 So I just want to say a big thank you to Leon and the whole team for what you've created because it really matters that we have these opportunities to come together. And I also just want to thank the camp because they are supporting partners of the Drupal Association the only camp that is and basically a supporting partner is someone who says we really you know want to you know join forces and help the Association fund Drupal.org and all the work we do we have an engineering team we have infrastructure costs and most of that's paid because of supporting partners. So I just want to say a big thank you for that kind of support and giving back. So thank you. And you know throughout all these years of working with the Drupal community you know I have to support all kinds of stakeholders you have your your developers and your site builders trainers and of course we have the agencies that are here to build sites for clients and then of course you know all the clients out there all the customers using Drupal. And I have a real special place in my heart for the digital agency stakeholder and I'm going to talk a little bit more about that and what you know kinds of conversations I want to have with you and but the reason I have like this real appreciation for digital agencies is because Drupal requires agencies to really have like they're like double leavers for growth and they have to invest in two ways that's very unique for an agency to have to invest in. They've won the agency owners the one that says yes we would like to work with Drupal and build sites with Drupal and then we're going to invest and get clients and build these amazing digital experiences for clients with Drupal. That's your typical investment that a business makes but what's unique about these digital agencies that are supporting the Drupal communities they're also investing back into Drupal and the people that are building the software that's being used. So they're funding camps, they're making sure they have a culture of contribution where their employees are contributing back code, they're supporting partners where they're helping to fund Drupal.org and so for me it's very important to take care of our digital agency business ecosystem because there are leavers for growth on both like that R&D side of the project and that community health as well as getting more people to fall in love with Drupal. So I want to have more of a conversation this year about what we can do together. So you know that's just why I'm really excited to be here today and to have these conversations and before I kind of go into my talk I wanted to just know a little bit more about the room. How many of you are with a digital agency? Raise your hand. Okay so it's about a little more than 50% and the rest you are and users using Drupal? Yeah? Okay great and for those that are working at a digital agency raise your hand at the majority of your buyers are coming from the technical side of your clients versus marketing. Yeah and then raise your hand if you're selling more to the marketing side. So yeah that's about that's what I'm seeing in the marketplace that's what I want to talk about. So I want to talk about, I'll just kind of go through my, well that's my hello, and so from my talk what I want to cover is the insights that I have you know I'm in this position where I get to talk with agencies all over the world and I kind of get this unique opportunity to see where the trends are and be able to kind of like aggregate that and share it out with you. So I want to talk about some insights and then I'm going to kind of like summarize it with a little swat that you know I think we could probably even do one together and expand it but I think it tells a good story and then I want to talk about what the association is going to be doing this year as it relates to some of the trends that we're talking about and then I would just want to let you know where our heads at as the association and how we want to have some bigger conversations with the project. So why don't we start here. So the TLDR this whole talk is that the future is bright for Drupal and with all things technology there's change and change creates opportunity and if we understand the changes and we understand how to position ourselves to take advantage of these opportunities that Drupal can keep growing and expanding beyond what we are today. And so I want to just start with some of the insights that I'm seeing and I thought I'd just start with kind of just some comparisons about change and technology and starting with the story of my own and the whole thing was like basically what was is again we've been through a change as a community and how Drupal's evolved and how we sell has evolved. I'm sure you kind of seen it yourself and like just just different ways you've had to adapt over the years and that's not unique to Drupal that's just with every technology and so I wanted to talk about 1999 way back when when I was selling application servers and so I stole this off the internet this is from a company called BEA who's our competitor because they they I can't find anything from 1999 about the company I work for which is called Bluestone Software but we competed with BEA and they had an application server and at the time everyone was just like ooh I want to go from bricks to clicks and they wanted to start storefronts right and they might have had a static website and they're kind of just starting like what we now call a digital transformation but like this was like really the start of it and at the time I could sell an application server I'm like well if you want to go from bricks to clicks you're going to need an application server and I was selling a point product and it was you know at the time it was pretty easy and then eventually what happened was is that the business owner said okay that's great we've got our application server we're starting putting things together but I really want to go into this further and I want to have a web experience you know come using more current terms I don't think they talk this way at the time but they're basically like I want to have a web experience where you know it's like everything's online and I'm starting to sell online I want to have a store I have inventory I've got I want to have some personalization you know and it's like I got to the point where they didn't want to talk to me about app servers they want to talk about a solution and so I realized I had to change and the company had to go through a transformation of its own because the person we were selling to was different it was the business person had this bigger vision versus just talking to the technical person who was buying the app server and they wanted to see a whole bundled solution they wanted to have this kind of like what we now call this best of breed and so I had to go out and build all these relationships and integrations with SAP and interwoven I think that was personalization at the time I'm just trying to remember all these names back from like you know 2000 and so what I found was is like I'm now having a different conversation with a different person and I'm also pulling in professional services that were much you know they were deeper engagements