Talking Drupal #553 - Saving The Open Web

[00:00:00] Nic: This is Talking Drupal, a weekly chat about web design and development from a group of people with one thing in common. We love Drupal. This is episode 553, Saving the Open Web. On today's show, we're talking about the open web, what it means and why it's important with our guest, Alex Moreno. We'll also cover Aischema.org JSON-LD as our module of the week.

Welcome to Talking Drupal. Our guest today is Alex Moreno. Alex is a computer scientist with a major in AI from the European University of Madrid. He currently serves as a partner manager in developer relations at Pantheon, and he's an elected director of the board... An elected director on the board of the Drupal Association.

Drawing on nearly two decades of experience as a software engineer and architect, he bridges the gap between high performers, cloud hosting, and the agency community across EMEA. As a prolific international speaker, Alejandro has headlined stages at DrupalCon Amsterdam, Atlanta, and Singapore. He frequently introduces main stage keynotes for industry leaders, including Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, while focusing on fostering innovation and brand growth for the Pantheon Partner Network.

Alex, welcome back to the show, and thank you for joining us again. Yes, uh, second time in the, in the house, so thank you. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me. I'm Nic Laflin, founder at nLightened Development. Today my co-hosts are Bernardo Martinez, senior front-end developer at Voltus. Hey. And also joining us as usual, John Picozzi, solution architect at EPAM.

[00:01:50] John: I don't know if I would say as usual. I feel like I've been spotty the last couple of weeks. You know, show up, don't show up. You know, you never really know. Um, but happy to be here today. Yeah,

[00:02:02] Nic: I wasn't, I wasn't gonna say anything, but yeah, it's good to have you back.

[00:02:04] John: I know. My attendance, uh, I- I'll get out my attendance report at the end of the year and...

[00:02:12] Nic: All right. And now to talk about our module of the week, let's turn it over to Jacob Rockowitz, a longtime Drupal contributor, maintainer of Webform and schema.org blueprints modules, and many, many, many sub-modules. Jacob, what do you have for us this week?

[00:02:25] Jacob: Well, first off, I'll start by saying this is kind of a module show and tell, 'cause I'm covering for Martin 'cause it's my module.

I released it a few weeks ago, and I'm just gonna go through a brief description. Um, the AI schema.org JSON-LD module provides a straightforward way to send a prompt, including a webpage's content data, along with instructions or requirements to an AI provider, and receive a response containing valid schema.org JSON-LD.

For saving and embedding in a webpage. It's, it's pretty much a glue module bringing together AI automators, field widget actions, and J- a JSON-LD field to create this AI-powered schema.org JSON-LD field for content entities. Um, the project's namespace is aischema.org spelled out JSON-LD. It was just created last month.

It's just in an alpha release. It's really just a kind of a proof of concept, but it's also a recipe that other people can use. I'm actively maintaining it 'cause it's in alpha. There's no security coverage. There's a lot of test coverage 'cause it was AI generated, and as a side note, I'm using, um, Superpowers plugin, which is a test-driven development workflow for, for writing AI code.

Um, the documentation, there's some basic setup instructions with a two-minute demo video just walking through basically creating an article, going down to the bottom, having a dedicated JSON field, which is capturing JSON-LD, and hitting the AI automator to say generate the schema.org JSON-LD, and it goes out.

Right now I'm just using personally, um, OpenAI, and it brings back valid JSON-LD to be embedded in the page. Um, only one site's reporting using it, and just the breakdown of the features. Yes, it adds a native JSON field, which contains the JSON-LD to content entities. You can pick and choose which ones, which bundles.

It's populated by an AI automator using a field widget action, which is basically a trigger at the bottom of the field that says, "Go generate the schema.org JSON-LD," and it goes out and generates it and brings it back. And once it's stored as JSON data, that becomes like a knowledge graph of your site.

It works with complex nested data structures because you have full control over the prompt, and you can use tokens to say, "Give me the full rendered page," or, "Focus on this piece of the rendered page or that piece." Um, there's a sub-module to log all the prompts and responses to help you debug and improve your prompts.

You can also export those prompts as a CSV and send those up to an LLM to help, help you optimize your initial prompt, and this is configurable in the UI, Drush, or even a recipe. There's a config action, so you can just say, you know, "This is how I want to set it up." Um, the philosophy, this module is completely generated using AI, which use AI to build a tool that helps AI understand your website while keeping a human in the loop.

Um, I used, and I just throw this out to everyone, is I use both quote-unquotes when I write code. I tend to go back and forth between review and write. Um, and I'm just encouraging people, you know, to take a look at this. It solves a big problem for sites that need good schema.org JSON-LD. What do you guys want to see?

[00:05:37] Nic: So I guess my, my first question is the, uh- the schema, is it attached to the individual pieces? 'Cause I, I know that the JSON LD can sometimes be like a full page piece, or you can attach it to, like, individual little components on the page. Does this aggregate them to the top or-

[00:05:58] Jacob: It's a field on the entity, so it's to the top.

But let's say you had nested media objects and you wanted to do that with- Yeah ... you could pull those in as well. Okay. And it goes out on your page. But the idea is it's, it's a root level. It's the main content entity with a field on

[00:06:14] Nic: it. Okay, s- 'cause you had mentioned before we started recording that- Yeah

Canvas was one of the drivers. So if you, if you, you would connect this field directly to the Canvas page, not to the individual SDCs, it would then send off the page rendered to some agent or some service- Mm ... get a response back, attach it to the top of the page, and have it structured.

[00:06:37] Jacob: Yep, it would parse it.

Okay. I mean, if your HTML structure... I mean, your prompts could be really flexible. If you're sending up the raw HTML, you could say, "Target this class, extract this value, parse it." Mm. Um, there's a lot of possibilities, but you also... It's token powered, so you... And there is a token to get the full rendered page into the prompt to help-

[00:06:59] Nic: When you say, when you say token, you mean, like, the Drupal definition of token, like AI- Drupal definition of token.

Okay. Yeah,

[00:07:04] Jacob: Drupal definition of token. Okay. I actually forgot what the... It's, it's ba- it's the namespace of the module, and it just gets the rendered- Okay ... the full rendered node. There's a module for that, but this felt a little easier, and you can optimize it a little bit. Okay.

[00:07:19] John: I, this, this feels like, like...

I mean, I get the idea behind it. I like the idea behind it. I- I... but this is, like, up here above my head. I just wanna highlight, um, that I'm now in love with the way that, um, uh, Jacob says JSON. 'Cause it, it just feel, it just feels so much smoother. And then I was kinda like, "What? What are we talking about?"

And then I realized, I was like, "That, that's great." So that's really my only contribution here.

[00:07:52] Nic: So I, I will say really briefly that we did talk about the parent module, um, all the way back in episode three- 366. It's been quite some time. Mm. Uh, it's 2022. Might, might be due for an update. Yeah. Yeah. And, and just to really quickly mention, yeah, what, uh, JSON LD is for, it's really about, um, providing schema to search engines, and I presume now AI companies, about the page in a way that they've agreed they will parse it.

So I think, you know, if you have a recipe or an event, how do you output information so that your event shows up in that little block that Google shows when you search- Mm ... for events near me? And- JSON-LD is one of the many formats that you can use. There's, there's, I, I don't know, about a dozen of them, I think.

Um, but it's really more about ... It, it's less about the format itself, and more about how you're structuring the data about it, how you're saying like, "Oh, this is event, this is the time it starts, this is the time it ends, this is the type of event." All that stuff is specified by schema.org, and, um, is well supported by most, most search engines.

Um, so that's the point. It's about pulling kind of unstructured information, or semi-structured information, and putting it in a way that specifically will assist search engines in displaying that information to people. So it's really powerful, and it works really

[00:09:24] Jacob: well. Well, I mean, the other part is it's, it's a universal standard.

So if someone wanted to pull your content and you had JSON-LD, it's easier than them parsing it, and you might not have an, a readily available API for them to get the data. And it might become ... It has that potential. I mean, also this illustrates this example where you can kind of transform your site on the fly with AI.

