Talking Drupal #528 - Drupal Goes to the U.N.

John: This is Talking Drupal, a weekly chat about web design development from a group of people with one thing in common. We love Drupal. This is episode 5 28. Drupal goes to the UN. On today's show, we're talking about the United Nations Open Source Week, digital public infrastructure, and digital sovereignty with guests Tiffany Ferris and Mike Gifford.

We'll also cover local association. As our module of the week.

Welcome to Talking Drupal. Our guests today are Tiffany Ferris and Mike Gifford. Tiffany is the CEO and co-owner of palantir.net with almost 30 years of technology technical consulting experience. Tiffany serves her team and her clients through strategic and agile mentoring, facilitation and co and coaching.

Her current work focuses on creating sustainable environments that enable high performing diverse teams to solve complex problems. Tiffany has served on the board of directors of the Dral Association for over 13 years. Tiffany, welcome Michelle, and thanks for joining us.

Tiffany: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

John: Mike Gifford is civic actions, open standards and practices lead, and a thought leader on open government, as well as digital accessibility and sustainability. He has worked with governments in North America and Europe and spoken internationally. He is also a W three C invited expert and recognized offering tool accessibility expert.

Mike, welcome back to the shelf. Thank you,

Mike: John. Happy to be here.

John: I'm John Ozzi, solutions architect at EPAM and today Mike co-host are joining us for the second time Schaeffer community Lead at Evolving Web and lead organizer of Evolving digital, formerly evolved Drupal, and a board member of the Drupal Association.

Maya is doing it all. Maya, how are you?

Maya: I'm good. I'm happy to be back. Thank you.

John: And last, but certainly not least, Nic Laflin, founder at nLightened Development. Nick, how are you?

Nic: Doing well. Happy to be here. I just wanted to quickly mention Jurgen reached out to me about the orchestration module of the week a couple weeks ago and wanted me to mention that I think I completed AI and orchestration.

They're actually completely unrelated. Orchestration is just about connecting with external tools, kind of like Zapier. I think. John, you probably had a better handle on that than I did, but just in case anybody else was confused as well, orchestration is just about kind of connecting different endpoints.

It has nothing to do with ai.

John: So it doesn't directly have to do with ai. Right? Your orchestration could have an AI element as part of it, but it's not like directly connecting into Dr. Ai.

Nic: The, the, the, or the orchestration piece has nothing to do with ai, but you could use orchestration to connect to an AI agent, I presume. Correct?

John: Yeah. So if you look at Dre's, like Dre's example from DRES note he actually does like, I dunno, a simple example where he, he just does some manipulation of, of some content and then he does more advanced where he connects to an AI and does like, yeah, much more manipulation of content. But that is a that is a great great clarification actually just was, and, and we're not gonna turn this into the orchestration show.

I'm gonna fight the urge, but I was actually just with a with a client who was using. Not using or orchestration that, you know, in the Drupal sense, but using a service to kind of do some orchestra. I was like, oh my gosh. We'll be able to do this in Drupal soon, or like right now. But anyway, I'll dial down my excitement and turn it over to Martin Anderson Clutz, a principal solutions engineer at Acquia, and a maintainer of a number of Drupal modules of, and recipes of his own to talk about our module of the week.

Martin, what do you have for us this week?

Martin: Thanks, John. Are you looking to create a website for a local Drupal association? There's a project on drupal.org to hope you get started. It's called Local Association and Bracket. EU sites project, and it was created in October of 2023 by Jeremy Chinquist of Drunomics and Drupal Austria.

It only has a dev version available. It seems actively maintained. It does have or it's opted into security coverage, but of course, without a stable release, doesn't actually have any practice, and there is a documentation guide to help with setup. The project does have 49 open issues for which are bugs, but because it's not a module, there are no usage stats available.

Now this is an unusual project because it's designed to help you quickly create a Drupal site, but it doesn't follow any of the usual patterns. I've seen a distribution composer, project template, or a Drupal site template. Instead, the recommended path is to clone the. The repo to your local and run a setup script that creates your D dev project, runs a composer install, and then a DR site install and even runs a Dr ULI command so that you can log into your built site with just a single click.

Once it's done along the way, it will install a couple of custom modules. One populates a multitude of default content, so you have a pre-populated site, including navigation as your starting point. It will look a lot like a clone of the 2022 Drupal Netherlands site, though there have been ongoing tweaks to the overall setup with the most recent in June of 2025.

The other custom module provides some additional layouts for use with layout builder, and the project also includes a theme meant to be customized. As you may have guessed by now, this project started when the Dutch Drupal Association rebuilt their website in 2022 and wanted to share their work with other local associations.

Drupal France was the first to adopt it, and there was a B at DrupalCon Lil in 2023 to discuss it, share to discuss, sharing it more widely. Following that, an international work group began collaborating to establish this project, and it was adopted by Drupal Associations in Belgium, Germany, Norway, Finland, and London, England.

Since today's topic is about positioning Drupal on the international stage, I thought it would be interesting to talk about how local Drupal associations have also formed their own federation to reduce. So let's talk about local association.

Nic: I'm interested in that existing config flag that they passed to Dr.

Si. I've never seen that and that. I kind of wanna do a show on this now and find out how they're building it and maintaining it, because it seems like kind of a nice middle ground of like, not quite a recipe, but not quite a database dump starter starting point. So it seems useful.

Martin: Yeah, I think they probably, the previous time I had seen it Bernardo Martinez had been doing some presentations about having a theme that could import configuration, and he was using a similar flag as part of his process.

So, but yeah, I, I agree. It's not something that you see every day by any means.

Interesting.

John: Yeah. I I'm also interested in that. I think anytime you have kind of these sorts of, like, starter starter points and things like that, like I easier you. Martin, you might have said this and I might have missed it. Any indication about how many sites are kind of like, built on this or like are using this?

Martin: So on the project page, they list out, I think it's seven different ones. It's possible there are other sites that have used that as a starting point, but certainly in terms of actual Drupal associations at this point, I would say yeah, our best indication is seven.

John: Hmm,

Martin: interesting.

Nic: Oh yeah, they have like, they have separate sub sites for each one too.

Like they're using the ecosystem to link them. So like there's a local association at ch et cetera. I think you, I see, see how people are using the sub sub site. So it looks like the a t one is for France, Belgium, German, Switzerland, Austria. So, yeah, it's interesting.

John: So, Martin

have a little bit of a question here.

So I'm, I'm interested how this compares to kind of what you're doing with,

Like your work with, with like event platform and that sort of stuff.

Martin: Yeah, great question. So really different focus. So as an example on the project page for local association, they talk about the, the features they get outta the box, being able to manage news, events, partners, cases, component pages, and basic pages.

So component pages, I'm guessing is sort of like layout builder landing pages. Yeah. Whereas. Event platform is really more focused around sort of a campsite where you are collecting session submissions. It's got a built-in rating mechanism. There's an overlap certainly around like news and, and there's probably a couple of other things if you were to dig into it.

