 I did just want to start by shouting out to all the other speakers who've presented the last couple of days. We truly have a world-class Drupal community here and it's fantastic to see you all again. And I wanted to grapple with a slightly ambitious topic about the future of Drupal for the next 20 years, hopefully a little bit beyond that. And I'm not going to be performing a high wire act, but it will be a bit of a journey talking about where we are today. There's obviously some obstacles in our path we need to get through and where we can go from there. And me, well, that fresh face guy was attending his first local Drupal event here back in 2011. And that wasn't that long after I'd co-founded previousnext with Kim Pepper. And for those of you that aren't aware, previousnext recently became an employee-owned company. And we've always had a very close involvement with both the local and international community. Both as co-contributions to the Drupal project. And my own focus has been very heavily on the community side with roles on the Drupal South Steering Board and more recently with the Drupal Association Global Board, which I'll talk a little about. And back in 2011, there's a few other people at what was then Drupal down under. We've got Josh Wahee on the left there looking very fresh-faced. Next to him, another Josh, Josh Kearney. I think shortly after this, he founded a little company called Pantheon. I think they're worth around a billion dollars these days, so he can probably afford slightly better flip-flops. And some Belgian dude in the middle, I think that's Josh Wahee's boss, obviously Dries, co-founded the Drupal project, co-founded Acquia, also worth around a billion dollars. So things have come quite a long way in a decade. And fast forward to a few weeks ago at DrupalCon Prague, I was lucky enough to be there as a member of the Drupal Association Board and for the last year or so I've been on the board executive. And we have a sometimes daunting but always fascinating task to ensure that Drupal keeps thriving as both a product and community. And it's really heartening to see how much attention Dries pays to that still after so long. And before we do get too deep into the talk, the views in this talk are my own, even though it's heavily influenced by the work that we do on the board. So let's have a look at where we are now. We're not lost, but we are 21. We had our 21st birthday this year as a project and that is positively ancient in tech years. We would all be dead if we were counting in dog years, but rumors of Drupal's death are greatly exaggerated. And back in 2017 at Drupal South Auckland, I was asking this question about whether we had reached peak Drupal and we're in for a steady decline. And you can find that talk by Googling, have we reached peak Drupal? And luckily, most of what I said then still holds true today. And what it did look back at in 2017 was the notion that Drupal powers a million websites, but was that even a good metric to be using in terms of gauging the health of the community? And as you can see from 22s, 2022s figures, we have seen a steady decline in overall install base. And it is worth noting that a lot of those sites still are on Drupal 7. We haven't seen them all move to later versions of Drupal or off to platforms that are a better fit for purpose these days for smaller sites. And if you do look closely there, yes, there is still about 500 sites running Drupal 5. And we have an astonishing 23,000 sites still running Drupal 6. So I'm not sure what those people have been doing for the past decade. And I think importantly, this trend of a downward scale in install base is not unique to Drupal. It covers most big CMS products that we compete with. And you can see that there's a tapering off, whether it's WordPress or Joomla or Adobe Experience Manager, Squiz, Sitecore, they've all had this tapering off in the last five years. And what this indicates is that we've moved into a much more diversified market for CMS platforms as products like Headless, CMSs and SAS platforms do gain market share. And the stats are much better when you consider the bigger websites with Drupal running just under 11% of the top 10,000 sites. And you can see there that we're the second biggest CMS. I'm not sure what people use Salesforce and Atlassian Cloud for with websites, but they show up in the stats for some reason. And this level is being reasonably consistent over the last few years. But I want to look at things through a different lens, and that is cold, hard cash. So most importantly, in the latest Drupal business survey, 75% of companies reported growth. And this survey is done by a few of the European business leaders and surveys, CEOs of Drupal-based businesses around the world, including many from here. And importantly, these companies are mostly optimistic about the future with about 70% of them expecting to grow in the near term. And that's obviously up a long way from 2020, where there was something that caused a bit of nervousness about the future. And that obviously wasn't unique to Drupal. And anecdotally, as I've walked around Drupal ConExpo booths in North America and Europe in the last year, most companies you've talked to have experienced significant growth over the past couple of years. And it seems like everyone's hiring, and there's been some big acquisitions lately. So Sreejan and Amazie.io, supporters of this event, both announced acquisitions recently. And what that