 Can you all hear me okay if I talk like this? Okay, great. So my name is Josh Koenig, Josh Kay. I'm here to talk about my vision for Drupal's Destiny, so I'm really grateful that they put me on the core conversations track to do this. I've given a version of this talk a few different times at different camps, starting at Drupal Camp Dallas last summer. So it's been almost a year I've been tooling this thing around. And I've sharpened the presentation slightly because we are in a core conversation and there's a bit less of a rah-rah Drupal and a little bit more of a specific call to action about let's get this thing rocking and rolling. But hopefully you'll appreciate where I'm coming from and then I'm happy to take questions at the end and hopefully this is exciting and motivating for all of you to do more and better things with our favorite content management system. So I got started in Drupal because I was trying to take over the government. That's the scope at which I like to sort of think and that frames the ambitions that I have for Drupal as a project. And what I mean by that was I was living in New York City in 2002, 2003 and trying to agitate against the notion of having this war that we ended up having. So I was doing a lot of hippy stuff, getting in the streets, holding up signs, having like gatherings of people to talk about that. And it totally didn't work. It was absolutely utterly ineffective. And we realized that was because the people in charge did not care. And we believed then or I reached the conclusion that maybe if we changed to the people in charge where we would have people who might care and listen to our concerns and so I got involved in presidential politics. I discovered this candidate who was sort of a dark horse no-name guy from Vermont because somebody put some videos of him on the internet and he said some things that I really agreed with crazy communist things like let's not go to war and let's have universal health care and let's have marriage equality that now seem like total no-brainers but at the time we're verging on heresy. And the internet sort of chose this guy. He was not tech savvy. His staff was not initially particularly tech savvy. They were simply willing to take a chance. They started blogging. That brought them and that got their positions out there more widely. There was a constituency online that embraced those positions and wanted to help. What started to happen was a very, very exciting feedback loop of grassroots enthusiasm, small-dollar donations to actually help the campaign grow and professionalize, and continued use of the internet to amplify the message and do outreach. And it actually really worked. This guy went from being an asterisk and who was supposed to be a no-name, also-rand, no-compete person that nobody remembers for a while being the front-runner of the organization to go up against Senior Bush in 2004. And I got involved in this campaign first just as a supporter, as somebody who said, like, yeah, I like this. But then I realized this internet thing was happening and I thought to myself, well, my real-world meat-space activism skills are at best B+, but my internet skills are pretty much A-grade. So I could do a more valuable thing for this campaign than getting people to sign a petition. I could work on the internet side to help them be smarter and more effective with how they use the internet. And I went to a website that I found called Hack for Dean that said internet professionals of the world unite. We cannot wait for this campaign to give us direction. We just have to do stuff for them. Let's make awesome stuff. And joined the mailing list, and over that summer we sort of hashed out what we wanted to do. We eventually decided that the thing to provide was campaign-in-a-box software for all the affinity groups to have their own web presences. So we did that as dean space because Hack sounds scary to the uninitiated and we didn't want to generate bad press. And we picked up a very early version of Drupal. It was a Drupal 4.1, I believe. That was when the slogan was community plumbing, and that's what we wanted. We didn't want to build this thing from scratch, but we wanted to be able to deliver a pretty high-quality, community-oriented website that had things like RSS feeds and blogs and other stuff so that all the different affinity groups that were springing up, teachers for dean, so that they could all have a web presence and have a voice in this campaign and be part of this movement. And it was a total success. We ended up with several hundred different affinity groups. The campaign itself officially picked up the software and was using it to run state-level campaign operations. And it was a pretty exciting thing. What we actually had built was a very, very primitive installation profile where you downloaded Rtarball, which was Drupal plus a bunch of modules, and then you loaded this blank SQL file that populated it with settings and content so that when you actually booted it, it was like a real website and not a blank Drupal. Unfortunately, the campaign did not work out. It was a... it had a lot more mojo, in my opinion, than the anti-war organizing, but it failed in rather spectacular fashion. When we failed to do it, we thought we would do it in Iowa, and then this guy was on the mic, and the mic was a little hot, and then they just buried him. So that was very sad. It was actually kind of heartbreaking to think about for quite a while, but we kept going. The experience we had as a group of people who had come together to work on this project and seeing... there's one thing to believe that the internet can change the world, and then there's another thing to see people use the internet to make a pretty major dent in what is one of the most change-resistant systems that we have, a.k.a. politics. That was pretty magical, and you saw things move really fast and change really quickly, a very, very intoxicating and empowering experience, and even though it ended in tragedy and heartbreak for me, I'm still very glad to have been a part of that, and most of the people that were involved, some people totally burned out and never want to talk about anything like this ever again, but a lot of people decided they wanted to keep going, and so we turned the tech that was Dean Space into Civic Space, and it became more a transparent thing that was built on top of Drupal, and the founder of this project was my friend Zach, who I had met. He was the guy who set up Hack for Dean originally, as a 19-year-old kid on summer vacation, and we got Neil Drum hired to work on Civic Space. He had been a campaign guy, and he ended up going on to manage the Drupal 5.0 release and now works for the association, and that's just me weighing a lot less. But we basically retooled everything we had done for the Dean campaign to be a campaign agnostic, any cause, any organization. Look, if you're a nonprofit, you shouldn't be sending money into this proprietary system that's just bleeding you dry and taking a big off your donations. We