Thank you all for coming back and thank you for spending the day with us.
The idea of the people who organized this and I'm going to give 99% of the credit, I
think appropriately to Crystal and Matthias.
Thank you very, very much.
We're also key in initiating the Open Website Alliance as an organization which we have,
I would say, successfully launched today.
We need to bash some champagne against someone somewhere but other than that.
So I also found the program really interesting and really well rounded and actually ran the
gamut from technical including code to very aspirational.
There was tons of practical pragmatic stuff along the way.
So I just wanted to run through this idea of things that bring us together based on
the talks that we heard and I'm going to have to sit down or something so I can see my screen
while I do it.
Or what if we change the slide up there?
Please change.
There we are.
Right.
So for those of you who weren't here at the crack of dawn, Matthias and I talked about
the wake up call that we had about a year ago where Open Source is losing out to proprietary
offerings in cases where we clearly shouldn't be.
So the big wake up call was around the Australian government and personalization but we've seen
and heard many other examples.
So we think that we need to remember what Open Source is about at a fundamental level,
how it can make us and anyone we know better business people and how in very practical
ways using and applying Open Source principles and technologies can make the world a better
place.
So that is what we kicked off the day with.
Gabber Hoitje gave a really interesting inspiring talk about the nuts and bolts around coordinating
volunteers around long term technical goals and getting community to become contributors
and keeping them there is something that Drupal's been working very, very hard at since the
project existed and they're really admirable and Gabber's a big force of nature in that.
So thank you for doing that Gabber and I think that that gives us ideas about how we can
coordinate our own communities and probably how to make a meta community around what we
want to do with the Alliance.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's been a long day.
I think offered us a really powerful tool set to help grow Open Source in general and
probably grow what we do together as well because the certification, competency, skill
tree concept, once you show how to learn or teach any given CMS, how much of it is going
to be applicable to the next one, 70%, 90%, there might only be the details there and
I think that also since skill display has a really tight affiliation with Open Source
anyway I think they're really interesting allies for the future so thank you for coming
Fluria.
So Martin and Lucas who I think are not here anymore gave a really cool accessibility talk
and reminded me of a bunch of things.
It's just really important that all of us bake accessibility in right from the start
and I guess it's because of the nature of my career and my work now but yes building
things accessibility is easier if you do it from the start and cheaper but it doesn't
have to be a moral choice.
There is a significant percentage of people who are online who have some disability of
some kind and some or all of us are sometimes less able than others.
So from a business perspective or any kind of value proposition where I want someone to
do something else, I want to conversion, I want them to read something, I want them to
buy something, the more accessible you make it the better business you can do if you're
offering is a good one and the more accessible you make your web properties the better they
can be found by the robots who will then show it to your consumers.
So I like these stories that we in our communities cloak in a lot of morality and ethical choices
which is right and proper and the thing to do.
I like to note that there are a lot of ways to argue for those things that are from a
non, it's not a moral conversation so it's a very pragmatic one.
So I was really happy to see that one today.
Owen gave a bit of an aspirational picture of what it looks like to be the biggest CMS
in the room with grappling with some problems of like being at huge scale but not necessarily
being taken seriously at the same time.
Like everybody's heard of Aqia now.
I've been to some events where people talk about Aqia and it was so surprised and then
they know there's that Drupal thing behind it and that's that oh there's that thing behind
it that I think is really challenging.
But Drupal's got really, really conscientious leadership and I think that if we get the
chance to work together on some of these visibility issues I think it will be really exciting.
I especially somewhere in your talk I realized that the thing that Matthias talks about a
lot is open source could, should be a brand and you should come in in your tech decision
making process early and say I want to use open source yes no and then if it's yes open
source which it should be then is it Wagtail, is it Drupal, is it Type 03, is it right?
And then we can still make our own work and things do better together by collaborating
at the community level on the code level and so on wherever it makes sense.
