 There we go. Awesome. But you wanted me to do record. Record version. Play. Play. Record. Hit the record down here. Yeah. Three, two, one. Thank you. Awesome. Wow, thank you all so much for having me here today. I'm really proud to be part of the first Drupal North up here in Toronto. I spent a lot of time up here in Canada. I ran the first venture-backed Drupal startup company called Now Public out of Vancouver for about seven years. So I'm thrilled to be back here. I work for Acquia out of the office of the CTO for Dries, the founder of Acquia and Drupal, where I run a division of Acquia called Large Scale Drupal. Large Scale Drupal is about engaging organizations in open source, enabling them to truly leverage open source and fully realize the benefits that open source can bring to your organization. That's a lot about what I'm going to talk to you about today. What we do is we help organizations adopt the tools and methodologies that have helped Drupal grow and become one of the largest and most successful open source projects in the world. Simply put, by enabling organizations to work together, we form a strategic alliance, we can reduce the costs by creating an economy of scale, and we can create better software through the input of many minds. We have over 60 really amazing organizations and four beta partners that we're working with, and we have some really cool collaborative projects going across organizations like Major League Soccer and Pac-12. So it's really exciting to see organizations come together and work together in open source community. Before I begin though, I just want to say thank you to Angie and Ezra, who helped with this presentation, provided some slides and some input and feedback. And of course, in the spirit of open source, there's a link there. If you guys are interested in using any aspect of this presentation for yourselves, you're welcome to do so. You can download it or just drop me an email, and I'm happy to share it. I thought I'd step back for a second. In Los Angeles, at the DrupalCon keynote a couple of months ago, Dries did this great retrospective, and I thought it kind of blew my mind to see what we've achieved and accomplished. So I just wanted to step back for a second and point out that Drupal is one of the largest and most successful open source projects in the world. We have over a million users on Drupal.org. We have an unbelievable collaborative community of individuals that come together to create the software that we all use. Over 25,000 individuals create that module base that we all glue together to get our sites out. There's over 2,600 contributors just to Drupal Core for Drupal 8 alone. Just to put this into context, it's apples and oranges, but Linux, since they started tracking contributions to their project 10 years ago, they've had just under 12,000 contributors. So Drupal has an unbelievably vibrant community that comes together to create the software. It's really unprecedented. Another really cool thing about Drupal is that we power millions of websites. We're not talking about just personal blogs. We're talking about every industry and sector. Major organizations in healthcare and finance, retail, organizations like Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson are transforming their business and how they go to market through tools like Drupal. They're dropping their costs by 50 and 60 percent. They're rolling things out 50 to 60 percent faster. We're truly changing the face of business in these industries. Almost every major media company in the world has some Drupal website. Organizations like NBC Universal have standardized on Drupal. They have over 100 Drupal websites for major properties, including several top 100 websites. Seven out of eight U.S. universities, and this extends out through the rest of the world, similarly, are using Drupal. They do some amazing things. I'll talk a little bit more about that momentarily. One out of three, 33 percent of U.S. government websites use Drupal. And we're not talking about just small sites here. We're talking about the ability to scale to serve the most complex and sophisticated needs in the world. We're talking about WhiteHouse.gov, the largest government website in the world. We're talking about Weather.com, a top 10 website, and higher when there are major weather events in the world. Mile Olimata, Examiner.com, or NBC Sports, the Olympics. There are also many organizations that don't just serve millions of pages every day, but they're organizations that rely on Drupal for mission-critical, can't-fail, one-day, must-happen events, like Grammys. Music's biggest night, the last five or six years, has relied on Drupal. These organizations have to scale up massive traffic amounts instantly and then drop back down. Another great example, Turner Broadcasting, which does the NCAA and March Madness. They literally spent 11 years out of the month preparing for one month that literally drives billions of dollars of revenue for the company. Hundreds of millions of dollars of width are generated online. If they have a failure, they literally can't recover from it. It just cascades. It's so critical that they are up. You're not talking about an individual losing your job. You're talking about divisions of people losing their job and a material impact to a company. If that website doesn't succeed. Drupal, the software that we've come together to create, has really enabled businesses to drive their needs. The thing is that no one has a single website anymore. I have multiple websites personally. Most organizations have a couple hundred websites. Some of the EDUs that we work with have over 10,000 websites. They want to enable everyone in their organization to be able to quickly spin up a website for their own needs while maintaining security and compliance issues, providing guardrails so that they can use their system. Warner Music Group uses it to power all of their artists. The National Basketball Association uses it to power all of their basketball teams. Really, we've created this amazing platform that can do everything from serve the individual needs of a local and state government or a small business or your personal blog, and scale all the way up to a top 10 website and everywhere in between. But as astounding and remarkable as Drupal the software is, what's really amazing and powerful is the community behind Drupal. Eric talked and touched on this in his segment, an introduction earlier. Andri said, it's really the Drupal community and not so much the software that makes the Drupal project what it is. So fostering the Drupal community is actually more important than just managing the code base. What makes Drupal great are the many minds, the perspectives, the ideas. It's the contributors. It's the people in the room today who come and participate and show up and create this amazing community. So you guys all deserve a round of applause for coming today. This is a great form of participation. What's