 Okay, welcome everyone. Today I'd like to take you through a little bit of a thought piece covering the concept of makers and takers. This idea came from a blog post that Trees did a couple of years ago now, and I'll also be talking about the concept of altruism and offering a few ideas as to you know how dribble might you know continue to to prosper and you know improve in the future. So, as I said, it all started with a blog post from Trees a couple of years ago. And in that blog post he was talking about the concept of makers and takers are makers of people that use dribble or any open source software but also invest you know time and energy into the open source project itself. And these people are contrasted to takers who will use the software but not actually contribute back to the open source project. I thought the article was really interesting from, you know, a number of angles in a first I thought it was great that Trees was, you know, taking a bigger view of, you know, open source projects, you know what the sort of underlying forces were within them. But he's also touched on a few different economic and philosophical concepts as we're there as well trying to understand just how we can convert takers into makers and you know, develop an ecosystem that will survive not just for, you know, one year or two years but you know decades and even centuries. That's like sort of the kind of timescale he's thinking of there how can we build an ecosystem for that. So if you haven't read that article, please do because I think it's quite it's been quite influential in in how trees been thinking about the project moving forward. I watch a lot of funny YouTube videos and one day this video popped up in my stream about green and bearded altruism. That title was weird enough that I just ignored it for a week or so but you know finally I relented and clicked on it and I was really really surprised to see what it was about. So the title of the video really got me writing the blog post about this subject and this presentation today is called simulating green bearded altruism. And I can't say enough nice things about the, you know, this particular channel and the way it's been done so it's, it's got a mix of, you know, economics and philosophy. You know, statistics, computer science visualization. It's just a, you know, a beautiful thing to behold. So go check, watch that video in full and, you know, also check out some of the other videos on that channel. But really what I want to talk about here is, you know, this video really segues very nicely in what trees was talking about with the makers and takers. In this case, we're talking about altruists and cowards. So the altruists are the makers and the cowards are the takers. The simulation you're about to see is this little world where you have a forest and the blobs go into the forest and harvest fruit and then these nasty tree monsters that will eat them, you know, the 50 cents, 50% probability. If the blobs survive, they go home to reproduce and if they don't, obviously they've been eaten. So the nasty tree monsters are essentially that, you know, the capitalist markets that we operate in, you know, there are winners and losers there, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. The blobs really are potentially our competitors or our friends. And the altruists in this particular case will tell the cowards about the tree monsters. In so doing, they risk being eaten. So there is a cost to being an altruist. So if you go through the video, yeah, you'll see all of that unfold. I'm going to show you just the last bit where there are four different actors. So you have true altruists. These are the ones who are altruistic and help other altruists out and they also wear a green beard to demonstrate that they're an altruist. You have the suckers. They're the altruists who don't have any outward signs of being an altruist. So you don't know if they're kind of good or bad. So yeah, they're the suckers because no one knows to help them. You have the cowards who are the takers. Essentially, they're the people who don't want to tell anyone about the nasty tree monster or in Drupal's case, just the takers of the software. And then the fourth version is an imposter. They're cowards who are particularly devious and pretend to be altruistic. So what happens with the impostors is that the true altruists will still help out or sorry, all altruists will help out the impostors because they look like altruists. So okay, so that's laying the foundation. You may just think this is all a little bit weird, but I'm just going to flip over to the video now and then we can see this in action. So here we go. And I take it you guys can hear all this, by the way. I don't hear anything if I'm supposed to be. No, you can't hear. Okay. All right. Bevan just tells me you guys can't hear. I'm sorry about that. But what I will do is I will kind of narrate as we go along. So sorry about this. So this is the simulation of the world. And we've got those four different blog types going out into the world and competing basically. And then up in the top left corner you'll just see the various proportions of blobs and how they how they survive so that they're going out from their homes out into the nasty world. There are some tree monsters in there that might eat them. And then we can see that the the red ones they're the impostors you can see the impostors have successfully won out in this case. The green beards there the greens, they did well