Who are you?
I have been an active member of the Drupal community for more than 25 years. In the project's earliest days I registered the drupal.org domain and handed it over to Dries Buytaert, a small but formative moment in the history of what would become this community. Over the years I have tried to build durable infrastructure for that community rather than just participate in it. I founded and organized DrupalJam fifteen times, growing it into one of the most significant Drupal camps in the world. I co-founded Stichting Drupal Nederland and helped build it into one of the richest and most successful Drupal organizations in the Netherlands, later serving as its chairman for several years. I also founded the Splash Awards, ran them ten times, and grew the format into a genuinely global event, replicated across dozens of countries and culminating in an international edition. Earlier still, I served on the board of the Drupal Association when it operated as a Belgian non-profit, where I contributed to its foundational work. Professionally, my path has taken me deeper into open source as a business, rather than away from it. I work as [your exact title], leading sales and public-affairs efforts in commercial open source infrastructure, specifically enterprise Linux (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) and Kubernetes management (the Rancher portfolio), including engagement at the level of the European Commission. This gives me a vantage point that is rare on most non-profit boards: I understand both the cultural and technical fabric of Drupal as a community, and the commercial and policy mechanics that determine whether open source projects survive and thrive at enterprise and governmental scale.
What does building community mean to you?
To me, building community means giving local colour the room to thrive, while making sure the Drupal Association functions as a strong umbrella above the many local foundations and user groups around the world. The Drupal ecosystem is not one audience, it is many: end users, large organizations running Drupal at scale, agencies delivering services on top of it, and the individual contributor who quietly keeps things running and is too often overlooked. A real community has to represent all of these roles, not just the loudest or most visible ones.
In practice, building community means activating people by setting examples and celebrating success. People rarely need to be convinced that contribution matters, they need to see it modelled, and they need their work recognized when it happens. That is the philosophy behind everything I have built in this space, from DrupalJam to Stichting Drupal Nederland to the Splash Awards: create the stage, show what good looks like, and then make sure credit reaches the people who earned it.
What does advocating for Drupal mean to you?
Advocacy is ultimately about making sure success gets seen, and celebrated, by the right audiences, through the right channels. That sounds simple, but it carries real depth: every act of advocacy is really an act of translation, taking what the community already does brilliantly and making it visible and meaningful to an audience that did not build it but needs to trust it.
For me, advocacy has to operate on multiple axes simultaneously. There is the axis we know well: developers as the audience, and earned media, conference talks, blog posts, word of mouth, as the medium. That path has served Drupal for two decades and it remains genuinely good. My instinct is not to abandon it but to make it stronger and more deliberate, more professional in its marketing, more consistent in celebrating wins rather than letting them pass quietly.
But that axis alone leaves real value untapped. The other axis that deserves far more deliberate attention is policy, reaching decision-makers, public administrations, and procurement officers who will never read a Drupal.org blog post but who decide whether an entire ministry standardizes on open source. And the other dimension that needs strengthening is the medium itself: moving beyond earned media into owned and, where it makes sense, paid media, genuine commercial-grade promotion of what this project and its ecosystem can do.
This matters financially as much as culturally. There is a long tail of potential sponsors who have never been properly approached, and a largely untapped landscape of subsidies and grants, government funding, but especially foundations, that fund digital public infrastructure and open source without yet knowing Drupal is a candidate. Advocacy done well is not just visibility for its own sake. It is the mechanism that turns recognition into resources, and resources into the next decade of the project.
Why are you running for a board seat at the Drupal Association?
I am running because I want to bring my network, my knowledge, and a fresh dose of energy to strengthening the Drupal Association, and because I want to do that on behalf of the whole world, not any single country, region, or continent.
My own roots are local. DrupalJam, Stichting Drupal Nederland, the Splash Awards, these were built from the Netherlands outward. But that experience taught me something that goes well beyond the Netherlands: every strong global community is, in fact, a federation of strong local ones. I believe deeply in couleur locale, in letting every region keep its own voice, its own language, its own way of celebrating its contributors. What I want is not to flatten that diversity, but to see every colour on the map grow stronger at the same time, with the Drupal Association acting as the umbrella that makes that possible everywhere, not just where the project has historically been strongest.
That is the energy and the network I want to bring to the board. Professionally, my work in commercial open source and enterprise Linux and Kubernetes has put me in conversation with organizations and policymakers well beyond the traditional Drupal heartlands, and I want to put those relationships to work for the entire ecosystem. A board seat is, for me, the opportunity to take 25 years of building locally and use it to help every local Drupal community in the world, wherever it is, become a little stronger.
Why should members vote for you?
Members should vote for me because I bring a rare combination of deep knowledge, a wide network, and a long, honourable track record of actually building things that lasted.
For 25 years I have put my name behind Drupal projects and delivered. DrupalJam ran fifteen times and grew into one of the most significant Drupal camps in the world. The Splash Awards ran ten times and became a genuinely global format, replicated across dozens of countries. Stichting Drupal Nederland became one of the richest and most successful Drupal organizations in the Netherlands under my chairmanship. None of these were one-off efforts. They were built, sustained, and grown year after year, which is the actual test of whether community work matters: not whether it launches, but whether it is still standing and still growing a decade later.
That same reliability defines how I work. I do not take on responsibilities lightly, and once I commit to something, I see it through with the people around me, openly and honestly. My professional life now adds another layer of knowledge and another network entirely, commercial open source, enterprise Linux, Kubernetes, and engagement at the policy level with the European Commission, which means I bring relationships and expertise to the board that extend well beyond the traditional Drupal world, while never having left it.
In short, I have a long record of taking on responsibility for this community and delivering measurable growth, with integrity, and I want to bring that same discipline and that same network to the Drupal Association at exactly the moment it needs to grow further.
What is your favorite Drupal moment or memory?
My favorite memory is the second DrupalCon ever held, which I organized in Amsterdam in 2005. We deliberately rode the wave of the O'Reilly Open Source Convention happening next door, and used that proximity to pull some of the great minds of the open source world into the same room as us, people like David Axmark of MySQL and Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP.
What makes the memory so vivid is the scale, or rather the lack of it. We were a small group, just over thirty people, sitting together trying to figure out where this thing we were building was actually going. There was no sense yet that Drupal would become what it is today. And yet many of the people in that room went on to become legends of the open source world, each carving out their own significant path. It is a memory I come back to often, because it captures something essential about open source itself: the biggest futures are usually decided in the smallest rooms, by people who have no idea yet how far it will all go.
