Yet another old friend and open source acquaintance of mine, Owen Lansbury, is with us. Owen volunteers for the Drupal Association and has been doing open source, I'm sure he's going to tell you, but for a very long time now. And touching on some of the topics that Matthias and I opened the day with, like how do we really compete on a business level with the big proprietary companies and what's the thinking going on in Owen's head and in Drupalland about that. And a special round of applause for Owen and his presentation shirt. So, oh sure, can we do this? Is that the speakers John Tick? I wasn't sure whether there'd be five people or five hundred for this talk, so thank you for having me. James, given the introduction about what the talk is about, I'm speaking from the Drupal perspective around the challenges that we're facing. And I have been involved in the Drupal project since around 2007, I think was my introduction. And then since then I've run a Drupal agency in Australia called Previous Next and then I've been volunteering on the Drupal Association Board for about the past five years or so. While I am representing the Drupal Association here, the content of my talk is mainly my own opinions, I'm not really reflecting official Drupal Association policy. However, what I'm going to do is tell you a little bit about Drupal that has been covered elsewhere, so I'll skip through what's already been talked about. I wanted to look back on the evolution of free and open source CMSs to understand where we might be heading with them. And then I'm going to dive into talking about how we wrestle the giants that we're competing against in the enterprise sector. And at the end I'll talk a little bit about how we can help each other as open source CMSs and then open it up for discussion and questions if you have any. So quick bit about Drupal, we have a saying in the Drupal world, come fit for the software and stay for the community. And that community was founded back in 2001, probably just up the road here in a college dorm room by Dries Spatets. And we just had our 23rd birthday as a project only a couple of weeks ago. We have a very active community. There's about 8,000 people that actively contribute code to the project, but then there's probably hundreds of thousands of people that use Drupal every day in their jobs as content editors, as developers, et cetera. We're currently at version 10.2.2, is that correct? And that has almost 8,000 extension modules if you're from the WordPress world, what we call modules you call plugins. And if you look at all the versions of Drupal, there's been about 50,000 modules written for Drupal over the years to extend its functionality. Importantly unlike other open source projects, we don't have a commercial module ecosystem or a commercial theme ecosystem. Everything that you do with Drupal is completely free. And that was a very conscious decision by Dries Spatets when he started the project. So I do sit on the Drupal Association Board, whether or not for profit organization that manages primarily the infrastructure around Drupal.org and then how people actually contribute code into the project. So we've had a big project to move to GitLab in the past couple of years, which has been a huge success for us. I think our build times have increased tenfold in terms of the speed that we can do that as a result. And then historically the Drupal Association has run DrupalCon in North America, which is our big flagship developer conference. We've had close involvement with the European event and then various programs that drive the project forward. And then outside of the Drupal Association, the community itself is very self-managed and self-sufficient. So there's hundreds of camps and meetups and other little country associations or big country associations in some cases that the Drupal Association has little to no involvement with in many cases. Now Drupal has always been at the forefront of open source and the open web. And this has been brought into focus recently where we have been officially recognized as a digital public good that in turn supports the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. And as with many open source projects, the Drupal community is highly motivated by being able to build world-class software that anyone can download and use. And as has been talked about with Type 03, the impact that that's now having in Africa is significant. And one of my kind of foundation stories with Drupal is having an African come to me and saying, hey, we're using Drupal in Burkina Faso. Can you help me? And I said, well, sure, we've got this prepackaged solution that you can download and use tomorrow. And here's all the training materials. Off you go. So that is a really big driver for us. And the Drupal Association's mission statement is to drive the innovation and adoption of Drupal as this high-impact digital public good hand-in-hand with our open source community. And we recently wrote a manifesto that defines our commitment to the open web. And I think that's been incorporated into our open web alliance, website alliance. What are we called again? So yeah, if you're interested in reading that, have a look. Now in order to fulfill our mission of supporting the open web, we do need to be successful as a product in the open market. And I often don't like showing this slide because what it's implying is that Drupal used Pete in 2018, and it's been on this kind of downhill slide ever since. But there is a very different story here. So in 2015, we released Drupal 8, which was a significant architectural shift away from Drupal 7 and previous versions of Drupal. And prior to Drupal 8, Drupal had tried to be all things to all people. You could build your personal blog with it, or you could run the NASA website. But what's happened since Drupal 8 is that we've