You're literally saying, "I have this data structure, and I want that data structure." You have unstructured data, and now you're saying, "I want structured data," which is really powerful, because you could then feed that ... I mean, if you think about it, if you were gonna do a chat-driven interface, you can use AI automators to simplify your content into a vector database.

'Cause you can't take a whole rendered page, and then when you start mapping fields, it can get really out of hand. Um, it, it's really powerful. And by the way, it's just glue code, 'cause I'm really leveraging the AI automators that are in the AI module.

[00:10:18] John: It's, it's interesting. It's interesting to me, because I, um- I feel like we need Nic's not gonna...

Nic might not like this comment, but I feel like we need AI to understand, understand our content and our stuff a little bit better, and I'll, I'll give you an example of why I'm saying that. Um, a- admittedly yesterday when Nic was like, "Hey, where are the show notes for today's show?" And I had realized that I'd totally blown the calendar invite last week to produce the show notes, I was like, "Oh, I need show notes."

So, um, I went to ChatGPT like I, I do some weeks, and I said, "Hey, I need show notes. Here's the slide deck that we're kind of basing the show off of. Um, provide me 10 questions." And, like, man, the questions that it provided me, uh, based on the slide deck were complete garbage. I was like, "These questions are not good.

These..." It d- like, "Hey, did you read this slide deck?" And it was like, "Well, admittedly, no, I didn't really read the slide deck." "But I just kind of took, like, the phrasing and, and, like, came up with questions based on, like, other internet searches." And I'm like, "No, read the slide deck." And it's like, "Okay, well, I, I can't really read the sl-" And I mean, it was Google Slides, right?

So, like, this gets me thinking that, like, hey, like, if they had a better, you know, maybe better schema or better way of, of communicating that data back to the AI, maybe the AI would've been able to be like, "Oh yeah, I totally know what you're, what you're trying to get at here, and, like, here are really good questions for your show."

Um, so you know, we could chalk that up to, to AI fails, but, um, you know, I think what you're, what you're getting at here, Jacob, is pretty, pretty important. And, and a lot of not, not only organizations, but a lot of companies are trying to, are trying to get that, where, you know, AI can get, can get to their data a little bit better and provide that data to folks that are, are asking, asking questions of our AI overlords.

[00:12:15] Nic: I mean, I- I- I, I

[00:12:16] Bernardo: guess, I get... Oh, sorry. Go ahead,

[00:12:19] Nic: Roberto.

[00:12:19] Bernardo: Oh, I was gonna say, out of curiosity, I was wondering, um, how many hours did it take you to build this module now with AI? It- And maybe- Yeah ... the amount of tokens that it took.

[00:12:32] Jacob: I am using those, um, the... Tokens are kind of free if you're paying for that, like, Max or Pro account for Codex and Claude, 'cause they keep bumping them up and down, and you just manage it, so I'm not tracking tokens.

And I, I, I don't advise anyone to start counting tokens when you're learning this. Just accept, you know... You gotta just open it yourself up to the challenge and go through it. And I mean, it only took a few hours to generate the base module. It does amazing stuff, 'cause what I did to build the module is I got the pattern working in Drupal, exported the config.

Mm. Like, I had a snapshot of Drupal, clean, built out what I wanted, exported the config, and then pointed the AI at the config and said, "Generate me a module that will build this for any content type." And it did it. And then I just kept iterating on it. And it really, I would say maybe 10 hours total on the code.

And using test-driven development, it made it very easy to iterate and improve it and work through a lot of issues. And it, it would've taken five times, 10 times as much time to work out some of those, those patterns. Mm. It, it... You just have to keep working at it and, you know, um, I'm... It's figuring out the right tools you need to start with.

I mean, I definitely, you know, sat there with the prompt to build it and, like, iterate it, and you gotta have, you have to have a plan with AI. If you don't, it'll skid off the rails.

[00:13:55] John: Can you elaborate on that- What? ... just a, a little bit? Like, you need a plan. Like, what are you, uh... Is your plan, like, "Hey, I'm gonna use AI and I expect to get this output?"

Uh, is that what you mean? It, it's like- Or is it like-

[00:14:07] Jacob: I would say most of the time, unless you know it's gonna do exactly what you want, you're like, even in your example of the slides, you're just like, "Generate me the slides." You could say, "How are you gonna read the slides and tell me how you're gonna get the information to give me questions?"

And that's the plan, and you're, you take a step. Especially when it fails, I can't emphasize that. When you have a failure, start a new discussion and approach it differently, and ask how it's gonna do it. And if it says it can't, you can then ask that key question: "Well, how can you get this information correctly?"

It's very likely in, in, um... John, in your case it would say, "Well listen, export the slides as a PDF 'cause I can read that without a problem."

[00:14:49] John: Yeah. So, s- heh, so I had done that, but I was using free ChatGPT and I ran out of uploads. So- Yeah ... um, that was gonna be my next step. However, I will say I did not think of, of starting a new, a new chat, um, 'cause obviously, you know, the chat had context and, and whatnot.

So that is, that's also a good tip. But- I think- Having a plan- Yeah, back- I like it ... to the

[00:15:13] Jacob: token thing, right now those paid services are giving tokens away for free. They're so much cheaper than what it's gonna be in the long term that it's worth almost paying so that you can experiment and get results and, and see what's going on.

And it is gonna go up, but it, it's a really frustrating thing. I mean, it's just weird. You could have a whole discussion about this. Weird race, it's gonna keep going up in cost, but then the open source models are getting cheaper and more viable. They're just a year behind.

[00:15:41] John: Uh, you know, our, uh, I think next week's show is about the AI Learners Club, and I just learned about OpenClaw.

[00:15:48] Jacob: Oh, you got... That's a whole other... Yeah.

[00:15:49] John: Uh, and I was like- Yeah, that, that is- That's a whole, that's a whole nother, a whole nother, um, can of, can of fish- I- ... worms, whatever you prefer. It's in

[00:15:57] Jacob: two weeks. Here, I'll, I'll wrap this up and say, "No, I'm not doing any of that automated agent stuff. I'm letting it run, watching it go."

And one of the best tools I've found to save tokens is if you're watching it do something wrong, you can redirect it while it's working. Or even exit and then just redirect. You could just be like, "No, no, stop. Don't do, don't do that. Go this direction." That saves you a huge amount of tokens than just watching it churn out, you know, like loop endlessly trying to solve a problem where it's going down the wrong path.

[00:16:24] Nic: Yeah. Well, that, that, that's one of the secrets too that of Claude, I think. Claude's long-term business model of producing better results is just they do it five or 10 times in the background, and then say, "Okay, out of these five results, these three kind of agreed, so that's probably more likely right."

But they're using, but it's using five times as much, as many tokens, right? Um, and, you know, since you're paying for tokens eventually, it makes sense for them to use as many tokens as possible each request, as well as providing you more reasonable results. So it's kind of win-win for them, right?

[00:17:04] Jacob: It's win-win- Um-

but everyone's using different models and bouncing back and forth, and you go from an advanced model- Yeah ... to a basic model. Like, I think token saving is getting overrated. Like, when you run into that issue, you deal with it. You know, like, but it is definitely worth not paying per token. It's like try one of those, you know, weekly usage ones, 'cause they tend to- Yeah

they're competing, so it's, it's really not an issue. All right. Anything else? All right. Let's wrap it up.

[00:17:30] Nic: Yeah. I was gonna say thank you, Jacob, for, uh, a, a module of the week. It... I think every time you come on, you talk about one that you developed, so it's always good to have you on- Yeah ... occasionally just to see what- It's showing up

you're working on. Yeah. Yeah, it's always, it's always good. Um- Right ... so if, if our listeners wanna get in touch with you or suggest a module of the week, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:17:49] Jacob: JRockowitz on the web, on drupal.org, Twitter, Facebook, uh, LinkedIn, you know, my website, dot com. That's... And Slack.

