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In the Open is a weekly series from Drupal Association Interim CEO Tiffany Farriss, sharing what she is hearing across the Drupal community and where the Association is headed. In this episode: why Drupal's commons is under pressure, how the Drupal Certified Partner program is evolving, and what it takes to keep free software running for the next 25 years.

"Drupal is free. The code of Drupal is free forever. But those of us who run Drupal know that running Drupal has never been free."

The following is a transcript of Tiffany's remarks, lightly edited for readability.

What I'm hearing from the community

The thing that's top of mind for me this week is reflection. I've spent a lot of time listening to folks, talking to folks, asking a lot of questions. I wanted to take a few minutes to share back some of the things I'm hearing, because these are the things motivating the changes in how I'm thinking about existing programs, and about how we might want to do things differently for the next 25 years of Drupal.

Whether it was the ecosystem survey, the business community survey, or conversations with the core release maintainers and other parts of the community, it's very clear to me that our commons is fragile. The technology of Drupal itself is a brick. It is solid. We are super proud of our security team. But the people and the funding sustaining it aren't yet in a sustainable place, and there's a lot of pressure.

That pressure is echoed in the business community. The businesses that have been very supportive of Drupal through the years, and I'm thinking not just of those 126 Drupal Certified Partners but of all of us, everyone is getting squeezed. The business survey data showed that the average deal size was down, and that pipeline expectations had gone negative for the first time in the Drupal business survey.

That creates a real impetus for us to make sure that people who aren't in our community are hearing about Drupal, because right now we don't think they are. We think the visibility and the curb appeal of Drupal is weak. It was one of the weakest scores in the business survey. And yet where Drupal is already in the mix, it continues to do really well. This is where you see our advocacy program trying to address this: getting the word out to people who may have a very dated view of Drupal, who haven't looked at us in a while. Because when people actually know Drupal, we succeed.

Rethinking the Drupal Certified Partner program

I take all that feedback, and I've been thinking a lot about the Drupal Certified Partner program. One thing that stood out in conversations across the ecosystem is that calling it the Drupal Certified Partner program has created misimpressions that aren't serving us well. It lets some folks opt out: "Oh, that's not really for me, that's just for small agencies, just for the folks who are already there, who are already contributing." That's not true. It also creates the idea that we're some sort of trade association, and we're not. We're a 501(c)(3). We are a not-for-profit with a charitable and educational mission around the Drupal project itself, which has been recognised as a digital public good. So we need to reinvent what that message is and how we address it.

Free code was never free to run

There are things that always have to be true. Drupal is free. The code of Drupal is free forever. But those of us who run Drupal know that running Drupal has never been free. It requires security coordination. It requires testing and packaging and releases, and those cost real time and money. A small group has paid for that for a really long time, and I think this is the time when the wider world is waking up and realising that's not such a good idea.

Last week's security incident with PHP brought a lot of light to that. The PHP Foundation has one full-time staff person, my equivalent, Elizabeth Barron. She's amazing. But just one person, and 70% of the internet runs on that. She has twelve people she's able to fund part-time to do security and maintenance work on PHP. So I'm hopeful that the broader conversation about what it takes, about this open source technology that everyone depends on, that's in everything and everywhere, creates an opportunity for us to have that conversation.

What every Drupal site receives

A lot of what I've done is extend the work I did a few years ago on what the Drupal Association itself puts into supporting Drupal. It's about $10 a year per site, and $7.50 of that we're actually able to raise. Then when we consider the things that aren't scratching your own itch, like core release management or the security work, things done by the community, I think the community itself puts in another $30 a year. So every year, every site receives $40 of services that are simply donated to it.

And when we come back to that volunteer time, those 126 companies who are Drupal Certified are shouldering that burden today. That isn't fair to them, and it's not safe for Drupal.

Making contribution visible, expected, and recognised

What I want to do is make it easy and expected for everybody in the ecosystem, everyone who receives value from Drupal, everyone who uses it, to understand what it means to be a net neutral citizen of Drupal, and to give that back easily in ways that are appropriate. We have asked people to give back for a long time. That's gotten us here, but I don't think it gets us where we need to go. The next step is to make that contribution visible, expected, and recognised.

That's how I'm thinking about the Drupal Certified Partner program becoming the Drupal Certified program. What we can do is be a certified trust registry. What does the Drupal Association uniquely have to offer? We can reflect how you're giving: in what ways you are a maker, in what ways you are a patron, in what ways you are an advocate. And we can calibrate those so they're appropriate to the sector you're in and the ways you would naturally want to contribute to Drupal.