because they had to build out all these integrations for these stores that wanted to go from the bricks to the clicks and yeah so we were making more money actually because we were dealing with more complex solutions you know and so that's just an evolution of just one technology the app server I mean they kind of went to it an interesting place we're like okay so you just get your Tom cat and you're fine and we don't need to talk about that BA got acquired and our company got acquired you know it's like these things evolve right but my point is is there's this arc that happens with technology and you can see it even with Drupal so when I came into the Drupal community eight years ago everyone had out their Drupal shingle they just had to say I do Drupal and they could get business right like raise your hand is that sound familiar yeah and then I was like I was coming from the solution space so I was I was having a heart I was like I didn't quite understand because I didn't quite understand this arc myself like I was just realizing this is a trend in technology but I didn't understand the time so I said well okay so CMS is part of a solution like where's your integration with ERP and how are you working with like these other business apps and business process management and all these things and they're like I was like so what's your stack look like and I'd get this like I got a lamp stack I was like oh okay got it you're selling a point product right now people really want Drupal and that's just where the market is and so then what I did find over time though is that there are these market forces that have been happening over the years that made people realize I can't just sell Drupal and the customer wants more than just Drupal they want these digital experiences that you know is Drupal working with other technologies that are going to create this experience for the customers and for the visitors of the sites and and and I'll talk a bit about those market forces but really what we've seen in you know really around the world with all the different companies that I've talked to is that we're definitely talking much more at the solution level now and we've evolved to this so now it's solutions and government solutions and media and publishing and we're doing much more robust integrations and solutions and we're having these more of a partnership with our customers and helping them solve the business problems that keep them up at night and and now when I ask people what their stacks are it's more like this right does this look a little bit more familiar the kinds of in implementations that you're doing right they're definitely pretty robust and this comes from Mar-Tac so and you know you can see with all the modules that we have to these integrations are just super robust and so my whole point is is that this is our arc and so for anyone that might have been going through this and saying well I'm going through a lot of change guess what that's technology and this is normal and we just need to stay ahead of the curve and we can as long as we keep understanding these market forces and the trends there's just so much more that we could be doing you know we we can still be thriving and growing and doing these amazing kinds of implementations for our customers and so I want to talk a bit about the market forces before I do I just realized do I need to watch the time so I know we started a different time okay great so let's talk just about the market forces so like I mentioned I get to talk with digital agencies around the world and there's just some themes I didn't include everything but you know with Drupal we definitely have globalization where really it's everyone's picking it up around the world and that's that is great and what it also means is there are some parts of the world that are able to do Drupal Drupal work at a lower price point so whether it's in India or it's in Eastern Europe or it's in gosh I was in Costa Rica they have a really great you know comic offshore model and it's what it's been doing has been driving down the price overall because people realize there's the opportunity to shop around and like I can get that Drupal work done somewhere else at a lower price and so I've watched companies especially whether it's in Europe or in the US people realizing okay so now if I want to protect my hourly rate and I don't want to just be like kind of pigeonholed into just this this new price point I need to offer more I need to move into a solution space and I need to kind of go upstream the conversation and not just talk to maybe the CIO about like hey I've got the CMS and it does these things and it's highly secure but now I need to go and talk to the business side but what's keeping you up at night and let me help you solve that and and so we've been seeing this evolution of digital agencies in our ecosystem wanting to have more of this specialty maybe they're a full-service agency now and they're doing more UX strategy or they're doing more design and then as they come up the strategy they are using Drupal as part of that solution the technical side of the solution so we're definitely seeing that change and I also want to say this globalization is also great as we have had more people in these different parts of the world join Drupal they have also joined our community and so it was amazing to go to India for Drupal con Asia and to meet all these people that are working at TCS like I went to Tata consultancy services and there's just a floor like floors and floors of people working on Drupal but you know what they also had great representation at our at our Drupal con and there was so much passion for one be part of this basically it's a movement right and getting involved and wanting to contribute back and and actually our second most traffic on Drupal.org comes from India because they're there contributing in the same when I went to Costa Rica that's a great place for people in the States to partner with because they're in the same time zone it's easy to get to and I was just down there at their camp this summer and they're in the same in the same place like yes this is great and it's helping our economy and we can partner and do all these great things with Drupal but they were really excited to be at that camp to give back so globalization might be affecting the price point we're adapting to that but also keep in mind it's good for our community too these people are giving back as well and just kind of giving perspective things like globalization is obviously not unique to us I just you know sometimes it's so easy to be kind of myopic what's happening in Drupal and be like oh that makes me a little nervous and you pull the lens back and you can look at this there's some great reports from a group called Society of Digital Agencies and they did some research with Forrester and it was a global research and you know what digital agency is just overall it's one of their top three concerns is global is people outsourcing right so we're not alone in this this is just how the market works and you know there's some they had some other concerns like commoditization or their clients are starting to insource things like analytics and so that might be affecting their