[00:18:00] Nic: Awesome.

[00:18:01] Jacob: All right. Thank you

[00:18:01] Nic: so much, Jacob.

[00:18:02] Jacob: Always good to see you. All right.

[00:18:04] Nic: Take care, guys. Bye. Bye.

All right. Um, I don't know why... Sorry, everybody. Uh, nope. Oh, that one's

[00:18:21] John: good. Wrong one. Um, nope. No, no, no. Nope. Trying to figure out how to- Do, do, do,

[00:18:24] Nic: do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. It's not- Do, do, do, do, do, do, do ... it's not doing what I want it to do. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. I will, I will tinker with that in a minute.

Special effects. I love

[00:18:32] John: it.

[00:18:33] Nic: Yeah, Alex, uh, our, um, our topic today is saving the open web. Before we dive into that, can you, can you define what the open web- It's a little topic ... is?

[00:18:44] Alex: Yeah. Uh, uh, by the way, you, you didn't introduce our little guest here, who is the, actually the star of the show. She's, uh, Miffy, and she's been traveling- Miffy

with me for, uh, the last three weeks since, um, DrupalDevDays in, in Athens. She came with me to, um, uh, Drupal Iberia this weekend, where I was doing a keynote actually about this, this topic- So the, uh, the thing about the open web is more of a hook that I'm using for this talk that I proposed. Um, first time was in DrupalCamp England at the beginning of the year.

And since, I think you, you were there, John. Uh, I don't remember. Yeah. Um, actually I'm getting confused because I've seen you in DrupalCon Chicago recently. Um- It was Chicago. Yeah. I unfortunately haven't

[00:19:30] John: left, haven't left the US for a Drupal event yet. I'm working towards it. Uh,

[00:19:36] Alex: but, uh, you have to come to Europe.

It's, uh, yeah. Um, but yeah, like, um, it has ... I'm, I'm pretty excited because if ... I wrote about this almost three years ago, uh, when I was working at the Drupal Association, and I've been talking about this at every single Drupal event that I've been attending. And at some point I realized, hey, um, just talk to people face to face.

There's so much that you can do. But then if I start to talk to, and propose this as a, as a talk, um, I'm gonna be able to reach, uh, a lot more people. So the open web is really a hook, uh, of something that we have to preserve. Um, it's something that Dries talked, I think three, two, three years ago in one of his keynotes on why Drupal was so important, and why Drupal is, like, something for the whole of the humanity, as, as well as open source, right?

Um, but it's something that it's kind of if we don't protect what we have, which is Drupal, we risk the lose of, um, uh, we risk losing one of the key pillars on the open web, right? And at the end it's about preserving our rights and our, uh, privacy and all of that, but that's kind of a side effect of what will happen if we lose what we have, which is open source and, and Drupal.

[00:20:54] John: So I mean, like, the, the open web, like, it, it kind of encapsulates open source, right? But it's, it's, it's like the opposite of the kind of like, you know, clo- closed web, right? Or, or like a proprietary, um, platform that's not, that's not open to, uh, to the public, right? So, like, that's, that's kind of one way, one way of thinking about it.

Also, like, informational, you know, right? Like being, being open, you know, keeping, keeping that information open and available to, to the masses. Like, is that, is that kind of how you're, you're thinking about it?

[00:21:32] Alex: Yeah. Think about, uh, every time you publish something, uh, into something that is not your own platform, your own Drupal, your own, um, WordPress, um, it goes into someone's hands, not in

You don't, you don't ow- own the data, right? And you may think that that's okay, but you actually don't know what people can do with that data in 10 years or 20 years, and if you have your kids', uh, information in there, or you have pictures or, you know. Uh, maybe it's that we are very protected with these things in, in Europe, but I think, uh, I think it's actually important.

[00:22:05] John: Yeah, absolutely. So based on, um, your keynote, your presentation, which I, I will say, um, we will have in the show notes for folks that are interested in, in looking at those slides. Um, you allude to Drupal being in a bubble. Um, interested to know why, why you feel like Drupal might be in a bubble.

[00:22:29] Alex: Yeah. Um, again, like this is what I wrote three years ago where I was working, uh, uh, with the Drupal Association as the innovation manager, and I was realizing that we were going to so many events, Drupal events, and we were kind of preaching, and we were talking to, um, other folks.

Most of the people that were friends that we have known for many years. I've been in this for more than 20 years, and at some point I realized that, hey, um, we've been the same people for, for quite a long time, and I don't see a lot of new faces. Um, and then you realize that you are proposing sessions, you are talking about how amazing Drupal is and how we are reinventing.

Because let's, let's be clear, like Drupal is not surviving, Drupal is thriving in terms of technology. We have reinvented ourself every few years, right? Um, and if you think what we have 20 years ago, think Matrix, the, the movie, and think the telephone that they used to have there. I was like amazed when I saw the movie.

It's like, "Oh my goodness, I want to have that." Nowadays it's like that's prehistoric. I don't even think about that, that phone anymore. But Drupal is actually very relevant, right? Yeah. Um, so but we, we are lacking, uh, a lot in terms of sending that message outside of those events. And at the end, we go to those events, and that's where I, where I, where I, where I speak about the bubble.

We go to these events and we talk about, uh, how amazing those things are, but we are only reaching a small percentage of the people that al- already know about how amazing we are. What about the rest of the world?

[00:24:11] John: So it feels to me like it's less of a technology problem and more of a marketing, PR, perception problem.

Would you, would you agree with that?

[00:24:23] Alex: Absolutely. If you think about when we moved to Drupal 8 and we were talking on, at, um, Drupal Leaving the Island- Mm ... that was a technology problem, and that was- Yeah ... when we joined, uh, Symfony and other communities and we... But that was a technology problem, and we are good at solving those things.

[00:24:40] John: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:41] Alex: This is more about marketing and, and PR, and we have been doing amazing work, um, around marketing- Yeah ... and, and we have rebranded Drupal.org for marketeers, and then for developers, and then for site builders. Um, but we haven't been able to send that message across, uh, outside actually of our, of our bubble.

[00:25:04] Bernardo: I'm curious to know if, uh, you think Drupal is the only one on that, uh, issue or you see other communities having that problem as well?

[00:25:15] Alex: That's a very interesting question. That's something I didn't thought until Drupal Dev Days in Athens, uh, three weeks ago because I have, uh... By the way, I was very honored because I have, uh, Jess sitting in front of me, but I also have Dries.

Uh, and I didn't realize that until the end of the talk, but Jess sent me that, that question. Um, and it was like, "Hey, um, is this just a, a Drupal problem?" And I've been talking to other communities, in particular WordPress, where I'm going to, uh, actually, uh, participate in a podcast with that community. I, I don't have an answer at the moment.

I think for what they tell me is that, yes, it's a common problem for them as well. But I suspect that it's actually a- an open source problem, because open source has been created by people, technologists, that we are good at that, but we are not necessarily good on the other side of the, you know, soft skills, um, talking to, um...

And, and, and it's a difficult skill. It, it- I've been in front of directors where they are not-

[00:26:23] Nic: Yeah ...

[00:26:23] Alex: technology savvies, and I've made the mistake of talking too tech savvy, right? And, and it's like then those people just disconnect

[00:26:32] Nic: because they- It, it's-

[00:26:33] Alex: Yeah.

[00:26:34] Nic: There- there's also a piece to it where, like, on the technology side, developers, if they're interested in fixing or changing something, they can just sit down and do it.

Like, it does take resources, but a lot of times those resources can just be free time. But when you look at marketing, you... Many times you can create materials for marketing in your own free time, sim- similar to how a developer can change a module or something. But actual marketing requires finding and reaching an audience, and that almost always takes actual cash, right?

If whether it's to go to an event or create a campaign that you advertise. Like, that takes, that takes something. And private companies, they, they invest and they pool, uh, they, they pool resources for that. They dedicate resources for that. And I think, I think a lot of the change behind Drupal CMS and what the Drupal Association is doing with joining industry conferences to promote Drupal, I think that's a great initiative.

