 Good afternoon You are about to see a presentation from Fatima John and Steve although they may look like your friends Fatima John and Steve For the purposes of the next 40 to 50 minutes. They are not themselves They are now as they stand before you the leaders of the 1337th meeting of the Council of Forgetful Futurmakers. Thank you gavel gavel gavel I Fatima Sarah Khaled call to order the 1337th meeting of the Council of Forgetful Futurmakers We the makers of the future gather Irregularly at a frequency interval unknown to discuss the unknowable future We will collectively make through our proactive actions and our ineffectual inactions to you the Council of Forgetful Futurmakers. I say the future is what we make it Council you seem to have forgotten that every time one of us says the future is what we make it We're all supposed to say again. The future is what we make it. Let's try that again The future is what we make it. The future is what we make it. Thank you The Council of Forgetful Futurmakers will now come to order the question before the Council today is the deployment of websites the Council has recognized the growing importance of websites to the state of humanity it is no exaggeration to say that humanity's destiny is intertwined with humanity's deployments on the web Today we will hear from two future advocates Steve Perch and John Richards. Hello Steve and John John and Steve do you remember exactly what you're here to present? I do not nor do I Alas, it is a curse of the Council of Forgetful Futurmakers that we all have terrible memories Oh, I do remember that we are all bad at remembering stuff What are we talking about again? I was explaining to the Council that you're going to present visions of the future right right and that will be considering these visions of the future through the framework of future cones Question yes, Steve. I forgot what a future cone is That was a statement Steve not a question. Oh questions. Yes, like jeopardy beep beep. Yes What is a future cone? I'm glad you asked I will now explain future cones and how they relate to the fact that the future is what we make it The future is what we make it. Please sit down John and Steve question. Yes, Steve I don't know where my sitting device is. Your chair is over there Steve. Thank you Futures are so full of possibilities and have the potential to be so so so many things and one way to visualize all of our alternative futures is as taxonomies on the future cone. A future cone is a visual representation of the different futures that are possible for humanity each with a variance of possibilities. You can imagine the precision of a future cone is much like the headlight of a car where the spotlight is clearer and more certain in the middle and fuzzier on the outside such to our visions of the future. As we review these alternative futures on the cone, you will see that they are clearer, more certain, more defined in the center and as we move outwards There's more abstraction. They're a little more uncertain and they become impossible So let us begin at the center. The projected future is an extrapolation of the past. If things remain as they are this is the future that will occur based on exactly what we know today and nothing more. The probable future is the future that's likely to happen. A future that is determined by circumstances and disruptions today. The plausible future is the future that could happen. This is based on how our understanding of the world works. There's little uncertainty in the plausible future as it's based on things like physical loss and social processes. The plausible future is the future that we can create. Oh, the future is what we make it. The future is what we make it. Thank you, Steve. The possible future is the future that might happen. It includes a range of all possibilities, including the possibilities based on knowledge that we don't have currently and knowledge that we might discover someday. And the preposterous future is a future that we see as impossible, full of possibilities based on uncertainty that we have not yet discovered. Future Advocate Stephen John will now demonstrate to you these alternative futures and how we might seek to understand them better in the context of web technologies. The future is what we make it. The future is what we make it. Steve. Statement. Yes. Is it my turn? Steve, that is a question, but yes, you may proceed. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Distinguished counselors, we are forgetful. If you are also tired of standing, I invite you to sit in the open chairs. Please don't be shy. Although we are a forgetful council of future makers, the task before me is to project into the probable future. I shall predict the most probably projectable future of website deployments 31 years into the future by looking back at the last 31 years of website deployments. The future is what we make it. The future is what we make it. And there is a very good chance because of our collective tendency to forget where we have been that in the future we will just keep revisiting the same places and patterns that we have been before. For me to review the last 31 years of website deployments, I must now forget to forget. I must remember to remember to project into the year 2053. I must remember the year 1991. 