fidzu : Drupal

The Enterprise Drupal Summit Europe 2026 will take place on 28 September 2026 in the SS Rotterdam.

We are now accepting session proposals.

Focus of the summit

The program focuses on Drupal in enterprise contexts, with emphasis on:

• Large-scale Drupal architectures
• Digital experience platforms built on Drupal
• AI use in enterprise content and delivery workflows
• Composable and API-driven architectures
• Governance, security, and compliance in regulated environments
• Operating Drupal at scale in complex organizations

The event is aimed at practitioners and decision-makers working on enterprise digital platforms.

What we are looking for

We are prioritizing submissions that are based on real implementations.

Relevant topics include:

• Case studies from enterprise or public sector deployments
• Architecture decisions in complex Drupal systems
• AI integration in content management or delivery
• Multi-site and multi-brand Drupal setups
• Sessions should be grounded in practical experience rather than product positioning.

Format

Accepted formats include:

• 20 minute talks (MAX)
• Case study presentations (focus on the business side)
• Architecture or strategy sessions

Selection criteria

Proposals will be evaluated on:

• Relevance to enterprise Drupal use cases
• Clarity of problem and solution
• Evidence of real-world implementation
• Transferable lessons for other enterprise organizations
• Technical or organizational depth

Submit a proposal

Submissions are open via Pretalx.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Article by: Aidan Foster, Foster Interactive

The three human skills that turn AI into a multiplier.

Creativity, strategic thinking, and articulation are the three skills that decide whether AI makes you better or just faster.

• Strategic thinking comes from experience. There's no shortcut.
• Creativity can be learned, but it's more like going to the gym than reading a book. You build it through reps.
• Articulation lets you craft quality prompts and specs for AI, and it's the most trainable of the three. But it only matters when there's something worth articulating. The value lives in the other two.

What Everyone Is Getting Wrong

The AI discourse has one dominant message: automate faster, cut the grunt work, reduce headcount, ship more.

Most leaders are responding by getting better at execution. Better prompts. Faster workflows. More output per person.

Execution still matters. It's just not where the constraint is anymore. The leaders who pull ahead in the next three years won't be the ones who automated the most; they'll be the ones who understood where the real constraint moved.

The Bottleneck Moved

Think back to five years ago. A new landing page meant a brief, a copywriter, a designer, a developer, a round of revisions, and three weeks of calendar time. A campaign asset required coordinating four people across two time zones for something that might run for six days before you killed it.

That friction was real. Teams were sized around it. Agencies were built on it. Budgets accounted for it. That friction is gone.

A capable team can now produce a landing page in hours. Drafts, variants, and structured content at a pace that would have required six people two years ago. The execution ceiling collapsed.

The bottleneck didn't disappear. It moved upstream, to the quality of thinking that goes in before AI touches anything.

Strategic clarity. Creative direction. Precise articulation of what you actually want.

That's where the value lives now. That's where most teams are dangerously underprepared.

Strategic Thinking

A CMO walks into a strategy review and knows something is wrong. They've seen this pattern fail before, in a different market with a different product. They remember exactly how it ended.

That's not intuition in the mystical sense. It's pattern recognition built through immersion. You watch your confident calls go wrong, you figure out why, you adjust.

Strategic thinking requires experiencing consequences. You have to have been wrong, and had something depend on you being right.

Researchers studying scientists at the frontier of human knowledge found the same principle. The best of them use cultivated judgment to ask better questions, to know where to go next. AI needs to be pointed. It executes brilliantly within a defined frame. The frame has to come from somewhere.

Our sense for aesthetics, meaning and embodiment give us a vital advantage over our technological creations.

Why Human Intuition Is Still Science's Greatest Tool In The Age Of AI - Noema Magazine, 2026

Creativity

Most people believe creativity is an innate trait. Either you have it or you don't. That's wrong.

86% more ideas after 3 months of training. The untrained control group barely changed.