I, I think that that helps with this, with this piece of it, but we still have, I think we still have a long way to go. Um, I, I... Sorry, John. No, no, go ahead. I think there's one other, I think there's one other thing, um, that you might wanna consider too, which is, um, we kind of have a twofold problem. One is, uh, PHP In one it...

Well, okay, let me, let me say this differently. We have another challenge, right? Which, w- well, I learned this a couple episodes ago. We have another challenge, which is PHP itself and Drupal as a CMS. Because in this day and age, for better or worse, people use AI to find solutions for their tools, and there is a significant bias in AI for Python and for JavaScript, for TypeScript, right?

If you ask it flat out, "Write me something that solves this problem. Recommend a framework that solves this problem. Recommend..." It is 100% of the time, if you don't introduce, like forget about Drupal, WordPress, like any of those, it will 100% of the time recommend some type script, like Next.js, React, maybe a Python thing if you're lucky, um, if you're doing something data.

So you need, we need a way to get outside the bubble there as well. Um, I think, I, I... Yeah, what do you, what do you think about that, Alex?

[00:29:02] John: I, I mean, I don't know, I don't know what Alex thinks about it. That's all. But I, I think like, I don't know. I, I think you just, you just highlighted kind of what Alex was talking about in the fact that, you know, a developer suggested that we have the AI technology, uh, we update the AI technology to better, better market our, our thing to, you know, marketers and site builders.

Um, you know- Yeah ... I think Drupal has for a long time suffered from, and this is gonna sound like I'm anti-developer, but, um, uh, for a long time we've, we've been, you know, as Alex just said, like we are awesome at solving technology problems. We are awesome at developing a quality product that, um, is updatable, scalable, flexible, all of the, all of the things, right?

What we're not good at is when talking to site builders and marketers, highlighting the business benefits that this thing will solve for them, as opposed to saying like, "Oh, well, you can, you know, you can interact with the API" and like, "Oh, you need to build a page? Well, just, you know, write, write this, this code and it'll do it."

As soon as like, as soon as we have that conversation or start with, with the words like, "Just write this code," like somebody's brain shuts off and they go somewhere else. Because they wanna, they want, you know, what Drupal Canvas is bringing, right? Drag and drop, all these nice features, right? I think we are getting there.

Um, but I, I think it's interesting to always, to, to hear developers talk because it's always, it's always going back to the code, and it's easy to do this. You just write a module, you write a hook, or you do a thing, right? And like- I think, I honestly think a lot of the problem is that, that terminology because it scares the average user away.

[00:31:00] Alex: I, I was waiting before because I had impression that you had something to say, John. Uh- Thank you ... and you are totally right. Um, you are totally right. Um, like in terms of, uh, why AI is doing that, every time you ask for a problem, it always comes with, uh, Ruby or Python script. Um, we were, we were having this discussion on the board retreat in Chicago.

Um, I don't remember which one of the director, but he actually asked AI, "Hey, why is this happening?" And the answer was, "Hey, just because Drupal.org is not suggesting what you should be doing or what you are good at." Meaning, we are not doing, we are good at SEO maybe because we've been doing SEO for many years, but we haven't done a lot of, um, how is it called?

Uh, it's not

[00:31:50] John: script again. They need

[00:31:50] Alex: Ja-

[00:31:51] John: they, they need Jacob in there to do some schema.org work on, on their- It's just optimization

[00:31:56] Alex: for AI, right? On their front end. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, uh, and then, you know, we don't have the resources at the Drupal Association because we are constantly, or they are constantly, uh, firefighting.

Yeah. And but it will be as simple as, uh, um, as simple as having another million things. It's not as simple. But having Drupal.org saying, "Hey, uh, in order to do this, this is the best way to do it, Drupal." And you know what? Drupal.org has a huge authority. If we start to do those kind of, um, success stories in our- Mm-hmm

Drupal.org, uh, it will help a lot.

[00:32:29] John: It's

[00:32:30] Alex: interesting- From

[00:32:31] John: my eyes. It's interesting you bring this up and, and, and it was a, you know, it was the board retreat at DrupalCon where this kind of first came up because I heard a similar storyline at Acquia Engage, um, in Denver a couple weeks ago, where they were like, "Oh, you know, we want, you know, Drupal and Acquia to be the thing that like, you know, people sugge- you know, people go to AI and get Drupal suggested," right?

And then, you know, they pick their hosting vendor and, uh, you know, obviously they engage. Ideally they hope it's Acquia. Um, but I then was like, what happens, what happens when you go to AI and ask, ask it questions to try to figure out, you know, get a recommendation on CMS? Man, I tried real hard, real hard to get AI to suggest Drupal to me.

It would not do it. Um, it, it-

[00:33:19] Nic: The, the, the thing is, it, the complexity is too high for these frameworks. For like, so they're, they're not gonna reco- like the thing is Node has just the Node dependency, and there's a million and one hosts that will kind of one-click install whatever thing you generate on GitHub.

Drupal- WordPress, Laravel, any of these frameworks, they, I mean, Ruby might be an exception, P- Python sort of is an exception, but they, they require a database, they require a local development environment. They re- more than just one dependency, right? And-

[00:33:56] Alex: But is that, is that the case? It's like are we simplifying because we are developers and we are simplifying the problem to a technology problem, or it's maybe a marketing problem and it's because we are not telling AI that we are the best?

I think it's both. I think it's both.

[00:34:08] John: Well, I think it's a, it's definitely a data structure problem, but I, like, so I guess my, I guess my, my query to the AI was, what is the best CMS for AI? And it's, it's literally the short answer was WordPress. And I was kind of like, "What?" I'm like, "Eh." And then it was like, Contentful, something called Sanity.

Never heard of it. Um- Sanity. Never heard about Sanity. And then Strapi. I don't even know what that is. And then it went on to- Is Strapi

[00:34:35] Nic: even a CMS?

[00:34:36] John: And then it went on to, uh, suggest Experience B- uh, Manager, Sitecore, like, and I, I really tried. I gave it, like, a couple more things. I was like, come on, like, try, you know.

D- nope. Did not mention Drupal once. Matter of fact, even went into, um, I even asked like, "What is the best AI native CMS?" And we're like, we're, we're going way off topic here. But, um, would not, would not come back with Drupal. Um, asked it if, if, if you need an API first component-based CMS that could integrate and use AI, which CMS would you choose?

Again, not doing it. Um, uh- Mm. Sorry, still scrolling. What do you think about Drupal as an AI native CMS? That one was interesting. Um, Drupal has several strengths that matter a lot for AI use cases. And then what was the, the... Yeah. I- I- anyway. Uh, it was just- Yeah. But- ... kinda like, not, not, not giving me, not giving me any love on the Drupal front there.

[00:35:43] Alex: I, I think it's- Yeah, no ... an amazing example of what we were b- talking at the beginning, because it's like huge companies have huge budgets for, um, marketing, and it's not surprise that most of the CMSs that you have said at the beginning, most of them are proprietary apart from WordPress, right? Yeah.

That's what we are competing against.

[00:36:05] Bernardo: Something I, something I noticed lately is that inside the Drupal community, we don't have that many Drupal evangelists or champions themselves. Um, we have a lot of champions and evangelists for tooling, 'cause I know there's plenty of people who have champion and become evangelists for Lando, DDEV, or any other tool that we have.

But for Drupal itself, we all like it, but I rarely see anybody at the general tech conferences evangelizing that, especially in the modern Drupal era. Hey, I'll put it out

[00:36:38] John: there right now. If anybody wants to pay me to go to an event and talk about how great Drupal is, I will gladly do it. Gladly do it.

Like, 100% would love to do it.

