 Hello, it's Rachel Lawson here again from the Drupal Association, with yet another of our candidate chat series with candidates for the Drupal Association Board Elections for 2020. And today I'm introducing Alejandro Moreno Lopez. Good morning, Alex. How are you doing? Good morning, Rachel, and I'm doing really well. Yes, thank you. How are you? Yeah, really good. Yeah, cat complain. Apart from my iPad being really strange today, so you'll see how this goes. So we've both been doing lots of various things in Drupal for a while now. You tell me an interesting story about how we met and I'm now quite scared to ask. Oh, it's something that you love to do. And it's something that I don't know why I was thinking other than it came to my memory. The first time we talked to each other, it was around five years ago, right? And it was because I was a point in my life where I was spending like four hours per day commuting, going to London West at BBC. I was thinking there must be a better way to do this. And somehow I found your profile on Twitter and you were doing all these amazing trips on your motorbike. And I used to love motorbikes. That's that when I moved to UK, I had to send my motorbike back in Spain and never thought about getting one. But at that point it's like, you know, I could save a couple of hours and get a motorbike and you were riding this amazing XR Idris. I was looking at that one and that's why I started communication with you, like, how is this bike? Is it good for commuting? And I remember your answer, like, it's very hot, you know? It will be a hell of a ride, remember you told me. It would certainly be a hell of a ride. I'll give you that into London, my goodness. It's crazy. It's not that I regret it. I still love motorbikes. But going to central London is horrible. It's like, yeah, riding next to huge trucks and it's a scary, terrifying experience. Yeah, I wouldn't want to do that every day. Okay, so it's interesting you say you've been around five years and, you know, you've met lots of people and it's all about community. So what can you tell me about not just the Drupal community it is, but how we grow community? What is it that we do to build new community? Yeah, everyone is talking about how amazing is the community and how amazing is meeting people and all of that. And I totally get that and I totally agree, right? And it's what makes working in technology worth going to Drupal camps, Drupal cons to any other events related to technology. And meeting the people behind the technology and meeting possible partners, customers, friends. But community is much more about, much more than that, right? If you think about it, without community there wouldn't be even technology. There are things like Drupal, of course, but things like Java or PHP or God's be the death. They are that amazing technologies that so many people are using because there is a huge amount of people behind the scenes sharing what they are doing just for the sake of sharing, right? And for the sake of learning and getting feedback. The Drupal community is of course all these things about meeting everyone and keeping contract and making synergies, but it's also what is the glue that keeps our world together, right? Our technologies and what makes a company, what makes our technology successful. So you talked there a lot about bringing success, you talked about all the various different things that are in a community. So we've got both companies and individuals and the glue, which is an interesting way of putting it. But we need to be able to reach out. We need to be able to continue to reach out beyond the edges of our community. And advocate for Drupal and talk about Drupal in different places. What can you tell me about advocating for Drupal and things that you would like us to be doing? So I think when Drupal 8 took the direction that took and a lot of people criticized, like always there is going to be people happy and people are happy about that slide, right? And you have to try to find the middle point. But the amazing thing that Drupal 8 started is it started as synergy. Everyone was talking about leaving the island and that started as synergy with symphony. Suddenly we were working closely with other community, which is the PHP or the... We've always been working with the PHP community, of course, but we were doing it in our own way, right? Suddenly we are more open, we are more adopting good practices from others and sharing as well our good practices. And sharing our work at the end, open source is not just about building your own framework or your own thing, but as well helping each other, not just in your small island, but as well helping on the symphony community, for example. So I would love to see that more happening and not just on the Drupal or in the development world, right? At the end, if you see, I'm focusing a lot on the technology side because I've been so well-developed for two decades, that's a long time. But what I've been more inclined recently or more is about the human part of everything, right? And I think it was Adam or Mike, one of the candidates that we're talking exactly about going out and reach other communities as well, going to world plus communities, trying to make more synergies, going to even places where technology is not that core of what they are doing, like marketing communities, right? The SEO and PPC communities where they talk a lot about their own world or their own solutions, but where we can find a lot of synergies on Drupal, there is this amazing tool. And this is what you are trying to solve. You could put these two together. And if you go to these places, you discover that a lot of people, because we normally go to Drupal Cores, Drupal Cams, we preach between us, right? We think that Drupal is the core of the universe, but we go outside and it's like, what is that thing about Drupal? I have this one minute pitch or 30 seconds pitch elevator to try to explain what I do and what is Drupal, right? So that's what we should be doing. Ah, that's interesting, yeah. I wonder how many people in our community could describe Drupal and why it's important in one minute? Oh, I managed to find the right, but I'm still practicing, yeah, specifically for me. It would be interesting to see. It would be almost like an interesting idea to see a whole load of people for one minute having to explain why. That would be interesting. So you have, as you say, you mentioned some Cams and so on like that. Have you got any particular favorite memories from visiting maybe Drupal Cams or anything else that came up? Yeah, I was thinking that it's really difficult because every time you go to any event, be it Drupal Cams in London, be it Manchester, be it Drupal Cams, there's always something special, right? Because it's a different city. It's not always different people. That's also amazing because it's like living off the island. Sometimes it's good that it's a small island because just in a few events you end up meeting everyone, right? And I think we're meeting you on every single event I've been going that I don't go to a lot of them, but they always meet you. That's amazing. You end up making friends and making new friends. It's difficult to choose one. Probably the last Drupal Cams in Amsterdam. That was very special for me because Amsterdam is a city that I love. But also because