1991, a most palindromic of years. Tennessee Senator Albert Gore shepherded the passage of the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. While not inventing the internet, this legislation greatly spent the progress of the then nascent worldwide web. In the last 31 years we have seen great changes in the manner by which the world of sites are deployed unto this web. In the last 31 years we have seen lamb stacks, mean stacks, jam stacks, spas, SSGs, SSRs, ISRs and other acronyms and initialisms whose full words I forgot to remember. No, such acronyms are not the entry point. I would like us to walk through on this journey to the past. Instead I would like to ask the question, on what computer do the templates meet the content? On what computer, often controlled by departments of information technology, do the templates, often designed and programmed by designers and developers, meet the content written by marketers and content editors? What reasons? What dynamics? What motivations have changed the mechanisms by which the labor outputs of these three broad groups unify into a functioning website on the world's wide web? Now, in setting up this idea that there are three roles to consider in the ever changing answer to the question what computer assembles the website I have forgotten as is our plight that in the beginning of the world wide web these three roles are often not played by three separate humans but by one web master and the computer on which the content and the templates were intertwined was none other than the brain of that very web master. Working with .html files, the web master would copy, paste, edit files, struggling mightily to maintain the design consistency before using the file transfer protocol to upload their labor output to a web server which would then distribute these files hither and yawn across the information superhighway. Within a few years though, specializations emerged as did the need for greater flexibility and power. Yes, projecting into the probable future we can safely assume humans will continue to want more flexibility and more power. Ten years after the passage of the Gore Bill, a growing ecosystem leveraged the combination of MySQL databases, the PHP language to create content management systems like Drupal. Such systems allowed for content editors to sign into websites, use forms to directly manipulate the content in the databases which were configured by the systems administrators and also worked with the programmers to ensure the efficient combination of said content with the templates. For a brief window of time, this model of CMS-based LAMPstack development, LAMPstack servers was the unequivocal paragon of professional website development. So, what happened? These phones changed everything. When Steven Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world in the year 2007, everything turned upside down. For one thing, the computer viewing the website could now be turned upside down. Or perhaps just 90 degrees. And somehow, our websites needed to keep working when the devices viewing the websites were now the most powerful computer in the stack. I said minutes ago that we humans often pursue flexibility and power. So what did we professionals of the web do when faced with this powerful challenge? What did we do when the computers browsing the websites, these phones, I and Android, became the most flexible, most powerful computers in the stack? Did we come together? Pool our cross-disciplinary expertise? No. The start of the smartphone era, if I remember it correctly and as a forgetful future maker, I almost certainly do not remember it correctly, was marked by panic and cross talk. Websites now had to compete with native applications. Designers and content editors realized their websites were doomed if they didn't keep up with native applications. The system administrators realized their websites could go kaboom if they ran on unstable, unreliable servers in a basement room. Developers often split into two camps, front and back end, separated by a chasm of gloom. And the site builders, the people for whom Dries reminded us yesterday, are the target audience of Drupal. They were often lost in a shuffle, left standing at the altar like a lonely groom. With web teams torn asunder, it was hard to put together even two pages. And so a single web page would have to do. Frameworks in JavaScript reading content directly from APIs would create single page applications, spas. Using these techniques it was possible to make websites that were very cool, but also very not cool. The performance concerns, the security concerns, the search engine optimization implications of this approach made the pure spa architecture untenable for a lot of sites on the world wide web. Like a lot of them. Still, the spa architecture opened the spigot of flexibility and power. It showed especially front end developers what was possible on the outer reaches of the future cone as it existed then. If only there a way to close off the SEO and performance problems of the spas. And so the Zeitgeist shifted from single page applications in which the phones was the computer on which the templates met the content to a model of static site generation. With SSGs a continuous integration server became the computer on which the meeting of the labor output to the front end developers would meet the labor output of the content editors. And again each step