So Daniel then incredibly beautifully picked up what I think was my point about making
a difference in the real world with open source thinking in practice and the incredibly
impressive to me work that's gone into like not just throwing some agency work to somebody
and leaving the Rwandans to figure out what they'll do next year but like building a structured
measurable completely practical approach to government digital infrastructure and then
oh yeah you can put your own websites on it I love that, I love my favorite part was
that no one from the Type 03 like none of the Europeans who came to help and teach wrote
any code I thought that was super awesome right. So all of us can use that open standard
to and that methodology to make sure there's a backup plan make sure you have processes
make sure there's disaster recovery and of course we can check any CMS we want in there
right that's going to be a huge resource for all of us so that was super awesome. Sage
gave us insight into as for most of the people in the room some cool insight to like what
coding looks like when it's not in PHP right and like the deep roots of building content
management experiences right when so many of us have been living in the world where the
interfaces have been built for a while or the paradigms have been fixed and the decisions
have been made and we just kind of live with what our code ancestors gave us right so I
really really appreciated the fresh eyes on to solving web publishing and yes and Jesus
talking about how we solve the contributor gap right the long tail the how many people
use it versus never contribute all of those issues and I think the fight for the future
initiative is a super cool idea and I think it intersects with and highlights ways that
other communities have tried to solve this you know contribution credits or not the
Gabor's idea about future promises versus measuring past contributions I thought was
super interesting so you know but we have to have healthy communities and contributions
all of us to continue our projects so that's got to be that's got to be some valuable
got to be some valuable insight for us I think maybe especially if there's some more data
that could come out of that that would be very very interesting so thank you to all of today's
speakers very very interesting day I think I had if I find my phone I had three concrete
questions that we could pose to the four representatives one of whom non-official from our four projects
disclaimer disclaimer so I think that we could try I have three questions we could try them
and we can see where they go right so how about I will ask the first question and each of you
has a minute to introduce yourself and like a couple minutes to talk about the question
and and we'll just let you fight over the microphone yeah so perhaps to the branding
side of things just like php fig and the psr's have helped us grow together and reinvent
even fewer wheels how do we do that at a public facing level Robert so yeah I'm I'm Robert
I'm representing in officially wordpress here and with the which our base is php so as as
James said it's very the foundation of what we're doing so what we can learn I think is
the that's so much code that we have is like as we had today the dependencies between the
systems are very small and so we could share those things and have less and learn that one
system learned and can have gift as to other systems so that we have shared shared code
and shared responsibilities and also can contribute it to central infrastructure maybe that we
can reuse between the systems super cool I thought on that note on that note I basically
thought whatever the next GDPR is right probably the accessibility thing or something like
let's make libraries and standards together and work almost together right yeah when I
hear that question I also think about you know it's actually important that we who work
with CMS's talk more together try to answer questions together so we know that one of
the projects is working on a nice solution it doesn't even mean that it has to be the
same programming language the concept behind it might be enough to share something that
can really help us all and I think then the difficult question will become you know well
what is not something that we want to share is there anything you know that goes totally
against the idea of our CMS for example you know that's also very very interesting discussion
that I also think we should actually take together.
I agree my name is Crystal I'm the president of open source matters which is the organization
responsible for the JUMLO project and this is Matias with typo 3.
So I think that there are so many things to talk about with this question it's a complicated
one but in respect to like how we're communicating publicly as a collaborative effort I think
it kind of goes back to how this whole open website alliance started because it was born
from the need to make a coordinated response to the upcoming cyber resilience act so that
was kind of the first time that we had collaborated on a global executive level in the United
States and we knew that if we were to try and make individual responses that we wouldn't
have the kind of impact as we could have as a group and I think that that's going to
kind of set the tone of our future collaborations not just on policy stuff because you know
the CRI was the first thing that we're going to have to deal with in open source for legislative
actions but it's not going to be the last but also to maybe coordinate on making resources
for our communities for this kind of thing a couple days ago we were at the policy summit
and I had the thought okay well maybe we could work together to have like some kind of compliance
checklist because there are so many things in common across each of our CMS communities
that it doesn't make sense to do the same thing individually put in the individual effort
to get essentially the same kind of result. One of the key concepts in programming is
don't repeat yourself right so we can apply that here too.
