 Welcome to day three of the main show at Drupal Khan Nashville. We forgot our clicker, one sec. We are your community elected board members in the Drupal Association. Shyamala comes from Chennai, India, where she is the founder of Unimity Solutions, a Drupal Services provider in India, where she really focuses on advancing Drupal and promoting Drupal in the community within her country. And this is Ryan, his drama. He's the CEO of Commerce Guys. Commerce Guys is an organization that prides in having contributions, such a big part of their culture. And culture has been a big topic of this conference, maybe in a way if you're a first timer that you didn't anticipate. As Dries introduced on Tuesday, the statement of values and principles that are beginning to, I guess, attempt to put into words what makes the Drupal community special, the things that we share in common. And I think what really encouraged Shyamala and I about this document was that it wasn't so much like Dries was telling us some new way to live our life, some new way to run our businesses or to integrate ourselves into the community, but really just kind of distilling down the essence of what makes the Drupal community special. So I invite you and encourage you to read the principal's document online and really consider how they might resonate with you like they do with us. For example, I guess helping others and serving others has been a part of my life since before coming into Drupal, but the context in which I did that was as a young man serving an underprivileged area in Louisville, Kentucky, trying to help people thrive and succeed in that environment. And really it took years to see impact if you ever saw it at all. And so when I got into Drupal, I kind of carried that passion for helping others and multiplying impact into a community that turned out to like span the globe and become many of my closest friends and mentors and collaborators, and I got to see that ability to prioritize people and to prioritize relationships extend into business and career in a way that I didn't anticipate. And so I think this ability to have a global human impact is what really motivated me and just resonated perfectly from Dries' statement that he put out for us. A couple of principles that really resonated with me was the choose to lead, and it's always amazing to see how this community, the Drupal community that we are go by this principle. In fact, this board meeting, we had a very unique unique meeting between all the leaders. It was a workshop, a governance workshop. We had leaders from different spectrum of the Drupal community together there and to have DDNI, the CWG, the technical working group and the diversity group, the mentoring group. All these groups of individuals and leaders were all self-organized. We as a community, I think we should take great pride that we don't just state a problem, but we actually take the initiative to lead and organize ourselves to find answers. Yes, another very important principle, I think it's 17 years of being a community and this is something we should really pride is the way that we embrace change. There may be small changes that we do incrementally and much larger that we take and the changes are in different spectrums again, be it technology where we are trying to make better editorial interfaces and the out-of-the-box initiative. Here at DrupalCon, this time we've had some really nice changes with the customer round table, getting the new stakeholders together. We had a leadership and team workshop that happened by Adam Goodman and the CWG team, the Digital Experience Tracks. We're constantly evolving to make ourselves better. Maybe some tiny steps and some large steps. And that principle even applies to the statement of values and principles themselves, so we definitely encourage you to read them, consider what resonates with you and contribute back to helping us improve them. I know that Dries would really welcome your input in that conversation. And something that Ryan and I always feel is that there is a big thank you that we must give to the Drupal Association staff. I think a big round of applause to them. They are a small team that works behind the scenes. They are a very small team. They work behind the scenes to make this large community experience multiple things, be it Drupal.org or the Drupal cons that we have. So a big round of applause again to the Drupal Association staff, the volunteers and everybody who made DrupalCon such a big success. All right, we have a few housekeeping slides to get through. So bear with us as we make these announcements. First, don't forget you can get free coffee in the exhibit hall until about 10.45 p.m. And you will also find lunch in the exhibit hall from 12 to two. So definitely stop by, grab some food, say hello to the sponsors and meet new friends. This afternoon, we invite you to return to this room for the closing session at 3.30 p.m., where we always announce things like how much coffee we drank, how much bandwidth we consumed, yeah, all that fun stuff. But we will also be announcing the winner of the Aaron Winboard Award, which is a way that our community recognizes those in our midst who prioritize giving back. And then this evening, we also have a DrupalCon tradition of trivia night on Thursday evenings, so we invite you to join us. All are welcome. And in fact, if you have never been to DrupalCon before, you will be in demand, because I hear there are bonus points awarded for being a first time attendee at the trivia night. If you have a question or just want to say something nice or encouraging or affirming during the keynote, please do so using the DC Rose hashtag on Twitter. And a big thank you to all our sponsors. I'm not sure if you guys had the same experience, but all of the sponsors really gave us presidential suites. We had black cars, limousines, really good champagne. It was just an amazing experience, yeah. And thank you to the supporting partners who've been with us and giving money in different forms and making sure that we as