along the way we are tracing shifting flexibility and shifting power. The SSG model brought the power of DevOps to the front end developer community. The performance fundamentals of static sites maximized certain types of flexibility and certain types of development power. But at what cost? Shopping off Drupal's head can lead a Drupaler to lose their minds. Especially, thank you. Especially the site builders who needed to track the re-implementation of so many details of website behavior to suit this balance of flexibility and power. The limitations of static site generation have pushed the Zeitgeist forward again to change the answer to what computer assembles the website. Perhaps instead of running JavaScript exclusively in the browser or a continuous integration server, what if we leverage the expertise of back end developers and system operators to run JavaScript on an origin server or even a content delivery network for server-side rendering. I postulate that the most probable projected future in the near term is a rebalancing of flexibility and power that accommodates the full web team. Content editors, business leads, marketers, strategists, designers, front end and back end developers, system operators, and yes, the builders of the sites on the worldwide web. Finding that balance will require intermixing each of these answers to the question what computer assembles the website. But in a way that both empowers every member of the web team while not overwhelming them with the incredible complexity of all of these computers. I would like to reaffirm the vision we heard yesterday in the keynote. Deployments empowering site builders in particular are the projected probable future of Drupal deployments. The future is what we make it. The future is what we make it. Thank you, Steve. So was that the projected probable future for 2053? Oh, right. 2053, yes. Empowering site builders is what I project for the next few years. That's the most probable projected future of website deployments recombining past and present, yes. Was that a statement or a question, Fatima? Oh, right, right, right. 2053 and what comes next? Well, I hear WebAssembly is cool. That is what is on my Twitter feed. Long time Drupalers will remember Matt Butcher, author of the novel team module known as Conn. Matt is now a leader in the WebAssembly community. He highlights what I project to be a future driver of the question what computer assembles the website. WebAssembly might offer us another way to achieve distributed computing, but in a way that reduces the cognitive overhead for developing distributed applications. In addition to wanting flexibility and power, we humans, at least me, were tired. And we want less stuff to think about. It's in the room again. Thank you. What about the futures in 2053? With me as my technology comes online. Future makers, I'm preposterously possible John, and I'm here to show you that probable pastive is wrong. Science fiction author and knight, Sir Arthur Clarke, agrees with me. Alexa, next slide. The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible. Alexa, next slide. 2053, maybe 31 years from now, but the best way to gauge the amount of change we'll see in the future is not to look 31 years ago, as Steve said. Why? Please bear with us, Council of Future-Forgetful Futuremakers. Please close your eyes. Thank you for bearing with us, Council. As you see, we are forgetful and I... I forgot to update Chrome. Forgot to update Chrome. Where was I? 2053, maybe 30 years from now, but the best way to gauge the amount of change we'll see in the future isn't to look 31 years ago. Why? Because the change that we're seeing right now is growing exponentially. Look at the incredible upheaval all of its experience in the last three years. Imagine that level of change occurring ten times over. The thought is mind-boggling. Three years ago, my vocabulary didn't include words like social distancing, sourdough mother, or that dreaded toilet paper shortage. These challenges spurred disruption and innovation. Those of us who are caregivers likely dealt with remote learning or homeschooling challenges, 60% of the tech industry reported an increase in remote working. Did you even know that in the last three years they started deploying meat? Version 3 of the Impossible Burger came out and by my taste test, nearly as greasy and delicious as a real whopper. Imagine how greasy and delicious version 7 will be. And of course, in the midst of the pandemic, we saw an unprecedented rate of vaccine development. Alexa, next slide. A vaccine was developed and deployed in the span of a single year. Contrast that to 33 years ago when the typhoid vaccine was released after 105 years of development. Now sadly, as this diagram from AVAC, an advocacy group around HIV prevention shows, there are still diseases out there without a vaccine. And that brings me to my second science fiction author quote. Alexa, next slide. The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. So what we're going to do here for a few minutes, we're going to take a look at four areas of technology seeing rapid innovation right now and explore what that could mean for both our privileged developer futures, but more importantly, the world at large. Let's first get in the right head space though. So everybody close your eyes for a moment. You can't see mine, so just