driving? There you go. You guys are awesome. Innovation is driving Drupal's growth and adoption. The success of the platform has been astounding. And with each major release of Drupal, we have more than double the size of the Drupal community. We're on track to more than do this with Drupal 8 already. We have more than double the size of our contributor base, the install base. And today we have this amazing global community of Drupal. There are over 500 local meetups every week that you can go to around the world. It's just astounding. It was so cool to see that group of people up here on the stage before from all the different local user groups that have come together to put on this conference here today. It takes a tremendous amount of effort and energy. And it's this community that's driving innovation. And it makes Drupal what it is. I'll give you an example of the breathtaking speed that this community can operate at. In 2011, Google launched their new social network, Google Plus. And this happened around June 28th. Literally, like less than 48 hours later, Ryan Sarzma released a Drupal module integrating with Google Plus before Google even had an API to integrate with Google Plus. We had basic integration capabilities. But in the true spirit of community, he says, I'm open to ideas on how to develop this further. Don't be shy about posting ideas to the issue queue. And I'm also looking forward to having a full API to play with. We are a community that fosters contribution. We want more people to get engaged. There's no doubt that Drupal benefits from your participation. You guys have seen Dries' keynote from DrupalCon Amsterdam, where he talked about open source scaling and sustainability. If you're interested in that stuff, phenomenal talk. I highly recommend you check it out. Drupal is getting more and more complex. It used to be that you could be a master of most subsystems, or at least half a dozen. You could be a maintainer of multiple subsystems. Today, it's a full-time job to be the maintainer of any single subsystem, let alone to coordinate communication across subsystems. Forget about your full-time job, family life, personal activities. We definitely need to get more people involved in Drupal to continue this amazing growth and this unprecedented success. Clearly, only by working together can we achieve this. Really, what I want to talk about is, while Drupal needs you, why do you need Drupal? Why should you get engaged and involved in open source in the community? Simply put, for many of us or most of us, your career, your business is or is about to be driven in large part by Drupal. It really behooves you to be part of that rising tide. That's what I want to talk about is, why is it that you should get involved in the Drupal community? A lot of people say, oh, it's about altruism and giving back and social responsibility and it can be about that. That's a great thing. More importantly to me, I think it is a way to radically improve your career, to change the way you do business, to grow your company. There are tremendous benefits and that's what I want to talk about. Why should you adopt open source? Why should you get involved? There are tremendous benefits and advantages from participating. I'll walk through first some personal things. What is it that you as an individual can get out of open source? I want to talk about organizations and users, many of our clients that use Drupal and how they can benefit from organizationally getting involved and then I know that there are a lot of agencies here and development shops and people that make a living off of developing Drupal and I want to talk a little bit about how that helps you. As an individual, coming to an event like this today, you have an opportunity to meet some amazing people. I have an opportunity to catch up with old friends, people I haven't seen in a couple of years, opportunity to meet new people. Invariably I'm going to learn about amazing tools, projects, solutions and I may not be able to leverage them tomorrow or in a couple of weeks but I assure you from spending over a decade in this community a couple of months down the line a problem is going to come up with one of the clients I work with or a project that I'm working on oh man, have you heard about this? Do you know this person over here? I went to Drupal North and I reconnected with Khalid and he's got this amazing project going on and it's going to solve your needs. I don't just know about that, I've had the opportunity to meet with him to sit down with him and talk about it, form a relationship with him. So doers have tremendous insight and awareness which is going to help them execute and also simply showing up to an event is a simple form of participation. One of the things I want to point out is that you needn't sign over your life to Drupal. Certainly many people get very engaged, it is a big and important part of what they do but there's a full spectrum of what you can do and how you can contribute and it's not expected that everyone is going to dedicate their lives and their careers to this but definitely the more that you put in to open source and getting engaged the more that you're going to get out. Doers and people that get involved in the community learn and grow and accelerate their career. It is some of the best free training and education that you can get. Not only are there actual little training sessions at the beginning of these conferences, we had yesterday with Pantheon had a training session and there was a Drupal 8 training session. You have the opportunity to learn the latest best practices and if you get engaged in things like Drupal core development you're literally building the next generation of best practices and tools that the rest of the world is going to be adopting. Drupal 8 is coming out later this year. People have been working on it for three years. Most people are going to begin to start adopting that over the next six to 12 months. So we have thousands of experts that are literally leading the world in technology and there's no barrier to entry. You can be a part of that group, you can come, you can show up and you can collaborate with and learn from your peers and you can accelerate your career and take it to the next level. Doers also tend to get much better help and they tend to get it faster. I'm not guaranteeing you that if you get engaged in the community we're going to solve all your problems. That's not what we're here for and that's not how it works. But frankly no one has all the answers, right? We all get stuck from time to time. We all need a little help from our friends. And it's just human nature. We're really busy people. My inbox is overflowing. Forget about inbox zero. I gave up on that concept years ago, right? I've got a tongue going on. I'm sure you guys all do. They shout to me all the time and they say, oh, I have a question. Can you introduce me to this person? I need help with this. If you're not on