business and these are just very important things to know but also to know that it's not unique to Drupal it's just how the marketplace is working another trend is that there are a lot more CMSs than there were before and so it's gotten even more important for Drupal to get clear on its strengths and its product market fit right and so I'm gonna talk a little bit about this but it's forced people to realize what kind of clients are really the right ones and we're to spend the most time going after your your business right and where can you make the biggest impact for someone so you know you're filling your pipeline with the right kinds of clients that are best matched for what Drupal can do and really create the business value that they're looking for and you know it's gonna continue it's like now we're all into headless and that's that's great but there's also now headless CMSs we have to be mindful of that and just keep getting clear in terms of what makes Drupal unique and how we sell that and also just as a community what are we doing to keep innovating the software so that it you know basically so we stay competitive right and then the other trend that I think is a really important one is the rise of the CMO and so I saw a lot of hands going like hey who's selling to the the marketing side of the house there was a lot that went up there's a lot they were like it's kind of getting there and that's what I'm seeing in a lot of places around the world is that there is this this shift that's happening it's not totally there a couple years ago Gartner said that marketing will be making the technology buys in the future and we're definitely we're definitely there 2016 2017 the CMO based on the survey the CMO was spending pretty much the same on technology as the CIO and so you know that kind of has changed who company digital agencies who they're talking to and who they're selling to and how they sell it really changes your DNA because you know at the end of the day oh I should say we're also seeing it on Drupal.org so we've been 93% of our traffic is anonymous and I'll talk about why we're starting to really get into our data and why we want to start improving our site but in the first step was understanding who this anonymous traffic is coming to the front page and it's still technical but we're starting to see the rise the CMO right here at Drupal.org so you know this is a real thing that we have to prepare for as well and you know it's important to get into the heads of that CMO when you have an agency that's been talking a lot to the technical side when you're talking a lot about is it the right choice especially in terms of security and total cost of ownership you know you have to realize that the CMOs are really different they won't have a different conversation they have different needs so you know really the CMO is all about business growth business success their heads a lot more into like the same space as the CEO maybe a little bit more focused on just growing the business where CEO is thinking about growing the company in different kinds of ways but it is a different mindset and of course they're trying to think about that business growth in terms of growing revenue through leads through conversions and they're thinking about that customer engagement and also proliferation of the brand and having that brand recognition and they when they are thinking about how to do that of course they have a team that have different kinds of needs and they need tools to support the work that they do and these teams are your content editors your content writers copywriters PR social media SEO e-commerce and marketing technologists and we have to really be mindful about what it is that they have to do and what success looks like for them and how we make them successful and what they want is not like oh is this gonna be a secure way of adding content to the site right like they want fast you want to be able to make an impact they want they need it easy these marketing people in the marketing departments you know they want autonomy to use the tool to get that press release out they don't have time or want to call an IT person be like hey that's not quite working right they want to click the buttons that they need to click so they have total control to move fast and get their content out because that's how they are measured on success and if they're not successful guess what they do they go to CMM like get rid of it right these people have a lot of power in how technology stays in their organization and so it's really important that we understand them and the one person that I'm really interesting game to know more about is the marketing technologists and it could be the CMO but it could be someone in staff and this is the person who chooses the technology tools that the team needs to use and this is the criteria like is it going to make an impact for our business is it going to help our team achieve their goals is it fast is it easy does it give them the autonomy that they need the data analytics that they need to make smart decisions and what they want is the ability to have best-of-breed solutions so they can pick and choose and they need to make sure everything works together and concert for that business impact right so this is a pretty important persona for us to get to know and that marketing technologists is looking at all of this technology and all these kinds of technologies so are you familiar with MarTech no might be something to explore MarTech is well marketing technology is you know what it's referring to and MarTech is basically the organization that's really talking about all the technologies that marketing people want to buy and they have conferences and it's all for the CMO and the content editors to go and find out what's the new emerging technology to use to go move your business forward and so they are without marketing technologists just picking all of these and I know this is now very hard to see but it has things like e-commerce and SEO tools and it's got your customer mapping journey tools it's just like everything that a marketing person would want and a CMS is right here right and so when we are starting to work with the CMO it's really important to understand they're looking at all of this and we need to make sure that our CMS and Drupal specifically is relevant to their conversation really how are we that digital hub that's going to pull all of that together and all the complex content that they're doing you know they want to be content first they want to be commerce first they want to be community first and they have all these tools to make that happen we need to be able to position Drupal as the digital hub that's pulling all this together right and so I think it's like you know one of the things that's on top of top of mind for me is how do we help everyone have that kind of message as we start having to shift to selling into the CMO so and actually before I get into that I think it's also important to know that where they're buying and I'll go into the samours analytics personalization and emerging technology so a lot of that content first personalization AI very content heavy Drupal is really well suited to be positioned with people that are