clearly positioned Drupal as being for ambitious digital experiences. And these slides are from a keynote that Drees gave back in 2017, where he outlined that vision of how we're moving away from being suitable for smaller sites and moving into these larger scale sites. And of course, larger scale sites typically means enterprise style customers. Now this coincided with the rise of SAS platforms like Wix and Squarespace and of course WordPress.com. And as they became more popular, what we've seen is that a lot of smaller sites have moved off Drupal to platforms like that, or other platforms that are better fit for purpose. And I think with that previous slide showing the downturn in the number of installs, that's not really reflecting the true story of what's happening with Drupal. And so what we've been trying to do in the Drupal Association for the past couple of years is rather than fixate on the number of installs, it's what's the health of our ecosystem and our Drupal economy, for lack of a better word. And if you look at the health of that ecosystem, it does tell a very positive story. So we have a listing of Drupal services companies on Drupal.org. With the top 100 of those companies, we estimate their combined annual revenues are about $1.5 billion US dollars. And then once you've factored in all the other Drupal projects that might be built by internal teams, other agencies, etc., our guesstimate, that's very much a guesstimate, is that the total market value annually for Drupal projects is about $3 billion US. So that is a big pie. I think Gabor talked about pies. I'm talking about pies too, because it's a big pie and there's a lot of competition for a slice of that pie. Now unlike other open source projects, Drupal doesn't have a single company that's responsible for the majority of the code contribution or the finances that run through the community. And the challenge that we've had with the Drupal Association is that our annual budget has historically been about $3 million, $3.5 million. So if we're talking about a $3 billion economy around Drupal, the Drupal Association is only extracting about 0.001% of that market value. So that has been a big challenge. And prior to COVID, the majority of that revenue came from running DrupalCon events. And of course, COVID hit, no one could go to in-person events. And we had to have an abrupt rethink about what the role of the Drupal Association is. And we had to refocus on how Drupal could be both sustainable and successful into the future. And so we've recently launched a new strategy that sees the Drupal Association play a closer role in both Drupal product innovation and also product marketing, two words that evoke quite a lot of emotion from people at times. And you might think, how is the organization that's at the center of this huge economy not involved in product management and marketing? But it is a big shift for the Drupal community and a big shift for the Drupal Association itself. So as I've often mentioned to people concerned about this change, if our open source product isn't successful in the open market, the community around that product is going to shift to where the action is. And it's definitely a case of if we can sustain a strong product and ensure a strong community, then we're going to be able to keep fulfilling our goals of providing a digital public good to the world. So all of these things are closely interlinked. So in order to see where we can go in the future, I'm just going to very quickly rewind. I'm sure most of you know these stories. But this story goes back 25 years to when Type 03 was released and then in the five or so years after that, most of the products that we know and love came into being in some form. And I don't need to emphasize that a quarter of a century in technology years is like a millennia. But any of these projects to still be running successfully is an incredible achievement. And I think if you rewind to 25 years ago when some of us were actually working in the industry, we were doing things like building our own custom CMSs and then having to maintain them ourselves and hope they didn't explode. And then big clients were only really able to use products like Interwoven or Oracle CMS, which literally cost millions and millions of dollars to install. So at the time as our open source CMSs came into that market, they were filling a really core need for reusable software that could be maintained across a broad network of people at a very reasonable price. And so as the mid-naughties turned into the 2010s, that really was a golden age for most of our projects. Most of us did very, very well. But then over the past decade, like I said, we have seen that shift towards SAS platforms. We've got headless CMSs. Now we've got static site generators. There's a lot of options out there. And I was looking on Builtwith.com for statistics for this talk and they have 242 CMS products that people are still using right now, which is, oh no, 424. Sorry, I misread that. And I think through this past decade, what we've also seen has been the rise of the digital experience platform, which everyone from Adobe to Sitecore and every other brand has jumped on board. And primarily because enterprise customers do want to have one platform that they can manage all of their content and customer interactions through. Now I personally consider DXP to be quite a clever marketing term. Often it's a mishmash of technologies that may or may not work that well together. But the key thing for those of us who are flying the content management flag is that we're getting shut out of those conversations when big clients are looking for a solution. So within the Drupal Association, we've taken that very seriously and we've started trying to formulate language around Drupal being at the core of an open DXP and however you kind of structure