And compliance is technostics so that makes perfect sense.
Yeah and to what Matias said about also knowing what things we shouldn't be sharing I think
it goes to knowing where we stand in comparison to other CMSs because there are things that
we share as strengths and there are things that aren't necessarily good fits and I love
to the chart that you shared in your presentation about where Drupal sits as far as richness
versus I don't remember what the other exes said but.
Oh was that the gotten though of course.
No it was where the.
Oh no that was that was Dries' slide.
Yeah okay it's a good slide. Thank you Dries.
And I liked that you said you know we know that Drupal is not for these smaller brochure
sites. I also liked that Wagtail had something similar that you said okay we know that people
are going to have to code to set this up this is not going to be like a one and done kind
of thing and I think that's going to be critical for how we are collaborating so that we can
make sure that we know where we sit and help people make the best choice per project as
opposed to being dogmatic about our individual CMSs.
That was longer than two minutes sorry.
It's okay so choose open source then based on the strengths of a project go ahead.
I'm Owen from the Drupal Association that's the body that oversees aspects of the Drupal
community and if I was going to pick one thing which is really really hard.
The thing that does keep me up at night is the renewal of new developer talent into our
communities. It's great to see a few people here under 40.
This side of the room maybe not so much.
And so I think where I think we can actually unify in terms of visibility and effort is
around promoting the benefits of considering a developer career pathway into any of our
platforms because it's not too hard to switch between platforms once you know a bit of PHP.
And I think what I have seen not so much in Europe and North America but in emerging markets
people are starting to look at careers in the future.
People are starting to look at careers in say Drupal as being a pathway to prosperity.
And Dries does have a great story about being in China and asking young developers why they've
chosen Microsoft over Drupal.
And the answer was well I want to buy an apartment.
He's like well what's the big deal about buying an apartment?
And if they can buy an apartment then they can woo a partner to live in that apartment with them.
And so it kind of speaks to these quite fundamental needs that we have this incredible ability to
tap into I think.
So many of us in this room have had 20 plus year careers based on open source of built amazing
businesses around that.
And I don't think that story gets told as well as it could is that there are these incredible
careers that you can have.
And just to kind of wrap it up the fulfillment of a career working in open source I personally
think is significantly above what you would get if you're working in a closed proprietary system.
And in our own company a key hiring metric that we use or a tractor that we use is the ability to be able to
work in open source as part of your role and to be working in a little 20 person company in Australia
but to be part of this network of mentors around the world who help you grow in your own personal development.
Did that make sense?
Yes.
And since we're all in the...
Since we're all in the same space right actually this issue of being able to find developers and whether you
know young CMS is not as cool as it was radical and wild 20 years ago right but content management is
somehow the backbone of how the world works now right.
Digital everything solving web publishing device publishing digital publishing of any kind in the end you have to
manage content and and these systems are a great way to do it.
Also yours.
I was incredibly gratified coming out of the pandemic when I started going to events again.
I have been to events in several communities especially typo 3 because I live in Germany and love that community
but also Drupal and whether it's been local regional typo 3 events even German language typo 3 events rather than
the international ones or Drupal-Con-Pittsburg I think in all my time in open source I have never seen so many
young people coming to open source events and I have never seen so much diversity before right.
So I find that incredibly heartening for all of us that some young people are interested in a sensible,
helpful career in the world right so I think that's pretty awesome.
We could and I really liked what you said about what makes working in open source potentially a lot more satisfying right.
You're not locked away in the corporate walls with secrets you can't talk about right.
You can work with the best and learn from the best and be part of something more meaningful.
All right.
Is there a need to reframe the conversation in each of our communities away from this level of competition and towards more cooperation
and if there is how do we make that happen?
