DrupalCon Nashville Key Takeaways
Shyamala Rajaram
Mon, 04/16/2018 - 18:17

Drupalcon Nashville has just been amazing with an interactive and productive board retreat, amazing inspiring Keynotes, meeting friends, the many sessions, great ideas and a wonderful community! Summarizing some of my key takeaways as I head back home.

• A live document summarizing the Core Values & Principles we have lived by for the 17 years at https://www.drupal.org/about/values-and-principles, thank you @dries for getting this for us.
• Drupal Product directions: Serve the Content editors, increased focus on Drag & Drop Layout builder, Settings tray module, Out of the box initiative, API first, Media management, Workflow initiative, Improve technical evaluation process
• Drupal Association to assist in bringing consistent and targeted marketing material to serve the new audiences. Checkout https://www.drupal.org/promotedrupal on Promote Drupal for more.
• Acknowledgement of the new audience, the enterprises. The next biggest users after the enterprise are HigherEd and Government
• Drupal Association is looking at reworking DrupalCon to serve the customer/end user audience better. First steps at Nashville was the “Customer roundtable”. Hearing the voices of the Customers, the value they get from contributions The Drupal story with in the Enterprise, Strategise to bring Cost advantage Delivering Long term value and best of breed code, building comparability to support upgrade & security are some strong reasons to link to Contributions as part of the solutioning The customers were excited to share learnings amongst themselves
• The Work of the Drupal Association  to make Drupal.org and Drupalcon possible, uniting the #drupal community. The team is constantly listening to the Drupal Community and evolving to serve us better and increase Drupal adoption. Incase you have not already, checkout the all new d.o https://www.drupal.org/
• First time Teamwork & Leadership program/workshop by Adam Goodman and CWG - getting young aspiring Leaders to look within to find answers and lead Part of Governance Retrospect session and the Governance workshop as part of the Board retreat. Hearing different voices and feedback on the way forward, meeting Leaders from different spectrum of Drupal, all self organized groups bringing value to us as a Community. It is amazing to see the energy of the Community voices, the involvement of CWG and the D&I groups. The Audience and Voices are still not representative of the entire community. Strongly feel a Regional direction will bring in more Diverse voices.
• Direction to expand the regional presence of Drupal & to explore Regional Drupal Associations
• Great meeting the new Board members over the weekend Retreat, A big thank you to Ingo, Baddy, Michel, Audra & George to be so actively involved and bringing in Diverse perspectives
• Meeting Maggi & Nick at the Open Web Lounge and hearing their stories in Localizing events. Amazing initiative to bring other Open source initiatives to be part of Drupalcon, tiny steps to make Open Web possible!
• A special thanks to Vishal, TCS for flying in all the way and spending time at the Conference. Hearing the voice of one of the worlds largest business and the role Drupal plays in their ecosystem, the comparison stories between CMS and trends in Digital Transformation was insightful!
• Was also excited to be presenting at Drupalcon my story on Intelligent content. If you didn’t get a chance to be at the sessions or at #Drupalcon do check out the story at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MujCYD9AstU