that open DXP is up to you. But we still have a huge amount of work to do in that regard. In the meantime, I think Jam had a slide showing Adobe's push into the government sector in Australia and they very cleverly marketed a Gov DXP platform to government clients in direct competition with, as Jam said, a government managed and run Gov CMS platform that's based on Drupal. And they're winning huge contracts off the back of that, tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. And this focus on DXP by proprietary companies is just driven by the scale of the opportunities. So Adobe themselves, they think it's worth $110 billion annually and the amount that they invest to stay competitive in that market is around $2.7 billion in product development, sales and marketing every year. And then they make about $4 billion in total revenue. So do us as open source CMS have any chance at competing at that scale? And the good news is we do quite well already. And WordPress is obviously the elephant in the room. They run 40% of all websites, not just big websites. And in this category, this is the top 10,000 websites off BuiltWith.com, they're running a quarter of all of those sites. So open source is definitely winning through WordPress there. But as we go down the list here, you can see we've only got that little 1.4% gap between Drupal and Adobe. And I can guarantee you there is whole teams of people of Adobe looking at how they can kill Drupal to get that leap on the market share there. And I fully understand why us in the open source world, we often recoil at talk of total market value and market share. But when we look at open source from the perspective of its philosophical underpinnings of being free, we do need to recognize that we still build products and products need to be relevant in the market because if they're not, there's only one path and that's down. So in order to maintain a healthy ecosystem for our open source CMSs, enterprise customers are key because if they're changing your product, it means you're still relevant. It means that they can see a pathway for the next decade ahead, that your product's going to evolve and be supported. And it's a huge stamp of approval. Because enterprise customers are going to be pushing money through your communities, they're going to be driving feature requests, and the budgets that they're working with are just orders of magnitude bigger than anything in any other sector. So there are $100 million website rebuilds, but even on much smaller scale, that enterprise investment that flows through to the agency's building, maintaining and hosting these types of projects, and in turn, that provides consistent, repeat income that ultimately flows into our open source communities in the form of stable jobs, good salaries, community funding, and sponsored code contribution. So with that scene set, I'll jump into the meat of the talk, which is how can we actually survive and remain competitive when we're dealing with giants like Adobe? The first thing I want to dive into here is not just a whole lot of bad stock photos, but the understanding, the buying process that these large organizations go through when they're selecting new technologies. As I said in the previous slide, they're often making these decisions for at least a decade into the future, if not longer. And you'll often hear that the responsibility for making those decisions is with the CIOs, and more increasingly the CMOs, the chief marketing officers. All of these people are very risk averse. They don't want to make the wrong technology decision that backfires on their multi-billion dollar company, and they're all quite hard people to influence directly sitting in their ivory towers. So these people will probably be the ones that are reading the Gartner and the Forrester reports. And as you can see on the slides here, there's only one recognizable open source brand there, and that's WordPress VIP. Now, full credits are automatic who run WordPress VIP. There's a very much for profit service. So they've worked out that to get listed here, you need to have a single company with a certain amount of revenue that the researchers can analyze and then do an apples for apples comparison. And having the WordPress brand in these listings just gives huge legitimacy to WordPress for anyone that's using it. Also credit here to Acquia. So Acquia has been mentioned a few times. It was the company that was co-founded by Drees that started the Drupal project back in 2007. They do talk extensively about Acquia Drupal in the context of their broader DXP offerings. The Drupal story is kind of getting through there, but again, we don't have the Drupal brand name there. Every other product on here is proprietary. There was Squiz here that started off as a pseudo open source product, but even they're totally closed source. While I don't think it's that quantifiable about how important these surveys are, just not having the Drupal Type-O3 or Jumla brand names in them does hinder their recognition significantly in this enterprise market. So I think there is an opportunity here. It would be a big process to go through to kind of change the thinking of these analysts to start including open source projects. But if we have an open website alliance that can lobby them, and it is about lobbying, then maybe we have an opportunity to make that happen somehow. Now the other way these C-level decision makers can be targeted is through events. Unlike Adobe, we probably can't afford to pay Ryan Reynolds to come and do a keynote as Adobe do. But in the Drupal world, again, Acquia have done a very good job with their Acquia engage events where they showcase customer success stories on their DXP platform and through that the Drupal story gets told. And the Drupal Association, we have tried to run some C-level decision maker