On the occasion of DrupalCon Nara 2025, Tim Doyle, CEO of the Drupal Association, visited Japan for the first time.
Our CEO interviewed Tim at the venue about the Drupal Association's initiatives and his expectations for the Japanese Drupal community. The following is a summary of our conversation in Q&A format.
First of all, could you briefly explain what your role is in the Drupal Association and what the Drupal Association does?
I'm the Chief Executive Officer of the Drupal Association.
The Drupal Association is a global not-for-profit, and our mission is to support for the Drupal project and the Drupal community. We provide the infrastructure that maintains Drupal, we work on its security, and we make sure that it's available to anyone, anywhere in the world, free of charge. That's our public mission.
In short, we try to build the tools that allow the community to build Drupal.
We became a Drupal Certified Partner. We have been the only Drupal Certified Partner so far in Japan.
What do you expect of us as a Drupal Certified Partner in the local Drupal community?
We started the Drupal Certified Partner Program to recognize and support the companies that contribute back to Drupal.
As an open source project, the future of Drupal is dependent on companies such as Digital Circus that contribute back to the project and help maintain the infrastructure.
Our expectation is that we want your company to be a good ambassador for Drupal in Japan, to speak positively of it, to be seen in the Japanese community as an expert in Drupal because of your contributions back to Drupal.
Then, we want to be able to support you in your business, so that companies that are giving back to Drupal are also seeing good business outcomes with Drupal.
Is the Drupal Association planning any new activities in the future for the Drupal community?
One of our largest initiatives right now is looking into the creation of an International Drupal Federation. At the Drupal Association, we would work directly with associations within countries like Japan, and work on joint programs to help both the global Drupal community and the Japanese Drupal community.
We hope to have stronger connections to the local community, but we recognize that the Drupal Association can't have the same impact at the local level that a local association can have. So we hope to build a stronger relationship with the local associations.
I understand that the Japanese community is going to begin to explore the creation of a Japanese Drupal Association as a not-for-profit in Japan. We support that, and would like to do anything we can to help make that happen.
Do you have any message for Drupal community here in Japan?
This is my first time to Japan. I find it a beautiful country, and I find the people very gracious.
I see a lot of potential for Drupal in Japan, the ability for Drupal to help the people of Japan have greater control over their digital life, their data sovereignty. Open source means you're not tied to one vendor.
So, if Japan can move in the direction of supporting open source, supporting open source projects like Drupal and other open source projects, I think we stand ready to help support that, and I think it would be good for the Japanese people.
Thank you very much for the interview, and for visiting Japan.
Thank you. Thank you for sitting down with me and for walking me through Japan.
Video
You can watch the full interview in the video below.
We are deeply grateful to Tim for taking the time out of his busy schedule to speak with us. Thank you very much for your cooperation and support. We remain committed to contributing to the Drupal community.