Partners may be equivalent to sponsors in event platform, but I would say the focus of the two is very different. Probably a local association underneath it would have a variety of sort of camps that are, are actually running the, the individual events. Yeah, I got it. Okay. So this is kind of like

John: the bigger organization as opposed to the specific event.

Event silos. Got it. That makes sense.

Exactly.

Martin: But also, you know, as, yeah, I think Nick was pointing out, you know, from an architecture standpoint, very different in terms of how it's set up to sort of create that site as a starting point.

John: Yeah, it always, like when I hear things like this, it always re reaffirms my philosophy that like.

And like it, there's never anything really like, new in Drupal. Somebody's always done it and like, you know, we say there's a module for that and like, I love it because like I'm like, okay, I have this idea, but I'm like, somebody has already had this idea. I know it for a fact. Let's go find it. And then you find stuff like this and you're like, yep, there it is.

Okay. Makes my life way easier. Awesome. Well, Martin, as always, thank you for finding a perfectly on topic module of the week. If folks wanted to suggest a module or chat with you, how could they go about doing that?

Martin: We are always happy to discuss a potential or past modules of the week in the talking Drupal channel of Drupal Slack.

Or folks can reach out to me directly as man clue on all of the Drupal and social platforms.

John: All right, well thanks Martin. Talk to you next week, week. See you then.

Let's jump in. We have so many topics to cover today. This is gonna be an amazing, amazing show. So let's jump into our first question here. Recently Drupal went to the UN for the United Na Nations Open Source Week. Tiffany, can you tell us a little bit about the UN's Open Source Week and what Drupal's role played there?

Tiffany: Sure, yeah. It was this the UN Open Source Week was a week long event hosted at the United Nations in New York by the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies in partnership with the UN Office of Information and Communications Technology. So they hosted it June 16th through the 20th, and there were two official days at the un OSBO Day, and then there was the Digital Public Infrastructure Day.

Those were the two kind of plenary sort of sessions. Then there was the Hackathon Day at the beginning where there was a project where they were focused on, uNICEF and, and things like that. And then there was an edita on concurrent with that. And then where I think both Mike and I were participating in the maintain Aon, where they got together a bunch of open source you know, maintainers and we talked about kind of shared issues.

Then there were side events at, at LinkedIn and p.

It was interesting because it was this very global multi-stakeholder kind of assembly. You have the technologists, you have the policymakers, you have open source communities, kind of all coming together to have the same conversation around a couple of really core themes, right? We were talking about open source and open technologies.

We were talking about digital public infrastructure, and we were talking about digital governance and cooperation and kind of collaboration, innovation. So there was just a huge range of topics and amazing people from all over the world that kind of were there. And I think what it said to me was that.

Open source is, is recognized not just as a technology choice, but as a, a leader and a, a platform of choice for the infrastructure, for the kind of digital governance that we're seeing emerge around the world. So Drupal obviously belonged at that table, and as part of that conversation, we are such a a, an embodiment, a real world kind of example of everything that some of the un sustainability goals are, are striving at.

Right? We are a very mature community led platform that already powers so many of the digital public services around the world, whether it's in Europe or Australia, everywhere. And, and it really shows, I think we, we show how collaboration can serve the public good. So it was, it was a really exhilarating week.

Mike, what were your thoughts?

Mike: Absolutely it was, it was amazing and I just wanted to also highlight that if people dunno what an osbo is, it's an open source program office. That this is a becoming increasingly interesting and relevant in in, in government agencies and educational institutions.

And then it's, it's, it's already had quite a a a standing in, in large corporations who are looking at, at promoting and, and, and encouraging open source development inside of, of, of those organizations. But it's something that the governments are starting to go off and, and to, to build, build on. And it was, was it was lovely to go off and connect with people from cms.gov.

Who, who are there? You talking about the, the open source program office that they had set up there. I think that, that the other thing that, that, that Tiffany didn't mention, but, but she should have, is that she, she did a wonderful job representing our community in front of the stage of the general assembly, and was was just a, a wonderful ambassador to, to the to the open source world.

That was, was, was at the, the you know, it, it wasn't in the security council, but it was in the room next to the security council. So it was like, this is, this is as high a platform as I think Drupal has, has gotten. And, and Tiffany did a wonderful job explaining our, our perspective and, and, and what we brought to, to open source in, in governments around the world.

The, the other thing, just, just to add is that, that, this is an interesting time for governments and the United Nations is, is certainly no different that governments around the world are trying to figure out, well, how do we deal with, how do we deliver more with less? How do we try and, and innovate?

How do we, we look at issues about, about like the challenges we're trying to deliver and find ways to, to make that happen. And, and open source has, over, you know, the last 20 years really demonstrated its value and it's, it's, it's its relevance. Not just to the public sector, but, but to organizations you know, around the world.

And, and was, was, was amazing to see people from the Germany Sovereign tech agency or now used to be the sovereign tech fund but talking about how they're, they're supporting open source and investing in that was, was great to see Tim Lehan from the, the Drupal Association there as well.

And looking at what these, these organizations who have, have worked with and, benefited from government investment, in core infrastructure and the foundational the foundational infras digital infrastructure that we all rely on. Like our modern world relies on this digital infrastructure.

And there's a few organizations that are starting to sort of think strategically and start investing in this not simply because it is good for the organization, but it's really good for the ecosystem. And trying to think beyond the individual or project-based focus of, the entity and, seeing leaders from from around the world talk about their, their initiatives to share their ideas, to, to really be inspired by, by what's happening off of you know, outside of, of Drupal.

And I definitely enjoyed connecting with, the typo three people who were there and, they're taking a whole other perspective and approach to evangelizing their product and, and building a community in Africa and in other, you know, southern countries.

That I think is, is there's really a lot to learn from in terms of building independence and, and bringing on that next generation of younger developers who are willing to push this product project or push, push projects ahead in order to build, a long term to build that next generation of open source developers.

Where are they? How do we build them and how do we maintain them?

Nic: So who, what other, aside from Typo three that you just mentioned, and obviously dral, what other projects were there? Because I imagine wasn't just CMS focused. No. It sounds like it was broader. So who, who did you all meet there?

Tiffany: Python Foundation, alpha Omega type of three was obviously there.

No was there. I talked to young folks. Then there were even smaller ones that you know, there was a talk to some folks from you know, a, a an art. Tool tool is built on Python. Other ones that you talked to, Mike?

Mike: I, I think there's, it was, was interesting, there's the projects that are external to government, but it was interesting just the number of, of government focused efforts that were, were that were being developed as well.

And and it was, it was it was, it was great to connect with folks at the the Chaos Project which is chaos Global. They have a, a Slack community as well, looking at how do you, how do you measure the health of a, of an open source community? Just trying to, to measure and organize that.

