these technologies. So that kind of, so I'll get it out there. Just a thought, you've got to, I mean, I've been thinking along the not making it worse lines in another context, and that's in terms of roadworks and doing that roadwork stuff. And my thought is that if we all aim at not making it worse, whether it's people doing that roadwork or whatever else, inevitably we're human, we sometimes don't quite get to the don't make it worse, and we all make it a little bit worse, so the trend is down. What we should be doing is to always aim for making it a little better. So we're always saying, no, the current state is the minimum, not the goal. Doesn't that make sense? Yeah, I think so. I went to the camp last year and I was the only Drupal person out there. I think this is what we need to talk about as a community, and I started off just talking about, you know, Drupal A changes things and that community is changing and where our road is. And yeah, I think that, you know, there are important things like this happening. We can do those big projects, get those enterprise clients, but at the same time we can use that to keep supporting the grassroots and people making positive change in the world. Yeah, more people letting the work come. I think it's, you know, a very interesting thing. I don't see it happening in terms of Drupal yet, because it seems to me that it still is a great thing, but then I'm not that familiar with Drupal A. I think one other question is... Yeah, the trend is that complexity gets pushed down the stack, and we build more and more layers of abstraction, so people don't really think about what's going on in the lead. The whole thing that Facebook and things like that will build on previously, so now is the community going there to see everyone you know within that. Because if you went to someone's website, then you've got to go to 20 people's websites if you want to spy on them for a reason, as we all do. So, I suppose I'm just thinking about what you said. If that's the case, then what happens to the communities that are built to break down or will be there for new communities, but then do we not have the same issue? I think the key thing we get is ownership control initially, so to think about that. The idea that you're better connected, and there are technologies to create those connections on the open web. We've had RSS for years and there's no reason why you can't follow all of your websites if they were supporting RSS, for example. It's similar, you could respond to things like my report or what I've mentioned. These technologies can be used to create that sort of two-way link from that two-way interaction. Hubsub as well is a way of getting, it's like RSS, but real-time. Just a reference is something called dark patterns. Dark patterns.org, which is the same sort of thing you're talking about, but with UX. So basically the people out there that are doing really nasty, manipulative stuff through UX. And it's basically like a name and shame campaign of like, look at what these guys are doing. And I thought you might like that. Dark patterns.org was a good resource. Part of your life is done. Part of my life is done. But there's a talk on there, it's like a conference, and you basically explain some of the things that he's seen. And actually go hands up that he's done it, and that he's been involved with these corporates that are doing these things, of shutting buttons where you can't see them, and putting things in your basket that shouldn't be there and all this kind of stuff. And he's basically running a campaign to say, if we're going to build a better web, we've got to stop doing stuff like this. Because it's bad context. I mentioned in the beginning of the talk about it that one single retailer basically owns a whole world of commerce. If you create bad experiences all over the web, you're just pushing people to that, single experience. It makes me think that just like architects of a civil building variety, we should have some sort of... ...require registration of people saying that we will not do bad things. We will not make buildings that fall down. We will not fail to put any windows in buildings or whatever it is. We'll just put hypocriticals for when to go. I don't know what shape it would be. Because I was thinking that I see this as a kind of conflict between... ...I need to re-decentralise the web that is all in this castle. You have any thoughts on things like blockchain? It's a good example. It can be used for Bitcoin, but it's followed its dynamic, let's say, but it can be used also for many... ...like the idea of creating kind of social contrast in a distributed way. Yeah. I mean, I don't really... ...yeah, I guess it adds extra level to the discussion. For me at the moment it's more of a philosophical... ...making a decision than this is what we want to do. How we do it. And yeah, I think all of these things need to be taken into account. It's not something I've looked at myself. Yeah. Three more minutes. Three more minutes if anyone has an opinion. Haven't looked at the schedule or anything yet. So maybe schedule that now. Anyone here can help with that.