used to call it Don Convio, because they really had you by the balls. They had all your contact records, all your donors, all your content, and we wanted to push this idea of open source into the world of do-good nonprofits and causes, which ironically had not really embraced that at that point. And we were pretty successful with Civic Space. We put up a nice website that explained what it did in terms that those organizations understood. They started using it, and then they would find out after the fact that really what they had gotten was something called Drupal, and then they needed to hire Drupal developers to improve their websites and add extra features and help seed some of the early marketplace for professional Drupal work through this project, which was fun. We did other fun things, like we made bike jerseys. We loved Drupal. We eventually met this guy, Matt Cheney, aka the populist, and he had been a friend of Zach and Neal's at college, and together with Cheney, he was a professional because Civic Space never got a sustainable revenue stream. It was essentially a grant that eventually ran out, and we never figured out how to get more... The whole how-do-you-fund-core-development thing what happened to Civic Space, and it petered out after the grant money ran out. So we thought, well, our friends have started companies, and it's working out for them now to be professional Drupalists. Let's do that too. So we started this company called Chapter 3. This is now on their old website. The new website is super sexy. And I actually should choose whether I chose the most recent website or the original one, which was designed by my mom. But it was exciting. You know, the three of us got together. We're going to be entrepreneurs. We're going to turn the Drupal dream into our livelihood. We're not going to work for the man. We're going to do the things we want to do. And that was a lot of fun, very exciting. Through the further work that we did on Chapter 3, I met this guy, David Strauss, who's the originator of PressFlow and sort of an all-around genius. And we worked together on a couple of bigger projects like the Tenure at Chapter 3. And then we decided to fire ourselves from consulting and start Pantheon, which is designed to be the platform that solves a lot of the like infrastructure and actual real plumbing problems that bedeviled Drupal sites. And so I say all this to give you just preference on my perspective on the market and how I think about things. I like being an entrepreneur. I like being in control of my own destiny. I like creating things. I like to be able to innovate. That's very gratifying. I think that's something that is losing very badly in terrible circumstances. And while you do learn more from losing, the experience of winning is preferable. But more than that, I really, really like being a part of something bigger than myself. And I think that's something that's innate in human nature, is the desire to be a part of something larger than oneself. Actually, I think this is part of a psychological model that I find very useful. It's Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, the way of saying, as human beings, we have a set of needs and you can only address the higher level needs once lower level needs are taken care of. Or conversely, once you have the lower level things, your problem moves up to the next level. So you have your physiological needs, if you can't eat or you have no air to breathe, that's pretty much the only thing you're going to think about until you have those things taken care of. Then you need your safety, which is a little bit more like, how will I eat tomorrow? Am I secure? Do I need to watch my back? Do I need to wear a threat or you don't know where your next meal is going to come from or your next paycheck? That's kind of the only thing that's going to be on your mind. Assuming that we are lucky enough to live in a first world country and in Asada, as you notice, most of us have our physiological needs met and feel relatively safe, we then move on to our social needs, which everyone remembers from grade school and high school, which is you want to be part of a group. And people will actually often pick being the picked on lowest status member of a group and some social needs are being met there and that's sort of a common thing in people or social creatures. But even better than being the picked on member of a group, you would like to have a steam, you would like to be a peer of people, you would like to have good relationships with your friends and your family and your colleagues. And assuming that you're a lucky enough person and actually most of us fall down somewhere in the second and third levels to be honest, or third and fourth levels, assuming you have all of these things met and you're a very lucky and blessed person, there are wonderful problems of self-actualization, which is really Maslow's way of saying what is the meaning of life, like why are we here? Yes, we're here to actualize ourselves and he says people find this through creative outlets, through their spiritual quests, through art, through helping other people in many ways and that's kind of where the peak of human experience is really at. The best times you will have in your life are times when you are being self-actualized or helping others become self-actualized. I believe that the Internet can benefit humanity and I find my own self-actualization through the exercise of this belief and that's kind of where I see Drupal fitting in and to me, Drupal's destiny is to pursue and continue along this path. I think there's a lot of great technical stuff that we'll do and I think there's a lot of great specific use cases that will enable that are also extremely exciting but those things are exciting to me not because they're in and of themselves cool, because I think they benefit humanity and they're going to change the way the world works. I think that the Internet properly executed, which is by no means a given, can lead us to a new renaissance. If you look back at history, every time that information has become easier to access and share and people have been able to generate more dialogue around the quest of understanding one another and the world around them, we've seen great leaps in what is commonly called progress. Standards of living tend to go up. Science tends to advance. People die of less terrible diseases and people have more fun. The renaissance was a pretty cool time. This is a little western centric, but you get where I'm coming from. There was the Dark Ages and then there was the renaissance and that was really all driven by people lightening up about printing information and the church losing some of its authority and there being more diversity in what's going on and that's all what led to the renaissance. Who here recognizes this photo? Okay, so pretty much everybody. I'm going to use this as an example and this is actually super appropriate given the tree snow because he was all talking about photography. In order for us to know