my priority list, you're not a client I'm dealing with. You're not a close personal friend. It's going to be really challenging for me to find the time to help you. But if you're Mosh Weitzman or Alex Pott or any individual that maybe has helped me in my business or helped me succeed, helped the platform grow, you better believe I'm going to try and find time to go out of my way to try and help you because you've helped me. I can't tell you the number of people in the community that have jumped in and helped my businesses and my initiatives over the year because of my participation in the community. It's unbelievably astounding to see what people are willing to do and the success that they want to see for Drupal on a platform. Another really important factor is that doers have a much stronger voice. One of the great things about open source is that it puts you in the driver's seat of technology. It gives you the opportunity to control and shape the tools and platform that you use. You just don't have to wait for someone's roadmap. You can fix bugs, you can add features, functionality, you can do whatever you want with it. But affecting change from the outside can be really difficult. I remember over 10, 11 years ago, 12 years ago, geez, time flies, I submitted my first pass to Drupal. People are like, who is this dude? You have to gain credibility in a community. You have to form trust in relationships. Yeah, you can affect change. You can improve Drupal having never showed up, but it's significantly easier to get your ideas and to collaborate with people and to make change if you're part of that community. You get engaged and involved. Your changes are much more likely to be accepted faster. Again, not a guarantee that your changes are going to be accepted at all. But it happens typically. The other thing is it's really not just about work. We are not automatons. We make sure that we have a tremendous amount of fun in the process. Through Drupal, I have had the opportunity to meet really amazing people, to develop lifelong friendships. It has turned the world into a village. I have the opportunity to travel around the world and very fortunate, and everywhere I go, I know someone through Drupal. I'm connected to world events and society around me. More important than that, I feel like I'm part of something bigger than myself. I talk to my friends, I live in New York City. We have a really active and awesome vibrant startup technology scene. I meet my friends at work for all these cool startups. They're like, oh, look at what I'm building. I'm like, you know, I don't want to poop at what they're doing, it's cool. They're like, oh, it's so cute, you're building a website. I'm building an ecosystem of millions of websites. I'm helping the world transform the way that they look at and build technology. To think that maybe I've had a small part in creating and shaping this amazing thing that's Drupal, that's helping local and state governments, that's helping educational institutions, that's helping nonprofits, as well as businesses succeed and transform, that I haven't had the opportunity to be part of that, is I think truly remarkable and rewarding in its own right and literally sometimes makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up when I see the growth of the community and how it's transforms people's lives and businesses. I think that's an important thing. Clearly, tremendous benefits for you as an individual, I've just touched on a few high level goals. You should really get involved. But what about business? This isn't just about personal growth and certainly if you run a business, I would hope that you would want everyone on your team to grow and excel and be the best that they can be and for those reasons, you should certainly encourage your employees to get engaged in an event like this and the Drupal community and to grow and to build their career. But beyond that, there's tremendous business benefits for you and your organization to get involved and to contribute to Drupal. And I'll tell a little story. I call it A Tale of Two Cities. It's a cheeky little story about two enterprises and I'll give you some real-world examples along the way. We have two main characters in our story. The first is DIY Corp. Do-it-yourself company. And their company model is we've been reinventing the wheel since 2003 and their corporate headquarters, of course, is in the silos next to the waterfall. Yeah, I thought it was going to be a little touchy so I thought I'd go with a story here. And our second is collabing and there's a module for that and, of course, there are a bunch of hippie tree huggers and their headquarters is out in the forest somewhere. Let's talk about a common scenario. Organizations adopt Drupal, either as a critical aspect of their business or powering their web technology. Invariably, you're going to have to extend that at some point that you're using it. Let's look at the two different approaches that these organizations are going to take and how it affects their business. DIY Corp, they want to extend Drupal? What do they do? Well, logically to them and you're operating in a vacuum, you either write code or you hire someone to write code, right? You got to solve the problem, right? So that's what you do. You jump in and you write code. You take what improvements that you make to Drupal and you host them locally, right? You put them in a private code repository. You don't share them in the world. No one else knows about it. You created it. You funded it. You own the long-term support, the cost, the maintenance, the upgrades, the enhancements, everything. You're solely responsible for it. If you have a problem with your code, you run into a bug, an edge case. You're not sure what's going on. You don't have too many options because you created the problem or the people you hired created that problem. You've known to turn to. You're not part of the community. So your option is to whip out the debugger, a stiff drink, get down to work and try and figure out what the hell is going on with your website and your system. On the flip side, we have Collab Inc. What do they do when they need to extend Drupal? Well, the first thing that they do is they look into the community to see if there's already a solution to solve their problems. I don't want to reinvent the wheel. That takes time. That takes money. I've built a lot of login systems and click and do that. I don't need to prove that I can do that. So the first thing they want to do is see if there's a solution they can quickly leverage or something that's close enough. Maybe they can take a kernel and build upon it. But it saves them a tremendous amount of time. More importantly, it creates a community. They're not going to go off and create software on their own. If there isn't a solution that doesn't yet exist, what they're going to do is they're going to create a new project on Drupal.org. From the moment they start, not after they build