going after those initiatives but I also just want to be really clear this is a market trend it's not like we can just abandon the CIO side and the technology side because you know like everyone had their hands up for for both when I say who's who's your buyer and that's still the case right it's still the case that you have your marketing buyer you have your technology buyer and it also differs by industry we were just talking about how probably the technology side is still going to be the decision-maker in certain sectors like government university but if you're talking to consumer goods you're talking to finance you know there's different sectors where it's it's really shifted to the CMO and then I think it's also important to say that you can't stop thinking about the developer right this is why camps are so important because it attracts these developers we're gonna have a lot of developers tomorrow and they're they're the influencers you know we still have when I do a lot of my user research I talked to customers about how did you get Drupal how did you choose Drupal I'm like oh well this developer heard about Drupal and they were playing with it and then they used it at a departmental level and and you know and then we said we need to replat form and we already knew a lot about Drupal we could see what it could do and now look it's it the entire university is using it right so so while I just said a lot about the CMO I just also won't be really clear we can't abandon what also works for us too which is talking to the CIO and catering to the developers but I also do want to talk about some opportunities and why I think it's like as things start shifting to the CMO it's also really important to know that there are some opportunities for us as Drupal digital agencies so yes in 2016 2017 the CMO and the CIO were basically spending the same amount of money on technology but the year later CMOs reduced their spend and that's because they realize I just bought a lot of technology and I don't really know how to do this right they're not dumb I'm not saying that at all but they're kind of in a brave new world and they're trying to figure all this out so they had to slow down their spend and now they're saying like I was going to in in source a lot of things like analytics and personalization and guess what like I need an agency who can help me figure this out I need a partner I need someone who can help me connect the dots and get the return on investment for all this money that I just spent so this is I think a huge opportunity for us and then another opportunity basically just some some things this is on that forester research with the Society of Digital Agencies was that there are already a lot of agencies selling to the CMO that they've been there for a while doing digital work but what this research was saying is that these agencies have not really thought in a robust way about digital experiences they might be thinking about your digital ad buy and advising there or advising on analytics and what I was saying was that those that might have been there before we've gotten there have might have a myopic view of what a digital experiences and how to create that and so they're really maybe not as positioned to be the partners of choice I think Drupal Digital Agencies actually are really well positioned to fill that need because you've been doing all because of all those other market trends that got you to think about solutions and doing complex integrations all you need to do is really understand what their business problems are and you know how to do that and then really partner with them on how to pull together their technology and be a partner in the business impact that needs to be made so we're good okay okay great so let's just go into competitive analysis like how is Drupal doing you know I kind of talked about the market trends and how I think that works well for us and I want to talk to just like drill down into the software itself and the competitive landscape you know one thing that I've realized is that over the years Dries by Tart who's the I always say his last name wrong I apologize but you know he's been trying to explain that Drupal is for ambitious digital experiences and that's been hard for people to understand right and so he did a presentation at DrupalCon Vienna that explains a little bit more and I think it is an interesting word or phrase to use and I want to kind of talk about that a bit just so we're clear we're aligned about what that means and I'll tell a quick little story which is my staff didn't know what this means and a lot of that's because we have been hired to nurture the developer community so we have this DNA to understand developer speak and so when these words were said we're like okay Drupal's for ambitious digital experience but didn't resonate we didn't understand and so as we've been looking at this rise of the CMO and realizing that we need to kind of evolve our programs to not just be for the builders but also the marketers I've been doing some in-house training and I had someone come in and speak to us so we can understand this marketing persona and they started showing us websites whether it's Adobe or Marketo Salesforce and they're all using this phrase called digital experience and my staff said oh Dries didn't make this up this is like a term like yes it is it's a term that marketing people use right and it's like this shift of perception and understanding there's a whole nother world out there with a whole another language and that Dries was tapping into that that we you know at the DA we didn't know we had to make that shift too so I'm not sure if that's also one of the reasons why I didn't always resonate with the community that's why I didn't resonate for us just in full transparency we had to realize this whole marketing world in some of their language but what I think is important is just kind of getting down to what it is and isn't so when we talk about these ambitious digital experiences we talked about like oh it's these sites that have great reach right like lots of visitors and needs to really be able to scale up and serve all these visitors but you know that could be brochureware right that could just be like a lot of people want to see this brochureware and that's not what we would say ambitious but you know if you're doing brochureware let's say that needs to be read in multiple languages maybe it's serving all of different European countries and also you're doing multilingual starting to get rich you have a little e-commerce is getting richer right and so like that more complexity and that stack that you're building right and that architecture that you have that's what he means by rich and so you know it's it's definitely gotten I think it was bold and right to say that Drupal is not for some things right like I actually am starting this women's unconference it's very small I needed to get some my ideas out I just did a wick site it's like I'll just bang this out the wick site right because it's not ambitious and it's for five people that I can communicate to it's basically what it was for I'm not gonna use Drupal for that and it's okay right we know that when you're starting to do the more robust