[00:36:51] Alex: Well- But, but here's, here's another idea. Like, I'm sure you have local events in your area, and most of us have local events in our area about technology. We don't need to take a plane and, you know, cross half, uh, world to talk about- Oh, yeah, I'll drive. I'll

[00:37:04] John: drive. I'll drive within- Yeah, yeah, yeah

like, a, you know, a four-hour radius. Like, I have no problem driving to New York City. No problem. I'll get down there. Because then the

[00:37:11] Alex: proposition is very easy. We can go to any company and tell them, "Hey, let's, uh, let's have two flags, the Drupal flag and your company flag, and sponsor me to, to go to..." And then we barge the world.

You, and you know what? Um, we go to those events where Drupal is not known by those people, and there is a huge potential to bring new people, new companies to our ecosystem. Well- That's good for Drupal, and that's good for the company that's sponsoring you.

[00:37:33] John: So I mean, I think that's, I think that's, that's great.

And, you know, uh, obviously I work for a large company. I also would like to go on the record and say that anything I say here does not, um, directly reflect on my employer, um, or, or represent them in any way. Um, but, like, a lot of the times, like, that, that philosophy is great. Like, "Hey, you pay half and we'll pay half, and, like, we'll go to the event."

But like, if they're not going to the event, it's a l- it's real hard to go get budget to go to, to send somebody to that event, because they're like, "There's no ROI on that for us right now. Like, we need to, we need to show that." So I don't know. It would probably be beneficial for the DA to go out and get some sort of grant that allowed for them to be able to kind of like fund some of these, some of these trips, right, for folks.

And, and like you said, Alex, like, if we can find people that can- you know, geographically get somewhere quickly and, and economically. Like, and, and, you know, it just costs the, you know, the cost of a hotel or, or whatever. Like, I think that's, that's, that's reasonable, and that's doable. But, uh, you know, uh, uh, I think we gotta start thinking about it.

I, I agree with you. Like, we gotta, we gotta get out there and start, like, telling people how great Drupal is. Yeah. You know, I have a, I have a blog post that I wrote, I think, last year about, like, the perception of Drupal, and, like, that's, that's the biggest problem here, right, is, like, people's perception.

[00:39:04] Alex: I, I love that you're talking about the Drupal Association, um, supporting this.

And I'm tired of saying, "Hey, we don't have resources," but actually we have an alternative, which is something that we are starting to discuss, like, Carlos Suspin is a big element of this. Um, and some people in Europe doing the, especially in Europe, obviously, doing the Drupal Federations as an umbrella of the rest of, um, association.

And having this in Europe makes a lot of sense because then we can ask for funds- Mm-hmm ... that are for European organizations, and then- Yeah ... uh, kind of not just funding the infrastructure and, but also funding this kind of initiative, funding the money. And if we tell Europe, "Hey," they are very receptive at, at the moment to, to these things, like, protect the open web.

[00:39:46] Nic: Yeah. I, I, I think that makes sense. A- and I think that helps, you know, that helps everybody in the Drupal community. Uh, gett- getting back to kind of the general marketing thing, do you think, do you think the Drupal CMS kind of initiative and project has helped offset the, some of the viewpoints that we're talking about, or is there still work to be done there?

[00:40:08] Alex: Uh, that's actually an example I used, uh, last weekend, uh, Drupal vary in my keynote. And, uh, that was, uh, two winters ago, right, two years ago, where we have 700 people in the same phone call, um, 1,000, I don't know how many companies, but we had people from all across the world talking about- Yeah ... Drupal CMS, and this is amazing.

And, you know, i- i- it is like everyone is talking about this. Um, and we have this amazing party. Um, and at, you know, what happened at the, the next day, uh, how many PRs we had from outside of, apart from the drop times that are doing an amazing job and the specialized Drupal press. No one was talking about this.

And that's, I was looking at that, it's like, oh my goodness, this is, this is actually happening. Like, this Bible actually exists. This is when I realized that, um, the article that I wrote three years ago, it was kind of materializing during the Drupal CMS event, and this was actually talking about this a few months later.

It's like, "Hey, we did this amazing thing and we only had one press release." So we are doing something wrong. Maybe, uh, we are good at doing those, creating that momentum, but we are bad at following up. And following up, following up is super important. Maybe just we need someone to send press releases.

Imbre- Yeah ... uh, was doing that with the release note. I don't know if that's making a difference at the moment. We'll, we will need to analyze it. But that it is, uh, you know, someone is doing something.

[00:41:37] Nic: Well, I, I honestly think too, I mean, aside from the marketing set piece, I think the site templates have a really

I think that's where the magic will really lie. Like, Drupal CMS is great for showcasing, here's what you can do, but site templates allow you to lower the startup cost to get to Dru- like, recipes have been fantastic, they're great, but they're so complicated to set up and get started that we haven't had the proliferation of like, "Hey, you want a site that does X, Y, Z?

Here's, here's a, a template to do that." And I think site templates, they're focusing on how to build them as well. Like, there's already, what? A dozen of them. So if you start, if you get to a point where you're like, "Hey, marketing person, here's Drupal. It solves all your stuff. It'll grow with you. You're trying to get into X, Y, Z market.

Here's a Drupal site template that does that for you and does, you know, gets you 95 hours of work of set up yourself basically for free or for some minimal cost. You install it, you have the site working, then you can build it from there." Yeah. That will, that will differentiate us from other platforms, right?

That, you know, ha- have- I think- ... a substantially lower startup cost.

[00:42:51] John: I think that's great. Like, I, I ca- 100% subscribe to everything Nic is saying right now. But what does the on-ramp look like, right? So you're saying, "Hey, site templates, recipes, all of these things," great. They will, they will definitely get people in, you know, to, to be interested and they will accelerate development and creation of sites, 100%.

But what does that on-ramp look like, right? So let's- Yeah ... think of this from the, from like the, I'm a, I'm a marketing intern and my overbearing boss just asked me to create a, an event website for an event we're having in three weeks because nobody thought that they should create a website, right? First thing I'm doing is, like, going to Google and doing a Google search, right?

And, like, maybe Drupal comes up, right? And, and a- as an option. But, like, there's no opt- there's no way for me to get a- Drupal playground or a, a Drupal, uh, workspace or a Drupal something or other to start kind of, like, building out that site and showing it to my, to my boss, right? Unless my organization's already using Drupal and, you know, I'm, I'm a- I'm in an ecosystem where I can, I can ask, make that request, right?

Um, I always go back to Squarespace because I'm like, you know, uh, there was a long time, and I think, I think Bernardo even said this at, at, uh, DrupalCon when we were talking, like, you know, there was a long time there where f- you know, family members would ask me for a, for a Drupal site, and I'd go, "Oh, go to Squarespace.

It's gonna be a lot easier for you to get that thing up and r- up and running." There- there's no equivalent, uh, to Drupal, and that on-ramp is desperately needed because if we have that on-ramp, if somebody can type, like, "Oh, I need a marketing site for an event in three weeks, uh, you know, it needs to be quick.

My boss is asking me for this," right? And they go, "Oh, hey, look, look at this Drupal thing. Oh, I can install the event, the event recipe. I can do this. I can do that. Oh, look at this. Uh, there's a site template already ready to go." Like, that on-ramp does not exist today, at least I, I don't see it. Maybe I'm, maybe I'm not looking in the right places.

[00:44:57] Alex: There, there are proprietary companies doing that, um, or hosting companies in, like, in my case, Pantheon, right, where you just go click a button and that happens. Uh, but we need something which is more Drupal, um, industry kind of accepted. And I remember, like, it's, it's very interesting, like, um, the way or one of the reasons to start those, that project, the templates, one was solving that issue of making things easier for- Yeah

people to install. But the other was, uh, monetary kind of goal, which is kind of attracting or creating a healthy ecosystem where we will attract junior or other developers that suddenly they will say, "Hey," or they will see the example, "Hey, I can, I can make a few hun- a few thousands, uh, creating this thing."

And then what in the past people would not be attracted at all, because there is no way to create any, any money apart from selling websites. Suddenly you have something similar to what happens in WordPress where, um, if you go to a WordCamp, it's amazing because you have the big hosting companies, but you also have a lot of small planning shops where they are selling their small solutions.