the code, when they're done with it, they're not going to release it later. That's still better than nothing, but they want engagement from the very beginning. They want to engage people in their ideas. They want to form a community around this code so they can share the upgrades, the enhancements, the bug fixes, the long-term support and maintenance so they can work together to build software to drive down costs. So they're going to share it publicly. When they get stuck, they're going to reach out to a global community. They're going to reach out to the friends that they met at Drupal North and they're going to say, hey, I know you're using this piece of software too. Did you run into this problem? How did you solve it? Maybe there is a solution on Google. I can't tell you a number of times that I do development by search. How do I fix this? We just talked about the Drupal 8 development for the conference website, searching Twitter. There's a whole community that you can rely on to reach out to you to get help and support and to grow your business. Here's a great real-world example of that. A five-star module does exactly what it says, which makes it such a great example. You can literally rate a piece of content from zero to five stars. It was originally developed by Lollabot, one of the first Drupal consulting companies, a really well-known company in the ecosystem, and Jeff Eaton is going to be giving the keynote tomorrow, I believe. They built it on behalf of a client Sony BMG who had moved all of their artists over to Drupal, and they were on Drupal 5. Well, Warner Music Group, a direct competitor to BMG, comes along and says, we're going to move all of our artists to Drupal. It's a great idea. And actually, we need to rate content in items, too. So we're going to use your five-star module. Some people go, oh, my God, you know, I can't believe direct competitor giving their competition a leg up. But what really happened is that WMG, around a year later, ported their website to Drupal 6. And along the way, they added feature enhancements, they fixed some bugs, they improved the software. And just about that time, Sony BMG was going through the process and, man, OK, Drupal 6 is out. They've got all these great new features. We want to upgrade. We've got all this work to do. Well, they went online, and it turns out that they could just download the module. Right? And so their upfront investment created a community around that software that literally upgraded it from version to version and improved it. And now they were able to just download it and get up and running with it. And so what these organizations are doing is they're forming a strategic alliance, right? This co-op petition. They're saying, we're willing to work together on areas of technology that are not core or unique to our business value. We are about creating awesome artists and music and great content. We care about five-tar rating systems and slideshows or any of the web technology things that are going on. That's not who we are. It's not what we do. Technology is a commodity to us. This is a cost center. And so they're willing to put their differences aside, form that strategic alliance, and work together. And it's transforming their businesses. Another very common scenario, I hear this from pretty much every client, every partner that I work with, any hot technology, there's a very hard time for organizations to attract and retain top talent. And I have these major world brands, these household names come up to me and say, Mike, I don't understand why I can hire Drupal talent. Everybody knows who we are. Everybody loves us. And no one wants to come work for me. I say, what are you doing? Well, DIY Carp, which has downloaded Drupal and is operating in a vacuum, they go out and they post to generic job boards all over the world. And they say, hey, we're this great company. You love us. Come work for us and do cool things. But as a Drupal developer, I'm not really going to hot jobs or whatever it is people search these days for jobs. I'm a little out of touch with the job search thing. And they're really unknown to the larger Drupal community. They've never come to a Drupal conference. They have no technology brand. They may be a household name, but I'm not interested in coming to work with them. I may be aware they're whatever it is they make or I'll use their products, try and be careful not to mention any one company. But they're in a really tough spot because no one knows who they are in the technology world. They have no reputation. And worse, they have very limited insight into their applicants. I can't tell you the number of times individuals have applied to a job that a company have worked at where they boast about or embellish about what it is that they did for a particular project. The only way that you can really get a sense of things is through referrals and references. Maybe you put them through some sort of like exercise or exam before you hire them. You're doing your best to kind of figure out who is this person. What is it that they're truly capable of? What am I getting into here? Frankly, a lot of times, I shouldn't be surprised anymore, but you pick up the phone, you check the references, and they say, actually, no, they weren't the lead in this project. They were an intern. It's really hard to see. The last thing I want to point on here is you are providing a disincentive for people like me to come and work for your company. I talked about career growth earlier, learning, advancing yourself. I want to do awesome things, and I want to go work for a company that's going to let me do awesome things, and that wants me to be a better person is going to help me grow. So if you're not enabling your talent to do this, you're not going to be a great draw, no matter how great and world-renowned your brand is, frankly. Clab Inc, on the other hand, they attend and sponsor conferences like Drupal North, right? They are a big part of their community. They know people in their local markets, right? They already have a pipeline that they're generating. This is not going to solve your talent problem overnight. I'm not saying that there is a... I'll give you a good idea later, but there are typically no quick fixes to solving your talent problem, but I've worked with major organizations and I've helped them get more engaged in the community, and I have seen them transform from having absolutely no Drupal talent churning and flailing with their technology to having recruited an amazing group of people and being able to achieve, you know, just astounding things, and it's about getting into the community, talking about the cool things you're doing, and saying, hey, we're open to working with you, right? The community, you know, I formed a brand. They know who I am. They know what I'm doing with technology, so I'm not just a brand. I'm a cool technology brand in a place that people want to go. I'll go into a little bit more detail on this, but