These are the slides for the keynote of Drupalcamp Atlanta 2010 (October 1), from Jeff Walpole, CEO of Phase2 Technology. The topic was "Execution: The Drupal Community's Next Big Challenge." Jeff's talk was predicated upon the importance of adopting a more professional and disciplined approach to implementing Drupal in order to meet the increasing demands of high profile, enterprise-level sites.
10. Community of Innovative Development
Deployment tools Consumer Drupal
Installation Profiles Cloud integration
Semantic web Distributions
User Experience Database support
Security Version control
16. A hard look at where we measure up.
Quaint marketplace of 10-20 person expert "shops"
Serious labor shortage of qualified developers
Inconsistent and poor training options
Too much focus inside the community on pleasing each other
Community obsessed with too few big wins
Poor systems of deployment and QA
No effective education system that will scale
Geek chic brand
26. Examples of being Drupal unique
Talent: Scalability Solution: ecommerce Service: Training
Location: Sweden Industry: Churches Expertise: data migration
33. What else helps?
Books Demos
Videos Case studies
Themes Pretty Drupal sites
Features High profile Drupal sites
Classes Innovative uses (of Drupal)
Documentation Client references
Blogging Social media chatter
Events (like this one!)
34. Take aways
Change is inevitable. The elephants ARE coming.
This can be good for ALL of us, if we do it right.
This can be bad for ALL of us, if we do it wrong.
Innovation and community are amazing in Drupal
but they are not enough to survive.
We have to adapt. There are consequences if we do not.
There are things we can do better.
They are areas of execution.
We can do this.
35. Contact Me
Twitter: @JeffWalpole
LinkedIn: /JeffWalpole
jeff@phase2technology.com
Editor's Notes
- Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really challenges businesses.
- We are all here because a great idea almost 10 years ago turned into the world’s best CMS.
- It is a CMS born and raised by a community of great innovators.
- I want to talk to you today about what I believe is coming next.
- How we as “Drupalists” can be relevant, helpful and successful as this thing takes off.
- This is a business discussion for anyone who relies on, invests in, or makes a living from Drupal.
- I suspect that is nearly all of you. Or will be.
- I am not Dries so I cannot address the needs and future of the entire Drupal community
- Nor am I in a position to speak for the product/technology itself
- What I can tell you about is how to be relevant and what practitioners of all sizes should be considering
- A lot of this is born of my own thinking, research and strategy for my company, Phase2.
Who: 40 person web application development services company
What: open source technologies including Drupal
Where: Washington DC
Serving 3 specific practice areas:
- publishing & media
- government & public policy
- advocacy & social action
Developer of 3 distributions of Drupal:
- OpenPublish
- Tattler
- OpenPublic (NEW)
Like anything, it was part many things:
hard work, community contribution
smart people working together,
great innovation and technical direction,
having the right things to offer,
a whole lot of the right time/right place.
The web innovated and gave us 2.0 just as enterprise and custom CMS options were being pushed to a breaking point both in terms of supply/demand and technical flexibility. The result: the value proposition failed - it was no longer worth paying for something that was not current or useful in a new web paradigm. One of the most interesting reasons however is the exciting innovation through which the Drupal technology community is pushing Drupal forward - potentially straight into enterprise software territory.
Community is a word you hear a lot and one that I cant help using today.
There are some of you who might not identify directly with the “Drupal community”.
Let’s define what I mean by that word in a much wider sense for today.
Core is the narrow definition of community, but most of you are part of a wider community of vested interest.
You probably fit one of 5 categories:
1. The adopters - i am using Drupal for my CMS - I need it to be the best
2. The implementers - i have invested in skills/learning/marketing - I want it to be the most in demand.
3. The community - we have created this thing and invested our ideas, time, money and work - it is our baby
4. The investor - I just committed to moving all x of my sites to Drupal and hiring consultants and staff - I need it to remain relevant and useful for years to come.
5. The newbie - I am taking my time/money to learn it - I hope I am not wasting my time.
Fact: Drupal is Going to be very very big in 2011
Unknown: Will it be the same by 2015?
Where do you fit in to this success? How can you benefit? What can you do?
You probably fit one of 5 categories:
1. The adopters - i am using Drupal for my CMS - I need it to be the best
2. The implementers - i have invested in skills/learning/marketing - I want it to be the most in demand.
3. The community - we have created this thing and invested our ideas, time, money and work - it is our baby
4. The investor - I just committed to moving all x of my sites to Drupal and hiring consultants and staff - I need it to remain relevant and useful for years to come.
5. The newbie - I am taking my time/money to learn it - I hope I am not wasting my time.
There have been many waves of adoption.
Drupal has now permeated the 4 major areas that matter to make it sustainable.
Reminder: Big sites/companies interested and starting to use does NOT equal success for Drupal.
Success is a significant change in market share for a sustained period of time + better levels of satisfaction.
Why Drupal? (it rawks!!)
- New Media was a champion of Open Source and Drupal for whitehouse.gov.
- The team had a very clear vision of what they wanted, detailed control to tell the human interest side of the Presidency, Drupal provided that.
- New functionality and improved administrative capabilities and a platform to extend.
The Drupal community has created some amazing things and proven it can innovate.
For over 9 years it has grown to include hundreds of thousands of contributors.
It is a culture of innovation that has gotten us this far.
We have amazing companies and people that work together to create solutions.
Some of the things that have amazed me this year include the following:
- Deployment tools - Aegir, Hudson continuous integration
- Installation profiles - first class citizens now and definitely on D7
- Semantic web - RDF in D7 and RDFa on Drupal sites
- User Experience - serious efforts went into admin and D.o improvements
- Gardens/Buzzr models
-
- Innovation doesnt create lasting and commercially viable things.