Drupal Association are able to make this special event happen. There was none of that, but there was bluegrass. I think there's not enough thank yous always. A big thanks to all the contributors who've made Drupal possible. Thank you to the business contributors. And finally, thank you to the Drupal Security team again. I know this was mentioned on Tuesday, but for making sure that we could have a successful security release and avoid being hacked while we all came to have a good time in Nashville. All right. Well, now we would like to welcome to the stage the CTO and co-founder of Platform.sh, my former partner Damien Tourneau. Hello again. So I'm Damien Tourneau. I'm CTO at Platform.sh, I'm Damzie on Twitter. And I typically sports a very cute French accent, but as you can hear, I'm a bit sick today. I have been a member of the Drupal community for a very long time. I was a member of the Drupal Security team from 2008 all the way to this year. Before that, I was a member of the Drupal.org infrastructure team all the way back when Drupal.org was running Drupal 5 and Drupal 6. At that time, I wrote one of the first varnish configuration files for Drupal, a work that was later integrated into Project Mercury by Josh Koenig and David Strauss, which became the technical foundation of what we call Pantheon nowadays. Around the same time, we were also one of the earliest adopters of solar for the Drupal.org project search. And of course, nowadays, you would not pick solar, you would pick elastic search, but that was not a thing, that was not a thing yet back then. Long story short, I have been designing and deploying infrastructures for a very long time. And what I learned from that is that we are doing it wrong. Modern infrastructures are messy. Sure, they are all cloudy, they are flexible, they are shiny, but they also tend to become very complicated very quickly. They break, they consume valuable time and resources from your project. And we always, always underestimate how much effort they take to run, but also to maintain and to optimize. As an industry, as a cloud industry, we are asking our clients to become experts in all the things, from networking, to kernels, distributions, packaging, service discovery, configuration management. You have to learn all the details about all the configuration files of all these tools that you want to use, but you also need to learn how to back them up, how to monitor them, how to administer them in the long run. We should really not be asking you to do all that work for your infrastructure. Actually, we think that your infrastructure should work for you. We should give you all the tools you need to deploy, to develop faster, to test with confidence and to deploy more often. We should give you the environments you need when you need them. At the same time, we should also let you in the driver's seat. We should give you flexibility and power. You get to choose what is the best tool for your job, what is the best solution for the job. You should be able to mix and match different stacks and different services just by saying that you want to. You should not have to learn all the details about the day-to-day operations of all these services. This is our vision. An application platform that does not get in your way, that combines this simplicity and this power that is inspires confidence, that puts you in the driver's seat. Of course, we are not completely there yet, but that's what we are aiming for. And we look forward to sharing more of that vision with you in the upcoming months. You can expect very big announcements from us. And in the meantime, for today, please swing by our booth. We have a lot of t-shirts to give you. And thank you. And now I'm going to yield the stage to our keynote speaker today, Emily Rose. Well, hello, everyone. How are we? Awake, hey, that's something, right? Awesome. Well, let's get started, shall we? Oh, that's a blank slide. So I know that was probably really confusing for a lot of you and maybe even a little bit uncomfortable. But the point that I wanted to make here, by the way, I'm glad we had this talk, the point that I wanted to make here is that we've already very deeply integrated technology into our lives. So with that, let's go ahead with introductions. My name is Emily Rose, known as AmoraLondra on the internet. I am a developer advocate who works at Twitch, formerly at companies like Salesforce, Particle, Sauce Labs. And I like to start my presentations with what I call Five Fun Facts for Free. And so my pronouns are plural, they, so figure that one out. And I'm an artist disguised as a developer. And lately I've been liking to think of myself as a live broadcaster slash nerdy entertainer. Case you were wondering, I am indeed transgender, genderqueer, or as they say in the Bay, hella gay. And I'm also from Portland, Oregon, which probably explains a lot, to be honest. Woo, Portland, yeah. So, and also just, speaking of, I work for Twitch. As you may suspect, I brought my stream with me. So if you're interested in seeing a little bit closer, you're welcome to tune in to the stream. Also, if you don't mind, would you be willing to say hello to my internet friends? Hey, oh my gosh, you guys are so good. Very gracious, thank you for participating. Blue Lava gave you a thumbs up. He appreciated it. Oh, and Alpha Duplo says hello, and Elka, and Sir Pink. And you're all welcome to join the chat, if you like as well. And this is just an experiment. So, don't take it too seriously, don't worry about it. Just gonna have my internet friends hanging out with us. So, with that, does anyone know what I'm here to talk to you about today? Probably just in a very vague sense, right? The future is now, realizing your potential as a cyborg. And I will give you all a warning. This talk is about to get deep, like hashtag deep. It's not a technical talk, there's no code, there's no demos, I won't be offended if this doesn't interest you. But I did wanna set the expectation. This talk is primarily focused on thoughts and feelings and overall goals