 I'm going to talk a little bit about the past, the present, and the future. Hopefully, it should be fun presentation. But let's get started. So as was mentioned, I'm Dries. I'm the founder and the project lead of Drupal. I've been doing Drupal for a long time. In fact, here is an old photo of me. This is Dries before Dries had spikes. So yeah, that's what my hair looks like. Actually, a surprising number of people asked me what my hair looks like without gel. So there you have it. And as many of you know, I started Drupal as a student. I was around 20 years old, I think. And I just wanted to build a website for myself. And at the time, PHP and MySQL, they were kind of the new technologies. And I figured I would build a system for myself. And eventually, I ended up open sourcing Drupal. And more and more people started to join. And I would also kind of hustle, if you will, to try and get people to contribute back to Drupal and to try and get people to adopt Drupal. And some of you may recognize this person. Do you or do you not? His name is Jeremy Andrews. And Jeremy had a website called Kernel Trap. And it was hosted on a PHP Nuke, which was an open source content management system, way back when. And at the time, this was 2002. So a long time ago. The Linux kernel was new and exciting. And people would talk about it. And people would write about it. And there was a website called Slash. I mean, raise your hand if you know Slash. All right, most of you know Slash. Good. It means we're all at least a certain age, I think. But back in the day, there was something called the Slash.effect. Remember this? When hosting was very expensive and you got mentioned on Slash. Your site would pretty much crash. And the owner of the site would often end up paying thousands of dollars or pounds because of unexpected traffic. This was when hosting was very basic. And so Jeremy would write about Linux on kerneltrap.org almost every few days, I would say. And very often, almost once a week, his website would end up on Slash. And his site would crash. And I was a big fan. I was a small contributor to Linux. And I was a big fan of Kernel Trap. And so I emailed Jeremy. And I said, if you migrate from PHP Nuke to Drupal, I promise you your website will never crash again. That's the hustle part, right? And if you're at the email, you can even see like I offered him root access to my website. So he could check it out without having to install it. And so I ended up talking to Jeremy. And Jeremy ended up migrating his website from PHP Nuke to Drupal. And next time he got mentioned on Slash.guess what happened? It crashed. It was great. But we didn't give up. And we started working together. And Jeremy helped make various improvements to Drupal, performance improvements to Drupal. He even created a module, which was called the Trottle Module, which has actually been in core for many, many years. And the Trottle Module would automatically disable features as the load to the website would increase. And once we had built that, I should say he built most of it, his website did fine. Every time he got on Slash.guess, his website kept up and running. And so I've saved a copy of this email because it's 20, what, two years old that email? Or maybe almost 22 years old? And it was just one email that I sent that led to Jeremy moving to Drupal. Drupal getting noticed back in the day because actually people started writing articles about Drupal with standing the Slash.effect. That was like an innovative thing back then. But maybe more importantly, Jeremy started contributing. And eventually Jeremy started a company called Tag1. And how many of you have heard of Tag1? Yeah, a lot more people. And Tag1 now has about 200 employees. Crazy. And many of whom are contributing to Drupal. Employ many top contributors to the Drupal project. And I just wanted to share this story because it goes to show what one email can do. Like one email led to Jeremy contributing, led to Jeremy starting a Drupal company, led to thousands and thousands of hours of contribution back to the Drupal project. Pretty special. And for me, that was like a big moment when I started to realize the effects of what one email could do. And also started to care about contributors coming into Drupal and making them successful. And by the way, back then, as just as an anecdote, we would email patches to each other. This was before Git wasn't invented yet. But we would literally have a mailing list and people would email me patches. And I would apply them and commit to them. Eventually, we ended up building project module before GitHub existed. So we kind of built GitHub before GitHub. And it's only now that we've been able to migrate to GitLab, now that the tools kind of caught up with what we actually built before they built it. So anyhow, here's an email in bigger. And so eventually by 2005, we started organizing the very first Drupal con. And this was hosted in Antwerp, in Belgium, where I was living at the time. And up until that point, I was working on Drupal at night on the weekends. And I wouldn't really talk to my friends and family about Drupal. I don't know why, but it wasn't just a thing for me. I would just kind of silently work on it, email back and forth with early contributors. And so when 30 people decided to show up in Antwerp to talk about Drupal for a whole week, my mind was kind of blown. I couldn't believe that there is all these people, all these people, that wanted to come to Antwerp to talk about Drupal. And it was a great event, and it was a very foundational event in the history of Drupal because we decided to keep organizing Drupal cons. And so we have, right? There's a few interesting people on this photo. So you see me, where it says me, just in front of me is Chris Messina. You know Chris Messina? He ended up being the