I'm not saying we need to replicate that because that has many other problems. Um, but we are kind of going towards that direction where we make a, a more healthy ecosystem. Uh, we create, um, a way for people to, to generate money, and we attract other developers, which is what we need as well, junior developers.

[00:46:24] Bernardo: So when I was getting into Drupal, I found a couple of videos that, um, I think Kent from Palantir and a couple of other people were going out to the Linux, uh, summits and the Linux conferences and then just speaking about Drupal and why not. And I wonder what happened with the Drupal 8 transition, 'cause it was mostly, uh, getting up the island on the code.

But somehow the community went inwards. We stopped going out. I haven't seen that many Drupal community members, uh, out there presenting at other conferences, and that's something that might be one of the issues. But I was wondering if you know about other, uh, problems that maybe, uh, other open web communities have that we could or they could try to avoid similar to that, and if you notice that being an issue as well, people not necessarily speaking at other conferences.

[00:47:20] Alex: Yeah, that's, that's a, a problem or that's an angle that I need to look at because I, again, I got invited to talk in a, a WordPress, um, forum and in a podcast as well, and I suddenly realized that maybe this is not actually a Drupal problem, and also the comment from Dries and Jess in, in Athens in the face.

Um, I, I don't have an answer to that. I'm actually, uh, on ... in the process at the moment to research on, on that topic. What I know is what we did a few years ago with, uh, the Drupal Association going to Web Summit with a few partners, right? Um, and, uh, it was very expensive. I don't remember the, the price tag, but doing it in between several partners, um, it made it a lot easier.

And I, I, I loved that because I could see in the ... I, I was there in Lisbon, and I could see the logos, and it was like all of them are competitors. So if you have a potential customer there, in a normal, uh, industry event, this will never happen. This happens in, in open source because we have this, um, this community and we have this way of collaborate, so we need to do more of that.

Um, again, Web Summit was something that it was a start. Maybe it was too big because if you think about the numbers, it was like 70,000 people, 1,000 speakers. It's probably way too big maybe for us at the moment, or maybe not. I, I don't have the answer to that. Maybe it's just creating branding, and that was great, and I actually got some feedback last week, I think it was from Dominic, saying, "Hey, actually that was great because we created branding," and that after a few months some people reminded, uh, still remember, um, uh, Drupal.

But what, what is for sure is that we need to keep doing those type of events. Maybe it's not just getting money and bringing a booth. Maybe it's just detecting those opportunities to send call for papers. And again, bring your, your flag, your company flag that is Spain, you to go there, and also your Drupal T-shirt and stay, like, put yourself in an comfortable place and talk about, you know, how amazing this solution

Not, don't talk about Drupal straightaway because people will disconnect. But talk about the problems that they are having and how you solve it for your customers, and then it's, "Hey, it's Drupal."

[00:49:35] Nic: Yeah, that, that's ... I mean, the recent ta- TD Cafe episode that I just did with Matt, we were talking about caching a lot.

And I mean, the truth is caching is one of Drupal's strengths. Performance is one of Drupal's strengths. You know, the access policy and variation cache are amazing. Y- you don't wanna u- like you said, you don't wanna use those terms. You don't wanna go up to somebody and be like, "Drupal, the... Do you need an access policy?

Do you need a permission structure?" Like, you know, but talk about how you- Is your

[00:50:05] John: access policy broken? Does your cache- ...

[00:50:08] Nic: not cache? Exactly. So, um, so you... But, but those are things that Drupal has and has, it, or like the responsive images. Like, those are problems that Drupal has solved that other platforms kind of just pretend aren't issues, and just deal with the fallout.

Um, and we should do a better job of marketing that- Busting the bubble ... promoting it. Yeah. Yeah. Promoting, yeah.

[00:50:35] John: So, so the, um, the event in Spain that you were, you were talking about, right? Um, and I, I don't wanna always, I don't wanna always bring it back to, bring it back to cache, right? But, like, there was a, there was an opportunity for, for, for, um, companies to come together and support that initiative, and companies came together and supported that initiative, right?

It worked out, right? Um, I would've loved to, to participate in that event. I would've loved to, to go and, and done a talk about, um, about, uh, you know, Drupal at, at an event like that, right? Um, it just goes back to my thinking, like, it would be... I don't know. It, it would feel better to me, a- and like, obviously there are companies that are gonna put money in to go to, to go to events like that and be part of that, but it would also feel, feel better to me if the, if the Drupal Association had a fund, and that fund could be funded by other, by, you know, external companies that are like, "Hey, we love Drupal.

Here's X number of dollars to kinda go promote Drupal," right? Abroad, um, or wherever, like smartly, right? And then the DA could kind of facilitate, like, "Hey John, we have X number of dollars to, like, f- you know, get you to this event and have you speak about, about Drupal." Um, and you know, I, I don't know. I, I think a lot of, a lot of the problem often i- in this too, is that, as you said, the DA has limited, limited resources, both, both time and money, right?

Yep.

And then there's also internal battles that happen within organizations that are, "What's the ROI on this?" Well- Yep ... you know, the doing it for the good of the community, like, I firmly believe in that. Yeah. I understand it. I believe in, you know, I, I think we should be doing it, but like, that's really hard to sell to leadership sometimes.

That, like- The ROI, you know, the, the ROI isn't there. We're not gonna see it immediately. We might see it next year, but, like, we're not gonna see it right away, you know?

[00:52:45] Alex: And, and you have a huge proof of that, uh, if you look at the sponsors in DrupalCon or Drupal Camps, uh, it's always the same companies.

That the companies that know how important it is to contribute back. But it's very difficult to recruit new ones because the other ones, uh, are, are just thinking about the ROIs, and that puts the companies that are doing it in a very difficult position because it's like, "Hey, I'm losing money because I'm promoting the community, but at the same time, I have to compete against these guys, and these guys don't waste, um, a penny on, on these things.

I- They just spend it, everything on marketing trying to steal my customer.

[00:53:17] John: There's a reason, there's a reason that you don't typically see, you know, Accenture, Cognizant at these, at the, at these events, and it's because, you know, in my opinion, A, maybe they're not doing a lot of Drupal work. You know, maybe their Drupal teams are, are nonexistent.

But, but B, it's also, like, they're probably not seeing a ton of ROI on, like, you know, sponsoring camps, sponsoring events, right? Um, they're, you know, they're looking at, like, how many leads did I get out of that event, you know, more specifically than maybe, maybe some other folks. But-

[00:53:49] Alex: Yeah ... um- Yeah, I have the experience of working on those companies.

I used to work for Capgemini, and I worked closely with, uh, NTT, for example, and I want to, you know, um, like mention NTT because they have an amazing team, Drupal team in Lisbon and Madrid, and they do a lot of things for the community, but the gap in between, in those companies, in between the, the Drupal team and the people making the decisions is huge, you know?

Yeah. And they make some budgets, but- And, I mean, I understand that Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a, I'm a

[00:54:15] John: product of that in my, my current, my current position.

[00:54:18] Nic: Well- Let- Well, part, part, part of the issue, too, though, is that the customers aren't generally coming to DrupalCons either. Like, it's an industry event- ... for learning about Drupal itself and promoting that.

You know, these companies will probably promote themselves at something like CES or something because they're generating- Yep ... that kind of a ... Their, their customers are th- Well- ... going there looking for a solution.

[00:54:41] John: Or Adobe Summit, 'cause the- Yeah ... the, the, the, the mix of people at that event are what they're looking for.

So- Yeah ... Nic, that's a great segue into my next question, and something that I, I really wanna spend, like, I don't know, a good, good chunk of time on. Um, but Alex, in your talk you mention that changing DrupalCon won't solve the problem. Um, I don't necessarily agree with that, but I wanna give you, give you a chance to kinda state, state your position and, and why you think that is.