events at DrupalCon, but we've had mixed results because they're kind of mashed together into a bigger developer conference. And why don't C-level people want to be at a developer conference? It goes against a lot of our open source principles, but they want to have exclusivity, they want to feel like they're special, they want to be networking with a very select group of peers and they want to have strategic insights into technology that gives them competitive advantages. So like I said, that goes against so many of our principles in the open source world, but there's a formula there that we can definitely replicate in terms of targeting those types of people. And while our not-for-profit organizations that govern our communities might not have direct relationships with these C-level decision makers, our larger partner agencies definitely do. So the role that we can play as the community organizations is to give as much assistance as possible to those agencies to help them win or retain new enterprise clients, just through playbook-style information. So does your open source project have a playbook that compares your product against a site core in Adobe and has a whole range of answers as to why yours is a superior product? Do you have a pre-package demo that's consistently updated with new features and functionality that can highlight your technology in the same way that a slick demo from Adobe would? This is an area we fall very well short within the Drupal world. Most of our agencies are off replicating effort every single time that they go off and pitch to a new client, but this is a relatively easy to solve issue if it's given the right attention. And something that's related to this is being able to focus on the strength and scale of our global sales team. We don't have anyone that's responsible for sales at the Drupal Association, but every day we've got thousands of people out there pitching new projects to clients, telling slightly different stories, but selling Drupal to these larger clients. So as I noted, we can play a role as the association by providing those salespeople with the tools to help them win those projects. We have started to address this within the Drupal community with a certified partner program, and I recognize that other open source projects have similar types of programs. And what we're doing with that is we're positioning our agency partners using the same language that a proprietary platform would use. Again, we're kind of compromising our core values by playing that game, but to play in the enterprise space, you do need to play a certain type of game. And then the really core group of people that you need to be convincing are the people who'll actually be using the products themselves, so the developers, the content editors, the DevOps engineers, et cetera. So any C-level person will lean heavily on this group to give them evaluations and recommendations about what technology they should be moving towards, and where do they get their information from. They get it from their prior experience of having used different platforms. They might have used Drupal 7. What impression do they have about Drupal 7 compared to what it is today? They talk to their colleagues at other organizations who are using it. Hey, what's it like having a Drupal site? Can you find developers for it? And then, of course, the internet. There's a whole range of challenges that we could spend an entire presentation on each issue, but the core of each of them is purely about perception. So does your 25-year-old open-source product look and function like a temporary piece of software? So WordPress, despite the slides that we saw earlier, is often held up as the gold standard in terms of content editor experience, and we have paid a huge amount of attention to that within the Drupal community to update our editor experience and our administration UI. And we've even got a project at the moment that's looking at integrating the Gutenberg editor into Drupal that WordPress helped fund. Thank you. Another thing would be, is it obvious that your products can fulfill contemporary requirements like a headless front end or integrating with a popular marketing automation platform? Like I said, it is easy to find qualified developers. So this is a much bigger thing that I'll talk about in a moment, but for us as not for profit associations, we should be at the center of those initiatives, whether it's as simple as having a job board available or running a full certification program. Can a developer quickly download and install a demo of your product? When something we struggle heavily with in the Drupal world, I went on the download Drupal page the other day and the first thing it said was, you have to install Composer. I can't do that. I'm not a developer, so there's these big hurdles that we have to get through. But first impressions around that are absolutely key. If it doesn't work the first time, you're probably not going to look at that technology. And then are there demos, case studies, and white papers that target specific industry verticals that you can easily collate, put them in a presentation, and then give that presentation back to your C level? Decision maker and convince them that your open source product is the best one. Bearing in mind that any proprietary platform that's talking to that customer, they're going to be in there with a very slick demo. They're going to have their global digital partners, our digital agency partners saying yes to every feature requirement and yes to every question. So we do need to be playing that game in terms of convincing people, giving them confidence that moving to open source is the right recommendation. And then the final group that C level executives will lean on is their incumbent agencies and consultants. So are they recommending your open source platform