for a while but they rapidly fell away. And the suckers there who are the blue ones. They lost out very quickly. And, yeah, depressingly just the straight out cowards still survived. And of course we have the impostors that that one, one out in the end. Sorry guys didn't get to hear the sound on that one but hopefully you get you get a very quick appreciation of what's going on there. The basic takeaways being an ultra is is not so great. The impostors and the straight out cowards will succeed. So with that I'll just flip back to the presentation. And I really encourage you guys to watch that a little bit more just to get it in its full glory. But we are what what are the core insights from this video. Well, you know, mostly being an altruistic is a lousy strategy, you know, if, and just relating this back to Drupal if you are contributing to the project is that there is a cost being imposed upon you. It's basically time and money and energy. And for those that are not contributing, they don't have that cost that they're at a competitive advantage. However, in certain circumstances, altruists can win out. And that's where the ultra signal that they're altruistic and other altruists are able to help them out. So in Drupal speak, you know, this is just members of the community, helping out other people in the community and making sure that you know they're able to win in a commercial environment. But I think you got the kicker there is that you don't want imposters to trick the altruists into thinking that they are indeed an altruist. Otherwise, the imposters will just win out. So that's quite a funny one. But I guess if you're applying that to Drupal, it will be like, you know, let's let's try to make sure that the the takers are being brought into the fold and not sort of staying outside and just playing lip service to open source software. Yeah, so trees has picked up on this recently as well at triple con global. That was just a few weeks ago. I know that's a massive quote, but I just think it was interesting because in in this particular case like trees just naturally came back and started talking about the makers and takers again. And one of his thinking is kind of developed to to linking, linking things to a financial incentive. And he talked about routing leads to organizations so that, you know, leads that organizations that are contributing are receiving more leads and this will increase their chances of having success and survival and then increasing the chance of triple survival. Dries goes on to know that sometimes he feels that we're afraid to talk about these topics, probably because, you know, it involves money and and financial incentives and we're talking about open open software here is who's free free as in beer and free as well so I, you know, I guess it's good for us to talk about these things and that's partly the reason I'm bringing this up today. So applying this to Drupal. What Dries was talking about two years ago has been applied to the Drupal marketplace. You're probably familiar with the, the, the rankings of different Drupal agencies, according to how much they contribute. What commits are they doing to core and to contrary. Are they people speaking at conferences and, you know, and being involved in the community so that the Drupal marketplace is something that's really come along. It's been driven by things like you know badges for contributing to the Drupal Association, as well as the contributions that I've mentioned as well as providing case studies and these kinds of things. So the marketplace has been gamified and that in turn is led to probably more financial money flowing back into the Drupal Association. And I think that's really kind of what you've seen after the initial makers and takers. So thought piece there you have people being essentially monitored for what their contributions are and being rewarded in that way. But I would like to take this thinking further and I'll just offer up a few other ideas that could be developed on top of that. So firstly, I think the marketplace is quite inward looking. You know, I think probably it's people like me and Drupal agencies that actually get worried about that kind of thing and you know we're part of the game and you know trying to improve our agencies standing and you know that in turn will have a positive benefit to the project. After all, it is companies that sponsor or fund individual developers to contribute to the project that leads to most of the code going into core. So I think there is a positive feedback there but I don't know if it's necessarily been reflected out into potential clients. I think it's more of an inward looking thing. So I would say trying to expose that the marketplace or people's contributions in a wider way would be a good first step here. We also hear about the little guy. The marketplace is very much skewed towards larger companies because they are able to, you know, they've got more resources and they're able to make more contributions. However, there are sort of smaller Drupal companies out there that are easily competing pound for pound and you know, putting in a bigger effort in a percentage basis. So I would say hey, why don't we normalize these contributions, divide them by the number of staff at a particular company and see how they're going and then we'll see how the little guy is going and I think you'll find there are a whole ton of agencies out there who are smaller but pound for pound are punching above their weight, shall