Creativity is a muscle. It responds to reps, to practice, to deliberate exposure to new inputs. A controlled study at Radboud University found that students who went through structured creativity training nearly doubled their ideation output in under a year. The untrained group stayed completely flat. (PLOS ONE, 2020)

You cannot read your way to it. You have to do the reps.

Research across Nobel laureates and major creative contributors identified two distinct types of creativity with two distinct peak ages. Conceptual innovators - the ones who execute one brilliant overarching idea - tend to peak young. Experimental innovators - the ones who synthesize across years of accumulated experience and observation - peak in their 50s. (Galenson and Weinberg, via Big Think)

The kind of creativity that matters most in marketing is the experimental kind. The kind that gets better the more you've seen.

The senior strategist who's been in the game 15 years isn't past their creative peak. The research says they may not have hit it yet.

Articulation

Articulation gets your thinking and creativity out of your head and into a form AI can use.

A VP with sharp strategic instincts and genuine creative range can still get generic output from AI if they can't extract what's in their head and structure it precisely.

Imprecise input produces generic output. Always.

The model doesn't know what your brand sounds like. It doesn't know who your buyers are, what language they use, or what keeps them up at night. It doesn't know what you've learned over three years about what actually converts.

All of that has to come from you, structured in a way AI can use. Articulation responds to deliberate practice faster than the other two. Most people never treat it as something worth developing. (Canadian Marketing Association AI Playbook, 2025)

Experience Is the Advantage If You Use It Correctly

The skills AI cannot replicate are the ones that take years to build. But knowing that doesn't help unless you act on it. Three things worth doing now:

Audit your process assumptions, not your expertise. The judgment you've built is the asset. The habits formed around the old production bottleneck are what need to change.

Treat articulation as a skill to develop deliberately. Document what you know about your buyers, your brand, your market. Structure it. That structured knowledge is what separates useful AI output from generic noise.

Do the creative reps. Consistent exposure to new inputs and new problems. New disciplines.

Give yourself and your team time to be creative. Whiteboard ideas as a group. Collect interesting work and express what specifically about it grabbed your attention.

Skip the reps and your creative edge fades.

Leaders who invest in all three first will pull ahead. The advantage compounds.

Where does your team sit?

Most teams I talk to are strong on execution. The upstream work - the strategic clarity, the creative direction, the structured articulation of what makes them different - is where the gap is.

That gap is also where the opportunity is.

Drop a comment. I'd like to hear how others are thinking through this.

Sources: Noema Magazine (2026), Radboud University / PLOS ONE (2020), Galenson and Weinberg / De Economist (via Big Think), Canadian Marketing Association AI Playbook (2025)

At DrupalCon Chicago, the Driesnote included a visualization with "community" as one of the three pillars of Drupal, along with "platform" and "agencies." That framing felt memorable, and worth exploring further.

If you attended DrupalCon Chicago, you might have experienced a slightly differently shaped triangle. I don't know the attendance numbers, but I saw technical sessions with packed rooms, while community-focused sessions had plenty of empty seats. That's not new. It's been true for years. People care about community, but when the schedule forces a choice between a session on AI integration and one on community health, most folks choose the technical session. I understand why. Technical work feels concrete. Community work is generally not why employers send folks to a DrupalCon.

This raises a question: how can all of us work together to close that gap without having to attend community sessions at DrupalCon?

Consulting our Code of Conduct

I serve on the Community Working Group (CWG), specifically on the Community Health Team. A lot of people don't know there are two teams inside the CWG, so here's the short version:

• The Conflict Resolution Team handles incidents after they happen. If you file an incident report, they're the ones who review it.
• The Community Health Team works on everything that happens before an incident report, such as workshops, resources, and other preventive work. Our goal is to help the community build the kind of culture where fewer situations reach the reporting stage in the first place.

Both teams matter. And beyond the CWG, the DrupalCon Code of Conduct offers advice for all of us. It includes a section titled "We are collaborative," which says:

If and when misunderstandings occur, we encourage people to work things out between themselves where this is practical. Where support is beneficial to achieve this, participants agree to ask for help. People are encouraged to take responsibility for their words and actions and listen to constructively-presented criticism with an open mind, courtesy, and respect.

