After five and a half years of serving the Drupal community as a Drupal Association staff member, I’m honored (and thrilled!) to step into the Executive Director role. This community is magical. Your generosity, kindness, and drive to create something meaningful together inspire me every day. Drupal 8 is destined for success, because each drop of code captures this ethos.

You’ve given me so many memorable moments. I remember that feeling of pride—that sense of “I’m one of you now!”—when my sprint mentor helped me contribute to D8. (The contributor sticker on my laptop is a daily reminder of how welcoming you all are.) Then, there was that time at DrupalCon Portland when people joined forces to build a site to help those impacted by a tornado in Oklahoma, USA. And I’ll never forget the first time a company joined our Drupal Supporter Program and then thanked us for creating this way to give back to the Project.

Those who work in other open source projects often point out how unique and special our community is because of its culture. I agree. This community is a bright spot in our complex world, and its health and longevity are worth protecting.

The Association does this through our mission to unite each of you—a global open source community—to BUILD and PROMOTE Drupal. With Drupal 8 out, my job will be to align the Association's resources where they are now needed most. 

Our Mission: To Help You Build and Promote Drupal

Over the last few years, the Drupal Association has partnered with the community to help you build Drupal 8. We invested in an engineering team who helped contribute semantic versioning, DrupalCI, and improved issue queue functionality. We also created the issue credit system to reward and motivate members to contribute to the Project. Plus, we raised funds through Drupal 8 Accelerate to pay for sprints that accelerated the software release. Additionally, DrupalCons have brought thousands of you together to grow your Drupal skills and learn from mentors. And, Con sprints are an opportunity to put that growth to work right away with hundreds of other people.

When Drupal 8 was released, The Drupal Association partnered with the community to promote the software on Drupal.org with rich, educational content, telling the world to “Build something amazing, for anyone.” And, we worked with the community to celebrate this great achievement by coordinating a global party. On release day, there were more than 200 release parties around the world.

We see so many wonderful ways we can help the community build and promote the software, yet our dreams cost more than our funding allows right now. So like any organization with a limited budget, we make choices based on priorities. Leading up to the D8 release, our priority was to help the community release the software. Now that D8 is out in the world, it makes sense to put more effort into promoting the software and do that in a way that only the Drupal Association can uniquely do. And, we need to promote the software in a way that generates more income for the Project so we can sustainably fund all the initiatives that help the community as you build and promote the software.

Grow Adoption. Generate Income

Drupal 8 is a platform that helps end users (customers) create amazing solutions that unleash digital business opportunities and solve business pain points. It’s ideal for complex web solutions as well as mobile, SaaS, and newer tech trends like the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the software alone is often not a complete solution. It must work in concert with third party software and hosting services. These solutions require an architecture strategy, integrations, and implementation—all of which is provided by our large ecosystem of service providers: Drupal shops, system integrators, and digital agencies.

When a CIO or CMO is deciding on Drupal as their platform, these software companies, hosting companies, and service providers want to be included in that decision making process. And, they are willing to pay for the ability to be considered part of a Drupal solution.

As a way to grow Drupal adoption and generate income, the Drupal Association can promote solutions, like Drupal for Higher Education or DevOps for Drupal, through its two main channels: Drupal.org and DrupalCon. For each solution, we’ll invite software companies, hosting companies, and service providers to participate in promotional campaigns and to pay for the ability to engage with the decision makers in our channels.

This is work we’ve already started, and it's working well. On Drupal.org, we have an adoption journey for visitors where they learn about Drupal. We invited other companies to provide educational content and services to improve that journey, so that visitors can see Drupal’s strength when it works in tandem with other technology. For example, from the homepage, people are invited to Download Drupal or Try Drupal, which is a selection of Drupal cloud offerings that let the evaluator get an immediate feel for Drupal. With this approach, we add value for visitors, and we lower barriers to adoption for Drupal. Plus, the Try Drupal partners generate leads and pay the Association for the opportunity.

We’re doing this work through DrupalCon too. We offer one-day summits that focus on specific verticals, such as Higher Ed, Media & Publishing, and Government. Current and prospective Drupal customers use the day to talk about how to use Drupal in new and better ways within their business. These talks help strengthen and deepen customer commitment to Drupal and help new customers decide the best way to use Drupal. As part of this event, we invite sponsors to participate. They are third party software companies and service providers who serve these verticals. We invite them to provide educational content, like case studies, and give them meaningful engagement with the audience. They in turn generate leads for future business and pay us for this business opportunity.

It’s important to point out that this opportunity is for those who want to pay. And that includes Drupal shops, who have always been an important part of our community. But I believe this approach still helps those of you not able to pay. Through promotional campaigns, we can attract more potential customers to the channels you are already engaged in: Drupal.org and DrupalCon. For online campaigns, we can point visitors to the marketplace to find all service providers. At DrupalCon, there are lots of opportunities to network and set meetings with a potential customer. Plus, we will look to share promotional content with businesses so they can use them in their local markets.

Bringing our multi-sided market together to help us promote Drupal and generate income works. It’s a tested approach that we can enhance, ultimately allowing us to realize the full vision of funding more work that helps the community build and promote the software.

Why This Matters

This is personal for me. I want Drupal to be adopted across all sectors and in all kinds of ways, so each of you are rewarded with the opportunity to pursue your Drupal dream and get paid doing it. You all give something special to the Drupal Project, from volunteer coding time to giving hugs and high fives when celebrating or supporting each other. I am constantly moved by these acts of generosity and kindness. My life is better because of knowing you and that fuels me to want to give back in the way that I can. The more we can grow Drupal adoption across sectors, the more doors open up to you to pursue your Drupal dream, from serving citizens through government solutions to working on new technology trends through Internet of Things solutions, and anything in between.

Where do we go from here?

I'm so thankful for Holly Ross's leadership. She showed an amazing ability to build community relationships and operationalize the organization, all while sharing her contagious laugh. The Association is in a better place because of her involvement. By investing in and empowering staff, and by leading by living our values, she created a team that’s passionate about serving our mission. I’m so fortunate to work every day with such incredibly talented, smart, kind, and passionate people. I will fiercely protect this culture we created, because it’s our secret sauce. Together, we’ll build off of the great foundation that Holly created.

I’m working with the board and staff to build towards our vision. We are looking at how to maintain and support the services you need to build the software while creating opportunities to promote solutions through Drupal.org and DrupalCon. We are in thinking and listening mode as we figure out the best way to execute this.

I invite you to share your thoughts on this vision. We are all in this together and we will be able to achieve this goal to fund more work on both sides of the Build/Promote equation if we have a shared vision and work together towards it. So please let me know your thoughts. What are the opportunities you see? What are the areas of concern we should consider?