inventor of the hashtag. Pretty cool, huh? And you see, I think Zach Rosen, who ended up founding Pantheon, I think is in the photo, or he was at the conference, I believe. Neil Drum, in the photo, is still working on Drupal. He's at the Drupal Association. So anyway, it's interesting what kind of ended up happening with a lot of people that were at the original Drupal con. Now, by 2007, we decided to start the Drupal Association. And part of the reason is that we needed a checking account. Sounds pretty simple, but that was kind of the main reason. So for example, the Drupal conferences that we organized, I would often use my personal checking account to collect the sponsorship money and the ticket sales. And that's probably not a good idea to use my personal checking account. And technically, I think you have to pay taxes on that, because I'm sure that was considered income. And so yeah, by 2007, we figured maybe we should have a checking account and have an organization so that we can keep scaling these Drupal events. And that's when the Drupal Association was born. Drupal kept growing as well. And at the time, I was still doing Drupal as a hobby project in my spare time and evenings. And larger and larger websites started to contribute to Drupal as well. And I remember spending a few evenings on the phone. And this was literally on the phone, because this was before Zoom. It would dial into a conference bridge. And MTV had switched to Drupal. And their site also was having issues. And I would spend my spare time, my evenings, free of charge. I never charged any money for this, helping these websites be successful with Drupal. And so I went from caring about myself, if you will, making Drupal for myself to caring about other contributors using Drupal to really caring about end users of Drupal, these large websites. Because I felt MTV was such a big brand. And if they're not successful with Drupal, it's going to hurt. It's going to hurt Drupal's reputation. And so I felt like I had to jump in and help. And we had a little Drupal dinner, or not so little Drupal dinner last night. And a similar story, Michael Mike told a similar story about a website having issues here in Australia. I still haven't figured out which one. And that's OK. And a number of organizations jumping in to help make that website successful. And it reminded me of my own kind of MTV story, if you will, of how it's so important to help make these websites successful for Drupal's reputation and brand. And so this actually was one of the two reasons why I ended up co-founding Acquia as well. Like I really believed back in 2007 that for Drupal to be successful, we needed to make more large organizations successful. And that was one of the reasons why I started Acquia. And the other reason is because I really wanted to make Drupal better, the software. And I wanted to be able to put a lot of resources to work in innovating and improving the Drupal software. And so I wanted to have an organization that could help with that as well. And so telling you this story because it kind of shows how my personal why, my personal purpose, kind of has evolved with Drupal growing up. My passion really changed from sort of selfishly being the single user of Drupal to caring about contributors and caring about end users. And then something else happened. Like in 2010, we had Drupal in San Francisco and we had over 3,000 people or maybe close to 3,000 people attend. And I was giving my keynote, the Drees note, as they call it. And this wasn't part of my talk track, but I don't know why, but all of a sudden I asked, if Drupal impacted your life or changed your life, please stand up. And like 3,000 people stood up. And it was this very, very special moment. Like you could feel the wave of goosebumps through the room, like literally everybody. And you can see on the photo all these people standing up. It was a very magical moment. And I was about to start crying on stage, to be honest. And it was very transformational in that sense because it made me realize that there is so many people that I don't know, like a lot of the attendees I didn't know, right, that are so impacted by Drupal. And so it really was another step in my evolution and why I do what I do. And I started to really think about optimizing for impact and caring about everyone, versus caring about myself, caring about contributors, caring about active users. I really felt like, wow, it's really about caring about people I don't even know. And that actually led me to really caring about the open web. And I started writing about it, talking about it. And I'm not the only person, obviously, talking about the open web. But to me, it means a web for all. And that became really important for me. And so this image kind of visualizes kind of my own personal journey. And I've said it a few times now, going from writing software for me to writing software for others, specifically contributors, and making their experience great to end users and eventually being really driven about the open web. Because that's how we maximize our impact. And I wanted to tell you this story because I hope that you can all kind of find yourself somewhere on this journey. So when you're new to Drupal, it might all be about you. And that's great. It might be about learning Drupal, getting up to speed with Drupal, building a website, making money with Drupal so you can provide for your family. And that's awesome. But I hope that at some point in your journey, you will also start caring about others and end users. And some of you obviously already do. And eventually, you want to give back to the open web as well. And I hope that many of you will actually go through a similar kind of step process over the years. I think that would be very powerful for the Drupal project. So with that, let's