things of on selling tickets and I need to be in different languages because my this conference idea I have is just gonna be wild and wildly successful then then it's you know me bill moved to Drupal for that right so I think it's important what it is and what it is not but then people say well what are you saying is just for the enterprise did we abandon our base and the answer is definitely not like I think that's so important to say again and again that Drupal is for these complex types types of implementations but you know the mid market really is like core and they do many interesting things with Drupal that is not gonna go away at all and it also Drupal a it's been designed so it also can serve the enterprise and so I think I've been seeing a lot more enterprise customers over the years because of Drupal 7 Drupal 8 and so it's a yes and and so you know we could talk some more about this and I'd love to hear what people's perceptions are here because every region is a little bit different how they interpret this ambitious digital experience and if you have a better word we're open to it you know but I think it's just really important to be clear about where Drupal's playing and what that product market mix is and I think what it we're really saying is it's really a broad product market mix it's it's very wide which is a good thing and so the you know one shoe and Exo they and the Drupal Association put out a survey this past year they had some really great data about what's happening with Drupal and it's it came back with some really positive news and also some things that validated an assumption I had which is if we're if Drupal especially Drupal 8 is more for these robust ambitious digital experiences what's happening in our pipeline you know are we starting to get less clients but more in deeper engagements versus in 2012 when I kind of starting up those people were just getting a lot of smaller smaller opportunities smaller clients and just really having to fill their pipeline all the time I wasn't sure where we were in that spectrum and what this is showing was that yeah we are having deeper engagements we are getting bigger deals because we're doing these more robust implementations but what also was great was our pipelines are growing too so it's not like that less you know less clients and deeper engagements it's like more and more right I think this is a positive thing so big thanks to Michelle for running that survey lots of other great data in there and then you know what I'm hearing is in the mid-market the big competition is WordPress it might be typo 3 and some of the countries here in Europe and then on the enterprise side it seems to be more Adobe and so when you look at this I just grabbed this from built with the other day so first I have to say built with is not pulling in Drupal 8 data at all and we're working with them to pull in the right file so you have to take this with a grain of salt right now but basically you know it's saying that Drupal for the entire web has gone down and it's like we just said that we don't want that lower market right that's not where Drupal fits and I think that's why it's going down and that's what we want that's not a to me that's not a bad thing that's just say we made a choice and we're just watching that choice have its words is being realized that's all and then I look at million we're going up for the category called million and then a hundred K we're going up but there's definitely some growth that's happening there that 10 K like that might be the enterprise that's going down and I think it's Adobe that's going up there you know I'd be curious like once since it's not pulling in Drupal 8 data you know we just don't have great statistics of what's happening in the marketplace right now and this is the closest we have this isn't great but it is telling a story like the things we said should happen are happening right we're not going after total market share we're not trying to grow our market share of the total web because we don't want the brochures in the blog sites and things like that we are growing that mid market and I think we have some good challengers in the enterprise but I also pointed out a lot of opportunities that we had to go after there too from a product perspective and Dries talked about this a bit we have some some areas of improvement that we need to work on and one is ease of use I talked about the content editor they need an easy experience they need to be able to work fast and we need our product to serve their needs we really need to start building for them and the story about that I like to share is my co-worker who's now our head of Markham was working at a company called learning.com it was built on Drupal and she was hired as a content editor and she walked in and she's trying to use this CMS called Drupal but it wasn't built with her needs in mind and it was really hard the whole department didn't know how to use it they couldn't find the trainer the trainer had left there wasn't any documentation and they just said we can't we can't do our job and they just switched to WordPress right like the content editors have a lot of power and whether you keep your account or not right so it's really important to understand what those content editors and commerce people that marketing technology is what they need and build for them and I have lots of stories of of accounts being disrupted because they were unhappy so you know there's a lot that's happening on the product side we have different initiatives happening in the community whether it's the out-of-the-box experience workflows lots of different initiatives that are already addressing this it's not like we're flat footed we know this and we're working on it and then the other areas total cost of ownership so you know while Drupal is free there are some costs that you may not have with other CMS's because you need to have an IT person on staff to do your updates right there's just some inherent costs that don't necessarily need to be there that we could solve for so for example auto updates is what initiative that we're starting so that we can especially the mid-market make it so it's a lot well cheaper to maintain a lot cheaper and easier to maintain your sites and you don't have to do everything so manually and pay that that the talent that you have to do that so that's another area that we're focusing on another area of sustainability you know as a project we want to be sustainable and it's really top of mind for me because I think about in the community do we have sustainability of our camp organizers this is a lot of work I really like that this camp has a mentor program right they're training their their next leaders basically right and are we doing that throughout the project and I also think about our module maintainers and their incentives and motivations for migrating their module to Drupal 8 for example I think about even the Drupal Association and our sustainability and I think we're in a good place but I look at other projects like WordPress that have they believe in free open-source software but they also have models where they monetize and commercialize around their software whether it's wordpress.com or they're selling