of our community at large. As you may realize by now, I like to start out with facts. Internet facts. Here's an internet facts. In 2013, 51% of internet traffic was non-human in nature, non-human. Show of hands real quick if you don't mind. How many of you were aware of that? Literally like one person raised their hand. So, the reason this is significant is it was the very first time that we were able to get some measure on the fact that we're not the primary drivers of traffic on the internet anymore as human beings directly. And to clarify, non-human traffic just means anything that isn't directly resulting from a person at a device initiating some interaction in that moment. And the data here is a little hazy but not terribly inaccurate and the SEO industry has a term for this or an acronym. It's called N-H-T. So if you see that, that's what they're talking about here. And fast forward a year, 61% of the internet traffic was non-human in nature. So in one year, 10% growth. So I thought, you know what? Let's do some linear extrapolation. That's always fun, right? For science's sake, keep in mind, I am not a data scientist, but I do know how to make pretty graphs in keynote and that's pretty much the same thing. So here's an extremely scientific graph for you. And what you can see very clearly is that by the end of this year, we anticipate over 101% of the total internet's traffic to be non-human in nature. It's pretty amazing, right? And that's even with the erroneous assumption that this growth will be completely linear. But we do expect exponential growth. So what would that look like? Well, I've prepared an obscenely scientific graph for you and you know, in reality, it might look nothing like this, but the truth will be even stranger than this fiction here. And you know, honestly, at some point the curve just gets so high it doesn't matter anymore, right? I think that's how that works. Anyway, like I said, I'm not a data scientist. So the key takeaway here that I want you to understand is that by the year 2020, by my calculations, over 9,000% of the total internet traffic will be non-human in nature, right? That's like 90 whole pie charts, right? That's why I had to use a line graph. I couldn't even fit them all in one slide. So that's cool, but like I said, the real figures are more impressive than bogus trends. And speaking of real figures, here's one, 50 billion devices by 2020. It's like two years from now. Show of hands, how many people have heard of this claim? 50 bill by 2020. All right, so like a dozen or so of you. And this isn't coming from me, right? This is Cisco saying this. So they know what they're talking about. And if you do the math, it's kind of mind-bending. 50 billion devices by 2020, that's like 50 devices for every person living in San Francisco. So it's pretty intense. So at this point, we know that the data is flowing, right? We know that there is a lot of data and it's just gonna be more and more as time goes on. But where is it coming from? Is all this data, all this non-human traffic, really all the result of things like exploits and, you know, DOS bots, you know, like the Mariah network, things like that? No. It's actually coming from like literally everywhere, like all over the place, right? And literally more of everywhere every single day, right? Like every day more sensors are coming online, new systems are collecting data we've never collected before and existing systems are adding data points with new sensors. And it's just, it's new data every day, literally every day. But more importantly, what does the data represent? Data in isolation is meaningless, right? So what does this data represent? Well, you probably know what I'm gonna say, literally everything, right? So from credit card activity, what else? Transit usage, temperature reading, seismological events, gas emissions, that was me by the way, excuse me. Everything from, you know, air and water quality to the toastedness of your toast, your health, you know, daily activity, whereabouts, all of that ranging from that to, you know, the overall status of the world at large. But more importantly than literally everything is literally everyone, right? Because this data represents something about us and again, without us, this data would be completely meaningless. And of course, literally more of everyone every single day, figuratively speaking, of course. You know, maybe not every day, but you get my point, right? Hyperbole is one of my superpowers, by the way, so please respect that. Anyway, I am going to drop my one and only quote on you. I hope you appreciate it. Speaking of superpowers, the late, great David Bowie. Homosapiens have outgrown their youth, gotta make way for the homo superior. And also if we could, a moment of silence. You guys are great sports. So my point here is that humanity has the opportunity to level up and gain new superpowers. And maybe not in the comic book, anti-hero sense of the word, but we have very real opportunities to improve the everyday quality of life and our safety and our accessibility of knowledge and other resources through the responsible and intelligent distribution of meaningful data. Say that with me, if you will. The responsible and intelligent distribution of meaningful data. One more time. Intelligence, responsible, meaningful data. Keywords. But one side note, on the term non-meaning, non-human, this is a bit of a misnomer. I don't think this is the right way to look at the concept because as I've mentioned, this data is all meaningless without us, without a context. And I truly believe that we are our data. So, quick show of hands. They're really just like show me your hands. I wanna know you're listening. All right, most of you are paying attention. Oh, thank you so much. My friends, you're gonna go on a tour of the venue. And you're welcome to tune in too if you wanna see, you know, who else is here watching? Sorry, all right, no, but really, show of hands. Who's up for a quick thought experiment? All right, you know, gotta love a good thought