Wonderful Westside meeting tonight

Dries has said he was waiting to post a DrupalCon CPH wrapup on his site until the video of the keynote was available, so I've held off on talking about this, too. It didn't make sense to talk about it in detail until people could see the video themselves. The video has just been posted and I transcribed the part in question.

The controversial part regarding gender balance in the Drupal community is around timecode 27:30. To make the transcript a little more readable, I took out the umms, you knows and so on.

What I do know we'll have is a sex scandal. I think Druplicon will be involved in a sex scandal and we'll have a sex video tape being widely circulated on the web, but for that to happen we really need to move beyond the engineers. [Crowd laughs]

It's not enough to just have developers, developers, developers and it would be really helpful to have a better mix of the different genders, a better balance between all of the different genders in this room. So hopefully by 2020 we'll have more than just engineers and we'll have more men and women, so I hope that will happen.

But the point, though, is that we need to grow beyond just the technical people. The way Drupal is adopted is still very grassroots by technical people. Say they build a website for their school or something and all of a sudden they're using Drupal or they're installing Drupal on their corporate intranet. That's pretty much the story that I hear all the time.

So we need to figure ways for the CIOs and the CTOs to learn about Drupal and we need to figure out ways to tell non-technical people like our mothers, you know, and their brothers about Drupal as well. So, both on the low end as well as on the high end.

Christefano here again. I like Dries' vision of Drupal in 2020 and agree that gender balance in the Drupal community is a hot topic, but I don't agree with the delivery of his vision in this keynote. Yeah, it could have been worded more carefully and it was a little clumsy at best and insensitive at worst, but I'm giving Dries the benefit of the doubt here. Public speaking is difficult, and when he talked about "our mothers and their brothers" and "the low end as well as the high end" I believe he was pointing out the ends of the various spectrums rather than assigning labels.

I don't have an outline but there is a video somewhere. I'll check with people on this when I see them on Tuesday.