talk a little bit about the present. All right? So today, Drupal powers about 1 in 30 websites in the world, which is incredible. If you think about that, it means that every one that visits websites uses Drupal. Because most people on the web visit more than 30 websites. And so anyone that has visited 30 websites statistically will have used a Drupal site. And in fact, if you look at the enterprise segment, so the larger websites, it's one out of eight websites, which basically means everybody on the web uses Drupal. Maybe not as a site builder, but as an end user of the pages generated by Drupal. And there are so many incredible brands. Like I think one of our biggest assets is the logos and the brands that use Drupal. I mean, I talk to a lot of companies as part of my job. And so few can actually show the brands and the logos that we have. And so I have a little video that I want to play to show you some of the logos, all right? Hopefully the audio will work. Think for a moment of the brands and companies shaped by Drupal, the power brands, the makers, the institutions, the cultural icons that unite us, the ones that make us sing, carry us away, the agile, the resilient, the ones who support them, the developers, the millions across the globe, the marketers, the front line behind the glass, the road warriors, the people out in the wild fighting every day, the agencies, the masters of stress and emotion. So what do all these people have in common? The digital platform that powers some of the most exciting experiences on the world, Drupal. Yeah, the logos are impressive. And honestly, we could create a video like this that goes for an hour. And we would be impressing people for a full hour. I mean, there's that many great organizations using Drupal. Not too long ago, Drupal was also named a digital public good. I'm sure some of you or many of you have read this, and it's actually a big deal because one of the organizations behind it is the United Nations, which is no small organization. And as you may know, they have the sustainable development goals. And essentially, they connected this definition or concept of a digital public good to the sustainable development goals. When you're a digital public good, they're basically encouraging people to use digital public goods because in their minds, according to their definitions, using digital public goods contributes to the sustainable development goals. And the fact that Drupal was recognized as one of the technologies is great news because non-profits, they will definitely look at this. Many organizations that want to have a positive impact in the world, they will prefer the use of digital public goods relative to products or solutions that aren't. And so when you're pitching and selling Drupal, it's something that you might want to consider using because it means by using Drupal, you're actually contributing to a better world in a way because of all of the side effects or benefits that Drupal delivers. So the Drupal Association has also taken a bigger role in promoting the open web. And we went through some strategy work. I think it was last year or maybe two years ago by now. And we said it was really important to not just focus on Drupal, the software, but also to expand our mission and to embrace the open web. And the Drupal Association with the help of many other contributors in the community, they created what we call the Open Web Manifesto. And it doesn't actually look like this. But you can read the full version on the Drupal.org website. And that was an important pivotal moment for me as well and a moment that made me very proud because I'd been championing the Open Web and advocating for it. And now we've expanded that to include sort of more officially supported with the Drupal Association and the Drupal project. And the idea of the Open Web is that Drupal is really built on freedom, that nobody should have permission to learn Drupal or to participate in the building of websites. Everyone anywhere should be able to help build an Open Web. It's also about decentralization and making sure that not a single person or not a single entity or a handful of entities control the web. And that's actually something that we have to be careful about. It's not something that's for granted. Like we have to make sure that the web stays decentralized. But it's also about inclusion and diversity, making sure everybody has a home on the Open Web. And it's about participation and empowerment. If you want to build the best websites and the best digital experiences, they shouldn't just be built by developers. And I know a lot of you are developers. But if you think about how do you build the best experience for an end user, well, you have to involve marketing and sales and maybe customer success people. And that's how you build really great experiences. So it's really important that we can enable everyone to help build towards an Open Web. And for me, part of the motivation to care so much about the Open Web is because I really do feel like that the web is a public good. The web is like what, 30, 40 years old or something? And I really do believe that the web is going to be around for hundreds more years. And I really hope the web will be around for hundreds of years. And if I think about my own kids and how I want them to grow up, what is the web that I want my kids to use? Well, it's a web that's decentralized, that is pro-privacy, where it's safe for them to go, where their personal information won't be exploited by organization. And so I really feel a sense of purpose from that point as well. And I think about my kids, if they have kids. And I want them to grow up with a safe web as well. So I really do believe it's important. And I think that Drupal is in a very unique position, given our size and adoption. One in 30 websites. Like