about this photo an enormous number of things had to happen. First of all, a highly trained professional had to have a highly specialized piece of equipment and be in the right place at the right time like leaning out of his hotel room window to capture this shot and then he had to hide the film in his toilet tank to be able to smuggle it out of the country and then he had to bring it to a photo editor, a major newspaper which is like a globe-spanning gigantic organization that then had to develop the photos and review them and look at them and select this one and decide okay, we'll publish it and they would take that out to a printing press or whatever other machinery they had at hand and then they would use that to impress this image upon millions of pieces of thin crappy paper so that it could get everyone's face and this is relatively recent this was like in the 80s and that's what you had to do to get an image like that out there you could also beam it around the world on TV and if you think about how complicated that is for people to actually do, it's a lot of work and the point is that in order for us to know things about interesting moments in time there had to be an enormously complex and fairly brittle set of interchanges of information to be able to get this kind of thing out and it certainly wasn't in any way global, if you go and take this photo to the country of China and show it to people no one will know what it is because at the time they were able to say we don't want that here let's not have that information they still do that to a much less degree but it's a lot harder for them to do now and so today we live in a very different world where everyone has a compatible device in their pocket that could take the next one of these photos and they're able to instantaneously share it around the world we become a world effectively that is able to witness itself in real time and process that information that is the raw capability of what the internet lets us do and it opens up wonderful wonderful possibilities for what can be done of course this is how it's used most frequently and I think that a lot of people say that you know you know when you make these big bold predictions you know you're kind of just being idealistic or naive because you look at what people actually do with their cameras they're just out there taking selfies and who cares and I think that while there's a truth to that it is not a very valid critique because when you open up the realm of participation to a much much much wider audience of people like in one era professional photojournalists and in another area everyone with a camera obviously you're going to get a lot more mediocre content that's just to be expected but the point is that at the top end of that most valuable most important content there's going to be exponentially more of it and you can't just get distracted by the mediocre stuff besides people have fun with their cameras it's okay the point is that fail will happen with or without the internet and pointing out things on the internet that are failures is most often when you see skeptics do this what they're doing is just pointing out something that was happening all along that you just didn't know about people would sit there in front of the mirror for hours trying to get themselves to look right now they just do it with a photo and so the internet has to see there's another counter argument about the internet there's a lot of respect for because he took all of his money and put it down on solar power electric cars and rockets which is like that's a pretty baller portfolio and he was at a conference last fall and he was sort of calling out Silicon Valley software startups and being like you guys are just a bunch of punks I'm here trying to get us to Mars and getting electric cars and putting up the solar power cells and you're just like that's the latest app and I think that there's some validity to that critique but I also think that that critique and there are certainly a lot of people who waste a bunch of time and money on stupid apps don't get me wrong but I think that critique belies or misunderstands the fundamental role that the internet and the web in particular I think has to play in making other things possible like actually delivering on all these things and I actually think Ben Franklin is cooler, Elon Musk is cool Ben Franklin is cooler and we have this idea and it's a truism a cliche that's out there that the internet is equivalent to the printing press in terms of its impact on how we live and what we do and everything else and I think that it's not exactly right for reasons I'll get into but it's sort of right and that gets back to that whole renaissance effect in addition to like the political hallucinings one of the things that drove the renaissance was the widespread ability to reproduce information so that you could get books they didn't have to be written by hand by monks to get another copy out you could actually press them and print them and that really drove democratization of knowledge and Ben Franklin, movable type took that to the next level and that's something that we're doing we are actually doing that and we're changing the way that people share this information and all of these big names you hear in the internet industry they all actually just point back to websites this is very simpatico with the grease note the Google is nothing without all the content to index and search Twitter is maybe something but without the ability to link to something and share cool stuff it's not as useful it's not as exciting Pinterest and Reddit would have almost no purpose if you couldn't link to the content behind them that people want and so websites are really we are the fertile fertile organic soil on which all this other internet activity happens and that's where the base for everything else that goes on because there's got to be a there there in order for the internet to be valuable, to be interesting even let alone valuable and that's what we do, we are the printing press of the modern era we are making the there there I think it's actually in certain ways we are more revolutionary than the printing press because the printing press was although it democratized things by making it way faster to reproduce information it was also ultimately a broadcast media you would have a person who would write a book and a person who would read a book and that's a lot like the person who would be on the radio and someone who would listen to the radio somebody who would be on TV, somebody who would watch TV broadcast media has been incredibly powerful but also has been really misused in a lot of ways which is kind of unfortunate and it's not as empowering as what we are doing which is a networked media the internet is inherently a two way system all of our interfaces with it are at least potentially bidirectional and therefore the types of interactions that you can have online are very different than the types of interactions you can have with a newspaper or a radio program or a