to their big clients? Now, in the Drupal community, we've always had a core group of companies that both support the project and champion Drupal to their clients. And like I said, we've recently launched a certified partner program. But the key here is with your agency network, how easy is it for new agencies to both upskill and become part of that certified partner program? And agencies, they're going to be attracted to technology. They know that they can sell to new clients and they know that they can build a business practice around that. So the key to these big global clients is being able to have big global agencies as part of those networks. Again, ArcRear have done very well with that for their own partner network, but it's not something that we've been able to replicate with the Drupal Association at this point. And I think it's generally hard for these big global firms to get their heads around open source. It just doesn't mesh with how they do business. And a pattern that we've seen in the Drupal world is clients will demand that their agencies provide them with Drupal services. They say, yes, sure, we'll do that. They'll do a project for them more often than not. It gets outsourced to someone else, done to varying degrees of success, but they'll quickly slip back into their comfortable pattern of partnering with big proprietary firms. The other part of that is that the way that their structure and run projects, their ability or willingness to contribute back to open source projects in terms of code or have any connection with the communities is generally quite limited. So again, this is a hindrance. It's a solvable problem. It probably takes a lot of focus to get over that hurdle. But again, something that we might be able to grapple with. Now, in terms of where we do clearly win, rapid innovation is something that we do incredibly well in the open source world. And I'm sure, like in the Drupal world, ChatGPT gets released. And then a month later, we've got a working module that you can start integrating that into your Drupal sites with. And I'm sure that was a similar case with most other open source CMSs. But in my question to Gabo's talk, maintaining the speed of that innovation and the scale of innovation is something that becomes harder and harder as your project gets bigger and more complex and as both the software and the community have matured. And so in the Drupal world now, we have this very carefully planned release cycle. And we need to make sure that each release is rock solid. We can't be taking risks by putting new functionality in there that may or may not work, especially with so many big customers. So there's a certain level of conservatism that we now have to adopt because we do have these big customers. And another philosophical hurdle we have is this notion that the Drupal association themselves should be directing actual budget towards innovation projects when there's this notion that contribution is free. But contribution has never been free, no matter how you look at it. The cost in personal time or wages is always borne by someone, whether it's the individual contributing their time instead of doing paid work or the agency that's sponsoring their team to contribute that. And I think the recognition we have in the Drupal world is that other open source projects have no issue with that whatsoever. So the Linux Foundation, they have $160 million that they direct towards strategic projects each year. So we've started getting our heads around that in the Drupal world. We ran this pitchberg contest last year. It was run at the DrupalCon Pittsburgh, if the name needs an explanation there. And this was having a competition where we had $100,000 in funding to drive a few strategic things forward. And one of those was the Gutenberg projects that WordPress actually contributed some funding to. And so as soon as there's some money in the equation, the agencies that are working on those things can easily prioritize them because, hey, they're getting paid for it. Now being able to scale that model up is the hard part. Like I said, with a $3 billion economy around Drupal, how can the Drupal Association capture some of that value? And even if we just captured 1%, then that would be a $30 million innovation budget that we might be able to work with. And I think someone's doing a talk towards the end of the day about how you've tackled that in the WordPress world. Looking forward to hearing about that. Similarly, the idea that Drupal would be marketed as a product by the Drupal Association has been this big wall to get over. And there's a legacy there in terms of being structured as a nonprofit association in the USA where legally funds that come to the Drupal Association are for the advancement of a charitable cause. So there has been a sense that we're not allowed to market Drupal as a commercial product as a result. As I noted at the beginning of the talk, our charitable cause in the Drupal is ensuring that Drupal remains as a digital public good that supports things like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. So we do have a core underpinning there. And I think the important thing for us in the Drupal world is that if we don't have that positive product awareness, then we can't actually fulfill that digital public good role in the first place. So whether we call it marketing or advocacy, we do need to drive a positive image of Drupal as a product in comparison to what's on offer from proprietary platforms. We've had a volunteer group within the Drupal community called Promote Drupal that's done a range of initiatives. But what we're starting to do is bring that inside the Drupal Association. We've just commissioned a go-to-market strategy for how to position Drupal as a product in the open market. And we'll have a range of initiatives that will roll out through 