we really can have an impact. We can really lead and show the rest of the world how the web needs to be built. And so I'm very proud and excited that the Drupal Association has made that part of their mandate. And as a Drupal project, we're all about the open web as well. Every year, thousands of people contribute to Drupal. That's another thing that often blows my mind. It's over 10,000 people contributing code every year and put all their names on this slide. I mean, look at that. Over 1,000 organizations contributing to Drupal as well. And the Drupal Association launched a new contribution help dashboard. And this is one of the screenshots of it. And what it shows you is the number of unique contributors and the number of credits to these unique individuals and contributors. And you can see that the charts are going up. There was a dip around COVID. People had maybe less time or opportunity to contribute. But you can see that in the last few years, the number of contributors started climbing again. And this is a really healthy sign. This is great. Drupal is doing well. The community of contributors is growing. If you go to the help dashboard, there is other charts. They're all positive. If you look at the number of organizations contributing, that's growing as well. So it's not just individual contributors. There's other metrics like time to first contribution. The time when somebody joins Drupal at Orric, to the time they actually make their first contribution. And so these things are trending in the right direction. And we're also paying attention to these metrics, actually, for the first time. And we're trying to drive them with initiatives, like how do we make it easier to onboard people? These kinds of things are all being worked on right now. The ecosystem, I would say, is driving with billions and billions of dollars flowing through the community. You think about tens of thousands of agencies around the world building websites with Drupal. It's a lot of money that goes around, so to speak. And some of that, of course, makes its way back to the Drupal project, which is exciting. Drupal is so good at so many things. Like really, sometimes we forget about this. Like how many of you know what cache tags are? All right, like maybe a third, half of you. And cache tags is a great example, you know? It's like a feature that no other CMS has to the extent that Drupal has it. Like, we're literally one of the best TMSs, if not the best TMS, at caching pages. And we don't really brag about it or talk about it. It's just like, oh yeah, whatever. And like, it's a bit of a shame sometimes, you know? And like, I'm sure you know the history, but like, we worked on something called Big Pipe, right? And so, Big Pipe was invented by Facebook. You may know that as well, but if you think about Facebook, it's probably one of the largest sites in the world, of course, but what's special about them as well is that no two pages look the same, hopefully. Because if your Facebook page looks the same as my Facebook page, you have a problem. So here's a website serving billions and billions of pages and no two pages are identical. This is one of the hardest problems in engineering, right? Caching. And so, Facebook invented Big Pipe to solve this problem. They basically flipped the rendering pipeline upside down, if you will. And you know, we built this. You know, Drupal ships with this out of the box. And again, we don't really talk about it that much. Insiders know, but the rest of the world, they don't know. Like, literally, we are one of the most advanced, most scalable CMSs in the world. The same thing with Composable. Talk to a lot of Mac vendors and they talk about Composable and you know, they don't even have Composer. Or something like Composer. They're basically headless services. They don't have like the orchestration tools that we have with Composer to automatically update and manage third-party dependencies. And so, there are marketing circles around us sometimes, even though we are much more mature in these capabilities. Headless is another great example. We started investing in headless nine years ago. Nine years ago, we added web service to support to Drupal Core. This was before headless was called headless. Really. So, headless only emerged later as kind of a new marketing term, if you will. But Drupal has been doing these things for a long time. I think it was, I forgot how long it was, but I'm gonna say it was maybe eight years ago as well that we made a formal commitment to accessibility. And we said, every version of Drupal that we ship, we're gonna strive to be double A compliant. And you know, this was before accessibility became a mandate for many websites in the world. And so, we've been first movers on a lot of these things and we have a lot of great capabilities in Drupal that many people I don't think know about. AI is another great example. Like, I don't know if you know, but Drupal was one of the first, if not the first CMS to have open AI integration. Open AI launched about a year ago and it took all of a few weeks for somebody in the Drupal community to have open AI integration ready. Like we beat every other competitor to it. And today that open AI integration is pretty robust and you can see some of it here on the screen where you can use it to suggest summaries based on text. You can suggest the title and it will automatically make a web service calls to open AI. You can use it to do auto tagging, basically automatically generate taxonomy terms. You can actually use the embedding features. It gets a little bit more technical, but it allows you to see how similar something is to something else. So that you can use to improve search as an example or to do searches like this. You can use it to change the tone of voice of content. It can make things