So as an example we had in Germany there is a collaboration between the communities from the open source world in Germany
called CMS Garden which is like all the CMS here plus a few more you never heard in your life and they were all awesome
and what we have with this collaboration is we simply know each other and we simply have like the contacts of the other CMS
so this is kind of like already happening in the world but it's not like that on the global level not like really normal standard
and that's why we simply now can like go forward and go like hey all of you in the whole world of CMS all over the world
you know someone bring them to the next CMS event that is not theirs and like simply have those connections who are already there
simply have them flourish and like move them forward and invite everybody to join in because like we I think it was Matt Malinweg
who said like that's like it's kind of like a sibling rivalry what we're having we are not really a competition
because we all stand on the same like open source paradigms and it's just like that we have like an understanding of like
I like my bowls to be red you're like your bowls to be yellow so but we built the same cars and we built the same structures together
but it's just like a disagreement of how to reach this point but at the same we at the end we still work together and as I had connections with
all the open source systems that's the same frequency everybody has so everybody's agreeing on that we need to work together
that collaboration brings more forward than simply downloading like this not open file to simply run something but it's really the goal to work together
and to achieve better results together with all the input that someone can bring.
Community.
Yes.
Yeah I mean the website Alliance is a community of communities and I think that's something that we can really use and I think
looking at things we can do I mean or what we're already doing.
Benny the type of three core team lead is sitting on in on core team meetings in Drupal and that doesn't mean that type of
three is becoming Drupal or anything like that which I think is an easy thought to make that you know we'll just copy everything
but it's something about participating in larger discourse knowing why are they making these choices.
Okay what are the reasons what is informing them on their decisions and that doesn't mean that we will always come to the same
agreement but it means that we all become wiser in our decisions.
Community connections perspectives.
Now I'm waiting for what my word will be so I know what to say.
Now I feel like a lot of collaboration has already been happening on the community level it's just not been recognized or talked about as much
as the CMS garden or like individual initiatives between specific communities like some I don't remember the exact details right now
but there was a security issue a few years ago that what?
The far wrapper?
Possibly I'm not a security person and it just goes in one ear not the other but so I think that there have been community level
or you know especially on an individual level or local level collaborations already like I think that Jumla recently lent some video
equipment to another CMS community in Germany for an event.
Thank you.
Yeah you're welcome.
So it's not that it hasn't been happening it's about acknowledging the efforts that have been happening and also maybe being a little bit more coordinated with how we can do this
because like Matias said we don't necessarily want to become each other we don't want a giant homogenous CMS monster.
We have one thing that someone said a few days ago in a conversation about this was shared strengths and we can also still celebrate our differences
because in different projects in different contexts one CMS is going to be a better choice than another.
Jumla people in the room don't kill me for this but Jumla is not going to always be the best solution for every single project.
It happens it's fine it's normal and I think it's important to say okay well this isn't a good choice for Jumla but it could be a good choice for type 03 or Drupal
and if we have more collaboration around those things and recognition of what are the things that make us different or what are respective strengths are
then we can help guide people to different choices that maybe they wouldn't otherwise make.
It's kind of a just because you can doesn't mean you should situation.
So sharing your word is sharing.
I like that word.
And choosing a technology.
Do you want the mic?
Choosing a given open source technology isn't always only WordPress does X better than type 03 does better than Drupal does.
There's times when hey what is the local service provider market where I live?
Who has been around and will help me run my business, the digital part of my business better in the long term?
Or who made prettier designs this time?
It's not just whether you're the super best at dynamic page building and the super best at very large very performance or the easiest way to get to specific site functionality
or like great pre-packaged functionalities that get you going very fast.
Everybody's got many other strengths as well.
Just take a moment to reset.
So I think in my talk I alluded to we had a pitch bird contest and one of the projects that receive funding was to put Gutenberg content editor into Drupal.
And the person that funded that project was Matt Malinvec.
Whether it was his own money or whether it was WordPress money I'm not sure.
But in any commercial setting that would just make people's brains explode.
That seeming competitor would offer their technology into a potentially competing platform.
And I think what it speaks to is that in the Drupal world we were tearing our hair out a little bit in terms of content editor experience for a number of years.