movie Drupal is a mashup machine it Drupal as software really really most effectively takes advantage of this bidirectional, multidirectional nature really of the internet by allowing you to bring different data sources together and it's been this way for a while I just found this old slide from a presentations act in the days of civic space where you can send data from multiple sources including your users and creating something new out of it that's something that our software that we all work on does very very well it could always do it much better but it is head and shoulders above all the other software that's out there and that's something that I think is in the DNA of Drupal it is in the essence of why we work together so well as a community because the software that we're making is about bringing things together and making connections that's why we have the awesome data modeling tools of use thing that's why the next version of our software has restful web services built into its core because this is what we do we're actually not just a printing press we're not just cranking out pages we're actually helping people connect helping different information sources connect and that's very different and very powerful the medium is the message it's like the Marshall McLuhan thing and in the sense that the website is actually the medium in which most people will engage with the internet that message because it is inherently down to its DNA a multi-dimensional multi interactive system so now I'm going to take a slightly different track and talk about the web as an industry for a second and we can talk about Drupal's place in that so in the United States $500 billion are spent every year on digital marketing that's a pretty good size chunk of money it's about as much money as Walmart makes every year but it's a lot right and $106 billion of it is really spent in what is classically classified as online advertising and that is all the revenue for Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. that's where this slice of the pie is almost like 90 to 95% of the money that they make because they just are selling ads online and they're very good at it $130 billion of it is spent on websites which actually ends more and that makes sense because if you think about it without the website what are you advertising how many of you guys have worked on website projects for several months where someone spent over $10,000 on building their website so a lot of people how many of those projects had sizable advertising budgets behind them after they launched like a couple so there's tons and tons of great websites that get built that don't even roll into the advertising equation at all they're just like I'll get this up there and I'll SEO it and that'll be enough and it works it's good but if you think about it it makes sense that all of this stuff the money that goes into the advertising is actually less than the money that goes into the websites again we are the basis on which all this other stuff operates duh here's the CMS market these are the tools that we use to make websites by volume WordPress is leading in fact kind of running away with the CMS market they're up over 20% now just by volume numbers of domains and sites surveyed there are a lot of WordPress sites out there there are a fair number of Joomla sites out there although they're actually in a little bit of a decline and then there's a lot of Drupal sites and then there's a bunch of other things that are out there too and this long tail goes on forever there's like a long tail that goes out to like the 5th year 60th name and you're still at something like 0.1% of the internet one of the big takeaways from this is that open source is totally winning this there are almost no proprietary systems that have any significant market share at all the big enterprise systems they probably make a fair amount of money but they only power a handful of actual websites and the proprietary site building tools there are a few of them that are up and comers but they're still in that kind of 0.1 0.2% range of the map there are orders of magnitude away from where the open source primarily lamp stack based tools are driving this like we the tools that we make are the ones that drive the web here's just a breakdown of the market leaders you can see blogger is like the only proprietary system with much traction and that's because it's like a software as a service thing that's really easy to use and it got a lot of attention a while back if you look at just the top 10,000 sites you can see Drupal is a much stronger second Joomla doesn't play there as much then there's some other but there's a a lie on the graph that I was showing you which is I was admitting the true market leader the true market leader on the web is none so none means no detectable signature of any content management system so of the people in the room how many raise your hand if you're like a developer like you've written you write some PHP code okay so most of you so prior to doing work with Drupal did you write your own content management system raise your hand so everybody so none none is all of that none is all of the static sites none is everything that just can't it's like people who just put things up there or none is probably also all the different things that are real tools but didn't make like the at a certain point they stopped calculating for around a few hundred different technologies so the point is that there's a lot of the internet is just built on kind of whatever and when people come around to launch a new website or they go to redesign their existing website they don't relaunch it once again on whatever they're going to pick up one of the more modern tools like the ones that we build to use and so the true the true if you want to think about market competition the true competitor that we're up against in the war to make a better web is none it's just getting people to use tools in the first place and I think that we can win that battle we're winning that battle we just got to keep working on it in my book for Drupal winning would be getting up to a double digit percentage there I think that I don't know that we're going to be the biggest but I think we can be big and important and have longevity at that level and be a really really great platform for the web and I think it's important for Drupal to be a winner it's not simply because I identify with Drupal and I want my tribe to win it's because I do deeply believe that there is something special about the Drupal project that it has this destiny to help us realize the potential for a renaissance driven by the internet and I think that more than just being the printing press the thing that cranks out pages for the web Drupal is a way for us to have a different way of organizing and thinking and working together and interacting together you know this this concept of experiences it's not just about like hey glass buy me this jacket it's about how we how we interact with one another as human beings all around the world and