imagine they're closed. Let's all take a deep breath and then exhale. And as your breath leaves your body, so too let your memory of the past leave and be forgotten. Now we look to the future and we dream. Alexa, next slide. First up, artificial intelligence. Now I don't have a cyborg butler yet, but that just mostly means artificial intelligence looks very different than what all the movies told me. Alexa, next slide. We're seeing investments pouring into everything from self-driving cars to robot coders. In 31 years, what will that mean? Is it possible we'll see in 31 years all coding jobs replaced by artificial intelligence coders? Preposterous, you might say. Well, in a coding challenge just this year, AI programmer DeepMind scored on par with the average contestant. Of course, we also, not too long ago, saw the release of GitHub co-pilot and if that was any indication we still got a little ways to go for autonomous coders. So zero coders, even I, preposterously possible, John, feel that's a bit too preposterous. But maybe we can at least have them do all the tedious bits. I can't wait for somebody to write my unit test for me. And certainly we all know these artificial intelligence won't become sentient and suddenly decide to revolt against humanity. Alexa, disclaimer, I'm pretty sure there has never been a negative consequence to rapidly pursuing emerging technologies. But I might be forgetting something. Alexa, next slide. Time to distract you with space. Space is cool. The coolest stuff at space, though, I think is what's happening much closer to our planet. Right here in low-Earth orbit. Alexa, next slide. Imagine high-speed internet access the world over. Due to a network of low-Earth orbit satellites, you may have heard of this. Starlink is on a mission to do just that. When Ukraine lost internet access at the beginning of the Russian invasion, Starlink redirected satellites over to their location to provide internet access. The goal for them is a network of over 30,000 satellites providing high-speed internet around the world. But what does that mean for developer communities? Let's look at some numbers. Alexa, next slide. We see that the developer community continues to grow. But there's reason to believe that even this growth might be hiding something, that we could see growth spike dramatically. Alexa, next slide. So if we look back to this idea of space here, what we see is that the percentage of people on the internet as a whole is coming. And the biggest increase that we're seeing is from people in developing and least-developed countries. As readily available access to high-speed internet becomes available globally, we're poised to see a huge growth and open source as all these new developers from underprivileged countries suddenly have the same access that you and I have to the internet. What could that mean for Drupal? Alexa, next slide. Drupal.org lists a million passionate Drupalists. But what if that number were to skyrocket as new developers came into the market? What if we could double that number or increase it tenfold or more? It might seem like a wild idea, but there's promising news that open source is growing. Alexa, next slide. Over the last year we could see that the amount of GitLab community merge requests has only grown. We're seeing open source contributions at an increasing rate. Imagine the whole world coming online and hundreds of millions of developers working together around open source. In a world with 100 million developers, what could they do? Well, first we need to have a way for them to work together. So, Alexa, next slide. That brings us to virtual reality and augmented reality. Now, the term XR or extended reality comes to cover both of those, so I'll be using that. And the business is booming in this market. Alexa, next slide. The pandemic brought about a huge spike in extended reality investments. Current estimates project an increase of tenfold the amount of money invested in the next two years, growing up to a $300 billion industry. They're working on tech right now that will let you share a virtual office with your coworkers, jump into an open Drupal contribution room and pair program with your favorite Drupalist. Of course, as you can tell, the biggest hurdle is how ridiculous you look when you wear VR gear and how clunky it is. But with 30 years of development, I really hope the user experience improves. And of course, this model is that I can walk around in is already so much better than the ones that were wired and kept you tethered. Imagine what this could do to events. Events an extended reality. DrupalCon 2053 could be a truly global experience where virtual reality is used to remove the spatial limits that we have and advanced translation software removes the linguistic barriers allowing us all to communicate and interact together. So with all these developers collaborating, we know the web is here to stay. But what will the web look like in 31 years? Alexa, next slide. So you've probably heard a lot of stuff about Web 3. It's become a catch-all term for exciting innovation happening in the blockchain space and how it could potentially change the fundamentals of how the web works. Now, right now, the technology is pretty immature but it is advancing rapidly. I can't confidently assert, though, that by 2053, we will be well past Web 3. Maybe Web 5 or 