And we realized that there was this big gap between what was happening in WordPress and what was happening in Drupal.
And I think it's a huge credit to both projects that there was this pragmatism to say well why are we going to spend all that effort to try and reinvent Gutenberg when we could actually just use Gutenberg.
For the people that want to use it because it's not the type of thing that every use case will require.
But for the people that want to use Drupal but they might be on the fence about committing because they do want that Gutenberg editor experience then that becomes a no brainer.
And it might go the other way as well. Views in WordPress.
But I think there is quite a strong model there in terms of where it makes sense to why reinvent the wheel when the wheel is already round.
So other people's pretty things right? If it's clear that Gutenberg just represents a significantly better editorial experience for most people, right?
That's something that we can actually all adopt and follow as a best practice or a standard or whatever.
So that's back to the sharing point. Okay, terrific.
You choose which piece and then that's how sharing works at my house.
Whoever cuts doesn't get to choose which piece.
Alright, so I feel really, really excited about this as a first step.
I think the energy is there and the wheel is there to make this happen.
I think it's a really interesting time economically and just in general in the world to be doing this.
I've heard stories today that I never heard before and reasons to hope as well.
And I think that getting these stories out and talking about these wins and talking about how this collaboration and sharing and connection is happening and can happen.
I think there's a lot of fun, easy things to do like encouraging people to go to other people's meetups and fix a bug in somebody else's project, all that classic stuff.
I feel like even that small stuff can really make a difference and those can really add up over time.
Does anybody in the room have any questions for us in the last 10, 15 minutes that we've got here?
Overloaded to here.
We need coffee or beer.
Can you read it?
Thank you very much.
Oh, see, I've been operating without glasses all day.
Wait, is this one from Mike Giverd?
It's for him.
Oh, Mike is not in the room, but...
Yeah, so Brian T. Mann wrote,
I don't know if Mike Griffith is in the room, but he gave a talk yesterday about the collaboration that took place between several open source projects on accessibility under the EU funded research project.
We need more of this shared research discussing the approaches and then our own implementations.
We need to have more cross project research projects.
That is a true.
So thank you, Brian.
That's terrific.
Mike was here for part of the day, but he's not now.
And I also...
He wasn't here when the accessibility talk started, and I promised the guys to introduce him on LinkedIn and he showed up during their talk and connected with him on LinkedIn while they were talking, which was hilarious.
So, yes.
Yes.
Just as the letter that came out of what is now the alliance to the European Union saying, hey, the Cyber Resilience Act has some significant problems and we'd love to help you, like, understand that the idea of it's illegal to release unfinished software is tricky, right?
And, oh, there has to be software that is purely European if it's going to be run in Europe, like stuff like that.
So a beautiful international community of practice sprang up and because these four projects run 50% of the web and because they were able to present a code instead of arguments, Europe's actually listening, right?
We've gotten some doors open.
So I think that sort of influence, right, is a really positive sign for us and the fact that we could probably also then go and make proposals that say, hey, European Future Project, whichever year they're going to do next, we'd like this money to put together X.
Accessibility guidelines, GovStack, European version, whatever the ultimate, you know, editing experiences.
I think that's a really interesting way to go.
Yeah, and I just want to also, you know, give a big call out to Wagtail and to Umbroko who are here today as well as fellow open source CMS.
Neither of them use PHP and I'm really happy that they're here because this is not, you know, for CMS group.
This is really a group for everyone.
And one thing that we haven't said anything about, well, we did say that we encourage everyone to become members, but we didn't say that the Open Website Alliance is built around everyone agreeing and, you know, making decisions together and that kind of stuff.
But it also says in the charter that anyone who, you know, doesn't have anything to do with a certain issue are encouraged to refrain from voting.
And that means that as a website alliance, we can also have smaller groups that, you know, are still supported by the whole alliance.
Because for example, maybe there's something with a programming language that isn't PHP and the PHP guys can say, well, you know, we don't know anything about it, but, you know, we're not going to vote against it.