shows is that big investors are looking at the Drupal sector and making big bets on further growth from that. So we can be heartened by that. And I do just want to return to 2017 for a moment where in the Drees note, Drees defined Drupal as being for ambitious digital experiences. And this is well and truly come to fruition as the scale of the Drupal projects we now work on is significantly bigger. And the companies that were able to accommodate those size projects have grown with that as well. In the meantime, like I've mentioned, smaller sites have moved off to SAP platforms and more appropriate technologies, and that's fine. But it's meant that Drupal is firmly positioned at the top of that enterprise scale there. And you just had to listen to a few of the talks today to understand the complexity of the projects that we build with Drupal. It's absolutely amazing and great to see so much work being done here. And I think it's important to understand that this market for building big complex sites is what CIOs, CTOs, CMOs all pay attention to, excuse me. And I think Acquia, again, one of our key sponsors of the event, they've really helped to maintain Drupal's presence in that C suite and keeping a position right at the top of that Gartner's Magic Quadrant. And for those that aren't familiar with Gartner, it's essentially the Bible that big organisations use to choose technologies. And Drupal still has a very strong presence there. And talking of Drupal's success, it's really worth noting that Drupal accounts for more sites than, optimally, Adobe and Sitecore combined in those top 10,000 sites. And at the Drees node in Prague a few weeks ago, again, fast forwarding, Drees focus on why these customers are attracted to Drupal when building ambitious web experiences. And it's because big clients like these want a platform that's secure, flexible, scalable, free of vendor lock-in. And these things are still huge factors for customers choosing Drupal over commercial competitors. But it's not just big customers that want to maintain these attributes, well, governments do too. And if you weren't aware, back in April, 61 countries signed this declaration for the future of the internet, including Australia. And they were talking about all of the same issues around the importance of an internet that's open, free, global, interoperable, reliable and secure. And this is a big issue that's receiving huge attention from both the corporate world and governments alike. And it's linked to little themes around reinforcing democratic systems and a competitive global economy. So no small themes at all. And despite all the huge challenges that we see in the news every day, maintaining the open web is still one of the top issues that is facing liberal democracies. And it's a clarion call to action for us in the Drupal community because Drupal is always championed and is uniquely positioned to both drive and capitalise on securing the open web. And as Dries said, we have to do everything we can to protect the open web. And it's also important to look at things in the context of the insane growth of data that's been created over the past decade. So we've seen a tenfold increase in the volume of data that's created each year. And we need to remember that Drupal's core strength is complex content management. So does anyone think that need's going to disappear in 20 years? Is it going to disappear in 100 years? And sure delivery endpoints come and go. The Flavour of the Month JavaScript Framework or mobile device might need to be catered for. But if Drupal does remain an innovative technology that keeps pace with change, there's no reason to think it'll become irrelevant any time in our lifetimes. And the scale of the opportunity is huge. So Adobe, in their anger report you can download, they put content and commerce alone as a $49 billion market opportunity by 2024. That's US dollars. And a back of the napkin estimate that we've done is that Drupal already accounts for about 10% of that market with about three to five billion dollars of Drupal-related projects running each year, depending on how you calculate it. And so while the overall install base of Drupal might be slipping, the value of the projects relying on Drupal is absolutely enormous. And so did I just say the Drupal economy is worth three to five billion? So what's the problem? So we do work with a highly competitive product that has solid market share and it's definitely in the top five products in its class. But it doesn't mean that we have to face some big threats to our sustainability as an open source project. And like any product and market, we've got obstacles that we need to navigate that are gonna be in our path. And so I'm gonna talk about those now. So going back to Adobe's annual report and financial reports, last year they made $4 billion from their digital experience platform business against a reported 31% profit margin. So that means you can do math quickly, they spent $2.7 billion on product development, marketing, hosting everything that they do to run the business with around $1.3 billion in profit. And to give you a better sense of scale that we're talking about just with Adobe, they spent $4.3 billion on sales and marketing across all of their product lines last year. And if we look at other CMS competitors, even open source ones like WordPress, the companies behind them, they've received hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and that's resulting in