On the Friday at, at pwc there was a, an an interesting focus on, on the, the UN sustainable development goals. And these are, these are really basic elements of like, how do we support human flourishing on this planet? This is all stuff that should be entirely non-controversial. 'cause it's like every one of them should just be about supporting people and planet.

And, yet we're in a space where there's controversy, unfortunately. So.

John: Couple of questions 'cause I, I think like you, you guys mentioned a lot of different open source technologies there. Well, let me go back like a little bit. Tiffany presenting at the UN bucket list item, like check that, check that out.

Right? That's pretty awesome.

Tiffany: It was incredible. And I had asked if my my son could actually come. And so it was a really special moment, not just to be in front of. Like, it's just like you see on tv. Like you're there, your name is in the, in the lights, and then you're up on the big screen. It's, it's incredible.

But, but to be there with my son and, and have him understand, right? So he's been, I was pregnant with him at DrupalCon Chicago. He's been in and around Dral for so long. But to have him be there and be part of the hon and those conversations and the whole week, it was just really, it, it took that bucket list item to kind of a whole nother level for me.

John: Man, you get bonus points for bringing, bringing family along. I don't know if I could do that and have my family there. 'cause I'd be like, all right. The other thing, you know, in, in the world outside of kind of this, the, the, this event and, and, and speaking to this group, but like in the world, right?

We often hear. Drupal. Oh, Drupal still exists. Oh, well, last time I used it, it was like old and crusty. Any of that there? Any anybody there that was kinda like Dr. Drupal?

Tiffany: I think there was, a lot of the, the governments that are there are already aware of Dral and they, they certainly don't come from that perspective 'cause they're using it every day.

The UN uses it. The site that everybody, you know, you know, went to for this conference was in Dral. Right. So I think that one of the things I was kind of there was to really elevate what. What Drupal has to offer to other projects that are, are trying to go down the same path. I mean, it is no small feat that we have been around for almost 25 years now and mm-hmm.

There we have collaborators from over 150 countries in the world. We are the embodiment of everything that the UN is trying to encourage. Right? We have an intentionally distributed open and participatory governance structure. We have structured our collaboration in a way that makes it possible for all the.

Hundreds of thousands of people who, who have, and still continuing to contribute to Drupal to be able to participate across nations and across languages and, and just understanding that, that the way we did this is very special, right? The way that we have the, not just the accessibility, which, which Mike is incredibly involved in, but the multilingual support, the automated testing, the transparency of our contribution, and then the recognition of how we are contributing both in code and in non code, and that we have defined our, our norms, our ways of working, and not just our ways of working together, but what happens when we disagree.

All of that goes to, I think, what has made Drupal such a sustainable project overall of this time. That's what's driven our success. So if others are there trying to kind of. Incorporate you know, elements of what's already working. Part of it is for us to get off the island and start telling that story.

We have solved so many of the issues that a lot of the younger projects and foundations are dealing with, and so it was just very eye-opening to me about how much we already do really well. Yeah.

John: I think

Tiffany: in Drupal we often focus on where could we improve. Like we're always mm-hmm. We're constantly iterating and we wanna be innovating.

But I do think that there is, there's something really special about the way that we have built this Drupal culture that has, has driven our longevity. And that longevity is what makes Drupal such a, a core choice for digital public infrastructure. Like, you don't change bridges every day. Right. And you need something that's gonna be around for the next 50 years.

And I think Drupal is that thing. So, you know, to a certain extent that reintroduction and that elevation of, you know, Drupal isn't just, you know, it's just not just another project we've demonstrated that we can, you know, we can modernize, we can be here for.

To just be able to, to have that conversation and, and talk about how Drupal serves millions every day through the sites that, that we run. But then we've also provided these meaningful livelihoods to hundreds of thousands of us around the world. So it's, it's pretty incredible what we all do together.

Mike: Probably, probably billions every day. Actually, if you look at all the number of services that are available, the things that, that people touch on a daily basis have no idea that Drupal's involved and prob possibly, you don't even have, have the poss if there's a a headless implementation, how would you even know that there's Drupal in the backend?

Right? But the, the other thing was, was like building on Tiffany's point, the, the i the idea that that there, there's not just one, there's an ecosystem of, of professional entities of, of, of, that are involved in, in contributing to Drupal and governing Drupal and building this community. People who have gotta know each other.

Over, over that, you know, 20, 25 year period. I mean, I remember Drupal Chicago, that was a great conference. Thank you once again for organizing that. But it was fascinating to see how. Like, so many open source projects have one cornerstone agency or firm that's backing up most of the work. And and so many open source projects on GitHub are run by one person or one organization, and they have very few contributors around that.

And, and that is, it's still, I mean, it's good that it's open source, but having multiple people involved, multiple agencies involved in having a governance structure, a mature governance structure behind it, means that there, there really isn't any opportunity to have that vendor lock in. That, that if you're dealing with other open source tools even if it's open source, like you're not, you're not guaranteed that investment is gonna be there over the long term if don't have the governance behind it.

That'll, that, that separates an individual's choice from, from that. And, and we don't have to. The WordPress community is going through a lot right now and, and they've, they've got a massive. Group of people using that software platform, but they don't have the mature governance program program that they have for, for 60 or 70% of the web to have invested in that platform.

Like, it's, it's, it's a problem. It

Nic: it, I mean, it, it, it's the, you, it's almost kind of two sides of the same coin. Like I always go back to open Z-Wave, which was a, a project, that home system, which is another open source project for home automation relied on for, its open for its Z-Wave integrations and Z-Wave.

For our listeners longtime listeners will probably have already heard this, but Z-Wave is just a protocol for automation devices to speak to each other and Open Zw was one developer and tragically five or six years ago, he lost a lot of his home. I think there was a lightning strike. It broke his laptop and a few other things.

And, and the project died because of it, because e even. He himself couldn't set up his tool chain again. He, it was so kind of esoteric and I've been sitting around a long time, so it wasn't even the per, like he's still around, but the device that he had his build chain on for that open source project died and he wasn't able to recover anything.

And kind of a silver lining out of this is that another group of people came together and built a node-based open source project for managing Z-Wave. And it's got a lot more collaborators, a lot more modern tool chain and evolves a lot faster like the jobs Corps world seems to do. So, you know, it, you know, it's a sad story for the original maintainer, but it's a, it's a win still for open source in general.

But to your point, Drupal doesn't have that weakness. You know, they've hammered out the governance side of it and there's thousands and thousands, you know, we still need to figure out how to make it more sustainable for individual people, you know, individual. Pieces like ECA relies a lot on Jurgen, right?

Webform relies a lot on Liam and Jacob and you know, if we could find a way to spread that out a little bit more, it'd probably be more sustainable. But Drupal has solved a lot of the single point of failure pieces. So I

Tiffany: think Drupal's resilience is super key, right? And I think bureaucracy is hard, right?