the whole organization, the whole thing that happened, a lot of colleagues from work and customers as well. We managed to get some developers on a train, on a plane and come there. So it was really special. The best Drupal event that I've been in the last probably ever was this one that you see here. It's the Drupal Camp Spain. Oh, wonderful. Yes. That's a splash award, isn't it? It's a splash award because we did a surf during the whole week. And we got the key of the events and they gave me that. But it was amazing because they combined not just the technology side, but also going outside, go walking, go horse riding, do surf. Go out with people and enjoy the tapas and all of that. And the weather is amazing. Yeah, I see you've got the skateboard behind you. I have a skateboard in front of my house. I have it for decoration and everything like that. I still use it. And people look weird. This guy 40 something next to the guy is with a scooter. He's with three years old kids. Hey, I've got a skateboard. I've got a scooter now. I bought a little nine-bot scooter. It's good fun. Okay, so you're looking to be on our Drupal Association Board. It's a team of, I can't remember the now. Is it 12 or 13 people now? I can't even remember. Who all have different skills and bring different parties. Anything that you that you particularly think that you bring as a skill to that team? I think I'm discovering that after being so many years on the technical side of things, I'm starting to enjoy something, doing something different than that, right? You get the creative, you get the joy of creating something, but suddenly you discover the joy of enabling people, right? And you discover that sometimes you push a little bit here, and it's not going to be the thing that you created, which was like something I was really proud in the past, like I was in this amazing architecture work and it was me. Now I see things different. I see like doing this little push. It starts things. And when you see these things evolving, you're proud in there, right? And you get like, oh, look, we got together and we managed to do this as a team, not just as me doing that, but yeah, for example, we did with a swag shop. I think it started with a silly tweet about, you know, the communities, the Rupal community needs your help. Everyone is raising money. That's amazing, but I'm sure there must be other ways to find how we can help, right? And Will Huggins think it was, yeah, he worked a lot on this and we end up doing something that some people will like it, some people won't like it, but at the end it's about that. It's about trying to enable things, trying to push, trying to move forward. And the same as well for the Rupal England and Wales Association that you are part as well, that we are trying to do something. It's about, yeah, about trying to find where we can help, where we can enable other people as well to be part of something, right, to improve things. Yeah, absolutely. I remember because when yourself and Will and Ruth came to me and said, why is there no swag shop? And I'm like, I gave a load of reasons and then said, hey, well, if you can come up with a better way, then fantastic. And all credit to all three of you, you literally went away and came up with a whole basis for how a swag shop can work and Drupal.org slash swag. Now Will, it's in the menu, isn't it? It's in the give menu. Drupal swag is in there. And it's really easy. It literally makes money for the Drupal Association just by buying hacks and t-shirts and everything like that. But you made it happen. So thank you for that because it's a really interesting, interesting new model. And it has to be said, it was the first step, right? We were trying to find a solution to something which is there is a hole in the Drupal Association and we need to have some help. Some people propose, okay, we could do the shop. There are better ways. But this is just the first step. We are discovering that it works and we are discovering that the community is behind it. Once we have numbers, we can probably do a second step, maybe do something or maybe in Drupal, maybe in e-commerce, but it has to make sense as well. Because I remember the conversations with you, it was about the previous attempts. You were losing money. Even you were setting for filming the deliveries and all of that. It was making the association to lose money because you had to have people working on that and you had to pay. Yeah, but what you built is what you built, created zero risk for everyone, zero time as well. So yeah, that's really great. Yeah. Okay, well, thanks for that. Have you anything that you want to add on or anything particularly you want to say about your candidacy that people should hear? I think we have a lot of problems, not necessarily in Drupal, but in the open source, right? And we have this round table that we've done on Drupal and London, and we have another, the same table with different people in DrupalCon in Barcelona, remotely in Barcelona. So I think we need to open the conversation and be honest about, we are in an amazing time. Open source is super recognized, and open source is beating all the alternatives, but this is creating lots of problems as well. It's creating a stress. It's like a road that is starting to get a lot of cars, but that road needs to be maintained and the infrastructure on top of which we are riding or we are driving our cars is maintained by most of the time volunteers. So we need to find better ways to fix problems that this is creating, like burnout on people, right? Things like security, because, yeah, no one is, if there is someone maintaining packets, suddenly you have a huge security hole and that's going to be a lot of problems for a lot of companies that didn't even realize that they were using that package, that's all. So we need to keep pushing on things like that, on keeping us honest and trying to find more models. People may not be happy about some decisions in terms of now how you vote, but it's as well on, okay, maybe not everyone is happy. How do we find an alternative? How do we find solutions, right? We have to keep, yeah, the communication, we have to keep the conversation about that and diversity as well. Everyone is talking about diversity and everyone, at least myself, I thought it was about giving everyone more opportunities for everyone. And since our round table in Drupal Camp London, that opened my eyes because it's not just about giving more people opportunities. It's as well, of course, it's about that, but it's as well what these other diverse profiles bring to the community. Suddenly you are not talking about just developers, you're also talking about design or about people in marketing or people from different counties, right? Suddenly the ideas, all the things that they bring on table, they wouldn't be possible without them, right? So I think we need to keep pushing on those directions and try to, we have amazing communities. Open source is great, but we have to keep things like that, we have to keep pushing to make sure that we stay on track. Brilliant. Okay. Thank you, Alex, that was brilliant. We're very lucky this year. We've got 10 fantastic candidates and I'm going to be happy whoever wins. So all the very best of luck and we will find out soon. Thank you very much, it was great to talk to you and good luck to everyone.