multi-billion dollar market valuations. And a lot of sources suggest that these types of companies spend about half of their funding just on marketing to game market share. And again, we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars here. But when there's a $49 billion market at stake, companies and investors are willing to make huge bets on competitive technologies in this sector. And in comparison, well, the Drupal Association budget is $3.5 million. And at best if we do our little calculations that 0.01% of the revenue generated by the Drupal economy. You can see where I'm heading here. Drupal's official product development budget, zero. And sure, there's a high internal cost of Drupal contribution, but that's all provided for free to the Drupal project by the companies and individuals that contribute to Drupal. And it's been very, very hard to quantify the dollar amount and value of that contribution. Believe me, we've tried for a number of years. And our global sales and marketing budget to compete with the likes of Adobe's 4.3 billion, zero. So while services companies do pitch Drupal to their own clients and there's a bit of content on Drupal.org that you can point them to, there's no centralized Drupal product marketing approach that competes on any level at all with proprietary software. And if we bring it back to product relevance and innovation, if we had maintained Drupal's architecture based on Drupal 7, then decline was inevitable and we would have been stuck in that circle of discontinuity. And we did need the innovation and breakthrough that moving to Drupal 8 provided to facilitate growth. And again, we're talking about growth in terms of overall revenue rather than side installs. And while moving away from Drupal 7 was painful for a lot of people, and it did mean that smaller users moved off the platform as it was no longer fit for purpose. Drupal 8 and all of the subsequent releases since then have meant that we've kept pace with technology and trends and we've kept innovating. And we do have the right mechanism in place to continue those ways of innovation that'll keep Drupal relevant if we have enough contribution. And that is how we're on the cusp of Drupal 10 being released in December. We've got a beautiful new front-end theme, Olivero, a beautiful new admin theme, Clara, and for people assessing platforms simply based on how they look, that's gonna make a big difference. And then under the hood, we've got a lot of improvements to things like JavaScript components and CK Editor, Symphony 6, PHP 8.1 just to keep pace with core technologies. And they're not the sexy things that everyone sees but they obviously take a lot of effort to implement. And we've got strategic initiatives underway that help Drupal keep pace with competitors and ensure its relevance long-term. So we've got the Automate Matic Update Initiative. We've got the Project Browser Initiative. And then we've got more systemic changes like moving to GitLab to make contributing to Drupal easier and more efficient to manage in the longer term. Again, not very sexy, costs a lot of money but really essential to keep pace. And we've got great thought leadership both from Dries and his core commitment team. Around where Drupal fits in the market and the technical trends that we need to keep pace with. And as recently as last week, you might have seen Dries blog post on how Drupal fits within the notion of a composable enterprise. But this team, it's very small, it's got 13 people. We've got two members of our local community in that team. I can't see them because I don't have my glasses on but Lee Rollins and Pamela Barone are part of that team. And then that team relies on the goodwill of companies that employ them and the hundreds or thousands of part-time contributors that help fulfill the product roadmap. And again, they're either employed by Drupal companies or volunteering their own time. And often it's a mix of both. And back in 2019, just before I joined the Drupal Association Board, Dries penned another blog post which is now quite infamous around how to balance makers. So the companies that do contribute to Drupal and takers, so companies that benefit enormously from using Drupal without contributing to its development. Still really worth reading these days. A lot of those things are really important for us. And that was a trigger to establish the Drupal Certified Partner Program that provides us with a mechanism to promote companies that do contribute to Drupal and hopefully incentivizes other companies to follow suit. And the end goal of a program like this is to position Drupal Certified Partners as the company's best qualified for clients to direct their business to. And if you haven't paid much attention to it yet, then check out the details on Drupal.org. And this program is very much in its early phases, but we still only have two Australian or New Zealand-based companies that have qualified so far. And there's only another three companies that provide any type of financial support to the Drupal Association. And part of the problem is that maintaining Drupal is some far-off problem that someone else is going to take care of. And just like the bushfire on the Distan Hill here, we don't think we can do something about it until it overwhelms our own property. But how much is it going to cost your company to retool in a new technology away from Drupal? Would it be a million dollars in lost clients and retooling in new highs? Or