As we now know, right? And we've invested in it, we've consistently come back to it. We have those hard conversations. And, you know, as it's the reason I've been on the board for so long, I think that the governance of the, of the project and on the project I've been, then also the governance of the community side, the governance of the infrastructure we provide, all of that really matters.

And, you know, the fact that we don't have a single privileged actor as part of that resilience, the fact that we are moving toward a Drupal Federation where we have, you know. Associations in many nations across the world. I think it's, it, it just again, shows how out ahead we are of a lot of the a lot of the parts of this conversation.

Nic: So, so, pivoting back to the show notes. You, you mentioned that you were there to kind of espouse a lot of Drupal's solutions to these problems, but what did you learn from other projects? Because it is always good to learn from other people's lessons rather than learning from your own hard lessons.

So, were there any takeaways that you think the Drupal community could start looking into implementing themselves?

Mike: In terms of, of you know, approaches of organizing and managing the community. I think that there it was definitely exciting to meet with people from like the chaos community and to see what's happening with the Osbo and to see how that the, the, the cultural pieces of this are, are being, being developed at scale in, in, in organizations that are not, they're not.

Tech organizations. And so, so I think that that was, was, it was interesting to sort of see how, how that cultural piece is something that, that even in tech organizations, we can, we can benefit from because it's as, as those of us who've been in, involved in open source for, for a long time, it's, it's, it's hard to remember.

Like it's with GitHub now. You know, GI, that's, that's the way software is done. People are familiar with it, but they don't realize the struggle that it was beforehand. How, how difficult, how much progress we've made having, you know, those of us remember using CSV and, and, and, and source for, like, that was a, that was a whole other era that, that so many people who are now involved in you know, open source are not, are not familiar with because they've, they, they, they started after that.

That phased out of, of, of, its, its predominance. But I, I think that cultural side of, of just, you know, trying to go off and make sure that, that we're, we're doing more and we're learning more to sort of talk about the benefits and the values and the, the approaches of, of collaboration and, and, and reinforcing that value.

This is what, that's what I got outta that.

Tiffany: I think I learned a lot about what's going on in, in Africa in particular. So, a panel I was on there was you know, some from the, the East Africa Union. I, you know, I, I have a little bit more insight into what's going on at, at, at, you know, some of the NGOs like World Bank and other places, but really understanding how adoption of open source isn't just about the technology itself.

It's about the opportunity that it creates. And because Drupal, you know, we've very much been a scratch your own itch. I do think that, that we have a lot of opportunity for how we end up engaging in more emerging markets and using that as development, not just in terms of you know, human capital, like helping people learn these skills, but, but then having.

That same kind of economic benefit that many of us have seen in throughout Europe and, and throughout the US in developing businesses that are based on it. So I think that part of what I came back really inspired to think about is what might, what might a model for engagement look like so that we could, you know, kind of underwrite some of that development.

And, and again, as Mike said earlier, typo three has been doing a lot of really great work in like Burkina Faso in, in places like that. I think. So, you know, what might we do more to support development in, you know, in South America, in Africa, in in other places? And think about it more as an intentional outreach rather than we tend to, to blow on embers that are already kind of smoldering, right?

And help those to catch fire. But you, what might we do more?

John: Tiffany? I'm, I'm wondering based on what you just said, was there any. Was there any thought or, or look at like outside of just development, right? So like obviously we can teach people how to develop for Drupal, we can teach people how to develop for open source.

But as you just pointed out, like Drupal has a lot of, and I'm sure other open source projects have a lot of uses, kind of that both connect disparate systems, bring things together, but also can, can empower businesses. So is there any thought or any did you hear anything about, you know, yes, let's work to train, train more developers, let's work to get more people involved in open source.

But then let's also go out and educate, you know, small business owners to the fact that like, hey, you could pull this thing off the shelf and, you know, kind of get it up and running yourself and, and potentially have your own e-commerce store, potentially have your own marketplace or potentially have your own you know, social.

Platform that you could use, right. As opposed to like, you know, paying services and doing that. Like, was there any talk there about maybe education and, and enabling like maybe small business owners or you know, entrepreneurs to kind of jump into open source technology?

Tiffany: I don't think that was the focus of the conference.

I was impressed with. You know, one of the programs that, that another attendee was telling me about was that in, I believe it's South Africa, whenever contracts, major technology contracts are given to multinational organizations, there's a, there's a capture, a recapture of funds that goes directly into developing the capacity within South Africa to be able to.

You know, to be able to do that themselves, right? Mm-hmm. And so that program is multi-tiered. It's Yes. About developing the next generation of developers, training small business owners to be able to use that technology, and then, you know, essentially being able to create technologies like that at home.

So there's kind of this multi-tiered to, all right, well we do need to upgrade and modernize and, and all of our systems great. If the only vendors who can bid on that aren't from South Africa, how do we then make sure that part of this money goes into making sure that in 30 years, that's not still the case.

So like, it's almost like a,

John: it's almost like a government on the job training program where you're like, yes, come in outside company, teach us how to do this thing, and then we're gonna start to try to develop those skills ourselves and do it. I mean, that, that makes a lot of sense.

Tiffany: It's more like a money capture.

So there's like a, a tax if you're not in the country and then that goes into other, then that goes more targeted.

John: Got it. Okay. That makes sense. I mean, still, either way, I still think it sounds, sounds like a good idea, but

Mike: I was just gonna add that there's, there's the sovereign tech agencies, talks, talks about not only their funding, these, these projects to support the German government to try and make sure that, that, that the German government has a a solid open source infrastructure for their technology, but they're really supporting the whole German economy.

So, so they, this is the open source is, is not just for government, it's for, for everyone. And then including sort of businesses and whatnot on that level. But, but also procurement is, was, you know, came up a few times and it's a real. Interesting challenge. Like how do you, how do you procure open source software and how do you move projects from, from CapEx to opex?

How do you make sure that you're able to invest in it on an ongoing basis? Like a road, like a bridge, like things which we, which governments understand that you need to go off and maintain bridges like that, that that's something you need to go off and do on a regular basis, but basis, so often with government contracts, the contract runs out and it's like, oh, well, you know, on we go, let's, let's, let's, let's carry on to the next thing.

And it's like, no, no, no. Like, all this stuff needs to be maintained. If you have anything digital, you can't just leave it there and let it run and, and assume that it's working there. If it's not, if the security isn't being updated, if the, if the, the features don't align with the, the rest of the, the growth of the API and change the, the change of standards and browsers and whatnot, it doesn't work.

So sort, moving, moving that sort of mindset around in, in terms of how, how, how governments are thinking about buying technology.

Nic: Well, and, and, and not even just that piece, but also making part of the operational expense going back to fund whatever project you're using, like the Drupal Association. Right, right.

If, if, if the, a government site is spending, you know, millions of dollars funding, you know, building and maintaining whatever number of projects, you know, sending 10 grand a month to the Drupal Association is, is nothing. And would, would be a huge game changer for the types of things that the Drupal Association can offer, which directly benefit every, everybody using it.

