Dries Buytaert is the original creator and project lead for Drupal, a powerful open source platform for building websites and digital experiences. Dries is also Co-founder, Chief Technology Officer, and Chief Strategy Officer of Acquia, the open source digital experience company.
Honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, he holds a PhD in computer science and engineering from Ghent University and a Licentiate Computer Science (MsC) from the University of Antwerp. Dries also has been recognized as CTO of the Year by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, New England Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young and a Young Innovator by MIT Technology Review.
He blogs frequently on Drupal, open source, business, and the future of the web at dri.es.
A battle is underway right now for the future of technology. Artificial intelligence is clearly poised to disrupt every industry. It will change the way we work and live and it will accelerate progress while introducing new perils. Massive change is coming.
Behind the scenes, a battle is raging between open source and proprietary AI. Proponents of open source argue that tight regulations on AI models will throttle innovation and ensure that the biggest technology companies capture the lion’s share of profits and users. Those arguing for closed-source AI claim it is too dangerous to allow into the open and that open-sourcing AI models and technology is like giving a superweapon to the forces of evil. While seemingly esoteric, this battle will have a profound impact on what our future will look like.
A longtime researcher of open source topics and a writer on the ethics of new technologies, Alex Salkever, will explain why open source must win the AI wars if humankind is ever to benefit from the full potential of this remarkable technological quantum leap.
Amber manages the content production pipeline and creates training content for Drupalize.Me. She also assists with issue queue initiatives such as bounty, bug smash, needs review, and the DA partner program for the Drupal project.
UX Engineer. Senior Front-end Developer at Lullabot, Drupal core provisional front-end framework manager and UX and Claro co-maintainer. Involved in Barcelona's local community organizing Drupal and other tech-related events.
Fran helps with maintaining and upgrading community websites for the Drupal Association. He migrates Drupal 7 sites to Drupal 10 and contributes to the Gitlab acceleration initiative within the Drupal community.
As part of his role he is a product manger for Gander, the performance testing framework for Drupal. Janez is a prominent contributor to Drupal core and its contributed modules.
Jürgen focuses developing tools, procedures, and their implementation. He is also a Drupal enthusiast and automation expert. With a passion for security and privacy, he follows the ECA (Event - Condition - Action) framework closely.
Mateu is the author of Single Directory Components, and former API-First Initiative coordinator for the Drupal project. Mateu's passion is the intersection between the front-end and the back-end, either with decoupled front-ends or with Drupal rendered components.
As part of Ted's job at Acquia's Drupal Acceleration Team he is currently helping to implement automatic updates for Drupal. I previously worked on the Settings Tray, Layout Builder and Rest modules. He has been involved in Drupal for over 10 years as a site builder, module developer and trainer.