friendlier. It can make things more professional. And this is just some of the things that we can do right now. There's also integration with, it's an ECA, the workflow tools in Drupal. So now you can make these things automatic. So like you can all configure this using drag and drop by moving things around. And when you hit save, for example, it will automatically create a summary of the text. And so you don't even have to manually interact with chat GPT like you can see here. Translations, another big example of how you can use chat GPT integration. So like, you know, like we're very robust in these areas. And again, we have all of this great innovation happening in contrib and we don't often talk about it. So I wanted to highlight that to all of you. All right, modern Drupal between quotes. So it is modern Drupal. You may not have heard this term, but it's essentially everything past Drupal eight. So excluding Drupal seven. And it's a concept that we're starting to talk a lot more about because we have such a large Drupal seven install base that it's really skewing a lot of numbers and a lot of metrics. But if you exclude Drupal seven, and for example, you look at the daily packages installs. This is, you know, I think you all know packages, but essentially the, I don't know what to call it, but it's where we download Drupal core and contribute modules from. That's what composer uses in the background. You can see that the number of installs is kind of trending up. So more and more people are getting their updates from packages, which I think is also really encouraging. Now, sometimes people are like, you know, Drupal is old and those kinds of things. And I don't think, I mean, it is old or 23 years old. There's something beautiful about being part of the foundation of the web as well. And I think about technologies like Linux. And I mentioned how kernel, how Linux at the time that kernel trap existed was kind of the whole thing that would end up on slash dot every day. Well, now people don't really talk that much about Linux anymore, but it's everywhere. You know, it's literally everywhere. There's billions and billions of Linux devices. They're just not that exciting to talk about anymore. The same thing with the iPhone, you know, like you remember when the iPhone came out? I was like, ooh, like the world was buzzing. And the first versions, like people kept talking about all the new features and capabilities. And now, you know, iPhone is like the most magical device, the most powerful device you can have in your pocket. And it's kind of like, yeah, you know, not that exciting anymore. And I feel some of that is true for Drupal as well. Like, you know, young web developers, they may not get excited about Drupal, but it sure is nice to have the infrastructure, you know, just like Linux and iPhones. Like there's an element of that that's impacting Drupal as well. But yeah, Drupal's rock solid, you know, people use Drupal because we've gotten so good at making Drupal secure and keeping it secure. The core committer team has done an incredible job, I think, you know, stabilizing things, simplifying the upgrade path, guaranteeing the security. And there's always more work to do, but we've really come a long way. And I think it's one of the selling points today for why people or, you know, use Drupal. And maybe most importantly, Drupal continues to have an impact on people's life. You know? And I have a video for that as well that I wanted to play for you. So let's take a look at this video. I was a single mom on welfare with two kids, one with a disability, and I was like, I need to find a job. The city came to my house to talk about this because I was on welfare for quite a time. And CXB said like, no, you've got special needs kids, you need to be at home and just stay on welfare. And I was like, no, I need to give my kids a good financial upbringing, you know? And I was looking around, like what kind of job would allow me to have flexible hours so I could take my kid to the hospital on a regular basis, take my kid to therapy on a regular basis. And it would have high earnings to allow me to actually be a profiler for my family. The city at the time had a crash course in IT and you would learn in four months, you would learn how to build websites. I learned about Drupal and I learned about open source communities. And open source communities are like a worldwide community where people put in their work voluntarily and they share code and there's just a very warm place to be. I just gave a talk at DrupalCon about poverty because I studied history and I started gender studies and there are not a lot of jobs in this area but it did give me an insight into diversity. And I noticed that this open source Drupal community is all about diversity and not just as in getting women on board or getting people from a different color or different background ethnicity on board. It's also about being there for each other and having a warm environment. I actually got a job. People allowed me, they took a chance so I got on a government job with a group full of guys and then me coming in. So it was quite a change on the workflow, a good change on the workflow. Drupal actually helped me to get a proper job, a proper earnings and I think that this is something that open source should be. It should include anybody that wants to work with Drupal even though you're not proficient in it. It doesn't really matter. Everybody is allowed to enter. That's how I ended up getting a financially stable life using open source Drupal and providing for my two kids. So thank you for this opportunity and I was even able to join the Dutch Drupal Association and now I can actually put all my energy into supporting this community feeling. Yeah, I mean it's great that all these huge brands use Drupal, but it's