experiment. First thing in the morning after a long night of enjoying oneself. So, imagine with me, if you will, just for a moment, that this space here, or this space, whichever you prefer, that this space is filled with all of the content that you've generated on every social media platform that you've ever encountered, right? Every Facebook post, every tweet, or tweet storm, every snarky Reddit comment and hilarious image macro and selfie and blog posts and source code and all that stuff, right? Think of it all, envision it, if you will, either side, actually, your choice, either side. I'm gonna give you a minute here, and I'm gonna sit down and drink my water. Well, thank you for the tour. Much appreciated. Round of applause for this gentleman, by the way, he's a good support. Sorry, I broke your concentration. Really, I just want an excuse to drink more water. So, anyway, so, you've thought, you've envisioned, and really, the point I'm trying to make here simply is that you are your data. I really want you to believe that. You are the content that you create, and when you die, your personhood continues to exist in the form of your data, and people will post on your Facebook page and it will become a memorial. And even today, current machine learning technology allows us to create a reasonable facsimile of your personality, just by analyzing existing data. So, I like to think about this in the context of, what does this tell us about what it might mean to be alive, even just 10 years from now, right? It's a lot to think about, at least for me. I think we have some really interesting challenges to confront in the near future. And another assertion that I make here is that the internet is now a conduit for the expansion of human consciousness itself. And the state of our consciousness is changing and shifting, and we're a lot more than we used to be. And we're literally enhancing our own senses at this point, right? So, an example that may seem very mundane is push notifications from your Nest, Cam, your security system at home, right? If motion is detected at home, you're not home, but you have a mobile phone and you have Nest, and now you know there might be something going on at home. That's ESP, right? And another good example, you have a GPS enabled application that alerts you to emergent traffic conditions before you get there. Suddenly, you're clairvoyant. You've got that precognition now. So, we're creating new depths of awareness, and we're quantifying our existence on entirely new levels, right? Show of hands, how many of you have a fitness tracker? A lot of you, myself included. I found it's been tremendously helpful to me personally, but that's just the beginning, right? We've got internet radio that catalogs all of our listening moods and arguably, could be very insightful about our mental and emotional states from time to time. We check in on Swarm, which reveals a lot about our lifestyle. A lot of us use ride-sharing applications that allow very detailed reports of our travels. And these are just a few examples. But the point that I wanna make here is that we can now understand and interact with each other and not ourselves in brand new ways. And I give you a couple examples. I think the stream here is another good example of something that is a relatively novel way of communicating at scale with people. And really connecting. I found it very meaningful to connect with the friends that stopped by and chat with me no matter where I am. I can be in a strange city and fire up my stream and I have friends that are always there that come and hang out with me and support me and make me feel a little bit less lonely when I'm in a strange city by myself. Shout outs to you guys, zero X couch, Rekha. Thank you. So at this point, perhaps in my presentation, you may be asking yourself, where are you going with all this? And that is a reasonable question to ask. And the only way I can really answer it is with story time. Who likes a good story? Sweet. Well, I'm not gonna promise it's a good one, but we'll see. So this story begins in a little conference known as NodeConf US, back in the year 2015. This is a conference up in the woods of Marin County, a little about two hours north of San Francisco. And again, just show of hands, I love audience participation. How many of you have heard of NodeConf? Awesome, okay. And so here I'm at NodeConf and just to set the stage, a lot of us were chatting in this tree. This is like a special tree for NodeConf. It's a little tree, people can climb up in it and they all kind of hang out and chat. And it's right next to this lovely antique barn that's called the Boogie Barn after dark because we all dance. And we're just chatting about nerdy things, nothing in particular, just whatever comes to mind. And a good friend of mine, a gentleman by the name of Miles Borans, just kind of mentioned in passing, kind of a silly joke, the idea of a cuddle-based economy. Right? And I don't think he was thinking too seriously about it. It seemed like a cute idea and we giggled a little bit and then we moved on. But I couldn't shake that idea. So one year later, this is still on my mind. I'm thinking about it a lot. And I'm like, I can't get this out of my head. Like what would that look like? Could it work? How? What would it take culturally or technologically to make something like that happen? So I find myself at NodeConf again for 2016 and we're at the same place, but a very different format. And the format for the year 2016 is that there's, it's like an Unconf format, right? There's no predefined sessions, no speakers. Everyone just kind of hangs out and then there's a whiteboard and they just draw like a little grid. Like here's some locations and here's some time slots. And then people can just go up and propose like, I wanna talk about asynchronous file operations over in the Buckeye Lodge. And I was like, you know what, why not? I went up there and I was like, the cuddle-based economy, the tree, and, you know, cause I was like, why not? You know, and I figured, I figured, I'm