Bold Changes to Propel Drupal Forward: Will Huggins

The Drupal Association Board Elections have officially commenced, running until 5 September, offering the Drupal community a chance to select the next at-large board member. As part of The DropTimes' "Meet the Candidate" campaign, we are featuring an exclusive interview with Will Huggins, a candidate with a deep passion for Drupal’s future. This campaign is designed to help community members get to know the candidates, understand their motivations, and make informed decisions when voting.

Will Huggins is the CEO and co-founder of Zoocha, a specialist Drupal agency established in 2009. With a background in commercial, customer experience, and marketing disciplines, Will brings a unique perspective to the Drupal community. Although not a developer himself, he has been an active participant in the community for over a decade, contributing through leadership roles in various Drupal events and initiatives.

In this interview, Will shares his vision for Drupal’s strategic evolution, focusing on the importance of innovation, marketing, and the need for Drupal Certified Partners (DCPs) to embrace change. He discusses his motivation for running for a board seat, the challenges he aims to address, and how he plans to leverage his experience to help Drupal compete more effectively with major commercial software solutions.

TDT [1]: The most generic question to a candidate at any election is why do you want to run? Similarly here, why do you want to run for a board seat at the Drupal Association?

Will Huggins: I am running in this election because I want to contribute to the strategic direction of Drupal and the governance of the Drupal Association… and I believe my contribution will add value.

Breaking that down a bit, I believe the Drupal Certified Partner community is an incredibly important ingredient in Drupal’s success, but to ensure the ‘whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ DCPs will need to embrace change and work together in ways that might feel uncomfortable or even scary. I want to be elected to help define and facilitate that change, enhancing the collective power of DCPs as Drupal’s primary ‘go to market’ platform.

TDT [2]: What can the Drupal Community expect from your candidacy? What are the innovative ideas Drupal should look forward to if you are to win?

Will Huggins: As a board member, the Drupal Community can expect me to be a champion of the DCP community, but also to hold that community to account in terms of its obligations to Drupal.

The principal idea that I would bring to the role is a DA and DCP integrated marketing strategy. This will require brand, financial, and operation alignment on an unprecedented scale.

TDT [3]: If you could change one thing about the current structure or operations of the Drupal Association, what would it be and why?

Will Huggins: The one change I would like to influence is to improve how ‘non-code’ contribution is optimized and rewarded. As someone who is not a developer, I have often found it difficult to contribute. Similarly, where I have been able to contribute, it is rarely credited proportionately alongside more traditional ‘code contribution’. There is nothing sinister in this, it is simply that as an open-source software project, the systems and processes have grown organically with a focus on code. That must change if we want the brand communication, marketing, and end-user experience to be as great as the code.

TDT [4]: How do you envision the Drupal community evolving over the next five years, and what role do you see yourself playing in that transformation?

Will Huggins: I believe that Drupal can compete alongside ‘big tech’ brands in a way that no OSS brand has ever done before. What this will mean is that a much wider audience of end-user decision makers (domain owners, CTOs, marketers etc...) consider Drupal as an alternative to commercial solutions and that choosing Drupal is just as easy.

To achieve this, we will need more than a leading product proposition, but compelling marketing and coherent commercial propositions too, requiring the Drupal community to operate in new and different ways. With my product, commercial, and marketing experience, I want to help craft these ‘go to market’ propositions.

TDT [5]: Can you share a specific instance where you successfully led a community or organizational initiative? What were the challenges, and how did you overcome them?

Will Huggins: Zoocha is the organizational initiative I am most proud of. Over 15 years we have faced and overcome many challenges, but a common thread is the need to manage change. From day one, I put culture and shared values at the heart of what we do and what it means to be part of Zoocha. This enabled the team to embrace change, anchored to those values, supporting each other to grow and improve.

TDT [6]: "I will be an advocate for change that whilst difficult, will be necessary to achieve what we are capable of," said yourself in your nomination. What is a change that is difficult to make but necessary to attain full potential in Drupal?

Will Huggins: An example of a difficult change that I believe will be necessary is restructuring how the marketing of Drupal is funded. Commercial software providers have coordinated budgets, resources, and suppliers to devise a coherent marketing strategy that can deliver a return on their investment. Drupal on the other hand has:

• Also no comparable marketing budget and no direct measure of return on marketing investment
• A community of commercial partners (DCPs) who all have their marketing approaches and budgets
• DCP’s with marketing budgets that often focus on DA events and initiatives, which whilst funding the DA, creates an inward facing investment loop.

Whatever the answer is, it is going to require a significant change in the commercial relationship between the DA and DCPs and if done in the spirit of open source, between the DCPs themselves.