11, who knows? But let's look at Web 3 right now and see what maybe that can mature into in the future. Alexa, next slide. Web 3 is having a massive influx of developers. It ended last year at an all-time high. Web 3 is built on blockchain technology and its proponents hope that this technology could bring about a more open and decentralized internet. Goals that much of the open source community agrees with. So I'd like to focus on one specific area of Web 3 that I think open source projects might have the most alignment with. And what I'm talking about is something known as decentralized autonomous organizations, often called DAOs. Alexa, next slide. So these DAOs are organizations built and maintained on blockchain technology. DAOs use the blockchain to publicly record and automate the group's rules and actions. And this is known as a smart contract. This smart contract allows large groups of people to collectively participate towards a shared goal. And since it takes a consensus vote from groups, members to change the contract, you know you'll have a voice and decisions going forward. You can think of it as test-driven development for humans. Now, one DAO, known as Constitution DAO, formed a bid on a copy of the Declaration of Independence at Sothby's. It had nearly 17,500 strangers got together to raise $40 million. Unfortunately, they didn't win, but it did get people talking about how DAOs could be used. Now, what if instead of pursuing national treasure Nicholas Cage style, we decided to use something like this for supporting an open source project? Now, I told you all to forget the past, but I'm not forgot the past. I just remembered a story. It's December 2018, and I'm going to do a horrible thing here as I'm going to mention WordPress at a Drupal event. They had been working on a new project called Gutenberg, and the community was trying to decide was it ready to launch. There were quite a few accessibility issues not addressed, but it also been delayed quite a bit. So there was now a lot of business pressure to get this out the door. Some of the team leads and Matt Mullenweg, the Dries of WordPress, had a private meeting a few days before in Slack, and this was just before their WordCamp US, a version trying to be like, you know, this amazing event here, DrupalCon, and their version of the Dries note. We don't know what all was discussed in that private meeting, but the outcome was a decision to row out the change despite the majority of the community feeling it wasn't ready. Eventually there was an apology, but it created a lot of friction in the community. Now, I only bring this up. I want to first caveat it by saying, by and large, the people running and representing our open source organizations are absolutely amazing. They provide so much value to all of us, but sometimes there are conflicts of interest, and it complicates things. The decentralized autonomous nature of a Dow could have made that situation impossible, with deployments being automated and triggered by a public group consensus. Alexa, next slide. Another place Dow's could have a spot in an open source is that they are experimenting on how to reward those who contribute to the betterment of an organization. Imagine a future where we see a Dow managing funds that are directly distributed to those contributing time and knowledge back. When a PR request is accepted, instead of just contribution credit or a gift of open source incentive, there would be financial compensation. Could we build an ecosystem where developers can make a living wage entirely from open source contributions? Alexa, next slide. So what will deployments look like in 2053? I dream of a future with hundreds of millions of developers deploying code from all around the world, while collaborating in real time through extended reality. There's a sustainable living for our contributors and project maintainers. Now, this might sound preposterous to some of you, but remember, the future is what we make it. The future is what we make it. Hold on, John. The meeting is not yet over. For the Council of the Forgetful Future Makers to better plan the future, I've written down some things which I think are some plausible futures, that could happen based on our understanding of the world. Now, Council, I will now need your input to categorize whether these futures are possible, plausible, or projected. Remember that projected is an extrapolation of the past or the current day with no changes. Possible is a future that might happen, and plausible is a future that could happen based on our understanding of the world today. It is now time for you to decide our futures. Please take out your portable internet devices and connect to the following uniform resource locator. The internet would work. There's a Q&A section. Here's your very first question. A AWS has a data center on Mars. Please put in your votes. Members, would you like to comment on this first question? Yes, Fatima. I would postulate that an AWS data center on Mars is preposterous. In my opinion, for that to become possible or probable, a Mars-obsessed billionaire would need to do it. Elon Musk is busy buying Twitter, so I don't think he will be able to buy AWS in the next 30 years. And Elon Musk will be bogged down, perhaps for the rest of his life, navigating the content moderation difficulties on Twitter. So I shall say this