Certified organisations will be those who agree to a set of shared good practices: contributing fixes upstream, responding to our security team, tending the issue queues you maintain, and keeping sites current. Any organisation with a developer can meet those maintenance commitments in-house. And if not, we're going to set up a maintainers fund. Drupal has a lot of maintainers who would appreciate a little support, so if your organisation has modules you maintain, or that you need maintained, we can be a conduit for that. We can help you be a good Drupal citizen.

What will always be true

Drupal is GPL, and Drupal is always going to be free for everyone. Security patches and advisories will be available to everyone. No one can pay for that. You can join the security team, and I really encourage people to do that, because we know the volume of security issues is up tremendously. AI is both the culprit and the solution to that.

What you'll start to see over the next six months is a real evolution in how we take that responsibility as a public ledger very seriously, and make sure it's clear to people both inside and outside our community how you're engaging with this ecosystem. So that we can continue to have a really nice commons, a digital one at that, for the next 25 years.

Follow the conversation

New episodes of In the Open publish each week. Subscribe on the Drupal Association YouTube channel to follow along.

With thanks to Stephen Cross of Second Signal Media for producing this series.

Your website may have the information people need. But the way they discover and evaluate their options is changing, with AI-generated answers becoming part of the journey.

EAB's survey of more than 5,000 U.S. high school students, conducted in late 2025 and published in February 2026, 46% reported using AI tools during their college search, up from 26% in spring 2025. A separate EAB survey published in August 2026 found that 57% of more than 2,500 U.S. parents surveyed had used AI to evaluate colleges and compare options for their children.

Together, these findings suggest that students and families are adding conversational tools to the ways they research universities. For institutions, that raises a practical question: could a more guided experience also help people make sense of the information on their own websites?

Growing adoption doesn't mean trust is guaranteed. Pew Research Center found that 66% of U.S. adults were extremely or very concerned about people getting inaccurate information from AI. For institutions exploring AI-assisted guidance, that makes accuracy, transparency, and testing with real users central to the experience.

For Higher Education institutions, this raises a practical question: could a more guided experience help students and families make sense of institutional information while preserving accuracy, trust, and control?

On October 29, 2026, at 9:30 am PT / 12:30 pm ET / 4:30 pm GMT, join James Hall, Product Lead for Websites at Everyone TV, as he chats with Joe Kwan of the University of Waterloo, and John Tran, CTO at ImageX about "Navigation to Guidance Using AI to Improve Digital Experiences". They'll share a behind-the-scenes look at an AI-powered admissions advisor proof of concept, with practical lessons for anyone exploring where AI could improve a digital experience.

Start with the questions people are trying to answer

The University of Waterloo and ImageX began by working with Waterloo's graduate and undergraduate admissions teams to understand the student journey.

Where were students getting stuck? Which questions came up repeatedly? Where did search and navigation fall short? And when did students need guidance from a person?

Those conversations shaped a conversational prototype designed to help prospective students find trusted information, compare programs, understand requirements, and navigate next steps.

The project offers a useful starting point for other organizations: identify a specific moment where people struggle, then explore whether AI could help. That gives teams a concrete problem to investigate and a clearer basis for deciding whether to invest further.

Find out what users actually think

A working prototype is only part of the story. The team also tested the experience directly with prospective students. Research showed strong interest in a more conversational way to explore university information. It also surfaced important considerations around privacy, tone, usability, content quality, transparency, and trust.

The webinar will explore what the team learned through that testing and where human guidance remains essential.

The session will focus on discovery, prototyping, and user research, and what those stages can help an organization understand before moving toward production.

Where Drupal fits

An AI-assisted experience raises questions about the information behind it: Where does it come from? Who maintains it? How is it reviewed? And what happens when it changes?

For the Drupal community, the session will explore the role Drupal can play as the governed content foundation behind these experiences, connecting AI assistance to institutional information that an organization manages and trusts. For marketing, digital, and service leaders, the broader question is equally relevant: how can you make information easier to use while retaining oversight of its quality and accuracy?

You don't need to work with Drupal or in higher education to benefit from the discussion. The approach is relevant to teams considering AI for complex information journeys across nonprofits, public services, and businesses.

What you'll take away

Join the webinar to explore:

• How discovery with internal teams can uncover AI use cases worth investigating.
• What prospective students thought about using AI to explore university information.
• What user testing revealed about trust, privacy, tone, transparency, and usability.
• Where human guidance remains essential.
• How governed content can support AI-assisted experiences.
• How to validate an idea with real users before moving toward production.

Whether you're a Drupal practitioner, a higher education leader, or someone responsible for a complex website, this session offers a practical example of moving from an AI idea to an experience you can test and evaluate.

Join James Hall, John Tran and Joe Kwan on October 29, 2026, at 9:30 am PT / 12:30 pm ET / 4:30 pm GMT for From Navigation to Guidance Using AI to Improve Digital Experiences.