I suspect that many people read the harassment list and the reporting email and stop there. That's understandable. Those parts exist for a reason. But the passage above describes the wide middle ground where most friction in our community occurs.

The middle ground of community health

If the only two options we envision are "this is fine" and "file a report," we end up with a lot of buried resentment, a few dramatic blowups, and not much in between. Most day-to-day friction doesn't rise to the level of a Code of Conduct violation. It's tone. Assumption. Misread intent. A comment in an issue queue from someone who didn't scroll up to read what had already been said. A joke that came off differently than it was intended.

The Community Health Team's work is to strengthen the middle. That means helping people develop the habits and skills to address friction directly, kindly, and early, so it doesn't compound into something that needs the Conflict Resolution Team. The Code of Conduct invites everyone to do this work. Not just CWG members. Everyone.

Some ways we work things out

Here are four situations I've seen in the community, and in some cases been part of. None of these are scripts. They're illustrations. The point is that the Code of Conduct invites you to try, and that you're allowed to. You don't need permission.

• Late at night at a DrupalCon, after hours of sprinting and drinks in the hotel lobby, someone says something about another contributor that turns a few heads. That person might realize it the next day. The generous move, the one the Code asks for, is to find that person and say "I said something last night I want to walk back." Not a grand apology. Just a small, honest correction. Most of the time, that's the whole fix.
• Someone drops a comment in an issue queue without reading the full thread above. Their comment reads as dismissive of work that's already been done, or repeats a point that was already addressed, and it comes off as rude. They might not know that's how it came across. A direct message from someone in the thread ("hey, I think you may have missed a few comments, here's where we landed") can turn that into nothing. A pile-on in the issue turns it into something else.
• You witness an exchange between two people at DrupalCon that makes you wince. Maybe it's cultural. The Drupal community spans continents, and directness that comes across as rude in one country seems normal in another. Maybe it's a power dynamic, or a bad day, or both. Checking in with the person on the receiving end, just between the two of you ("I could not help but notice your conversation and I wanted to ask, are you doing okay?"), doesn't escalate anything. It lets them know they weren't invisible.
• Someone keeps doing something that just doesn't feel right. Not harmful, but grating. You can do your best to describe how it made you feel before it becomes a grudge you carry into every future interaction. "Hey, can I mention something? The way we're doing X did not sit well with me, and I want to figure out how to talk about it."

If you need help figuring out the best way to handle a situation like this, the Community Health Team is available. We can help you talk through a situation, decide whether a direct conversation is possible, or offer a second perspective. You can reach out at any time. We don't investigate, and we don't take sides. We think with you.

When it isn't practical

The Code says "where this is practical." Sometimes it isn't.

We live in a world with power differences. If the person on the other side holds significant authority over your ability to contribute, a direct conversation may not be safe for you. Ongoing patterns of behavior are different from single incidents. Safety concerns are different from style concerns. And if the other person has shown they aren't willing to engage in good faith, you are not obligated to keep trying.

Those are incidents for the Conflict Resolution Team. Those are the situations the people on that team signed up for, and you can reach them through the incident report form. Filing a report is not escalation for its own sake. It's using the right tool for the situation.

The three-pillar framing

Returning to the Driesnote, if community is one of three pillars holding up Drupal, then the pillar can't only be carried by the folks who show up to CWG sessions. The math doesn't work. Community health has to happen in the rooms with the technical sessions, on the Slack channels where the code review happens, or at the dinner table where someone just got interrupted for the third time.

Most of the work the Community Health Team cares about isn't work you need a whole session to learn. It's work you're already in a position to do. The next time something said in an issue queue doesn't feel right, you catch yourself venting about someone, or you see a newcomer get talked over, you have a chance to support Drupal's community.

Community is a pillar, which means it doesn't get held up by a small group of people with CWG in their session title. It gets held up, or it doesn't, by how we talk to each other on a Tuesday afternoon when no one's watching.

Drupal's Code of Conduct doesn't just give you a way to report harm. It also asks you to do the smaller, harder thing first. That's where most community health happens.