2024. One initiative that we tried recently, which was a complete experiment, was to have the very first Drupal product brand at Booth at a big tech conference that was at Web Summit in Lisbon. And again, this was like this kind of radical thing that had never been done before. And it is a very expensive undertaking to do a booth like this at a product, at a conference like that. And so we partnered with a range of bigger Drupal services companies who help co-fund that. And then, of course, they get leads that come through from having a presence there. So in the early days, we have good anecdotal results from having tried it and whether we can kind of replicate that long term. I think the important thing I said to Boris earlier is that we're actually getting out of our bubble and we're putting Drupal out there as a product in the open market. And then likewise, having people tell the Drupal story at non-Drupal events is really key and something that we've been historically quite bad at. So this photo is our former Drupal Association chair, Batti Brattat, doing a keynote at Web Summit off the back of having a booth there. And there's just so many events around the world that we could be doing that type of thing at to get the Drupal story out there. Now, something that doesn't cost a huge amount of money is good press. So for this talk, I did a Google search on best CMS for enterprise. And amazingly, on the first page, we had Drupal come up as best for enterprise. Now was this coordinated by a clever PR person at the Drupal Association? No, there's no one who has that role at the Drupal Association, but it's something that we should probably start paying a bit of attention to. Because for every good review, then there's going to be a negative review about an open source security vulnerability or someone moaning on a internet forum about how bad the user experience of Drupal 7 is, even though Drupal 7 came out 15 years ago. So big firms, big companies, they're really good at managing those narratives. And there's nothing stopping us from doing the same with the right attention. And again, I'll just bring this example up. I think you had a version of this article of the way that Adobe is restoring the playbook of fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the Australian market at the moment to try and convince big customers away from open source. And this article is in Australia's version of the Financial Times, where they just regurgitated a press release from Adobe. Adobe had run a global survey, and surprisingly, the MyGov site they talk about here is now 20% better to use because it was built with Adobe Experience Manager. So us in the open source world, we need to be able to have counter narratives to this. And again, it's a playbook. It's a game to know how to play. Just to kind of finish on here, the biggest strength that we have in our open source communities is the depth and expertise of our developer pools. And there's huge value in being able to market that in a way that enterprise customers understand. I think Jam had a version of this slide in one of his talks a while ago where if you talk about Adobe, hey, they might have a thousand people working on Adobe Experience Manager, but in the dribble world, we've got 20,000. So again, being able to develop that or grow that developer network through robust outreach, training, mentoring, career pathway programs is something that us as nonprofit organizations should be at the center of. It's a big time intensive exercise, but something that's a solvable thing. I will finish very quickly on a couple of slides. So as we've talked about a little bit today, us in the open source CMS world, we're really at the forefront of championing and sustaining the open web. And it's not just us in the open source world who really care about the open web. It's something of huge concern to governments around the world and large organizations around the world. So whatever we can be doing to collectively maintain the focus on and protect our open source technologies is incredibly important. The work that's been done with the cybersecurity act is a good example of that. And similarly, let's look at ways that we can collectively promote positive open source and open web narratives in the enterprise market. And that might be as simple as ensuring that we've got consistent things that we all talk about or it might be as simple as engaging a PR person to manage those narratives on our collective behalf. So I'll leave it there. If there's questions, I can repeat them. Thank you so much. I'll just talk loud and hope that my catch is that one of the things that came out in Matthias' work around that has come to initial fruition with the open website alliance is that open source, we have 100,000, a million developers. We don't know, a huge number. And all of our lives are touched by it every day and you know someone who works with it. But you have people who come and say, oh, I tried open source once, it didn't work for me so I'm never going to do open source. And we are often worried about Wordpress or Jumla or Drupal or very obscure issues for people who aren't in our level of experience. So part of this idea could also be that the mass and the force for good, we don't have that marketing budget that Apple or Adobe or somebody has but trying to figure out how to leverage that scale and make these experiences somehow or these values visible at this collective level seems like a really exciting part of what we're doing here. And Drupal as having found the key into the enterprise market and into the government space very effectively is one of those players I think has a lot of really great examples to follow and I really hope that we can come to each other's conferences and interact more through channels like this. Great. Anyone have any questions for Owen? No.