[00:55:15] Alex: Well, w- w- for sure we need to do something, uh, because ... And I don't know if it's something around DrupalCon or something around the whole bubble concept, but if you look at the numbers, um, we have- In Austin, I think it was 3,000 people, DrupalCon North America, 3,000, right? The last DrupalCon was 1,300, 1,200, something around those numbers, and that has been the norm for the last three or four years.

Um, again, the numbers are not growing. The sponsors are difficult to justify their ROI. Uh, we need to do something. Um, the problem with doing something means it can mean that something that, that is actually working, we can, we can break it, which is, like Drupal is great at communicating, right? And it's, it's great at doing what some people are starting to call the Driesnote driven development.

So Dries goes from the States, he gives his vision, and everyone leaves excited, and we give a huge push to Drupal for the next 12 months, right, or six months until the next, uh, DrupalCon, uh, Europe or, or America, North America. But if we change that, maybe we, we break it. Um, and I, I don't know. I don't have the answer.

We, we've tried with the Summits, but the Summits, and that's the feedback that I've heard, right? I don't know firsthand, but it looks like we are attracting kind of the same people. We create a healthcare Summit the day before DrupalCon, and we have the same people that the next day are attending DrupalCon.

That's not doing anything good. Uh, maybe we have one or two extra customers, but we want to have 100 or 200 customers on the Summit. So are we going to be able to attract or make someone fly to DrupalCon because we have a healthcare Summit the day before? I don't know. Um, maybe what we need is just to fly a couple of Drupal developers to a healthcare Summit where all the healthcare specialists are going to go, right?

And going back to, A, call for papers and all of those, all of those things. Maybe what we can do actually is attract junior talent, and that, that's an idea from Dries where maybe we can co-locate. Actually, actually, I don't know if it's Dries, but we were talking about this in the, in the, uh, retreat in Chicago, and it's like, "Hey, we, we can co-locate DrupalCon with maybe Symfony or maybe some other more popular event where we have a lot more developers, and we attract interest- Yeah

from other communities, and we cross-pollinate, right?

[00:57:37] John: So, uh, y- you're, you're, you're kind of hitting on the problem, um, I think. And I think, like, I do agree that, um, like the format of DrupalCon and the excitement that people get from the Driesnote and leave is, is, is great, and I wouldn't want to change DrupalCon to negatively impact that, right?

But, like, let's call, let's call a spade a spade, right? DrupalCon is a developers conference It's not a marketers and site builders conference. It's a developers conference. It's people that are building and supporting people who build Drupal, right? Yeah. Um, I think one thing, and this w- this happened in, um, this hap- actually happened in Drupal Slack, um, right after DrupalCon, uh, this c- this idea of, like, changing, not changing DrupalCon, but, like, how we change the mix of the audience at DrupalCon, right?

Because the, the, the problem with DrupalCon is, like, we aren't seeing ... We're actually seeing decreased numbers from post-pandemic, right? Before the pandemic, we would see, like, 3,000 people at DrupalCon. Now we see 1,000, 1,500, somewhere in that range, right? Mm-hmm. Um, those numbers might be ticking up slightly, but a lot of the folks that are at DrupalCon, again, are, are developers, are folks looking for jobs, are, um, not decision-makers within companies, right?

They're not people that you could say, "Hey, let me take you out to lunch and talk to you about how we can help you build better Drupal," and they could say, "Oh, okay, great. I'd love to do that," right? Um, so there are some conversations, as I said, happening in Slack, where we're talking about, like, hey, maybe, you know, there's a push to develop more, you know, CMO, C-suite, marketing-focused sessions that speak to, "Hey, how do you get ROI on your website?

How do you..." You know, to, to Jacob's point earlier, how do you better optimize your site for AI, right? And make it more C-level as opposed to developer level, right? Yes. Um, also the idea of, like, going out and, and inviting the folks that you want there. You have C-suites and, and, you know, directors and folks that are decision-makers saying, "Hey, you know what?

Here's a free ticket to DrupalCon. We'd really love it if you'd join us to see what, you know, what we have to offer, the new stuff we're working on. Dries is gonna be pr- you know, unveiling, you know, new features," or, or whatever. Whatever the, the, the draw is, right? Um, I mean, I, I don't know that we have to change DrupalCon as much as we have to change the mix of folks that show up at DrupalCon, right?

And, and, I mean, I guess I'm kind of, like, speaking out of both sides of my mouth there, because I think maybe we do have to change DrupalCon a little bit in order to attract and bring those people in, um, and not see the same faces that we see again and again. Um- I also think, you know, you talked about Drupal camps a little bit, and I think that, like, Drupal camps are powerful tools for kind of the developing that on-ramp to Drupal.

Um, but they're also powerful tools for, again, developers, junior developers, folks that are new to the community to kind of, like, get into Drupal. Um, and a lot of people are like, well, you know, w- and we talked about this with JD, right? A couple, couple episodes ago, where, like, eh, developers aren't excited about Drupal, and, you know, I, I might have a- I, I think I might have asked him, like, when your, when your organization's picking Drupal, how many times does it, is a developer really, like, in that conversation, right?

A lot of times it happens at a higher level, and it's like, "Hey, we're gonna use Drupal now. Like, you have to go figure out how it works," right? So I mean, I think, like, overall, like if we can, if we can take, you know, if we can move DrupalCon into a, a, a, a, you know, a 50/50 split of developer conference and C-suite, marketing director focused content, we can then, we'll then start to see a developer community that's getting, air quotes, more excited about Drupal.

[01:02:03] Alex: Well, uh, it, it is, I'm not saying it's not the... That's definitely the right direction. We need to attract, um, people that will bring ROIs to DrupalCon, but it is difficult. Uh, I, I've seen that happening, like CXOs coming to DrupalCon, uh, from big companies. But you know what? Those companies were already evaluating Drupal.

They were close to making a decision, and the reason to go there was like, "Hey, um, I'm going to start using this for my company. I want to know more." Uh- Right ... we actually need to go one step before, where they are thinking about, uh, Adobe or Sitecore. And- Mm-hmm ... those people are not going to attend every technology event because they, and, and it may not work in terms of timeline, right?

Maybe I need- Mm-hmm ... to make a decision in January, um, and the next DrupalCon is going to be in, in Ap- April. So we are trying that with the summits. And, and again, I'm not, we are gonna, we haven't tried in Europe with summits. Yeah. We are, we have, um, AI summit. Mm-hmm. And, um, higher edu- um, higher education summit as well, the day before DrupalCon, and I hope that we can make a difference and,

[01:03:10] John: you know.

See, like, your co-location idea for those summits, it like, so AI Summit New York is actually co-located with a larger AI event. Um, the education summit being co-located with, like, uh, eduweb or something like that, th- like, that makes great sense. And listen, I don't want anybody listening right now to get me wrong.

Like, I don't think this is an easy problem to solve. If it was, we would've done it, right? Like, that is not what I'm saying here. Um, it is a very hard problem to solve, but I do feel like it's an important problem to solve because- exactly of our topic today. Like, it is, i- i- you know, it's integral to saving the open web, saving Drupal, and, like, providing Drupal for free to everybody.

[01:03:57] Alex: So, so maybe DrupalCon is not the right, uh, I would say platform. Maybe Drupal camps and local events are actually the right one because they are cheaper and they, uh, happen all over the place. Uh, they happen in Grenoble- Yeah. Well- ... in Portugal- I, I think it

[01:04:11] John: could be a little bit of both though, right? So, like, if you, in your, your last example, your last example was great.

If there's somebody that's deciding, you know, between X platform and Drupal, and then a, and a DrupalCon is within their window, like, they should come to a DrupalCon 'cause you're gonna get that energy once that trees note's over, once they, uh, from the community, and you're gonna say like, "Oh, like, these, these people are really excited to build this software.

That's awesome," right? Um, but, you know, maybe a, maybe a local event subs in there if, if it's not, you know, if a DrupalCon isn't, i- isn't as, uh, as, as, uh- Well- ... possible or, or, or close.