that Drupal has a potential to really really help change that and drive that and improve that and it's more than just cranking out pages so what will it take in my opinion for us to succeed at least in the short term I think we're in an interesting point with Drupal 8 just on the cusp I think it takes volumes of people this is an advantage that we have by the way we're doing pretty good on this front but for any technology to really get to that point of being a double digit percentage of the internet you need like literally millions of people that know how to use it at least hundreds of thousands of people that can service it and support it because no technology gets gets to widespread adoption without a huge ecosystem of people behind it you know even Apple though they they stand front and center in front of all their technology and brands how many people how many people in this room when they were younger maybe made like earned money on the side by helping other people how to set up their Apple stuff anybody I did that in college I don't know so like we're all there supporting Apple when we do even if we're not an Apple authorized retailer it was going to take a lot of people for Drupal to succeed it's also going to take Drupal making the leap to these types of devices because the adoption curve on these things is crazy and it's not going back right the the the more and more and more and more of people's interactions through the web are going to be driven through not laptops but phones and tablets and I don't expect that trend to actually reverse at any time and we're going to need to this is not we need to adopt get but I look at github and its relationship to get and I think that there's a need for more things that can do for Drupal what github did forget so if you think about it I think there's some interesting analogies get is a very powerful tool it's also not straightforward to figure out how to use it it will openly mock you if you use it incorrectly and it causes lots and lots of frustration if you're not doing it right and for a long time it was really just confined to people that already were experts in it and already understood it because they had spent the time to learn it or they were kernel hacking or whatever and everybody else was like yeah these guys keep raving about get but I can't figure it out I mean SVN works for me and then github came along and said oh let's make this actually really easy let's make this very straightforward to get started let's help you learn the way to do it and let's like make it easy to collaborate and take away some of the other pain points amazing results and I don't think it's just a symbol as like hosted Drupal because obviously that's not the answer but it's paradigmatically ways to make Drupal more easily graspable for people but not just in a way that like they don't ever have to see the powerful parts it's just that they're not confronted with like the business end of the chainsaw first so I think on the people front as I said that's an advantage we have a lot of people that's really good so keep telling your friends to get into Drupal because it's where it's at we also are good at training we've got a lot of books out there so we can make new people just by promoting our information we're using printing presses to our advantage too we also have this wonderful professional services ecosystem this is also very important the businesses behind the technology help make that technology viable and help contribute to its future development and we have PHP on our side PHP is the most widely used language on the internet there are lots and lots of people who know PHP who don't yet know Drupal but could know Drupal pretty easily PHP is also going through a renaissance of its own as I've been trying to say hashtag PHP renaissance and that honestly PHP the core of the PHP project has become a much more functional community and has been getting out regular releases and other people have been lining up to support PHP and putting resources into it Facebook is really standing behind PHP which I think has been a major boon as I presented earlier this morning with David there's some really great performance enhancements coming with PHP so don't take it when people look down their nose at you because you work in PHP you don't have to take that kind of crap from them anymore I think it's time we had some PHP pride PHP renaissance it's happening and it's going to help us with Drupal but it's not all wine and roses I think that we actually have some significant challenges ahead in part because we're on the cusp of Drupal 8 and there's a lot of uncertainty if you look at Drupal's own publicly available metrics even though we can pick out some stats that say things have been going really well for whatever time window if you look at where we were between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7, we've definitely hit a plateau in terms of committers by month in terms of the activity on Drupal.org the actual website itself that runs it fewer nodes are being maybe that's because people are now posting less forum topics because there's Drupal answers or other things there's lots of ways to interpret this data but I think that it's not wrong to sense that there's some unease in the community and there's a question about whether we're really going to make it and maybe we've plateaued and maybe we need to hit some kind of new breakthrough and I think that is true we actually have to grow more as a community and as a technology and it's incumbent upon all of us and not just doing core development it's really like popularizing Drupal making Drupal accessible showing people how to use it those are the things that drive activity although Ruby on Rails had a bigger hype bump and has fallen off to be down where we are and nobody says that Rails is dead so again I don't think this is doom and gloom but I do think there is a sense where for me personally having been involved in Drupal at the very bottom end of that thing and felt it grow up through that whole curve it definitely feels different now and I'd like us to get someone that get our mojo back around the Drupal 8 release I think we really can, I think it'll be amazing and what can we do to do that? Well I think one of the best things we could all do as developers as members of the Drupal community especially around the release of Drupal 8 because this is really hard to do in Drupal 7 is make the front end developers of the world of the internet really really really feel like their first class members of our community because I think thank you because people do the most crazy amazing awesome stuff in browsers now and there's just so much innovation happening there and we historically have not been helpful for them when looking to do that innovation on top of Drupal so we did a few things early on that were smart like we got on board with the jQuery train but then we were unable to release keep that version of jQuery up to date and so at the very beginning it was like great oh jQuery that's the