stories like this. Why I'm here after 23 years? It's the impact on individuals and I don't know, just people come up to me and tell their story and it's just incredibly inspiring and powerful and I hope you also get to feel that. I recognize that in my role I get a lot of these stories but I want you to know that the work you do and the contributions you make have a huge impact on many people's lives and continue to have in the present, today. So with that, let's talk a little bit about Drupal's future in the last part of my keynote. And so if you think about it, we have this very important mission for all the reasons that I mentioned, the impact on people, the open web. And so the question is how do we amplify that? How do we do more with that? How do we get more people to use Drupal? And so we went to a strategic exercise with the Drupal Association and we basically identified that there's like two main things that we need to do. We need to drive innovation because at the end of the day everything starts or stops with the product. The product needs to be rock solid, right? That's why people adopt Drupal first and foremost but we also recognize that we need to drive marketing. Like a lot of these things that I talked about a lot of people don't know about it and that's a shame. And so we wanted to focus on these two things. Now in order to get more innovation and to drive marketing, we need to grow contributions. That could be code contributions, financial contributions, any kind of contributions. And in order to be successful at that, we felt the need to be more clear about who we are, what we're for, et cetera, et cetera. And so we decided to set a clear focus and our definition of the open web was a part of that. All right, so I wanna talk about these things a little bit more and I'm actually gonna talk about it backwards now, if you will. So I'm gonna start with the focus and then work my way through the other topics for the last part of this keynote. And so setting a clear focus, there's actually a lot to talk about but the piece that I wanted to highlight for this presentation is this concept of ambitious side builders. And I've actually talked about this a few times already but this was actually inspired by me attending a conference and Sacha Nadella was the keynote speaker. It was pretty special, it was a relatively small conference and he was being interviewed on stage. And Sacha Nadella, if you don't know, he's a CEO of Microsoft. I'm sure most people know him but one of the questions was so interesting to me. He's like, the interviewer's like, well, you know, Microsoft is kind of been chugging along under Steve Ballmer things, didn't really go anywhere, there was a lot of failures, they tried to get into mobile, they tried this, none of this thing worked. And all of a sudden, Sacha Nadella walks in, if you will, or gets promoted, it was already there. And Microsoft starts like growing like crazy. It's like a renaissance happens. And so the question was like, what did you do? How did you do that? You know? I was like, wow, that's a great question. And so the answer was also fascinating. He said, well, I talked to a lot of the old timers, the people that have been at Microsoft for 20, 30 years. And I asked them, what is Microsoft all about? And they said, they told me Microsoft is about building, you know, the original MS-DOS, the original Windows, it enabled everybody in the world to build applications and to ship applications for the Windows operating system. And so I decided to go back to our roots and to make Microsoft a company for builders, again. And it's why they bought GitLab, which at the time I was like, why did they buy GitLab? Didn't they hate open source? And they bought GitLab because it was all about builders, is why they invest billions of dollars in Azure. Because guess what? It's the modern version of Microsoft Windows. It's cloud services to build applications on top of it. And so a lot of things in their strategy are about builders. And so I talked to a lot of Drupal people, you know, and a lot of people got into Drupal back in the day because they were ambitious site builders. You know, they fell in love with Drupal because Drupal allowed them to very quickly build something without having to be a professionally trained developer. You know, there were technical people when people got involved in Drupal and they weren't afraid to do a little bit of coding or they could maybe find something on Stack Overflow and copy-paste it and, oh, here's a hook you can copy-paste in a file. And if you do that, it will do this. And people would copy-paste something in a file. Ooh, it worked. And people would feel so empowered, you know, that they got Drupal to do something differently. And so I felt like, you know what? We may have lost our way a little bit and we may have become a little bit too complex or like senior developer focused. We need to think a little bit more about sort of the ambitious site builder again. And so we've been focused on that. And the feedback that I've gotten has been, you know, very positive, I would say. Like some senior developers or sometimes agency owners are like, well, why would we care about that? You know, we have all these senior developers but I think even for those people, agency owners, senior developers, it's great to bring new people into Drupal and the way to bring people into Drupal, I believe is to focus on this particular persona. And we can go on and on about why and I won't do that right now but I'm happy to talk about it. And so we said, you know, Drupal is for ambitious site builders and that's what we're gonna focus on. As I mentioned, we also said Drupal is for the open web and that's what we're gonna focus on. So we defined our focus, you know, and we will continue to refine it as well. But with that