- People need solutions not ideas
- Most of the “buyers” dont understand any of that stuff
- It is actually easier for larger organizations to just buy something
- The community only matters to those in the community
- Our openness means that others can just copy us
- Its always geeks that get it started
- where is goes from there is another matter
- Microsoft is an extreme example because most people in this community dont ever want to see Drupal become something that big, but ironically they DO want to make a significant difference to how people use the web - Huh?
(a.k.a. the elephant in the room)
Speaking of Microsoft, they are one of many very large companies entering the Drupal community
Refer to Dries’ keynote about the elephants and how they are already here and more are coming.
Talk about IBM, Cap Gemini and the govt contractors people dont even know about yet.
These are household names, Drupal is not.
Size and scale have many benefits and its good to have some elephants in yours.
They legitimize us.
- Developers in large numbers - see hiring trends going through the roof
- Marketplace for commercial solutions
- Certification
- Big implementation experience
- Customer References
- Education & Training
- Big dedicated contracts
Drupal is exploding in govt right now.
Thanks in large part to the Obama administration’s decision to move to Drupal last October.
Government introduces new challenges this community - largely speaking - is not accustomed to:
- Procurement process
- security process (C&A compliance), security clearances
- accessibility (Section 508 compliance)
- regulations - records mgmt, appropriate use, privacy,
- open gov directive
They (commercial CMS + big interests that fear OSS) create doubt about our ability to:
1. scale
2. perform
3. be secure
4. be supported
5. be stable
BECAUSE we kicked their ass on functionality and innovation
Drupal could lose market share to alternatives that move faster
Drupal could become less relevant
Drupal could become less in demand
What would that mean for your business? your site? your team? your skill set?
E.g. Recent example of Microsoft Live blogs that were transferred to WordPress
Why should we try to be “bigger” than we are now?
The best reason: because we have to to remain relevant/viable
Let’s be honest, for many of us, its about the ability to make money
But there are other legit reasons:
- do bigger and better things
- get new ideas/tools/toys
- grow our community
- leverage resources we as a community already have (to solve new problems)
- increase the pool of resources we dont have
- increased access to investment (training, marketing, etc.)
- credibility/reputation of our platform (and work)
- Dont you feel good when a truly big site launches on Drupal?
One thing we can all do is (in our own ways) identify and plug the gaps.
Themes
- Provide solutions
- Create marketplace specialization
- Address under served needs
- Improving professional practices
- Learn to market and compete
Do you know what this is?
It is half of one page of a 5 page “cheat sheet” for Drupal modules that Kent Bye from Lullabot created years ago
It is great we have so much to choose from but that is becoming part of the problem
With 6700+ modules now, how do new people understand where to start? What to use?
If this is a “cheat sheet” we are screwed taking this to a larger enterprise audience.
Distributions are products made from (and are just) Drupal
They actually help the community grow/mature by providing more contributions and innovation.
They provide open-source alternatives to proprietary solutions
End-users need total solutions, not just tools they have to piece together themselves
Developers don’t want to repeat their work
Most organizations have neither the time nor the resources to build custom systems nor re-invent implementations
Drupal is leading the way on distributions because of its flexibility as a platform and not just a CMS
By Talent
By Solution
By Service
By Geography
By Industry
By Layer
By Talent
By Solution
By Service
By Geography
By Industry
By Layer
Everytime a Drupal project occurs without professional practices, we all suffer.
What practices does a professional community practice?
- Project Management - have a PM, they control schedule, scope, budget.
- Methodology - do you have something repeatable. You cant just say you use “agile” are you using agile for real?
- QA & Testing - what is the quality assurance process you guy through?
- Maintaining the solution - not doing maintenance create a reputation.
- Training - everyone in the process (users, admins, editors, developers, sys admins)
- Security reviews and audits
CMS gives us a way to stay free of
Imagine a restaurant that winged it. What would happen to the quality of the food as new cooks were brought on board. Over time, the quality would suffer and so would the reputation and ultimately the rating.
What types of things can you provide and process for?
- Configuration Management (and version control for all)
- Deployment (Aegir)
- Building code (Drush MAKE)
- Continous integration (Hudson)
- Unit testing (SimpleTest)
- Version configuration (Features / code exportables)
Get beyond the one man team - it creates role conflict that is unresolvable.
Big companies need to invest in multi-functional teams.
What makes up a good project team?
- Project Manager
- Technical Architect
- Requirements/Testing Lead
- Developer(s)
Education supports software markets
It gives adopters confidence
It creates entry points
It allows companies to hire and people to join
We are open source but we have competition - namely right now - Wordpress
We have to “show” better.
Drupal.org needs help
We have to represent Drupal in a more professional way that appeals to the big “buyers”.
This is part of what Acquia and the Drupal Association does for us we dont even recognize
The redesign is a great step
It puts solutions and marketplace front and center
It addresses people’s need to be led to how to USE Drupal
It will NOT solve the problem of what people do when they get Drupal
Everyone here and in the community (in every sense of it) can do something to help.
Let’s start with the mentality of education, documentation and contribution and we are headed in the right direction.
Specialize. Spread out. Position where you fit.
Be professional. Approach Drupal with process and precision.
Institutionalize. For the good of all - document, share and teach.
Influence. Contribute, market, evangelize.
Execute. Talk is silver. Results are gold.
Email me, follow me, or link to me if you have more to talk about...