Right. So,

Tiffany: well, and I think you're gonna, that was part of the conversation, I was there to start to have is around this idea of upstream support. And often in open source we, we think about upstream support. Rightfully so as the, you know, that solo maintainer working on that module that you're using, and that is a part of upstream support for Drupal, but then there's also the actual invisible infrastructure that the Drupal Association provides, and how do we have that conversation as a, as a risk mitigation, right?

I think you know, it's not just a, an altruism, oh, this is the right thing to do, sort of, sort of question. But to, to Mike's point, you know, I do think those OPOs are key to being able to solve this. So part of the, the function of, of an open source program office is to help both the end users within an organization as well as those procurement officers understand how to engage with source in right.

You don't get to see the transformational benefits of using open source if you are just gonna go get the software for free. You're like, oh, I got this for free. This is great. You know? Okay, well then you actually just have technical debt. You haven't actually achieved anything, but are you contributing your patches back?

Great. That's kind of a first level that you're part of this dialogue within open source. That's, that's step one. Step two is, you know, really are you putting your modules back out there? Are you contributing back into the ecosystem so that we can reduce the, the amount of, of. Public dollars that are wasted recreating the same solutions over and over and over again.

And then of course, the, the, the gold standard, the best you can do when you're engaging in open source is make sure that you are contributing to the full lifecycle, the full ecosystem of the projects that you're involved in. Making sure that those few have written the modules you depend on are, you know, able to, to both be sustainable in themselves and then also have succession plans.

Are you contributing to the infrastructure that you rely on to pull, you know, to run Composer, for example. Right? I think people just don't necessarily think about that invisible infrastructure in the same way that when you drive over a bridge, you know, everybody uses that bridge. Nobody really thinks about it and you've funded it through your taxes.

Right. So the, this whole conversation around digital public infrastructure is, is that same conversation but about. Digital infrastructure that you, everybody uses, but nobody really thinks about and we're super dependent on. So how do we pay for that in the long term? And, you know, where, where does the money flow?

Does it get to the right places?

Maya: Let's maybe go a step back how Tiffany, maybe you can describe how, like what is digital public infrastructure in simple terms and why should we consider open source as part of this?

Tiffany: So digital public infrastructure is the idea that you have these shared. Building blocks of the digital foundation that allows people, or governments or businesses to interact safely online.

So it is like digital identity systems or payment systems your data exchange layers and then registries, right? So all of your records, your the power of your health records or your land records or education systems. So the idea is that you want to build those core layers once openly and safely so that everybody can innovate on top, right?

You don't wanna recreate the wheel in the same way In Drupal, we don't wanna have 10 modules that do the same thing, right? We would rather continue to iterate on it. So, you know, you want, and you know, if I'm a policymaker in a country, I want my country to have, you know. Obviously a digital identity system, easy payment systems.

I want them to be able to do what they need to do online. But I don't actually want to pay to write that from the ground up. So how do you do that? How do you think about it? And this is where open source becomes a really good fit because we have transparency. So you're not you have that trust factor, right?

You can see how it works. It's not a black fox. It becomes a shared investment. And this was particularly important in more emerging markets in the world. I, I, there was a, you know, someone from the government in Haiti was talking about how there, you know, kind of innovating around different places, even in, in France shared some of the, the work that they're doing on their digital stack their French.

Digital stack, so it becomes a shared investment. And then that leads into the digital sovereignty point, which is you don't wanna have lock-in, you don't, you want the nations to have control over their infrastructure. It becomes a national security issue. If, for example, you know, your nation comes in conflict with another nation that you know.

Suddenly says, no, you can't have this anymore, and your payment infrastructure goes down and you can't collect taxes. Like that's a huge national threat. So that's where the digital sovereignty starts to come in as part of this digital infrastructure. And I think there's a reevaluation about whether the entire world being so dependent on US-based tech oligarchies is, is in their national interest.

And I think that that's a, a rather timely part of the conversation. So then you kind of get further into it and it's like, okay, well do the piece, talk to each other. You know, you have all of these different agencies, they have all these different budgets. Well, can you share information back and forth in a way that you would need to, are you reinventing the wheel there?

And then there's the kind of a more philosophical question, which is, you know, do. Is the public getting the value out of this, or are you just funding some sort of private monopoly? So I think open source is a big part of that conversation, and that's where we get into the idea of this digital public infrastructure being a public good.

In the same way that we manage water for our collective benefit, maybe we should start to think about managing and engaging with our, our digital footprint in the same sort of way.

Mike: There's some interesting there's so much nuance around and there's a lot of politics involved.

Anytime you're dealing with, with, with international efforts like this, you, you're suddenly into, well, you know, what does, what does, what does an India's advantage versus you know, the European Union's advantage and, and, and so it's, it is an interesting. Time where, where, where, where there are different plays.

My understanding of the digital public infrastructure is that it, it is, it is includes open source as a big part of it, but isn't necessarily open source. That there's a the, the Microsoft and others and Google are pushing ideas around digital, public infrastructure that involves their infrastructure as a core.

Piece of this. And, and that's sort of one, and, and if you're looking at data centers, there's, there's definitely arguments for, for having some big players involved in managing some, at least some of those data centers. But but there's also like digital public goods. And Drupal two or so years ago became a digital public goods which is a certification that, that that, that is managed by the Digital Public Goods Alliance.

And again, it's, it's the idea of, of open source, but also good documentation, security, privacy, like respecting sort of a, a gold, a gold standard of, of what, what government should be investing in. And typo three is also a member. June lab most recently became a member. So there's a, there's a movement of, of, of organizations moving towards, towards adopting digital public goods as a, as a standard, more, more than just a license.

It's also like, is this worth investing in as a, as an institution that, that has aligned values. And the last one, which is also, tied to, to where it's, where there's both proprietary and, and, and open source solutions involved is, is govs stack. And, and which, which again, this interesting idea, like how do you take the idea of government and break it into blocks and say, what are the things that government needs?

And can we create a set of requirements that says this is what government should be looking for in terms of interoperable systems that like what is the CMS layer? What is the, the, the authentication layer? What is the, this, this, you know, how, how do we structure this in a way that that allows allows for governments to start thinking about reusable components?

And as opposed to every project is a special snowflake because they aren't, they really aren't. And then yet, if they, yet the mindset of government procurement is very much around, this is my project and my baby, and I'm gonna develop my special baby and it'll be unique and different from everyone else's.

It's like, no, no, this is just a bunch of pieces with some custom code to make it unique. And it's 99% of it's the same as the project next door.

John: So. Couple of things there. One I will add a link in the show notes to a 2023 keynote from the New England Dr camp where Whitney has talks about the inner workings of being a public good.