more likely, would your company even survive? And how much would it cost all tiers of government in Australia? I'm guessing a billion. So multiply that scale globally and you get a sense of the issue that we're talking about if Drupal just fizzled and died. And while ambivalence is one factor, even for companies that do contribute, we have the paradox that as they get busier and grow, their ability to direct already scarce resources to Drupal contribution diminishes. And this is compounded by the fact that Drupal is a highly complex platform that requires experienced developers to work on. So you can't just go and hire a bunch of juniors and hope they solve the problem. It's hard, it's expensive. And that's why proprietary companies have R&D budgets with lots and lots of zeros attached to them. And related to this is whether Drupal is perceived as the shiny new thing. We do spend a lot of time navel gazing in the Drupal community about how we can't compete effectively with new technologies like headless CMSs. So remember content fall from a few slides back, that little startup that's now worth $3 billion. I can tell you they spend a lot of their marketing budget convincing developers and clients that they are the shiny new thing when the reality is is their capabilities lag massively behind Drupal in many regards. So this is largely a marketing failure to developers and clients alike outside the Drupal bubble. And if $0 is spent on marketing Drupal's capabilities, should we really be expecting anything else? And we have all grown up a little bit. So the days when a CEO would headline his own rock band of the Drupalcon party, which is here, they're not over, but we haven't been great at bringing a new generation of younger people into the developer community. But this is not a hard problem to solve. And it was great in Prague to see how many young enthusiastic people were there. And it's great also to see so many new faces in this audience here today. Because age is just a number. And while we are 21 years old as a project, that's not an impediment if software can be continually enhanced and innovated. And a great example is a little Swiss company called Day Software launched a product called CommuniCase CMS back in 2000. They're making about 25 million a year off it by 2010. A company called Adobe came along and bought them for 240 million. And as I discussed earlier, this 22 year old software now generates four billion a year for Adobe, 160 times more than it was making when they first bought it. So back to our journey, what does the path ahead look like and where can we go? And it's worth starting this by asking, well, what is the Drupal association ever done for me? And it is quite pertinent for our little Drupal community down here at the bottom of the world feeling a little bit forgotten. But it's also important to understand that the Drupal association was only ever formed to manage the service Drupal code was hosted on so Dries didn't have to use his credit card and it's literally how it all started. And as more people started loving using Drupal, the DAs were all quickly morphed into managing Drupal cons and Drupal became the primary source of revenue and the core business model for the Drupal association over the past 15 years. So this means that the DA was an event organizing company and any remaining profit was used to fund everything else that underpins keeping the Drupal project running. So remember our little $3.5 million operating budget that's all from Drupal con tickets and a few relatively small scale sponsorship fees from Drupal companies. And then we had COVID interruptus in 2020 and that effectively destroyed that event organizing business overnight. And as a Drupal association board member through this period, the focus was literally on avoiding a new death experience and it was saved off by another paradox that most Drupal companies were doing great through COVID and through their generosity, they were able to donate enough funds to keep the DA afloat through that period. So the organization at the heart of a three to $5 billion economy only stayed alive by begging. And I think you can see there's something wrong with that picture. So while we did come out of COVID relatively intact thanks to everyone's altruism and generosity, we had a broken business model and we knew that we couldn't sustain the key needs of the Drupal projects namely to drive contribution and product innovation. So we had a workshop in Portland earlier this year. We literally started with a blank sheet of paper and tried to reimagine what the DA should be like moving into the future. So could it be sustained for another 20 years and Dries had slightly more ambitious plans what about 100 years? And so we came away with two key questions from that workshop. How do we innovate on a 10 fold scale and how do we compete about against commercial competitors? So this was a product and marketing problem. And to solve this, we realized we needed to establish what we're calling a Drupal development fund. So if the economy is $3 billion around Drupal what would happen if just 1% of that revenue found its way back into funding the future of Drupal? So we're talking about 30 million bucks. Still chicken feet compared to the big commercial competitors and sure money doesn't solve every problem but it solves a lot of problems. And who's got that kind of money? Well, just as an example, 70% of universities in the USA alone use Drupal. They