open source is about transparency, right? So I have unprecedented insight into the people that I'm about to hire. I can do very strategic recruiting, and I have great insight and can do analysis. And because I'm enabling my resources to be part of a global community to contribute to a project, I'm providing an incentive for their growth and career, right? Now I'm a really attractive place to work, even if I'm not a great brand. You know, I'll give you an example in a minute here. We'll use Webchik as the example. She's obviously not looking for a job. But you know, the first thing that I want to do when I'm going to go out and hire a new individual is I'm going to look at their Drupal.org page. I can't tell you the number of times I've tried to hire a Drupal engineer, and they said, oh, I had six years of experience in Drupal. I'm a senior Drupal developer. And I said, great. What's your Drupal.org, Nick? I want to go check it out. I said, oh, I don't have one. Are you kidding me? Like, I'm really skeptical at this point, right? So you're saying you've been developing open source software. You can sell yourself a senior developer. And maybe that's possible. But I'm going to be extremely skeptical that you're claiming that you're a senior developer and you don't have any code or any reputation in this community. So I can look at Angie's user profile. I can see, oh, she's been a member of this community for over eight years. She's pretty senior. I can look at what it is that she's contributed to the project. How does she work? Angie actually documents code. I'm in love. Who documents code, right? More importantly than that, I can see what it is that she works. One of the ways that I've solved my talent problem in the past, and here is a quick fix that can help you, is I go through Drupal and I see who's contributing to what projects. Well, when I was an examiner and now public, we were doing a lot of work around multimedia systems, right? Or caching and performance and scalability. So I reached out to the leading contributors and I said, hey, it doesn't look like you're being paid to do this. I think you're doing this on your personal time. I want to hire you to work full-time on making Drupal faster. I guarantee you that the majority of the code that you create, that we're going to open source. We're going to be a big part of the Drupal community. We're going to help shape and drive the future of Drupal. Within a year, I had 15 of the top 100 contributors working for me. So, you know, organization is sitting saying, I can't find talent. You're not approaching talent in the way that they need to be approached to attract them. Beyond that, you know, I can see how an individual represents themselves in a community. Again, it's not about what you tell me, it's about what I see. You know, are you a senior developer? Okay, well, are you in the forums asking lots of questions or are you actually helping other people and answering questions, right? You know, are you a douchebag or are you polite? You know, are you a good person, right? Do I want to work with you? And I get a sense of you in the interview pretty quickly, but you know, I want to see what you're like under pressure, right? When the shit hits the fan, I want to know how you're going to react and how you hold yourself up as part of the community because you represent not just yourself, but me as an organization, right? And I can see exactly what you've contributed. I don't need to put you through an exam. I can look at the code that you've contributed to the project and I can tell whether or not you're a great developer, whether or not your interests, approach and methodologies align with what I'm looking for. I can get a much better sense of what I'm getting into when I hire you as a resource to come work for me. So, clear benefits for you, clear benefits for an organization. I want to shift for a minute and talk specifically about, you know, development shops and agencies and why this is really good for you because I know there are a lot of folks here. I'm just quick out of show of hands who here works for or does, you know, Drupal development as their, you know, primary job. Wow, okay, so this will be great. This really differentiates you from the competition. The agencies and partners of Acquia that I talk to that are meaningfully engaged in the community and there are a remarkable difference in their business and how companies approach them, right? It is a differentiating factor. You think about it, if you're a client and you're going to go out and you're going to hire an organization to help you build a Drupal website, would you rather choose an organization that builds on top of a platform or would you rather choose the organization that's meaningfully engaged and actually creating and building out that underlying framework? Well, all things being equal, if I can afford to hire that organization that is meaningfully contributing to Drupal, that gives me tremendous confidence in your capabilities and your ability to solve my problem, right? Everyone thinks they're unique snowflake with these crazy needs and so organizations are going to see you as an expert not just as an implementer in this platform and it's going to give you a significant competitive advantage. It's also going to help you win business. I talked to several of the organizations like Chapter 3 that has Alex Pott, a full-time employee that they invest into Drupal is one of the five core committers in the world. App Innovation, Phase 2, FFW has two core contributors. These organizations are saying this is a really worthwhile investment because since we've done that, organizations have approached us and said we want you to bid on this project or forget about bidding, we want you to do this project, right? They're getting leads and business because they are experts in the community and again organizations want to work with not just people who implement Drupal but the leaders and the people that are shaping the platform. So it gives them tremendous competence in your capabilities and most importantly to business, this is about money, right? If you could build the same thing twice as fast and half as costly, you're making more money, right? You're doing things better, faster, cheaper and that is what open source is enabling many organizations to do but it's about how you use open source and not just about downloading it, that's not going to give you a 50% savings which driving, you know, Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson to drop their costs in their rollout times by 50-60% is because they're doing things like leveraging the tools and technologies and the methodologies of Drupal so they have an internal distribution of Drupal, right? A Drupal distribution that they leverage to quickly stand up their new websites, right? So they don't have to glue together 20 different modules, they have a couple base configurations that they can quickly templatize and pull together. So