said in stone, now we can drive contributions towards the things that are relevant for that. And we're doing that in a variety of different ways. And by the way, after this, we'll have a Q and A and Owen, the current chair of the Drupal Association will be on stage as well, as well as Tim Doyle, the CEO of the Drupal Association and we can talk about all of these things more in the Q and A as well. But we've been very focused on improving our developer tools because that GitLab platform that we developed before GitLab, as I mentioned in the beginning of the keynote has been superseded, if you will, by GitLab and GitHub. And so we've been working with GitLab for many years now to migrate our own tooling to it. And I would say that finally has started to click, if you will, this year. Like we're really starting to see an acceleration of contribution because the tools that we provide now have gotten so much better. The testing has gotten so much faster. Like there's so much great stuff happening right now after several years of investment in GitLab, it's now finally starting to unleash a lot of development. The Drupal Association is starting to focus on the onboarding experience because we do a pretty bad job onboarding people, if you will. And I say that with a lot of care and passion, but people literally sign up on Drupal.org and then there's not much. Great, you have an account. But a lot of other organizations, they'll nurture people. They'll guide them to their first contribution. They'll say, hey, maybe as a next step, you want to do this. And here's how you can do it with videos and instructions and manuals. And we don't do much of that. There's so much opportunity to get people to sign up and contribute and get them to become very efficient. And so we've decided to start focusing on that as well, which I think is incredibly exciting. We're simplifying the core development process. You know, people often feel like, well, it's hard to contribute to Drupal core. And it is, you know, because it's complex and we have a large install base and all of these things, but the core committers got together for the first time in many years, sometime last year. And we spent several days brainstorming, like all the ways we can simplify the core development process. And again, I won't go into the details, but I think some of the core contributors may have already felt a change in the contribution process. Like we're willing to take a little bit more risk, maybe. We're willing to roll back patches a little bit faster. And there's more work to do, but we recognize that we want to simplify and streamline the development process. We've also decided to invest in philanthropy, you know, raising money from organizations or individuals willing to donate. And a lot of these organizations, they wanna maybe not necessarily invest in a single technology like Drupal, they wanna invest in a bigger cause. And our definition of the open web has actually helped us raise money. And so we got $300,000, for example, in the beginning of this year at the end of last year already, you know. And so our philanthropic efforts, you know, we've been able to raise our initial grant, which is really exciting. And that money will be used for innovation and marketing and basically advance our cause. And, you know, this is thanks to the Drupal Association as well. And they hired a full-time person to focus on fundraising and philanthropy, which is pretty exciting. And then we're also making changes to the Certified Partner Program. Not everybody might know what that is, but, you know, people have been able to donate money to the Drupal Association in exchange, they've been listed on marketplaces, et cetera, et cetera. And I think Tim might talk about this more later, but we felt like we needed to really focus more on makers. And so we're trying to incentivize, encourage more organizations to contribute to Drupal. So now in order to be a Certified Partner, it's no longer sufficient to give money. You know, we still want organizations to give money, but we also want people to contribute back to it. Because we want to promote those organizations that contribute. Like if I think about it sort of logically, if we have a project, let's say, there is $10,000 that's gonna go to one agency. Like we should give it to the agencies that contribute back to Drupal. Like let's say that agency makes $10,000 and they invest $10 back into Drupal. Like we should do that over routing projects to agencies that don't give back at all, you know? Because Drupal doesn't really benefit as much from that as giving the work to agencies that contribute. And so that's a little bit the idea. I wrote a very long blog post about some of this, which was called Balancing Makers and Takers. You haven't read it, you can read it. It has some of the original thinking about evolving the Certified Partner Program. But it's really built on honestly economic theory and a lot of the inspiration, like I didn't come up with this, but I read books about it and some of the theory was by a Nobel Prize winner that looked at communities that have sustained for hundreds of years and she extracted design principles like how is it possible for communities to live for a hundred of years without the central authority? And these design principles let me to write this article. You know, I basically took some of the thinking from her and others and tried to apply it to open source. If you're interested in those kinds of things, go read that article, make sure to set a site 30 minutes long, but anyhow. And then marketing, you know? We need to do marketing, like as I mentioned with all these great features, people don't know about it. We need to get new people into Drupal. I think it's really important. The Drupal population, if you will, is aging and getting to new people