And that's also a really important part of collaborating, saying that, you know, wow, you're doing an amazing job.
It's not what I'm doing, but, you know, we're here together to support each other.
And yeah, I love it.
I also want to say that the results that we've seen with the CRA, with the European Union listening and chaining significantly from the original drafts is not only a result of the work that we did as CMSs.
I think that a massive, massive amount of work and effort was put in by Open Forum Europe and their policy task force and everything and all of the very, I think almost 200 open source organizations had submitted feedback to the European Union about the CRA when it was during the feedback period.
And so this is certainly not a result from just what we did.
And I just want to make sure that we acknowledge that because so many people, so many projects put hours and hours and hours of time into this.
And it really isn't perfect.
I think one of the things that I liked that was said during the policy summit that we attended on Friday was that it's imperfect as all things made by humans are.
But it's definitely a lot better than it would have been.
So just brief shout out to them as well for their efforts and in making that kind of impact because it could have had a drastic, it would have changed drastically the way open source works, I think.
What was the question?
There wasn't one.
Hi, Brian.
We've got this now.
What do we do with it?
Right.
I think that we as an alliance.
Yeah, Owen.
I think I remember the question.
Again, in my talk, I referenced that the protection of the open web is a very keen interest well beyond the people in this room.
To the point, and I'm not sure how many people are aware, but the statement on the future of the Internet was signed by 60 national countries like their foreign officers signed this collective statement that said we need to keep the web open and free and interoperable and all of the things that we stand for and that we can support.
And it's quite interesting to then think, okay, well, what kind of investment are they prepared to make to ensure that that remains the case?
And then it's not just governments, it's major corporations, major tech companies that rely on the open web for their business models.
If you have a major search engine, you cannot have content locked behind paywalls.
So it's in their vested interest to ensure that content is open and indexable and all of those types of things as well.
So there is significant forces out there that want to succeed.
We need to have the language and the stories to be able to have those conversations with them in a way that that value then flows back into our projects.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
This grouping in terms of scale, right?
If the Alliance can come up with a common voice and common answers, more or less representing the hundreds of thousands of people who make a living either by building and maintaining these things or running their own businesses, right?
The millions of people that benefit from all of our work, I think that gets us to see the table, right?
And if we're prepared then to use the language that works at the higher levels than we are normal humans are used to interacting, right?
I think that gives us a potential to make more of a difference too.
Matthias is looking keen.
Yeah, and about the charter, there's another point.
We really like the charter.
Yeah, the charter also allows us to have affiliates, so non-CMSs, but that sort of share our values that can also join meetings as observers, for example.
And that's also a really nice feature that I like.
And I know the clock is ticking here and we're closing in on five o'clock, and I also wanted to take this opportunity because I like to hear my own voice.
But also because, Jam, you've done a fantastic job today.
I wanted to say thank you.
You volunteered to do this.
So this is real volunteer community contribution.
And just because I know what you love most in this world, I brought two bags of Norwegian salted nut chocolate for you.
That counts as vegetables, right?
That counts as vegetables because it's all from, you know, it's...
I think it's fruit, technically.
Yeah, it's technically fruit.
So that works. It's five a day. Anyway.
Thank you. I'm super happy to be here.
He says he's super happy to be here.
Yeah. Nice.
He's happy to get the candy.
He told us.
What about my salt liquid?
Oh, no.
The tumble is for next day.
So do you want a final word?
Well, yes. Who's coming in exactly on time?
I live in Germany. We love that because we don't get it from the trains anymore.
So anyway, thank you all for coming. Thank you all the presenters.
Thanks everyone who's here. Thank you also for the people on the stream.
Thank you for having the super cool idea of the Alliance.
Thank you for not representing WordPress but being very involved in WordPress.
Just disclaimer, disclaimer, right?
Thank you for coming the furthest to be here.
Oh, and flew in from Australia to be here today.
Right. And it really was my pleasure and privilege to be here and interact with all of you.
And I'm really looking forward to the next time and to seeing what the Alliance does.
So thanks everyone.