What got us here won't get us there

Day one at DrupalCon Nashville started with the traditional keynote by Drupal's founder Dries Buytaert. Dries talked about what is new and where are we heading. One of the main announcements was the Promote Drupal Initiative. The goal of this initiative is to start a promotional campaign that will enable to make Drupal known and loved by new decision makers.

The same evening I happen to see a tweet from a formal active Drupal contributor that was questioning the director of Drupal. The tweet that got deleted very quickly said that we are compromising quality with marketing bulls**t. My first thought was: that is so typical for an engineer to say. The thing is, Drupal community consists mostly of engineers. What if other developers feel the same way? We have to address this and try to explain why changes will be needed to survive let alone grow. 

There is a mantra in the business world that I like to recall in situations when painful changes need to be made: 

What got us here won't get us there

It's entirely OK to say that Drupal got where it is now due to its quality and security. However, this does not mean those same features will continue to draw more people into Drupal, especially end users who are not responding to technology anymore.

Every new technology has two phases of adoption. The first phase is driven by technical features. You can take a look at blockchain technology for example. Today, every blockchain startup talks about how will they take advantage of the new technology, and use blockchain for their platform. In a couple of years, blockchain technology will become a commodity and the only valuable assets those startups will have will be their business model and ability to execute. The second phase is not about features and what technology can do, but instead about what impact can it make when applied. 

Same goes for Drupal's market. Today everyone assumes quality and security should be inside of all content management frameworks. We have to evolve and start thinking about the buyers and what they want to achieve. Even developers need to be sold into the idea of trying Drupal. At AGILEDROP we do this regularly by explaining what a great career choice Drupal is on events and otherwise.

I have a very good feeling about upcoming changes in Drupal.org marketing activities. I hope together we can tell the world how Drupal can help them solve their problems and help them achieve their goals.

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