new hotness we can use that and then a few years later it was like oh I want to do this great jQuery inflation oh I can't use Drupal for that and it's a real downer and I think it's because partly because it takes real work to do this there's like don't be a PHP developer looking down your nose at a front end developer because they have a world of complexity and interesting stuff going on in their space too and it's complex to keep up with and I think it also has to do with bringing those people into our community being more welcoming more like honestly a little bit I think we have some ground to make up here so I would suggest that we should kind of if there are I apologize if it blows a strategy if there are any front end developers in the room but I think we should be over respectful to front end people because I think we have to make up ground with that community I think we should go out of our way to make their lives better to listen to their concerns to try to make it so that they can do their next crazy awesome demo on Drupal instead of on some static site thing and I think that will be huge for us I think we can do it I think we're already with Drupal 8 is moving in the right direction we just have to get the community behind that idea that front end development is first class development and I think we'll be golden we'll reap benefits and rewards from that we also have to master the mobile equation it's like way too hard right now to build great mobile websites and everybody needs them it's like no longer optional you have to have a good mobile website the use cases are evolving very quickly and I think that the community what we can do around this is try to popularize best practices try to think about it more try to think about like actually using our phones and our development processes more this is different than what we've been doing historically over the past 15 years you kind of been you know it was like well my big concern was does it work in IE and now it's actually the browsers and phones are better than than IE used to be like that whole thing but they're also very different and that's a challenge and I think we actually have to make that a first class challenge in terms of what we do like the challenge of mobile is one that we must, must rise to and best and it sucks right the Drupal.org homepage is not a mobile website it just shrinks everything down and like it's kind of usable but it's not really like it's not a mobile website and I think we have to start putting our best foot forward and hopefully that's actually going to be part of the new redesign which would be great because again these numbers are going up and up and they're not going back and if you look at how the amount of time people spend on there don't be fooled by the way people throw out all these benchmarks about how nobody uses the web on their phone and they're utterly misleading because what they do is they don't differentiate between the time spent looking at web content in the embedded browser in the Facebook app or the Twitter app they only look at it when you launch the native browser and so it says like oh only 10-20% of time on phones is spent looking at the web browser when actually and like 40% of it's on Facebook in actuality a good chunk of that 40% is also spent on the mobile web and again it gets back to that point where the websites are what everything boils back to and so don't just think it's all apps because the mobile web is utterly important to the future it's going to be totally key and then lastly of course is our whole learning curve problem right you guys probably are all seeing this graph but I think it's funny so I put it in there you know we have this this kind of weird thing where Drupal sounds great it's kind of like great promises but then you go and you try to get involved in it and it sort of feels like this bridge to nowhere you kind of feel like maybe there was like a bait and switch somewhere along the line because I thought I was supposed to be empowered by the system and instead it's making me feel stupid that's not a good experience right that's not a welcoming experience to other people that are trying to get and use our tools or become a part of our community this is not new either this is a slide from Drees's presentation at the open source CMS summit in Vancouver British Columbia in 2006 it's old enough that Plone gets on the diagram but it's the same problem like richness is what are all the things that you can do I should say also old enough that Vignette rates on the diagram because who uses that it's you get richness right what's the range of things you can do and you get reach which is how broadly can you be adopted and how big is your community and it's interesting that he's a smart dude right he saw this word press Joomla Drupal and if you look at the current market share it's word press Joomla Drupal it's not a coincidence we can make our we can improve the reach of Drupal by building better technology but a lot of it's also just explaining Drupal better better tutorials like the Drupalize me stuff is great but I think we need more voices getting into here's a really simple explanation of how you can have a total win with Drupal and get to an aha moment in like an hour and do that will really improve the reach of the platform and that's something we can all contribute to as developers because Drupal is important I agree I hope I've maybe at least planted a seed for you to think about that but it's also too hard and too expensive the hidden cost of open source software is that you age while you try to figure out how to use it and it's just too hard and that equates to expense whether that's labor cost or just the fact that you don't have the time to invest in beating your head against something that feels arcane and difficult to use we've got to improve that we've also got to improve the fact that there's all this infrastructure you got to take care of and obviously I'm deep into that and that's another layer of complexity that I didn't talk about at all that really does hold back the adoption like WordPress.com is one of the reasons why WordPress is that huge there's like 70 no sorry 17 million blogs on WordPress.com and that's because you don't have to do anything to set it up there's no you don't have to like configure Apache you don't have to FTP your stuff anywhere you just go and so there's a lot of those like probably at least 10 million of them are various degrees of abandonware but it really helps with adoption when you can get the infrastructure out of the way and help people experience the software and I think we think of Drupal very often in our own experience as developers especially those who we are here right you're you've already mastered it and we're like it's like this beautiful building block system and I can just pile the functionality on top of each other and snap it together and create things that if you develop them from scratch would take months in a matter of an afternoon or maybe a weekend and people hear that promise