is important. Marketing is important. We need to go to where these people are. We need to tell people about all the improvements in Drupal, all the innovation happening in Drupal. We have, I meet a lot of people and a lot of their responses are, ah, Drupal, yeah, use Drupal 6 and you know, 3,000 something, and haven't looked at it since. And they really think Drupal has been frozen in time, you know? They don't know about all the usability improvements, the UX improvements there, and all the stuff, right? And so we need to tell people about it. And we also see increasingly more competition, you know? The CMS space has more competitors and we need to make sure we can hold up our own and explain why we're better. And we've already taken a few steps. At the end of last year, we basically went to Web Summit. And it's a great example, like we need to go to where the web developers are. And Web Summit is one of the largest web development conferences in the world, there's about 70,000 people. And for the first time in 23 years of Drupal, we had a booth, you know? That's pretty cool. And so it's an example of marketing and I wasn't there myself, but the feedback that I got was like overwhelmingly positive, you know? People are like, wow, Drupal, didn't know Drupal and this and that. And so we want to do more of it and that's why we need to raise more money and that's why we're changing the certified partner program and all of these things. And so, and then finally, innovation. How am I doing on time? Am I over time? Yeah, all right. I could sense it. All right, I'm gonna wrap it up. So we started investing more in innovation. We had Pitchburg, which was a wordplay on Pitchburg, the location of the last DrupalCon. We did an innovation contest. 35 people submitted. Previous next, actually won one of them as well, which is exciting and we funded for about $100,000 in grants for innovation. We want to do more of those things. And then we're investing heavily in these strategic initiatives. Number one feature request based on a survey that we did, thousands of people responded, is automatic updates. We want to make it easier for people to update their Drupal sites. That is advancing. It's going well, I would say. We're waiting on some backend capabilities to come online on Drupal.org, but pretty far along, I would say, we're also investing in project browser and recipes. Maybe that's what we're talking about very briefly, but today, when people want to install a module, as you know, you have to go to Drupal.org, then you have to figure out the module, which could be hard, you may have to talk to some experts to get advice on which module should I use, and then you need to basically compose or install it. So that actually is a lot of a staked out for granted. Oh yeah, just compose or install, but it's like, huge thing, you lose so many people. The moment you have to leave the browser and go to the command line, you've lost 90% of all potential users, because the command line is terrifying, you know? Like it's not for many of us. And so project browser is trying to solve that, where you don't even have to go to Drupal.org. You can explore all the modules right from within Drupal without having to leave Drupal, and then you can install modules right with a single click. It's very similar to an app store on your phone. It's maybe a good mental model. And then we want to combine that with recipes, which is kind of distributions 2.0. The recipe will allow you to bundle modules and configuration and content, and we can create these higher level building blocks, because nobody really wants to figure out that they need to install token module and this module and that module, just to do a simple thing. Again, we lose so many people, because it's like so hard to figure out what you need to install. And if you don't have access to an expert, it's like good luck, figuring out how to do basic things sometimes. And so with recipes, we can be opinionated. We can bundle a lot of best practices into installable bits, and we can even promote the recipes that we want people to start from. And so we're pretty excited about this in terms of driving innovation for the ambitious side builder. And then we're also starting work on the next generation page builder. It's something that I announced, a Drupal-con-lil, and I'll make sure to talk about that more in the future. And so these are some of the high level concepts that we're working on, I hope, and I believe, and I'm convinced that it will lead to more users, new users makes Drupal less expensive, more contributors, and more open web. And so finally to wrap up, just a couple more slides. What can you do? How can you contribute to scaling the impact of Drupal and making Drupal better? There's many ways you can help, but do wanna recognize and thank the organization behind Drupal South and all of the volunteers for making this event happen because running a local community and running events is a really valuable contribution, and it takes a lot of work. And I'm grateful that I'm here and grateful for all the work that people put into putting this conference together. Coatsprints are a very big deal. Previous next is sponsoring one. I think it's a great way. Usually we pair people with a mentor, we teach you how to contribute. Like it's a great way to get involved. If you're here on Friday, I encourage you to participate. If you wanna contribute, but you don't know how, we will help you. We'll help you make your first contribution. And then finally, if you're an agency, become a certified partner. It makes a real difference, it really does. And so with that, I wanna say thank you. I wanna say let's scale our impact together. Let's evolve on the journey to grow Drupal and to grow the impact of the Drupal project on the web. So thank you with that. And...