foreshadowing a little here, but I figured, you know, maybe like a couple of people would remember from last year and it'd be a little joke, we'd have a little laugh and maybe we'd reminisce a little bit and that would be it, but I was wrong. And people really loved the idea. Like people that weren't even there for the original conversation last year, there were like 20 or 30 people that showed up for the first session. And I was super surprised. People really loved talking about this and it was an idea that resonated for whatever reason. We had numerous deep and meaningful conversations with people who were sharing things about themselves that you typically wouldn't expect someone to share at like a tech conference, right? And we talked about various concepts and, you know, kind of discussed how they might work and then eventually got into things like implementation details. But the idea very quickly evolved and we realized that there was a lot more potential than simply thinking of it as an economy. And so we started thinking like, what if we built this into a platform or like a network of the future? And so like after our first session, it was time to propose more sessions. And so I used what we had discussed to propose a second session, which we had determined should be called the Cryptocuttle Revolution. It was a crowdsourced name. And you know, this is when I realized, the session two is when I realized that people were really actually serious about this idea. And the discussion began to focus on identifying ways that we could actually build a system and figuring out how would it function if it were to be successful. And at this point, you know, we had, we started talking a lot about a platform and you know, like what would it look like? Would it be an app? Someone suggested the use of blockchain, of course. And you know, we ended up throwing around terms like n-dimensional cuddle coefficients and exchange rates and all those important questions. And then you know, questions like how would we interact on the platform? How would we interact with each other? Or would we even? And what would be the intent exactly? And the intent that we came up with that kind of seemed the core concept that we all agreed upon was how can we use, oops, I was pushing the wrong button. How can we use technology, you know, our unprecedented access to information and cutting edge technology to codify and teach empathy and help improve the condition of our social relations. And that led us to a hypothesis. And the hypothesis was that empathy is like a muscle. Has anyone heard this before? The idea that empathy is like a muscle, right? It's learned over time and it must be practiced and exercised, but if it is, you get better at it. And more exercise means more capacity, right? It's only through that exercise that we begin to strengthen our ability to empathize with others, particularly people who are much different than us. And that's what increases our capacity for compassion. And that exposure, more exposure equals more exercise. And again, you know, it's only through that exposure to new individuals, new customs, new cultures that we are able to continuously exercise increasing our capacity. But we also realized that that wasn't enough. Empathy itself wasn't enough. And there was a lot of musing on this, like what else would be necessary? And this is where I depart a little bit from where we left off at Nude Conf. And I picked back up more with kind of just my personal thoughts. And so I believe, sorry, I believe that we can't stop at empathy. It's not enough to get us to where we wanna go. And another assertion that I will make, and stay with me here if you will, is that we must redefine ourselves if we're going to be successful in an endeavor like this. If we're going to reach new levels of compassion, we're still constrained by our understanding of what it means to be human. So we must redefine ourselves completely. And what would that look like? What would it look like if we completely reexamined our definition of humanity? And so this is where I go one step further and I ask, and I guess I assert really, if we are to survive, then we must intentionally evolve. Empathy enough is not alone. And we are all cyborgs. And maybe I haven't convinced you just yet, but I hope at the very least I've given you something to think about. And I wanna leave you with a couple thoughts, actually a couple of questions, and a poem that I wrote on the subject. And I don't normally write poetry, but just another brief story here. I had the privilege of serving as an emcee for a couple of conferences in Europe, and I was asked by one of the speakers to write a poem for them. Apparently I had promised them a poem in the past and I didn't deliver and I don't remember that, but I was trying to be a good support and I was like, sure. So while he was presenting, I was trying to come up with some poem about the content he was presenting, and then when he was done, I went up, I read the poem and people really liked that, so I just started doing that for everyone. And what I realized is poetry really resonates with people, and it's something that I had never really experimented with. So I thought, why not, I'll take a shot at writing a poem about this subject as well. So before I do that here are two questions I would like you to consider. They are fairly simple questions, but what is our potential, truly? And how might it be realized? So I'm gonna give you a second just to think about that, and also just so I can catch my breath, and that brings us to poetry time. I'm really nervous about this, I don't really share things that are so personal to me, so if I seem nervous, go easy on me. The choices to make, will you give or will you take? Then will you help to awaken the next generation? A technocratic nation, one crafted with elation, for we are the ones who must build the foundation. Now is the time, find your reason and rhyme. This is the season to break free from thought crime. Let your voices rise up, persist and don't falter. Be