spend $27 billion a year on technology. So do you think they wanna replace Drupal anytime soon? You know what that would cost them? And governments around the world who rely on Drupal. So we're literally talking about billions of dollars of retooling if Drupal disappeared. And while you'll often hear big end users say, oh, it's impossible for us to give funds or resources directly to Drupal development. There are big vested interests out there who want to succeed long term and mechanisms to secure that funding via things like grants, philanthropy and new revenue streams that we're able to develop. And in the Drupal Association's defense, they've never been tasked to go after that kind of money but we do have the perfect structure to receive it as a nonprofit and all we need is the right stories and strategies to go out and get it. So I said we're being a little bit ambitious but it's definitely not impossible. And if we get that kind of money, what next? Well, let's just go back to it being a product and marketing challenge. It's not rocket science. So in terms of product acceleration, we do have these very well-defined strategic initiatives and if they were funded properly, we could get them to market faster and ensure that Drupal's perceived as a rapidly innovative product and all of the benefits that come from that. And we could do more of them. So how about a full-time Drupal UX team driving product design? A dedicated team managing the issue cures, a product documentation team ensuring that Drupal can be easily adopted no matter what language you speak. So let's just say there's a $20 million budget for these types of things. That's about 200 full-time salaries and they don't need to be Drupal association employees but would 200 full-time people working on Drupal product have an impact? That's a pretty stupid question but it's never been asked in that way. And what would a global marketing team look like? Could we have a network of global brand and product agencies that share collateral and campaigns in multiple languages? Could we have developer outreach and relations programs that extend way outside the Drupal bubble? Events to target new customers? Would $10 million make a difference? Another stupid question. So I know what you're thinking. Oh my God, it sounds like a big change. It's how we've always done things in the Drupal community. And I'm expecting a bit of a Twitter storm but yeah, we've got a tiny handful of companies contributing free development, free to a project that millions of people in this multi-billion economy relies on and we've got zero direct budget for product innovation and we compete head to head with these multi-billion dollar tech companies with zero dedicated marketing budget. And if we continue down that current path, Drupal's dead in the water in five to 10 years. We just simply won't be competitive but with some ambitious goals and making some fundamental changes then those benefits should come on stream relatively quickly and we're already making those changes at the DA. So we've got a chief revenue officer that's just joined with incredible experience in the philanthropic world. She's already applying for multi-million dollar grants from people like the European Commission who if you don't know employ 400 Drupal developers and sales and you might have seen this week which is hired a new CEO for the Drupal Association, Tim Doyle. And he grew a government focused startup from zero to 85 million in annual revenue in the time that he was there. And of all the people that we met through that long hiring process, he was the one that we found that had the right mix of that product and growth experience to take things to the next level. So with the right people in place and the ambition to make it happen, I think we will be sitting here in 20 years. Obviously not all of us but hopefully the next generation of Drupalists. And just in case you're worried that all of this veers way off Drupal's ethos as an open source project, this is how the big kids on the open source block do it. And we are a big kid on the open source block. So the Linux Foundation last year, 180 million dollars they spend on projects on top of all the contribution that happens inside big organizations that use Linux. Mozilla, 460 million in annual revenue, automatic the company behind WordPress. Well, to date they've had 800 million in funding and I've got 2,000 people working full time on WordPress product and marketing. So will it mean the end of code contribution for free within the Drupal ecosystem? Of course not. We're not thinking about changing that model where anyone can write a module and contribute what they need to and maintaining a sense of an open community is still a key driver for the Drupal Association through all of our existing programs and events. And of course, all code contribution is still critical and it's great to see so much interest in the code sprint tomorrow. None of that's going away. It just means that if we have a Drupal Development Fund it's gonna mean that strategic initiatives in Drupal Core get the momentum that they need to innovate and the marketing to ensure that the world knows about it. And underpinning all of this, getting back to the open web, the Drupal Association's vision statement for a long time has been a safe, secure and open web for everyone. And Drupal's role as a champion of the open web will remain at the core of everything we do in coming years. So I'm gonna leave it there.