She also talks about the UN's sustainable development goals. So, that could be interesting extra information for our listeners. So, Tiffany, I wanna go back to what you were talking about around digital public infrastructure and ask well, I'll start with the question and then I'll provide a little bit of context as to why I'm asking the question.

Right. Moving in this direction, right? Do we risk stifling innovation because. As well maybe this is more of a US-centric problem, plus a, as we know, like government doesn't always move as quick as it should. And going back to your example of like, you know, we, we standardizing a payment gateway, right?

So like say, you know, they standardize on Stripe, right? And you know, Stripe's great, I love Stripe. Like I think that's the right choice, but maybe there's another service that is coming in that could, could be better and another process that could be better, right? Do we risk stifling the ability to innovate moving in this direction or, or, you know, basically not being able to kind of quickly shift to emerging technologies by doing this.

Tiffany: I think it goes to the maturity of the organization, right? I mean, you're an enterprise architect, so you run across this all the time, I'm sure as well, right? Which is. There's a difference between making a choice because of a personal preference and, and or, and making a choice that that truly is net better, right?

And so I think that the way that you balance the, the kind of the tension between innovation and standardization or you know, is that what you do is you, you say, okay, if you're going to deviate from our standards, this is what has to be met in terms of interoperability and security and other, other considerations, right?

So it, it requires a maturity of a policy infrastructure that, that, in my experience, isn't yet. Always fully there, particularly in government. And so what we're trying to do, and I think those who are really engaged in this space, are trying to do, is to make sure that we're not continuing to waste public dollars, reinventing things that then can't talk to each other, and that then become technical debt or become a system that gets thrown away.

So, so much of the the money that goes into public technology projects, I think it's something like 60% of them fail outta the gate, right? So I think that when you are able to provide some guidance in terms of, okay, this, if you don't have a, a good reason not to do it, here's your basis. I think that, that there's a lot of value in that and I think that there are good reasons to, to try new things and to bring you know, new components in.

But I also think that it's you know, I will, I love it when someone says, okay, if you're gonna go down this route, these are the criteria you have to meet so that we don't then have to rewrite all of our reporting systems so that we can get the data out of it. And it's, you know, we can, our systems can continue to talk to each other so that you're not building yet another abstraction layer around the tools.

Does that make sense?

John: Yeah, and I mean, I guess as you, as you were describing that, you know, I, I guess it kind of like, hey, it's better to start from somewhere than nowhere, right? There's a, there's a, there's at least a bar, right? Mm-hmm. And if it's built in, in true open source fashion, right? You have the ability to.

Enhance, grow, have a conversation about, you know, pushing it forward. So, you know, I guess, I guess that, that all definitely makes sense.

Mike: John, I wanted to push back briefly on, on your, your Stripe, stripe issue. 'cause I mean, people, people are like engineers like Stripe 'cause it works and, and for that matter, citizens like, like it because it's, it's, our consumers like it 'cause it's, it's easy and it works and it's reliable.

But the, the challenge is and then Tom Greenwood, who sues the, the CEO of, of the whole grain digital in the uk. He, he, he, he raised this in, in, in his blog post. The idea that, that as soon as you have a, a single global payment payment processor, you're using that in your farmer's markets or your other places.

You're siphoning money out of your economy and your money is not going to your local economy. It's going to, to some big company and their share shareholders in Silicon Valley. And you know, there, there's a, there's a. There's value in solving a problem and those people that solve problems should be rec, should be recognizing, should be compensated for that.

But having a platform and having that network effect, so by, so that, that we're actually stopping other players from coming in and innovating beyond what Stripe has done. Because, because Stripe has already captured the market. And should we not be trying to say, okay, yes, you, you should get some compensation for that.

Should you get billions and billions and billions until the end of time because you've solved that problem? No. Like that, that doesn't work. There should be some sort of process where, where yes, you get some compensation for solving a unique problem, and yes, you're rewarded for that, but you shouldn't be.

Like, social media is another great example where like, how much of our, of our lives or attention have been captured by, by the views of a few. Few people in Silicon Valley who are dominating the ways with which we can express and communicate ourselves on the platforms that they've, they they've arbitrarily created.

And it's not, it's not like they're necessarily bad platforms, but it's, it's limiting the, the, the ways that we can, we can innovate because a few individual people are making decisions on, on how be because of the challenges of networks and platforms.

Nic: Yeah. I mean we, we, we need to solve the network effect problem, right?

You need to have the, that, and you know, Mastodon is great because you can kinda have your own simple local group and community, but getting back into kind of a wider community can be quite difficult, right? So you kind of need the, the, the whole point of social media is to interact with people, right?

So if you're interacting with only two other people, how social is it? But if you have only one provider for whatever, you're, whatever topic you're discussing, whatever you are beholden to that platform's direction as well. So, tough problem.

Mike: Just wanna encourage people to look up Cory Doc and Ification.

'cause that's what all these platforms are moving towards, right? So like yeah, you become the product

Tiffany: it doesn't have to be that, that you're the product. I do think that when we have kind of defacto monopolies, right, then it, it places whether it's companies or, or governments at, at at risk, right?

So we had a client, a government client who obviously uses Microsoft Office, right? That's their, that's what they've standardized on. Well, office, as we all know increased its, its per seat licensing. Because it added those AI features, which you didn't have the option to not get. But then this agency had a $2 million budget shortfall because of the extra $6 per license.

It's not like they could say, we're just gonna not use office in this agency. Right. It, it becomes a, a, a big problem, right? Budgets don't go up by as much as software companies would, would like their licensing fees to go up, especially right now in the age of ai.

Nic: That, that side side note tinfoil hat moment.

But my, my theory is, oh boy, here it comes. A lot of these, the way AI has yet to find a profitable problem to solve, I guess, right? Mm-hmm. So everybody's, they're all searching for how are we gonna be profitable? And I think the ones that are going to be able to be successful longer term are the ones like Google, Microsoft, where they're just tacking on a fee and subsidizing the cost of their research.

And ai, 'cause Google's the same way. Like you, you do have an easier way to opt in or opt out at the moment, but like, they're basically charging you more for whether you're user or not to subsidize the research that they're doing, trying to find that solution. And I mean, from Microsoft's perspective, it makes sense because, I mean, $6 a seat is a lot and they're tying it to something that I would argue most people don't want or need, but it's.

It's kind of enforced. They have vendor lock-in.

Tiffany: Correct. And that's where, why open source is so big in these conversations. You know, yeah. Because Dr.

Nic: Drupal had, o obviously is pushing AI hard too. But the nice thing is you can kind of pick and choose when to, like I'm, I'm working with clients right now, implementing some AI integrations that I think will be useful for them.

I think it'll be really valuable, but most of my clients have zero need for AI on their websites. And the fact that it's an a contributor project that I can just not install for the clients that don't need it, I don't even have to worry about it. And then the clients that do need it, you kind of figure out what the community is doing and what works and, and implement it in a way that works for, for that particular client.

Yeah. Community open, open source.