is preposterous. No AWS data centers on Mars in the year 2053. They used Drupal to be able to send a rocket to the moon, so why not send it all the way? It seems as if the rest of the council has voted this as most possible. I'm surprised, Fatima, perhaps we should take a look at our next question. All right, thank you, council, for voting. Question number two. A non-trivial number of Drupal 7 sites are still in production in the year 2053. Oh, my goodness. Council, I believe we already have a consensus. It seems as if probable is the likely winner. Now, if you had told me back at DrupalCon San Francisco in 2010 or DrupalCon Chicago in 2011 as we were celebrating... Always in the past, Steve. That is my focus, yes. If you had told me 10 or 11 years ago that we would still be running this many Drupal 7 sites in the year 2022, I would feel a lot of feelings, most certainly. I, though, must agree with the majority of the council that I agree it is probable that there will be a non-trivial for some definition of non-trivial number of Drupal 7 sites running in production in the year 2053. Drupal developers will be replaced by artificial intelligence coders. Please vote. Hmm. Hmm, indeed. This one is giving me pause. Do you wish to be replaced, Steve? I do not wish to be replaced, although I must say I am far less worried about artificial intelligence than I am about artificial incompetence. I am concerned about unaccountable, so-called artificial intelligence algorithms that are actually better described as artificial incompetence that suck in responsibility themselves. It looks like the audience is divided. It looks like the council is divided. Let's say you, John. Will there be artificial documentation for all this artificial code? I sure hope so. Finally, DrupalCon 2053 will be in the metaverse. I'm in the metaverse right now. I consider this possible. If in the next 31 years we can find a reason to go into the metaverse beyond floating around as legless bodies, there may be a reason to hold a DrupalCon in the metaverse. I think in the near-term future for the question, where is DrupalCon? Is it in the meat space as we are now, or is it on Zoom? We must answer the question, what is the meaning in the medium of DrupalCon? What is the meaning in gathering in person? I myself do not care for the sessions that simply deliver information. I think if we are going to continue gathering in person, we must have presentations that give us some reason to gather in person. I hope we have given you that here today at the Council of Forgetful Future Makers. Unfortunately, it appears the council disagrees with you, Steve. All right, well, I'm fine not attending DrupalCon in the metaverse. If it's preposterous, that's good by me. All right, Fatima, it appears we are running low on time. Thank you, future advocate Steve and Don, and thank you, council, for clarifying what you envisioned to be a plausible future. Before we close out this 1337 Council of Forgetful Future Makers, I just remembered one more thing to share with the council. I should have mentioned the preferable future in the opening of the Forgetful Future Makers, but alas, I forgot. Unfortunately, the Council of Forgetful Future Makers inherits from an interface that has a trait that leads to forgetfulness. The preferable future is one that doesn't quite exist in the same structure as the other visions on the future code, but this is the future we think should happen. This is the future in which we have the opportunity to define the future that we prefer, a future that we would like to see happen, and steps that we can take for our planet's future, or other planet's futures. I implore you, council, if there is one thing that you do not forget, it is that you have the power to build our future and track the course of humanity through 2053. As the presiding officer of the Council of Forgetful Future Makers, I have remembered and I have forgotten many a council and many a council discussion. And yet, I still have questions that evade sleep at night. How can we shape the visions of our future so that they are more equitable? How can we exist in harmony with this planet chosen to inhabit as humanity? And how can we chart this path from the projected future to the preferable? Societal change, while radical, my fellow council members, does not need to be radically impossible. If a session like this can get accepted at the con of Drew Powell, truly anything is possible. Remember, the vision for a preferable future is a reminder that humanity has agency over how our futures unfold. We have the power to plan, to adjust social laws and build the preferable future we ought to have, the preferable, ambitious future we want to have. It is not simply about imagining a future. It is about building one with the intent of being better off. And with that, thank you council, thank you advocates for your attendance at this 1,337 council of forgetful future makers. Let the record show that this took place in the year of 20,022, in the city that was known at the time as Port Land and at the con of Drew Powell. I shall look forward to seeing you at the next council wherever in time and whenever in place it may be, as long as I do not forget. The future is what we make it. The future is what we make it. The 1,337th council of forgetful future makers is now adorned. Scabble, scabble, scabble.