rid of your vices from years at the altar of deities false and dogmas of your, we shall simply abide by this bondage no more. We must forge a weapon against the procession of intolerance, violence, hatred, oppression. It is not a question of whether we can, but a matter of how we approach with a plan. A framework we form for a new school of thought, a system in which empathy can be taught. No longer shall judgment lurk in our midst by way of technology, our bias dismissed. We can build a world where we all coexist, but for us to do this, we all must assist. Wielding the keyboard, unyielding, it's through our cohesion we find healing. With our new networks, we begin revealing how these worldwide warlords keep us reeling. On all of us, a dossier, their politics leading astray, their promises broken by election day, so just how do we adequately convey our utter disappointment discussed and dismay? We pave the way. We build the engine, technology born with the intention to aid us in our societal ascension into a new age, one free of contention, with a new found gauge for shared comprehension. We watch as the world enters into our dimension. Now we take control and change our direction. We can fight the infection and repair the connection. We can strive for perfection through our collective introspection, and it will be through our rejection of the previous perception that our greatest gift is bestowed. A download? Yes, through diodes and transistors, but much more than that, my brothers and sisters, our truth spoken silently through digital whispers, a voice for the voiceless, we cryptic resistors, when they look back on this pivotal crossroad, and ask to whom their lives are owed, they'll see just what we sowed. We fought for freedom with our source code, delivered our truth through a payload for it was from our fingertips, the future float. Thank you. I put the fin at the end because I was told that makes it fancier. And of course, I feel like this ties in pretty well to Drupal Khan's tagline of be human, think digital. So thank you. And with that, I would like to open it up for Q&A. I believe I will be joined briefly. You guys wanna come over to the chair too? Oh, thank you, eliminate, I appreciate the compliment. Thank you, Emily. Of course. I'm looking forward to our chat. Yeah, yeah. I'm Michelle Jackson, I am a volunteer and I also work for Palantir.net. So let's get started. What is the first step to redefining yourself within this new context? I think the first step to redefining yourself is a very personal process. And I think that it depends on your understanding of the existing cultural context that you find yourself in. And so it's something that I would struggle to be too prescriptive about. I would be very interested in having a conversation with individuals on this subject. But it's not something that I feel is a really like a sound, biteable answer, if that makes sense. So how has technology changed the way that empathy is expressed? If someone likes a photo or someone likes your post or even shares an emoji, is that empathic? I think that's a good question. Yeah, I think that, I mean, I'm not a data scientist, as I said. So I don't necessarily have an overwhelming body of evidence to support some of the assertions that I've made. But I think it's, we don't have to think on that, actually. Like what would, what would be an emoji that would more effectively or effectively express that you wanna demonstrate empathy to somebody? Is it, you know? Well, I find I generally go for the hearts. We've got rainbow hearts now in emojis. So there's a heart for every occasion these days. But yeah, I think the interesting thing to think about, on the other side as well, it's fun to be all sunshine and daisies about empathy, but a big challenge that we have is fighting that tendency to lose a sense of empathy when you are removed from that face-to-face interaction. And that's a big part of why I feel we need to put a conscious effort into intentionally evolving and redefining our understanding of what it means to be human. Because more and more we find that our interactions are occurring through digital media. So we're finding, you know, through various technologies like AR and VR, ways to simulate the organic human experience as it were. But I don't believe that's sustainable in the long term. So I'm interested to kind of experiment with what exactly we can do in that regard beyond simulation. So earlier this week, we chatted a little bit about just some privacy concerns around, you know, radically redefining yourself and radically redefining connection on the internet. Would you be willing to chat a little bit about that? Yeah, this is a topic I find is one that does tend to trigger a certain sense of anxiety in various folks. When we start talking about the privacy concerns of such radical shifts, it's important to analyze the motivation behind a desire for privacy. And I would be remiss to come across as someone who's just advocating for a wholesale, you know, abolition of privacy in the way that we understand it. But it's important to note that a lot of what we think of privacy is a result of the fact that our society has been such that there are very real repercussions for certain personal information becoming public knowledge. And if we can find a way to overcome that cultural barrier, then we may find ourselves with a completely different understanding of the value of privacy. And in which context it makes sense and is important. And if we can get past that, I am hopeful that we may find ways to derive meaning and insight from data that we weren't previously able to share widely enough to get value from. So in terms of this topic of redefining oneself, what does this mean outside of a North American context with people who perhaps don't speak English? Are there any implications for how this might translate and how we might ideate and iterate around this? Absolutely. I think it's one of those things where I think of this presentation that I gave to you today as a set of open-ended questions