John: I dunno, I'm getting like. An anti anti-capitalist vibes here a little bit. And you know, I, I think like, I don't know the message, the message. I think I, I would like to, or at least how I would like to interpret the message, and you can tell me where I'm wrong here.

Please do. But like, instead of being like an anti anti-business or anti businesses making money, like it feels to me like we need to, we need businesses and government to work better, to use that money smarter. Right. And, and don't get me wrong, I do agree that there should not be like one player capturing all of the business in the, in the world.

Like there should be opportunities for innovation. There should be opportunities for competition. That's not what I'm saying, but like, ultimately I think. Tiffany's starting point here was that like we need to look at making sure that we're effectively using funds to build solutions that can grow and you know, be sustainable to, to, to continue to evolve, evolve that feature or thing, right?

I mean, I think we've all seen projects and we've all seen, you know, government projects where somebody builds something and it's like, it's this black box and it doesn't, you can't extend it. You can't improve it. You can't do, it's just like, here's the thing, we paid a million dollars for it and it just does this thing and it's gonna do it for the next five years.

Then we're gonna throw it out and spend another million dollars to, to do it right. As open source practitioners, right. We. Understand that, hey, you can, and Drupal again, great example of this for the last, what, 25 plus years. Like you can start with something an MVP, put money into that to build it, and then over the next X number of years, improve it and grow it and build it so that it keeps working for you and improving your experience and evolving and innovate it well into the future.

Right? So, I mean, I think. Instead of, instead of like us saying like, ah, companies are bad. Right? And I'm not saying that anybody actually said that, but like, that was kind of the vibe I was getting. I'm just saying. So hold on, lemme just finish, finish that thought and then it's all you. But like, I think like we just need to look at like, okay, let's just spend the money more effectively and think about being more future, future proof and, and, and, and moving forward as opposed to like, I don't know, silo siloing it up.

Mike. Go for it.

Mike: So just on, on the idea of it being anti-capitalist, I mean, I owned a business for 21 years. Tiffany still does own a business. The, you know, we're not anti-capitalist, but when you have market capture that's anti-capitalist. When you have a platform that, that that blocks out competition where you can't leave, like, I mean, I understand that that is an incredibly profitable hundred percent, a hundred percent agree with that.

Right? Further that like looking at like, like if you look at government, the number of. How much of our tax dollars are going to a few big US multinational corporations, the Deloittes, the Microsofts, the IBMs, the, the Oracles, like a huge por portion of the, the, of tax dollars globally. And let alone business dollars, like our money is going to support these giant corporations who have defined what is what is modern digital.

And, and I don't think that, that, like that platform, they've captured the market of several different places. And it is, I would say anti-capitalist because of, because they've, they've captured

John: the, the decline. Is there No trickle down there though? I mean, I mean, a lot of those companies have o open source.

Nick is, is getting on his soapbox. I can see him doing it, but he is muted so nobody can hear him.

Nic: Yeah, let, let's get back, let's get back to the show. We, I mean, no, there's no trickle down. Trickle down economics do not work this well. Okay. So maybe trickle down is not the right

John: word, but a lot of those companies have open source offices that they, and they're putting money into open source, right?

Like, and I don't know, that's a different show. It is a different show. We'll get back on that show

Tiffany: too. But yeah, I'll say, I will say,

John: Mike, like I, I agree, I agree with you. I can also kind of see the benefits of why they're doing it, but anyway,

Nic: well, yeah, we'll move because from one organization, they just made $2 million a year.

That's why they're doing it. And they need to fund the AI research. But well, and, and the

Tiffany: organization can't even use the AI tools, right? They gain no productivity.

Nic: Yeah.

Tiffany: Because they have a policy layer right around it, so. Right. I think that's the difficulty around it. And then, and that's just one organization.

But there's lots of different ways where if we think about, okay, what is the, how do we make it interoperable? How do we prevent vendor lock-in? How do we give, give that kind of optionality so that we are maximizing the benefit to the end user? That's what I care about, rather than maximizing shareholder value, you know, in, in other places, right.

When I have my public. Servant hat on. That's what I'm interested in, is making sure that we're continuing to increase the value that's delivered back to back to the public. Right. So it's, it's this idea that the public dollars should go toward public software. I agree

John: with that a hundred percent. And in my like rose colored glasses mind, I'm like, Hey, if you do that, then you know, you can build shareholder value.

Nic: Yeah, just to, to kind of close this out, I was gonna say like, it, it kind of brings back the open, there's like edge cases too with things like email, right. Email.

Email is an open spec. It's one of the success stories of the internet, right? It kind of just works no matter what, but if you are going to provide custom emails, you, I mean, there's only a few services out there that you can use that provide good value, right? I, I'm not gonna set up an email server at my house and managing the spam and all that kind of stuff myself.

Right? And, and, and realistically, who can you use? I mean, you can use your ISP, we all know people that [email protected] email addresses. You can use Google, you can use Microsoft. And it's the same kind of thing where the, we need a solution on both sides. Like you need the spec, but you also need a service that people can use that's sustainable and interoperable.

And, and that's the hard, that's the hard part. And if anybody solves that, let me know because yeah, that's a big problem. It's a hard problem to solve.

John: Okay,

so Mike trees wrote on his blog a few months ago about funding open source like public infrastructure, which is, is, you know, we just been talking about that. Right. I'm wondering though, like, what does that look like specifically for Drupal? Is it, you know, public funding or public infrastructure funding for things like the DA to, to basically keep up the servers and, and do you make up updates and provide security team support and like, like how does that how does that, like, you know, what.

I'll just restate the question. What does that look like for Drupal? Like, how, how does it, how do those two things connect?

Mike: I, I think there's, there's a lot of organizations or a lot of governments that are now starting to talk about public money, public code trying to go often to put that, that lingo in as a, a simple reminder that anytime that we should be aspiring to having all public money built around digital government infrastructure to be, be, be public code.

And, and yeah, absolutely. It comes down to, to seeing that, that organizations are able to, to, to build a a fund looking at, at supporting organizations like the Dral Association the, the German cyber tech agencies being quite useful in supporting the Drupal Association. Like that's one way that we've been involved, but there's also efforts to try and, and look at the setting up a Euro European sovereign tech fund as well to try and, and build that out our global process.

And I do think this is something that needs to, to be spread out to other governments or agencies around the world. But the easiest way is just to, to find ways to, to. Governance and others to start engaging with the community. Coming to events. Again, being part of that looking at ways to contribute code back learning from, from the Drupal community and engaging with the Drupal community to say, well, how do we, how do we learn about what effective open source management looks like?

Not just sort of throwing a project up on GitHub, but saying, okay, let's, let's engage and bring in a feature that we care about and make sure that we're contributing and our staff learns and is part of the community. So I think there's lots of ways, but, but Tiffany from, from the Drupal Association's perspective, you, you'd have a, a better sense I think,

Tiffany: well, I think we're working on right now as an upstream support that would allow us to engage.