their plugins through a marketplace and they use that that those funds to invest into the project they have so much money they're now buying ads on the radio and so if you know anything about advertising if you're buying ads on a radio you've got money to burn right I want to have money to burn for our project right and so I think a lot about that and as we know Drupal has a ton of strengths Drupal 8 is on the rise and we can see in the the research that one shoe and so they did that Drupal 8 is being used much more than Drupal 7 now and it has all the strengths that we know it's like I'm kind of preaching to the choir here so I won't spend too much time on here but really as Paul Johnson likes to say it's all about the ability to build the art of the possible right it's customizable you could build that best-of-breed solution that's just so much that you can do with it it's really powerful and of course it's secure and we have this amazing customer base and lots of stories to tell that we have a good foundation to build from but one of my favorite strengths that we don't we just can never talk about enough in my mind is the power of our community they are so passionate we have on our board Annie Miller who's VP of partnerships at WPP she handles the partnerships with Drupal she handles it with Adobe with Salesforce Marquette O for WPP and she came to Drupal Con Vienna and she's like this community is off the hook like quote unquote she's like I go to all these other conferences you don't get this you don't get this passion for the software and the people behind it that you get here with Drupal and our other board member is Mike Lam who's the senior director of engineering at Pfizer and he went all in on Drupal 8 and he said that he came to Drupal Con and he just saw the passion of the community he's like yep I'm going with Drupal 8 because this is what's behind it right and this is a unique differentiator for us hate to say that because these are human beings but it is amazing how passionate they are and what that means to our project and you know kind of just taking it to another level it's also unique and how much we believe in inclusion and I think it's really important just to pause and talk about this for a minute I internally at the association I have a value that we lean in heavily called celebrate then iterate and so at this message I wanted to just talk about this celebrate that we have a community that wants to include everyone and we have a very diverse group and we know that together with different perception perspectives that we are making better software but more than that we're making a better shared human experience and so I think we should really celebrate what we who we are and what we value and and so once we celebrate that then let's also iterate we can do better right so at Drupal Con we have a speaker diversity initiative where we want really high quality speakers and we want to have our speaker line up just represent how like all the diversity in our community and have different voices and so we've been last year was our first year doing it 33% of our speakers came from underrepresented groups and it was a really concerted effort to reach out to different kinds of communities different people that may not normally speak that are have a lot of great wisdom to share and we've provided scholarships to help kind of bridge the gap to get them there I was really successful it's a good benchmark here and now for Drupal Con Nashville we've done it again and now 40% of our speakers come from underrepresented groups and it's really great to have this kind of data and this passion and interest and willingness to get more voices out there because we're just better when we have different perspectives perspectives and I think about it with so I was advising the Docker community leadership and they were trying to work on diversity as well you know everyone's very passionate about this and I realized that I was in the big topic was how can we make our community more diverse and I was asked to come into a room of mostly camp organizers around the world and it happened to be a man a room full of men and that's and that's fine but it's also a little like oh we have some work to do here and we just talked about it's it's not hard to create diversity all you have to do is ask have to look for some other leaders and ask them to join you and and you can share these roles right if you're a camp organizer because I'm gonna leave this camp but I would like you to lead it with me right and reach out to people from underrepresented groups to join you and to learn and mentor them and just help them find out what their blockers are and and just bridge those gaps and this is not you know so what I'm saying is it's not unique to Drupal to have to work on this we're all working on this Dockers working on this and other technology groups I do think we're further ahead and I'm really proud of that and but we still have more to do including myself you know somebody had said to me Megan look around what voices don't you have at the table at the Drupal Association or on the board right and so even we have to think about this and someone else said to me Megan have you sent the elevator back down right I'm now the executive director of the Drupal Association have I sent the elevator down to find someone else to help them come up right so those are things on my mind we all have a role to play in creating an inclusive community but this is a strength of ours so let me just talk quickly about some opportunities so there are some CMS trends this year I've touched on this briefly there's artificial intelligence everyone's talking about this like right the rise of the robots that's a thing personalization like I said I've been talking about this since 1999 right but it's headless the Omni Channel right you talk to that CMO they're like headless what's that let's talk Omni Channel so voice right everything with Alexa at least top four trends their content first and Drupal and they're complex and this word Drupal really shines so I think there's some huge opportunities to position Drupal in these bigger conversations of emerging technologies and where companies want to go so SWAT you know I just did a really simple one I think the TLDR just kind of being mindful of time is we have a lot of strengths a lot of strengths and there are many opportunities that are opening up to us especially as like the marketing budgets are opening you know for technology and we know that they need partnerships they don't know how to do all of this we're positioned really well to help them and you know there are some weaknesses but you know we know what they are we've already been working on them and our community is really good about focusing and solving hard problems together and then threats you know there's many CMS's and guess what that's like it's called competition you know we know how to do that we know how to solve for that too so I think it's all really great and okay now you have to give me a time limit five minute warning I mean we have a big buffer today oh yes okay if I just keep going so what we want to make sure I'm not sucking all the air out of the room no no no no we can always can the boff