they, you know, it used to be they had to get a host of the account instead of a website and literally, you know, in an hour or less, you know, minutes people can spin up websites with absolutely no technology experience, right? And so it is transforming the way that your company is going to do business and the money in your pocket because you're literally going to be doing things better, faster and cheaper. So, you know, Drupal is a global community of people and organizations and you can benefit from downloading Drupal and using it in a vacuum. It's a great piece of software. You don't have to give back, right? You don't have to participate in the community. But if you really want to get, you know, the true value and benefits of open source and Drupal, it behooves you to get engaged in the community because Drupal is really about a set of methodologies and best practices and a global community of people and working together in that community with those best practices to develop software. And when you do that, that is when you really see the true benefits of, you know, building. So I hope you're sitting here right now on the edge of your seat saying, all right, Mike, I can't wait to get more engaged in the Drupal community. What do I do? How do I do it? So I figure I wrap up and talk a little bit about how it is that you can get started. I said, there is no barrier to entry. Drupal is a duocracy. If you want to make something happen, you have to jump in, own it, and make it happen. All you have to do is get started. And there are so many resources out there to help you. You know, I said earlier, we are a community that wants you to get engaged and we provide tremendous resources and help to do so. Showing up to events is a simple form of participation, a great opportunity to meet people and learn things. You know, we talked about the 500 meetups that happen every week around the world. There's meetups. There's three meetups in New York City where I live, including a Drupal drinks meetup. You can get together and have beers with your Drupal buddies and talk about problems. Believe me, that really helps solve problems. You know, there's Drupal camps, you know, events like today. So meetups can draw, you know, anywhere from 10 to, say, 50 or 100 people. Camps like today draw, you know, typically in the 200 to, say, 1,800 range. You know, there's business summits, right? This isn't just about technology. Maybe you're wearing a suit and tie or you're a business stakeholder or, you know, you're a site builder or you're less interested in the technology components and you want to talk to people about how business, you know, Drupal is impacting their business and driving growth. Go to a Drupal summit or, you know, a business day. We typically have a couple of those every year. And I'm curious, who here has been to a Drupal con? Awesome. So I'm largely preaching to the choir here. All right. We'll skip through this. You know, it is a spectacle. I don't know what else to say. To see, you know, 3, 4,000 Drupal developers running around at a conference, it is just, you know, it's vibrant. It's really a remarkable experience. Barcelona, Tupacana is coming up September 21st through 25th. I highly recommend you check it out. And if you're interested in getting more engaged in the platform, there are sprints. So sprints, there's a sprint on Sunday as part of this camp. This is an opportunity to sit with your laptop out next to amazing Drupal people as well as, you know, newbies working together with the laptops out. Many camps provide mentoring services or, you know, informally or formally. If you go to Drupal con, the Friday of every week of Drupal con is a community sprint. We have community mentors that will come in. You could have never installed an IDE. You could have never written a line of code in your life. You can do nothing about Drupal. They will literally sit with you, hold your hand, help you install the software, get you up and running and walk you through your first contribution to Drupal. They have projects for everybody. You know, this isn't about just code. You know, there's opportunities to contribute pretty much on every level and every layer of Drupal. You know, if you want to do translations, we talked about, you know, the French translation for this website, for the conference, automated QA testing, you know, building on infrastructure tools like the underlying QA bot and testing infrastructure, marketing, UX, project management. I mean, issue key firing, the list goes on. You don't need to be a developer. You know, you could help organize an event. Of course, code is critically important to Drupal. We highly recommend that you get engaged. The reality is that individuals and organizations don't do one of these things. They typically do some mix of these things across one or many of their resources. And if you can't do any of these or you have money, a great way that you can participate and support Drupal is by donating money or sponsoring a local conference and event, right? Win-win for you. I'm not asking for you to do anything that isn't going to help or benefit your business. You know, putting your logo, your name on a conference and event like this helps you build that technology brand, helps get the word out about what you're doing, gives you an opportunity to come up on stage and say, hey, you know, we're a cool company doing great things with technology. Maybe you want to check us out as a client, as someone you want to come work for. So it helps you build that brand. I hope you guys are all aware of the Drupal 8 Accelerate Fund. We're trying to get Drupal 8 Release Blockers finished to get Drupal 8 out the door. We're addressing, you know, the finishing touches, performance scalability, security, you know, the testing infrastructure. We are so close to our $250,000 goal. Just go to Drupal.org, D8 Accelerate, and you can donate and contribute to that fund and help us reach that mark. One thing I want to make sure is that you guys are taking credit for your work and that you're crediting others. I don't know if you guys are aware of the new commit structure. I'm not going to get into the technical details. But when you make a contribution to Drupal, you can say, I did this. And I did this on my personal time, and I want the credit for it. Or you can say, I did this, and I worked for Acquia. And Acquia paid me to do this contribution. And so you can give them credit as well. And perhaps we did this on behalf of a client. We did this for PAC-12, one of the organizations I work for that helps support the Drupal 8 Accelerate campaign. So you can say, I created this PAC to Drupal or this documentation or whatever on behalf of Acquia and our client PAC-12. Why is that important? Well, because we're going to shift in the near future to new user profiles and we're going to add organizational profiles. And I stole this from Jesus' keynote. It's a mock-up and it's not real. This is where we're