and they go and they kind of get on that bridge to nowhere and they're like no it's like this like what's going on you know it's a huge mess and I'm stepping on things and if you think about it this is not a great experience for people like if all the Lego company did was sell you a giant plastic sack full of Legos like this they would go out of business tomorrow because this is not a great way to be introduced to something it's why they sell Legos like this right there's like a box on it and it has a picture of what you're going to get and you can be reasonably certain that everything you need to get the picture is in the box and it says whose it's appropriate for like this one's for little kids right maybe I don't want to buy that for my teenager or I don't want to buy the teenage Lego's for my little kids right it helps you make a good decision right away and feel good about it and then have a successful experience with Legos and then actually I'm going to back up one and after you get 10 kits and you end up with this because this is the most fun thing to play with but that's not where you start you start here and we can do better with that with Drupal I've seen that work before that was what I saw work with Civic Space was if you can give people an experience that gives them the immediate feeling of oh I understand what this is for I am doing something productive now the rate of adoption you can get for that is much much much higher than the rate of adoption you can get for something that asks its first question of well what does content mean to you it's a great question to ask but it's a little bit inscrutable for the average layman and I think that there's a huge amount of potential for us to sort of productize Drupal further and you know installation profiles have been a maybe valuable maybe just a marketing exercise thing for far too long I think we kind of in the era of Drupal 8 will either see this happen or we'll have missed the boat and I hope we see it because it's really cool when it when it works so to wrap up don't be discouraged be excited the history making part of the web is just beginning that's I think very important to keep in perspective I've been doing this for like 20 years so it feels like old hat to me a lot of the time but it's important to remember that this is we're early in the story of what all this means for the world we're early in the story of what the internet actually does for people in their lives and we're very early in the story of what it means for us as a species that lives on a giant rock that floats through space we've got this mash-up machine but really what we want is something that helps us be better together there's so many better ways that we could live that can be mediated through information it's impossible to overstate the scope of the activity here we're just getting started the whole world is really just getting started we're so early I'm going to show this this little animated graph this is from some World Bank data you can get from Google and I'm visualizing internet access up and GDP wealth and it's going to animate through time and play and so here we can see nobody has the internet right this is like the early 90s and then people in Asada as you notice they start to get the internet and and then other things are happening broadband efforts are going on 2006 2000 there's a little recession and then kind of here we are the data only goes up through 2012 and the important thing to take away from this is most of the people in the world are in the lower left but they're moving up and eventually also out to the right in the next 10 years we will have 4 billion more people on the internet than we do now 4 billion more people that's 4 billion more people who will be interested in interacting with one another who will be interested in creating who will be interested in connecting the potential of what's possible with that amount of people wired up to talk to each other and figure things out is just mind blowing it's almost impossible to overstate the scope of the opportunity that we have not just as Drupalists but as human beings to make a better world for all of us through this medium which has these unique capabilities to empower and so on and so forth and it's not a done deal like clearly the internet can be used for evil too we have to guard against that but I believe that historically is that technology becomes revolutionary when the technology itself begins to fade into the background and we're just starting to see that here in the United States and it'll take a while to see it in other places but when the story is about the technology it's just about the technology and technology is disruptive and it changes business models and so on and so forth but when the story ceases to be about the technology and what it is and starts to be about what people are doing with the technology right and Twitter is not, oh Twitter did this and the story is the Egyptian government was overthrown which largely happened as a result of their ability to use social media to organize that's where really really powerful things start to happen that are very exciting and this is going to change everything for all of us and I'm really excited to be a part of that I'm really excited to be with you and be a part of that and I thank you for taking your time out of your busy Drupalcon to listen to me rant and I hope at least you got something worth thinking about out of this if anybody has any questions you can use the mic Thanks Josh So the disconnect that we find I'm going to mention the higher ed space just because that's where I happen to be is that I have Drupal developers we're good programmers we could build whatever you want we have departments who have kind of an old school business model maybe and they want to be they want to bring themselves out so the disconnect is what do we need to build who's going to come up with the idea of how to help the department or this part of the university or maybe the whole university as a whole who comes up with that middle piece of being able to solve their problem because they're probably not coming up with it we don't know enough about that industry or their particular department or their particular business to come up with it but we can help we can show them maybe some possibilities of what's available so what's that middle piece right there I think that's a really great question and I don't know my guess is that it requires someone to come from one side of the equation and move towards the other and that could be someone from your side that is able to take the time and has the interest to really just sit with the other people and really get in their heads and understand their problems or on the other side it could be somebody who really knows the problems and is going to come over to your side and be like tell me more about the technology how can we do this because you really do need a meaning of the minds at some point people who deeply feel and understand a problem space and people who deeply feel and