idea and still have time to head back early later at the end of the day okay don't worry this is great okay great um so Drupal 8 is out we've built something amazing now we need to share it with the world and so the number one goal of the project and therefore the association is to accelerate adoption specifically we can do that in our channels on Drupal.org and Drupal.com and so that's been really top of mind and as I've been thinking about this I've been thinking about the Drupal Association's DNA and we've been solving we've been serving the developer community very much especially the contributors you know building them the tools that they need to collaborate online and creating even Drupal.com is very much for the builder and I had and I had a change in perception that we need to expand not leaving the developers behind but just expanding how we serve our community and who our community is and you know this is just one of those like personal stories that I want to share so you can just understand where my where my head's at and so I'll start the story by saying it has a happy ending I'm totally fine but I had a digital experience that kind of changed my life you know it's Uber can change your life or Lyft right like I got that car and it was cheaper that's great it is like I never really stop and think about that I'm like that was just a good experience but this was a it was as health related I had a health scare as we all do as we get older you know that happens and so I had to go and get a lot of tests really fast to see what's going on I'm going to this hospital and it's a little scary right like when you're going through this you have these emotional experiences like okay I know what I have to do and I've got a good doctor and you know but you're you're nervous you're not quite thinking well and so you I went to this hospital experience that was really they clearly had like usability testing and the entire process and it was very digital throughout the whole thing so wherever I was I had my phone and I had my patient portal and I'm getting in line and they had things happening with kiosk that were telling me information was personalized to me as I was putting in my information or they're swiping my little my little wristband and I'm going from doctor to doctor and this scan and that test and and I'm like I don't even know who I'm seeing and what's coming next I just know that like I'm getting updates on my phone of who I need to go see I'm getting reports sent to me on my phone just like it was just amazing how I felt so much more in control at a time that was chaos right like you're just scared and you're just like I don't know what's happening but it's like it's amazing this experience that I had that information really helped me now in the end guess what I'm totally fine I'm just you know I'm in my 40s and that's this is just what happens so I just want you to know that everything's fine but this experience really had a profound effect on me because I had to think I stopped and I thought about how do they build that right like the Drupal Association we talked about the developer someone built that but I'm like you know there was so much more that went into this there were you know the user user the user experience was amazing the content was amazing it was highly personalized to where I was sometimes even in the hospital because of beacons and things like that right it was just really so much more than just a developer building with a team and I realized that if we want to create amazing digital experiences and have more of that the Association needs to change its thinking and not just serve these builders but the whole chain of personas that decide on the technology build and put in all the content and create this user experience and so I've really started to make a shift in having these conversations at the board level where we are now talking about okay like we need to serve all these personas we need to make them all power users in the way that they're using Drupal so that together they can make these amazing digital experiences that have an impact with people like me so that is one big change so to accelerate Drupal I've realized we need to kind of expand who we're serving and so you know I kind of break it down until I think about well what's the what's the work that we need and who are these personas along the way so of course on the adoption side you have your decision-makers you have your influencers and then they become users and then you've got your teams that are building you've got your marketing teams you got trainers in there right and then of course you have the community and that needs to be not just our developers right we need more marketers in our community too you know if you having a camp and you're a bunch of developers that are creating a camp you're gonna have amazing content but I bet you would love to have some content editors and marketing people that can help you get the word out right like there's just a lot of roles for all these personas and we need them all so I've been thinking a lot about how to bridge that gap and create an on-ramp for some of these new personas to join our community now I have to so I'll tell you a little bit about what we're doing to accelerate adoption in our channels and I have to just point out that we are 17 people with an event and a website and that is not to diminish the hard work and the important work the staff is doing I just like to be very clear that we have to be very specific about and very mindful of the work that we choose to do so we really went for the high-impact near-term efforts and so I'll just kind of be a quick update so one we are starting an effort to understand the Drupal Lifecycle the customer life cycle the journey of someone evaluating and becoming a user and we want to understand the decision maker decision maker personas throughout that and one of Annie Miller from WPP our board member is helping to leave that charge and we're going to use that to start evolving all of our programs so that Drupal con is not just an event for builders but for everyone and get them all under the same roof my whole thing is like their chain of personas and no chain is stronger than its weakest link so how can we use our events or a website to really strengthen everyone as they use Drupal and then in our channels we want to really inspire and inform those evaluators that are coming in we have amazing stories to tell that we're not doing as well as we could so I want to get more case studies out there whether it's at Drupal con or whether it's on Drupal org and make them really front and center because we have amazing stories and then we want to accelerate that evaluation path so for example if you come to Drupal org today and maybe you saw the blog post from previous last name but Matthew did a study of what's the evaluation path like for Drupal versus Laravel versus WordPress you know there's a lot of blockers in our evaluation path on Drupal org and we want to really accelerate that so we're doing some user research on Drupal org and and looking to see how we can improve that and giving people the resources they need to say yes I want to keep going in this path and ultimately what we