going. We're going to show who the top contributors to the platform are. We're going to highlight organizations and individuals that are going to be contributing to Drupal. And we're going to help you build that reputation and ensure that the word is getting out there. And as a community, it's going to give us really great insight into how Drupal comes together so that we can optimize and enhance the way that we approach building and maintaining the software so that there are many great people that work for companies. Is that company actually paying them to work on Drupal or are they doing it on their own personal time? We need to really be able to clearly see who's funding what. And I think that's an important part of the transparency of open source, especially as the commercial interests come into play. I think it's important that everyone's up front with what they're doing and where they're going so that everyone is cool and kosher with it. So if you want to get more engaged in the community, check out drupal.org slash contribute. Tons of resources there, including step-by-step ideas for first-time contributors and people that haven't written code. Literally, it'll give you a task, something simple that you can take off and build. If you don't want to come to an event or you're working on a project, there's tons of online resources to help you. It's unbelievable. Create a drupal.org account, hop on IRC. There's chats about pretty much every topic, every location, groups.drupal.org. It's how I find out about events like this. It's about how I learn about the community and what's going on. Core mentoring. This is another free program. I know there are several people in Acquia's office, the CTO, that participate in this. They give you free help every week. We hold office hours. You can literally get into a chat room with world-leading drupal experts, and they're paid to sit there and help you for that period of time and get you up and running if you've never contributed to drupal every week. So there literally is no excuse to get started. But I understand it can be extremely intimidating. I've gone to Code Sprints. I've had debates with these people, and they are impressive, and they can be challenging, and I can understand it can be daunting. But I assure you that if you're willing to learn, if you're willing to make an investment, and if you're going to contribute to the platform, there are thousands of people that are waiting there to help you, that are willing to make that investment to get you up to speed, because they know that you're going to become a great contributor. Sunita Williams, the commander of the International Space Station. Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian athlete of all time. Yo-yo Ma, world-famous cello player. These guys all have one thing in common. Any idea what it is? I wish. That would be pretty awesome. Well, hey, the opportunity for them is there. They just have to do it. Each of them did the thing that they're famous for for the first time once. And so picture Yo-yo Ma reaching out for that cello for the first time. Think about Michael Phelps waiting to that pool for the first time long before he was an Olympian and an athlete. And I want to say you can do it. A really great example of this. Angie Byron, a web chick who I talked about earlier, probably one of the most well-known people in the dribble community. I don't know if you guys know this, as a Google Summer of Code student. She hadn't really contributed to an open source project. She didn't know a lot about development. And over the last eight years, she has become one of the most famous, well-known women in technology. A magazine came out last year, and she's one of the top five most influential women in technology, along with people like Meg Whitman, CEO of HP. She's been on the cover of magazines like Linux Journal. And Angie will tell you herself, and she's here in the community to help you get started. You know, if you're willing to jump in and make a contribution to Drupal, there are amazing folks like Angie who are waiting there for you and want to help you get started. So thank you guys. I hope that you guys are getting even more engaged in the Drupal community. I thank you for your support and for coming here today. And I think we have a few minutes for questions before coffee. Any questions? Up front. In putting together the Drupal North website in Drupal, we ran into all kinds of interesting challenges, bugs it's expected to beta software. It was an interesting learning experience from my point of view to notice that when we, basically because you're not using any contrib components in the build anymore, I found that it was somewhat intimidating for someone who's using Drupal for many, many years now to switch over from like resolving problems in the contrib queue which is like boxed in and small and switching over to the core issue queue where they're like, you know, if my error code doesn't show up in that issue and a number of issues, especially a couple of months ago in the core queue, it was a bit of a challenge to resolve. Do you have an opinion or any thoughts on, I don't see this issue growing, this greater issue as many of the contrib stuff or it makes a better product, but at the same time it's made it, at least in my experience, harder to try and debug and solve those issues because it is way more intimidating than pitch the post to the core issue queue because you know it's got to be polished, triple check your post and all that before it goes up or else someone will politely correct you. Do you have any opinions or thoughts on how we can, so I just, this is clearly an issue that I think is going to, I think that's a community we need to work on. Do you have any ideas or thoughts on how we could make the core issue queue a little friendlier, a little easier, a little less intimidating? Yeah, I think that's a really great point. I didn't really get into the details of how Drupal's created. You know, there's the core of Drupal and there are stringent standards for contributing to the core of Drupal and the way that that's developed is very different from extending Drupal. Anyone can create a contributed module to Drupal and you largely do that in a vacuum. As long as you follow the standards of the core, you can easily extend it. There's minimal approval process to go up and launch a module. Building a module and extending Drupal for your needs is completely different from getting involved in core development. I talked about the scalability of community and how we're getting more complex. This is something that we spent a lot of time thinking about. Can we say decoupled Drupal more? Can we, you know, the adoption of symphony, right, building on top of other platforms and saying, you know, we're not going to build everything ourselves? You know, think about scaling human collaboration, right? We can't get all, all get in the room and talk about something. Otherwise, you know, you just