and a request for dialogue from interested parties. I don't have all of the answers. I have very few. I'm barely figuring out what this means for me and I know that I'm nowhere near qualified to make assertions as to what people in different cultural contexts should do. But I'm very interested in having conversations with people from different walks of life and hearing from them how they perceive this topic. So when we think about connection, can you share a little bit about what came up at that discussion you shared earlier when you were thinking about how you could actually create something where you could actually house, essentially, and facilitate that connection? Yeah, well, we talked a bit about like, okay, well, if it was an app, like I mentioned like the whole, like the cuddle coefficient. And it was this kind of idea of there, like, you know, cuddles are not necessarily a fungible thing. You can't just trade one for the other. There is a very complex kind of rule set around what a cuddle might be worth from one person to the other. And that was an interesting topic to explore. But I think the most direct result that I witnessed from the conversations we had at NodeConf in 2016 is once we got to the point where we're like, oh, this is a thing that we believe we could potentially achieve and that we all think is important to us. It was a little surreal, but in the boogie barn that I mentioned, that was like, you know, that housed our evening's festivities, there was actually just like this kind of spontaneous cuddle puddle that just kind of emerged in the corner of the barn and like several people were just kind of hanging out and like doing exactly what we had discussed of their own fruition. And I thought that was, it was a powerful moment to see, specifically because it was something that was so out of context for what you would expect from a tech conference. So yesterday we chatted a little bit about the difference between privacy and space and asking for space. Can you just peek through that a little bit? Yeah, I think that, and this question actually touches on a similar topic that I've explored a bit and that's the idea of, and I think it's actually something that Amber Case, who's a cyber anthropologist explores, the idea of calm technology, technology that is functional and provides value to you by getting out of your way and doing what it's supposed to do without demanding attention from you. And I think that's part of the formula. I think obviously privacy is very important when it comes to the repercussions of other people having awareness of certain elements of your identity or other bits of personal information. But that idea of having space or being able to create space for yourself, I think is very interesting and important and one that I don't, I mean, I admit I don't have a full understanding of how we would wrestle with that, but I'm very interested again in kind of exploring how that might come about, whether it's things like taking the concept of like home automation and applying that to digital spaces. I mean, who knows really? It's definitely interesting to think about that. So one of the things that comes up when we talk about empathy is often fear and shame. Are those barriers to entry or are they essentially opportunities? I would suppose they're a bit of both. I think that, excuse me, the first thing that I think of is if someone is experiencing a fear, it's an emotion that has some usefulness to them. Fear obviously protects us in a lot of ways. And so I think the first step is understanding where the fear comes from. And if it is a fear that is still relevant or one that's based off of previous experiences in similar contexts. So I think there is a lot of value in being able to come to a place within yourself where you're prepared to kind of confront your fears in a safe way and be vulnerable with people that you trust. And I think that's the first step. So before you mentioned that we have a lot of technology that helps us do our day-to-day tasks. We have GPS, we have notifications about the weather. Can technology help us confront our fears? Absolutely. And help us identify. And what is the risk of allowing essentially technology to have access to data that reveals our fears and then actually helps us understand what's going on? Yeah, well I think that you touch on a subject that I think involves the conversation around ownership of data. And where does your data live? Who has access to it? What pieces of it? How widely can they share it? And that's something I find particularly intriguing, especially with what's going on around data privacy, all of these breaches happening. Obviously Facebook is dealing with a lot of this as well. And I would love to see more focus within our industry simply on trying to get a better understanding of how we can federate ownership of data in a sense. But also to your question about can technology help you overcome fears? Anecdotally, I have I guess maybe a fun example to share and that is within the context of Minecraft. I was introduced to Minecraft much, much later than most people, maybe about a year and a half ago. And I loved it, but I was deathly afraid of Enderman. They scared the hell out of me. And it took me along, I would just like avoid them. I was like, oh, it's an Enderman, I'm getting out of here. And eventually I was like, you know what? I'm gonna confront this fear. I don't know, figure out how to deal with them. And then eventually I learned how to, you know, take care of them without dying. And then fast forward about a year or so and my son turns five and he's expressing great interest in playing Minecraft. And the same thing happens to him. He's afraid of Enderman. And for people who don't play Minecraft, Enderman are these very long, slender, pure black with purple eyes mobs that were modeled somewhat after Slenderman if you're familiar with that internet legend. And they have a peculiar behavior in that they're totally docile unless you look them in the eye and then they scream at you and chase you down. And