want is to connect them with the digital agencies a lot better than we're doing today and then we also are going to work on some product improvements so the community as you know they're the ones that do these different initiatives to evolve the product but the association actually has a role in the product to whether it's our tools and things like that but we've left a lot of people behind because they don't use composer and so we want to bring them back we want them using Drupal 8 and that can really bump up the numbers in terms of people that are building and acquiring clients with Drupal so we're going to build a tool for those site builders so that they kind of we can bridge the gap for them and then also we just want to reduce some barriers of entry so that total cost of ownership area that's something that we can help with by starting the auto updates initiative and that's going to be I think pretty helpful with that mid-market so that's a few things that we're doing on the user side this is all about the retention we're going to have to do a lot of work here I only have two bullets but one is understand our users we don't know who all of our customers are we say we have a million sites pinging Drupal dot org getting updates and we don't know who they are so we're working with Drupal core to start to get that data and that data is going to tell us a lot and I'm pretty excited to you know what we can do with that data and then again I talked about how we're going to expand the types of our users that we serve so we need to start understanding that and you know this year will just be a year of learning on the community side I want to create those on ramps for personas that are not part of our community today that should be so for example customers so those of you that are using Drupal for your organization we you are part of our community we want to find a place for you have a lot that you can provide in terms of feedback on the product or just unique skills so at Drupal con I'm going to have a round table that's hosted by Mike Lamb of Pfizer was just going to be a peer-to-peer discussion of how do we as leaders in different organizations create our own community within this greater community and where can we start to maybe invest back into the community for a for the purpose of having a bigger impact on our business with Drupal so I want to start having these round tables just to create these good on ramps for these personas that we we don't have in our community today that we need and we also do a lot with our community in terms of recognizing it's kind of people want to give but sometimes they want you know they want some recognition for that work that they've done some of its social capital that they get and right now we've been putting a lot of emphasis on those that contribute code and that's important but things like camps that are real marketing machines happening all over the world those camp organizers deserve recognition yeah okay so anyhow so we're gonna start doing that and we're gonna keep looking at improving our developer tools and so we're also doing all of our user research looking at different best practices that other technology companies are using for their evaluation path and so you're gonna start seeing Drupal.org evolve this is just a comp but you're gonna see that we're gonna do some different paths for different kinds of evaluators making it an easier smoother experience and there are other things that are on my mind that I want to have as a conversation so we're gonna accelerate we need to define what growth is can't be total percent of market share of the whole whips of the world of the internet right we need to get clear about what success is so we feel like we can have something to celebrate we also need to talk about how we fund the growth of this project right so like where's my money for radio ads not that I want to buy radio ads and then how do we better support Drupal agencies you are as I mentioned our double leavers for growth we need to be doing more I see the association could be more of a trade association to support you all in a much bigger way and I want to have that conversation and then this is just one last story about why adoption matters right can't just grow for growth sake there's a reason why we need to grow and this is my personal why and I'll just use my two minutes to tell my story this is my sister she's a climate scientist as you know in the US climate scientists are being defunded you're not allowed to use the word climate science so there's a reason it's a fuzzy picture yeah it's a real problem anyhow she called me up a year or two ago and she's like hey guess what she works for the United States Geological Survey or federal organization they do applied science to help you know improve climate basically and she said hey guess what we're using Drupal by the way I can't get my picture up in my bio page can you help me I was like all right we have to fix that but she and I started to realize like you know my sister and I are very different people we don't have a lot in common other than we love each other because we're sisters and but I realized we have something very special in common and when you look at her story she went to Cornell University and helped them like come to come up with an environmental undergraduate degree because they didn't really have one that was you know she was kind of early so she she went there then she got a full rod at San Francisco State University to kind of continue her education in environmental sciences she got her PhD at University of Berkeley of California with a specialty and remote imagery and using that for environmental studies and then ultimately she got this job at the federal government at the US Geological Survey doing applied science so that means that she's going to go out and help farmers understand the impact that they have on the water systems in their area and then come up with scenarios and options for them to reduce the pesticide that's flowing into the water right so like directly applied to saving the environment anyhow when you work for this organization you have a job but you don't have money you have to go find your own money for your research and so because of her specialty with remote imagery that satellite stuff she gets millions of dollars from NASA and then she works with them so she basically coordinates to get satellites to fly over her research areas like the San Francisco Bay and then she goes out in a boat and then she collects water samples and she ends up doing this a couple times in a longitudinal longitudinal study correlating the data to see how her work is improving the water that she's trying to address and every organization I just mentioned is on Drupal and she is working with scientists at all of these institutions passing information back and forth using Drupal and she's getting her grants and submitting applications for grants through Drupal right and so it's like I realized it's like I need to make sure Drupal is thriving because my sister is depending on it right and if I can help my sister save the planet think of all the other people we're helping out in the world and so that's my why of why we need to grow adoption so thank you