understand tools before you can get an innovative solution but it's not a third force I don't believe in that I don't think somebody just swoops in from outside and it solves it and is that common for Drupal shops to get people then pay them to go and be part of that or to get paid to be part to do that I don't think that's overtly economically all that column but it's certainly common for Drupal shops to spend a lot of time working with a particular industry or a particular type of customer and get better and better and better and better at understanding their problems and solving them quicker more efficiently, more cost effectively over time and I think that's like a lot of this sort of like the civic space model was a vertical that was like we understood the problems of political organizing because we had just gotten done doing this crazy campaign so we knew that we had an answer because we had lived it and I think that there are a lot of people in the Drupal ecosystem who are getting to that level of knowledge about some vertical or another and it's just a question of now how do you turn that knowledge into something practical which we don't know that's something we'll have to work on Thanks, Josh I think you make a very good and compelling argument for communication, for social media, for open source but easily 95% of this talk you could give at a word camp or at a Jumla Dev days and it would still apply what makes Drupal special in disregard aside from the fact that we're doing it and we're awesome, that aside what makes Drupal special especially when we're not the market leader Right, so the piece that I think that makes Drupal special is the Drupal has the DNA of of interconnection there are like plugins you can stick on top of WordPress to make it into a community site and there are things you can do with Jumla I'm sure to do the same and there are other forum softwares that don't rate in the in the top brand that are just there to like help people chatter with each other I think that to me that what makes Drupal special is that it has both a technical architecture that is incredibly apt for the challenge of bringing different data sources together and rationalizing them and regurgitating them which then makes it very apt to solve the problem of connecting people and data and it is driven by a community that has that same ethos and that's not to say that those other softwares don't also have great communities but there is a difference in their ethos and I think that what makes Drupal special is that it in particular I believe embodies this connective and networked nature of the internet is so revolutionary there's certainly revolutionary potential and everyone having a blog too and I don't want to discount that but I think that there is something you're right to pick on this because I don't think I'm fully articulated in my own satisfaction but the specialness of Drupal is like in the Drees node the notion of Drupal has this hub and it can have you have your users you can have your administrators you can have 9 other different services that you want to get out to that's something that only we really do like the other any other if you want to do that and you don't want to use Drupal you're probably writing it from scratch and I think what the world needs is many many many more applications that can serve that type of purpose a good answer thank you two quick questions Josh one do you see Pantheon as wordpress.com and how does that play in with the fact that you now support wordpress and two what is Pantheon doing to push designers and themers and front-enders are you guys doing much to help with that so the first answer is a resounding no because we are by-foreign of developers and wordpress.com is a consumer product it's really for someone who can't get a developer so we're very orthogonal to that and in terms of what we're doing to bring front-end people to the equation honestly I want us to do so much more and part of that is going to be able to put together documentation and tutorials the one thing that we did was we made sure that even though we were building this very version control oriented like arcane platform that you could still get into the development environment and work there directly because that's how a lot of front-end people prefer to work but like every time I press Sam Richards in the hallway he's like where's my SaaS support and I'm like working on it so we have a long way to go hope that answers your question yes? I love your analogy with Lego and it's a really great analogy for Drupal and Lego because you can buy $20 piece for your three years old also you can buy $400 Death Star that you will be putting together for three months yeah that's actually a really good point too I should work that into my next version it's open source right yes totally one thing I want to mention is that every single Lego set even if it's like five pieces like $5 set comes with illustrated manual yeah I apologize I know everybody would hate me for that but documentation or Drupal.org somehow presumes that everybody knows everything and I'm wondering if Drupal is not just as a community but it has to be somebody who says this is effort that has been promoted to write documentation because I know lots of people who would be very happy to contribute documentation but the process of doing it so complicated at this point that if something doesn't happen somewhat soon people will begin going back to WordPress I think that this is something I don't know for sure but I know that the Drupal Association has been surveying people in terms of what can they do better and particularly like things that relate to Drupal.org I know one of the things that several people have said and I said to them was we should really actually probably have someone full time curating, improving and editing our documentation because there are a lot of people that want to contribute but if all you have is like hundreds of different contributors it's not coherent it's a lot of misconnections and it assumes knowledge that isn't reasonable and you need an editorial process that's not like difficult for people to engage in but that's smart in order to solve that so I hope that will happen I think I agree with you that the documentation, that's something we can all do better at and we can all contribute to so very good point that's great, I hope it will happen by the next Drupal channel see it happened thank you regarding Larry's point I feel like Drupal is special because of all the things that you said but like Larry said I believe that there are a lot of other tools out there that can do it there is beautiful code out there we're getting to that point in Drupal 8 but I really feel that what's special about Drupal is that we're passing that power to sidebuilders it's much easier for us to give a lot of power to sidebuilders and people to become sidebuilders to create these amazing things to connect people so I feel that if we keep that perspective that we're passing that power on to people that are not developers