[01:04:48] Nic: Well, I, I think that's the next question, Alex, is, you know, how, how can local user groups and meetups and conferences help with this?

Like, if, if we're looking at NedCamp and we decided we wanted to help with this idea, how do we go about finding another conference or meetup or group to kind of co-locate with in order to get some of that cross-pollination? 'Cause like I say, get, we offer free tickets to students at the camp all the time for the university students at the camp that we run, and I don't think very many come, but if there's another camp or organization having a conference, I think it's very easy to just go across the hall and see, see one show or one topic or, um, show, one, uh, talk or one presentation or something that you're interested in.

Uh, how, how do you think camps could go about exploring this idea?

[01:05:43] Alex: Yeah, like, uh, as I was saying, while we are talking, I'm realizing that actually Drupal camps and local meetups happen constantly all over the world, right? And we need to reach the local people. Um, but the problem is what you were saying, like you, you sent I don't know how many tickets, and you only get two, two or three students.

But that's, that's good enough. At least we have two or three new people. And if we offer them the Drupal, Drupal in a Day initiative, then we give them a plan. It's like, "Come and learn about this." Maybe I'm not an expert on marketing. I'm learning. Um, but maybe we are not offering that, uh, we are not offering what we can give them then with the right message.

Maybe if we tell them, "Hey, Drupal, Drupal, Drupal." You know what? It's, they are students. They want to know about their future, about, I don't know, maybe we need to rebrand the way we present that to the, to the students.

[01:06:31] John: But, but so Drupal in a Day, right, very, very focused on, um- You know, very focused on students, very focused on, you know, learning, learning Drupal, right?

I'm wondering if there's like a version of Drupal in a day that needs to be more focused towards marketers, executives, d- directors, right? Like, "Hey, you have a problem with your internal system? Like Drupal might be able to help. Come, come to this, you know, half-day, full-day, whatever it is, you know, session, webinar, you know, whatever, whatever you wanna call it, right?

To, to learn like what the power of Drupal is. And like, it's not like hands-on, "Hey, we're gonna code stuff." It's more live demos. Like, "Hey, look at Drupal AI. Like I'm gonna ask the AI to build me a page, and look at that. It did it. Hey, look at, um, web forms. Like web forms is great. Like I can build a web form, like point and click.

Click, click, click, build a web form," right? Install a recipe, like all of that stuff, right? Like let's, let's get to the, let's get to those things that, um, you know, empower, air quotes, "the average person" to be able to use Drupal.

[01:07:40] Alex: Uh, maybe we are ourself creating the bubble because actually it's a problem of language, of going to those places and talk to them in the language that they are expecting.

Um- Yeah, 100%. Again, what I was saying before, if we start talking technical, they disconnect because it's like, "What, what is in here for me?" But we start talking about their problems, and they will pay a lot of attention, and that's where you want to get them, right?

[01:08:01] John: Yeah, 100%. So, um, Alex, you- you've been kind of globe- globetrotting, going to a bunch of open web events.

Um, what, have you learned anything from any of these events? Like anything that you're like, "Oh, like we don't do that in Drupal. We should start doing this."

[01:08:18] Alex: Uh, uh yeah. I've been like, especially the last few months, I've been traveling a lot. Um, I will highlight Web Summit because of the scale. I mentioned before 70,000 people that was.

It took you f- 10 minutes to go from the beginning to the, where we had the stand, right? Mm-hmm. Um, FOSS in, in Paris, Free Open Source Technology, I think it was called. Um, that was amazing. We had a small... And it was prepared very quickly, like in a few weeks, and we had 200 something people, uh, in the room.

Something similar is happen- happening in New York, I think in a week. Mm-hmm. Where we are kind of collocating. Those are amazing events, and the feedback that I'm hearing is that, yeah, maybe we don't get a lot of people from the rest of the event into, because we are talking 1,000 people, and then we have our small bubble.

But actually some people come, and if just, if it's just 5 or 10 people, that's good enough. We are, because we are talking on those cases, for example, in FOSS in Paris, we are talking huge organizations, right? And it's not that I want Drupal to be enterprises, just, you know, one place where we can start. Um- The, the, what I will, one of the things that I found more interesting is, uh, because, uh, of my position in Pantheon, I've been going to WordPress events as well.

And what I found really interesting is finding the healthy ecosystem that they have there in terms of it's not just huge or big hosting companies, uh, waving their flag because they have their eyes and they have partners that they can start working. It's also small plugin shops, um, that are paying because they are gonna get potential customers.

[01:09:57] John: Hmm.

[01:09:57] Alex: That's something that we are missing in our ecosystem. At the moment, there is no, no investment apart from, or there is no justification in terms of, "Hey, I'm sending 10 people to DrupalCon or DrupalCamp." Like, like the

[01:10:08] John: marketplace, the marketplace model, right? Yes.

[01:10:11] Alex: Yes. Yeah, the marketplace could change as well the way we are, um, organizing DrupalCons and DrupalCamps, where we have more companies going there because actually there is something in there for them.

And-

[01:10:25] John: Yeah ...

[01:10:26] Alex: uh, and I agree, like we, it needs to, like we need to support the community, but most, a huge percentage of the companies don't understand that, and you are not going to convince them, right? And we need to do something that rewards the company that are doing it, but also attracts the ones that will only do it if there is something for them to, to benefit.

[01:10:49] Nic: Makes sense. Uh, I want to, before we close out the show, I did wanna say, uh, I wanted to say thank you to Martin for listening in, and he mentioned kind of something about the AI summit being co-located as well, which is something we had mentioned. Um, he also said hi from, uh, from the flight. Yeah. And he- He's on, he's on an airplane,

[01:11:10] John: which is, um- Yeah

which is interesting. And, and Steven's in, uh, in Phoenix, so. In Phoenix. Um, you know, uh, top of the show, we didn't remind you that you can comment, uh, and we can answer questions live. Um, we'll get better at that, but, uh- ... it's interesting to see the, the geographic reach that, um, we're, we're, we have right now.

[01:11:33] Alex: I love that you can do stuff, connect to internet and on planes. I didn't know that you could actually connect to Talking Drupal in a plane.

[01:11:41] John: Now, there you go. I'm gonna try that on my next flight, you know. Next time- Best way to

[01:11:44] Alex: pass

[01:11:44] Nic: the time.

[01:11:45] John: The next time I'm not here, I'll be, I'll be listening from, from the airplane, I guess.

[01:11:51] Nic: All right. Alex, thank you for joining us to talk about saving the open web. It's always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to

[01:11:58] John: be here. Do you have questions or feedback? Reach out to Talking Drupal on the socials with the handle Talking Drupal, or by email with [email protected].

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[01:12:50] Nic: All right. Alex, if our listeners wanted to get in touch with you, what's

[01:12:52] Alex: the best way for them to do that? Uh, I'm on socials. I'm normally very active in LinkedIn. And,

[01:12:59] Nic: and what's your username?

[01:13:01] Alex: Uh, Alex Moreno.

[01:13:03] Nic: Perfect. And Bernardo, what do you- Alex Moreno

[01:13:04] Alex: with a segue, but if you search for Alex Moreno Drupal, you will find it, uh, you will find me. Okay. Perfect. And Bernardo, what do you- There's a footballer as well, football player, but that's not me.

[01:13:15] Bernardo: And that happens. I had a guy who was a VP for PayPal, so I was like, "Ooh, he's gonna rank a little higher."

But yeah, for me, it'd be BernardM28 on Slack and Bernardo Martinez on LinkedIn.

[01:13:30] Nic: How about you, John?

[01:13:31] John: Uh, you can find me personally at picozzi.com. You can find me on the socials in drupal.org @johnpicozzi, and you can find out about EPAM at epam.com.

[01:13:43] Nic: And you can find me pretty much everywhere @nicxvan, N-I-C-X-V-A-N.

[01:13:48] John: And if you've enjoyed listening, we've enjoyed live streaming to your ear holes.

Have a good one.

[01:13:59] Nic: See you next week