So a lot of governments we're, we're a 5 0 1 C3 based in the United States, and so even if we were, you know, governments in the US. Cannot pay us, right? So they can't give you a donation. They can't just give money away. That's not how governments are structured. So it does have to be around some sort of service.

And so what we're looking at is kind of what is an upstream support package and what kind of guarantees can we can we give back to them that would help support the infrastructure that their projects depend on? And then also as that program becomes successful, that allows us to then start to create an infrastructure to support the maintainers as well.

Right, so this is, I think, a, a bigger issue when you have, you know, government agencies are not allowed to just, you know, do a bug bounty or other things. They, they have a lot of procurement rules. So part of it, I think goes to, you know, what Mike was talking about earlier with those procurement agents and making sure that they understand that it's not just about putting, you know, we have a preference for open source technologies in a.

Into an RFP or an RFI or some, you know, call for proposals. It's about understanding and evaluating the vendors that you get, are they extractive of those open source communities? Right. So I can be, I can be an agency that just uses open source, but if, if that agency doesn't give back, if that agency doesn't participate in best practices, if that agency doesn't you know, release the modules or support the infrastructure, support the community and support the other maintainers, are you really getting the benefits of open source or, or are you undermining what you're trying to, to actually support?

So I think a lot of working with those procurement officers in various as well as OPOs. To make sure that we have some language that they can just plop into RFPs, making sure that they know to give preference to those who are actual you know, contributing members of an open source community like Drupal.

I think that would actually start to close the loop because there's such a dynamic flywheel effect that we can get an open source. But part of it is that our flywheel is very leaky. And a lot of the biggest projects go to folks who don't contribute back into the community in any way, shape or form.

So while our, the economy that that Drupal has is, is probably in the billions we, we really see very little capture of that to come back into funding innovation, let alone just making sure that our basic needs, our infrastructure needs are met. So I think there's a, it's a, it's a bigger conversation.

We're kind of right at the tip of, of starting to have those conversations, and I expect you'll see something coming out of the Drupal Association in the next coming months.

Maya: Tiffany, if we look five years into the future, what role do you see Drupal and the broader open source community playing in shaping global digital infrastructure and sovereignty?

Tiffany: I think triple's gonna be playing a leading role in this. We, as you know, has been talked about in this episode. We're one of the very few open source communities that, that doesn't have a single privileged actor behind it. And so I think that makes our voice very important as a part of this conversation and the way that we lead on open source.

So I, I think that we're gonna be involved and we're gonna be at the table of, of trying to create these, strategies and programs and approaches that can scale and work for open source from, you know, those little emerging projects to, to the ones that are very, very large like ours. So we have a, a unique perspective, and I think it's a, a long-term perspective, really rooted in this idea of resilience and, and being based in the community.

So I, I'm excited for the conversation. I think that, as I mentioned earlier. Our federated work in Europe is a big part of this and, and I'm, I'm very involved in, in that work as well. You know, seeing how we can, you know, make sure that we're not just dependent on a 5 0 1 C3 in the us. We are a global project and most of our contributors are actually not in the us.

Most of the services are used outside of the US and most of the funding that we currently get is actually from the us. So I think that that highlights an opportunity for us to be able to become more globally resilient, to help us better, you know, both reach out and engage different communities, business communities, and develop our communities and student communities around the world, but also to make sure that, that you know, economic pressures in one region don't, you know, disproportionately impact our product.

So it's, it is all about resilience and, and making sure we have a model that not only scales for us, but then can be used for others. I'm, I'm excited to be part of that.

Mike: I, I see this as, as, you know, I think that, that so many people look at, at the web as just, you know, hiring an agency like civic actions or Palantir or others as just being you're hiring a plumber and you want them to, to, to go off and implement, to add the pipes.

And I think that that more and more like. As governments start to sort of look at the infrastructure and understand the complexities of it, I'm hoping that that they that in five years time that, that people who've been involved in, in looking at, at government technology like evolving web, like others like are, are actually looked, are, are being involved in the policy discussions around this to say that, that people who understand the technology and understand the communities and understand how, how these pieces can fit together and, and work more effectively together through collaboration, through proper governance, through good documentation.

And thinking sort of long term throughout the technology, like our community has done that, that there's a, a real opportunity to try and, and bring, bring this, this, this together so that, that the, the the experience that we've, we've built over, over nearly 25 years is something that, that can, can allow us to play more of a role of a, an open source statesman of a sort.

Because, because the web is the front end of, of most, most citizens' interactions with their government. If we can play, not that the Drupal's Drupal is a be all and end all, but we are a dominant player in this space and we can do more to go off and open up the doors to other technologies. Both both in the CMS level, but also on the, the stacks underneath so that there is a there's a, a definition of a good that we can, we can all start working towards.

John: Well, Tiffany and Mike have thoroughly enjoyed our conversation today. It's always great to have both of you on to talk about these topics and sincerely appreciate the efforts and the work that you guys are doing to keep, keep us apprised of this, keep us involved in this and, and keep keeping us pushing, pushing forward.

I think this is super important work and, and we, we all, all should be aware and, and helping to support in any way we can. So thanks for joining us today.

Mike: Thanks for having us. That's great. Thank you.

Nic: But before we close out, were was, were any of the talks recorded? Do you know if they're available online?

If people wanted to listen back?

Tiffany: They're

Nic: okay. I'll I'll ask for a link to that.

Tiffany: Yeah, mine, I think I put mine up on LinkedIn and they, they were all hour long sessions, but, alright.

John: Awesome.

Nic: Do you have questions or feedback? You can reach out to talking Drupal on the socials with the handle talking Drupal or by email with [email protected]. You can connect with our hosts and other listeners on the Drupal Slack in the Talking Drupal channel.

John: Wanna be a guest on talking Drupal or our new show talking TD Cafe.

Click the guest request button in the [email protected].

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John: Alright, Tiffany, if folks wanted to get ahold of you, how best could they go about doing that?

Tiffany: I am Farris on drupal.org and at LinkedIn at Tiffany Ferris. That's F-A-R-R-I ss.

John: Wonderful. Mike,

Mike: what about you? In Mo most social media is M Gifford, but but I, I have a really short domain name. I have ox.ca, so if you go to ox.ca, you can find all the other ones as well. So. Can you spell that for me? O x.ca. Perfect. Maya, what about you?

Maya: Best? LinkedIn, Maya Scheffer, or also drupal.org.

Maya Elena.

Nic: Awesome. Nic, you can find me pretty much everywhere at Nicks van, N-I-C-X-V-A-N,

John: and I'm John Picozzi. You can find me personally at picozzi.com or on social media and drupal.org at John Picozzi. And if you wanna learn more about DA, you can find us at EPAM.com

Nic: And if you've enjoyed listening, we've enjoyed talking.

See you guys next week.

John: Thanks a lot, everyone.