I say and you know I think that would be really interesting insight into the Drupal community and who is contributing the most on a proportional basis. Talking, turning towards advertising on Drupal, oops, my spell adds incorrectly, I apologize for that. We have an ad space quite prominent on the bottom of most if not all pages on Drupal.org and this is the space is used to to publicize companies that are prepared to pay the money there. When I saw that I felt I got a little bit of a surprise really because I think this privatized space is promoting a subset of companies, rather than all of the makers, and I think the Drupal Association could open this space up a little bit more. I'm sure there'll be plenty of makers out there who want to sponsor that that slot and I see no reason for that to be as privatized as it is so I think if that was opened up to a wider range of makers that would that would benefit the altruism and you know the feedback loop. The Drupal Association, you know does a great job it supports Drupal and you know the Drupal infrastructure. You know, it provides governments and runs Drupal cons and and brings the community together so I think it does a great job at doing that and we should all support that. I just signed up for membership I encourage you to do so because that's that's the most pragmatic thing you can do to to support the DA. However, the DA does not write the code. So supporting the DA will get you a certain way there for providing infrastructure and the governance but it's not going to actually help code actually be written. So that's the thing I'd like to talk to talk about really is just how can we support developers better developer burnout in the community is a thing, you know, supporting, you know, large modules is, you know, takes time and stress, and recently you may be aware of Jacob Rock of its web form module as a maintainer sort of stressing out about not being able to support the module. It's module used by hundreds of thousands of people. It makes a lot of people a lot of money, and yet, you know, Jacob's getting a whole lot of feature requests and support requests so that got too much and, you know, he could wrote a whole series of articles detailing his experiences and just what he was going to do. The solution was to turn to open collective which is sort of like a nonprofit US based nonprofit that will hold funds in trust and then, you know, it will pay them out when people have, you know, done the work and essentially invoice it so Jacob's found a one off solution, you know, for the web form problems there. And I think that's that's been by by and large a good, good approach, it's been a transparent one, and it is sort of easing the pain there but the problem is it's just a one off approach that an individual has has made. So what I would really proposing is like how can we sort of close this loop between these two different people, you know, companies with deep pockets and shallow expertise and developers with shallow pockets and deep expertise. So I think we can bring some takers who want to be makers into the fold, if we're able to, you know, show that there are there are benefits to being makers, and by doing that, by then providing a pool of funds for these other developers who actually need the support. So the makers I'm referring to here are not ones that work for companies that are able to fund them but ones who don't do not have that support and I think bringing those two groups together could, could sort of close the loop and, you know, bring wins to both these parties. So yeah, why don't we try to systemize that open collective approach developer pool of funds and, you know, spread that out amongst a team of quality community based developers who are then rewarded for implementing high value features. This is not a new idea. I know, you know, people have spoken about this for a long, long time and it's not without its difficulties, right, which features are worthy which developers are worthy. I'm sure there's hurdles to cover there but I think this potentially is a way to, you know, bring a lot more development into Drupal and it's a way to bring other companies into Drupal as well and I think it's a hard problem to solve but I think solving a will, you know, really improve things. So yeah, in conclusion, I think Drupal is in a good place, you know, we've got a really passionate community, you know, we've got agencies and individuals and those individuals that, you know, have been funded by private companies to develop the code. We do have, you know, mechanisms in place and I think Drupal really has pioneered like this, you know, contribution credit concept and, you know, rewarding people through the marketplace is a great first step. We also have a leadership that's thinking about the future. You know, in this presentation, I've, you know, I've provided a few ideas there for how we can increase the recognition for makers and the big idea really is, you know, how can we, you know, support the developers or maybe, you know, time porn under stress. How can we give them some financial rewards there by bringing the takers into the fold in an easy way by allowing them to financially support these these makers. And of course the end goal there is to make Drupal survive in a competitive world and also thrive for the future. I've written about this in a blog post recently there so that's on the Moff blog if you want to read about makers and takers and altruism and just in a little bit more detail.