have a thousand different opinions, right? And so they just, I think, published better guidelines online about roles and responsibilities. You know, like, what is a maintainer's role, a core maintainer's role? What is a committer's role? What are your responsibilities? And so I think that we're trying to help the community understand, you know, how you fit into the picture so that we can avoid some of the bike shedding or the tremendous back and forth that we can streamline the process a little bit more and help people understand who's a product owner, who's a decision maker. Because I think that's one of the challenges, too, because we are a community and we're so welcoming and we're so about ideas. It's really hard for someone to step up and say, I own this, I'm going to make the tough decisions balance the priorities. And there's a lot of back and forth and debate that just go on and on and on until, you know, someone comes in and, you know. And so I think that, you know, through things like, you know, better, clearly identifying roles and responsibilities, decoupling components so that these individual communities can focus on, you know, smaller components, right? If we separate the database abstraction layer, we can get more people working about on just that independently of the release cycle, say, of the larger system. Now, adding complexity has challenges, too, right? Because now, all of a sudden, you've created, you know, significant dependencies, potentially with, you know, third parties like Symphony. You know, so there's risks as well as tremendous reward. And I think that's what we're trying to do now as a community and a lot of what Okto is focusing on is, you know, trying to figure out how we refine that process. So... Sure, so the resistance and challenges that I face on a day-to-day basis with respect to trying to engage organizations in open source, I think, you know, one of the biggest challenges is that, you know, typically I have a champion, right? It could be the CTO of the organization. It could be literally their technology leader. But that, you know, that individual needs to get the bind and support of their CEO. I think their CFO, their legal counsel, right? The entire executive team. And I think oftentimes a lot of what I need to do is help that individual, that champion, navigate that process. So we... Doug Gaff, who is the senior director of technology for NPR, he left the organization last year. They were a founding member of Large Scale Drupal. He wrote up a guide based on his experience at NPR and some other big organizations and walking them through the process of adopting and leveraging open source and creating an open source policy. And it wasn't like this is, you know, exactly what I didn't know how to do it. It was sort of like a framework of how to approach and, you know, hear the arguments that your legal team is going to come back to you with. And here's topics that you, you know, understand to make the compelling arguments. So what I try and do is enable these champions to navigate their organization, but I think that's their challenges, that there are people in technology that get it. Open source can be kind of counterintuitive, right? The idea that working together with your peers, collaborating, you know, is going to save you time, is going to, you know, do things faster when you're in a community... A lot of people don't understand it. And until you see the benefits, until you see the cost dropping, you know, they just like, you know... And so I think that's honestly the biggest challenge is changing behavior, right? Changing behavior in large corporate organizations that have been very successful doing what they're doing and are either extremely resistant to change or find it very difficult to engineer and make change, right? The big boat, you know, making the turn. And for these organizations, adopting things like Agile and Scrum and, you know, transparent methodologies that foster collaboration can be extremely challenging because it can often be at odds with the current culture and operating mechanisms for their company. And really it's about, you know, for a big organization, you know, you can't just go out and say, you know, oh my gosh, the disasters I've seen of companies that say, you know, okay, we're open source, you know, I'm coming Monday morning and we're an open source company. That's not how it works, right? You know, like anything, you need to make some quick wins. You know, you need to engineer change. You need to go team by team. You know, you need to take a very conservative approach to making this happen across your organization. And if you just try and make an overnight change, you know, it typically is a disaster, right? This is about learning new capabilities and competencies and training your team and changing the way you and your organization work. And it can be very painful and it can be very challenging for certain organizations and people, especially when they've been doing things, you know, very differently for, you know, however long. So, yeah, it is an uphill battle. You know, honestly, you know, the battle that we've won in open source is that people download and use it, you know, and then we can commercialize and grow businesses on it. And the next generation is, you know, what we see in the high tech sector is, you know, you know, those organizations are contributing to and getting engaged much more so, you know, it's, you know, we need to get the, you know, the rest of the world collaboratively engaged in this process. We have time for one more? Yeah, I think we've got that. Yeah, I think we'll... One more. John? What's your guess for Drupal Con North America 2017? Because 16 is in New Orleans. New York City! I don't know. I don't have any idea what it's going to be. It should be. Or it should it be? I love the fact that we rotate Drupal Con's around major cities. One, it offers me an opportunity to travel and get to meet different markets and people, you know, and it helps us bring Drupal different audiences. But I really like when we go to major cities, you know, I would love to go back to San Francisco, right? You know, I think we'd have five, six thousand people. We'd double the size of the conference if we went back to San Francisco in 2016, 2017, sorry. So, you know, I'd like to see us go back to a major city, New York City if you've never done it, or San Francisco, you know, a major tech hub to, you know, especially with, you know, where Drupal is, you know, today, that would be my preference. Awesome. Thank you guys very much. Sorry. Okay, so sessions start sharp at ten o'clock. So if you want to get coffee or things, or hit the washrooms near the elevators and so on, please do so. Look for the signs for the rooms, and have fun for the rest of the day. All right, thanks. Sorry, I didn't actually get to check on this and see what you got, but we'll put up the recording and we'll launch the little things. How do I stop it?