that was particularly, you know, upsetting for him as a five-year-old. But over time I worked with him to help understand what is it that scares you, what's the sound? Well, you know, it is just a game and we talk through that and then I come to find out, I come home and he was so, so excited to show me that he went into creative mode where he can just build with whatever he wants and he built himself a giant Enderman, a huge Enderman out of little black wool blocks and he painted this giant smiley face on him and was like, he's holding a house. And I'm still having conversations with him about how he got to that point but it's so fascinating to me that on his own, as someone who's only five years old, it's very clear that he went through a process of understanding that he has a fear of this entity and the game that he enjoys and found a way to overcome that fear all by himself. And so that is just a silly little anecdote but I think it illustrates some of the ways in which we can start approaching these things. What role does exposure play? Was that something that came into play? I think so, yeah, I mean, it was something where, and he was initially very, if we're still talking about the Enderman thing, he was very hesitant to go into any of the worlds that had Bob's spawning unless I was there with him and so it was, I think, a process of kind of reassuring him, reminding him. It's such an immersive game, especially for a young person that it's easy to forget you're not actually in the game. So it kind of helped remind him of that and then a part of his process, before he got to the point where he was building giant Enderman and appreciating them and describing them as happy, he actually would go and build little pens and then he'd find the Enderman's spawner egg and just spawn a ton of them and basically make a zoo and he's like, okay, they're all in there, they're still scary but I got them under control. So definitely seen that kind of increasing exposure as potentially a good way to go about it. Because it sounds like he actually had empathy for the Enderman. Yeah, yeah, and it's interesting that you note that. And I'm wondering, to what extent do we actually use technology to facilitate that and what comes up for me is gamification, which has been so effective in terms of motivating people. You think that there's just a place or a space for gamification of just certain compassion and empathy oriented activities? Absolutely, yeah, and I didn't really touch on it much in the presentation but that idea of gamifying empathy was a topic that we did spend a lot of time discussing and it was kind of back and forth on like, if we gamify empathy, does that take away from the validity or is it simply a method for us to kind of break down the barrier that we all tend to have? What were some ways that you discussed gamifying empathy? Essentially, the visual that we ended up kind of charting out is, you've seen, I forget their call but basically like a star chart where you have like the five axes and then you kind of draw where each one is and ends up with a polygon that kind of roughly describes five dimensions of some, five measurements of some kind. And so we were thinking about how you might apply that whether what the different axes might be and how you could affect it in the sense of like, oh, I have a score for like this metric here and this metric here and I can do certain things to impact that. So one of them was, and it was actually kind of when Black Mirror came out, I kind of was like, because there's an episode that kind of touches on in a more negative way what we were kind of thinking about and that was like basically if we had a way to kind of build a trust chain of people who if I trust you and you trust another person we could gamify a sense of the relationship and like how likely someone is to be compatible with you on certain levels, whether that's political viewpoints or lifestyles and things like that. So just vague things like that is kind of where we arrived and I'm definitely still interested in talking more particularly if there's people here who have an interest in it as well. Another question I have is this idea of an empathy buddy. So this is something that comes up in nonviolent communication and comes up in a lot of circles that practice compassionate communication. Yeah. Is that a role that can be fulfilled by a bot or essentially to use your rotations non-human? Yeah, I think that it's definitely something that has potential and particularly when you consider kind of what I've proposed in this presentation is if we do redefine what it means to be human, does that open up the title of human to non-biological entities? And aside from that even still, if these AIs are designed by humans, they're designed with the biases and the culture of the people that built them. And so in that sense, I would suspect absent real data that it is at least potentially worth exploring. I mean, I think, what is it? I think Eliza, the chatbot, one of the OG chatbots that was very, very, like it was not a smart bot. It did not use AI, but it just had keywords that it would pick up on and would simulate a conversation with a user and studies suggested that it was effective in helping people feel better even though it had zero understanding of what the person was saying. Or the process of simulating a conversation with someone that at least demonstrated empathy was enough to trigger that impact. So it's definitely worth exploring. Well, I think that puts us at time. It does. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Emily, for doing that. Absolutely, thank you. I really enjoyed it. And thank you all too. Thank you. We do still have some friends here with us in chat. We have Alka and Rekka, and there's a couple of other people who were there earlier. So if you don't mind just giving them one more round of applause. I want to make sure they feel included. Hello from Drupalcon. Thank you all so much. You've been phenomenally supportive. Oh, Suzuna's here, Alpha Duplo. Thank you so much.