Passing the Drupal torch: Will the next generation take it?

A father-daughter presentation featuring Thomas Scola and his daughter, Olivia Scola.

Olivia was born in 2001. Thomas began working with Drupal in early 2003, while she was still a toddler. As Olivia grew up, Drupal grew from a young open-source project into a global community—and became a defining part of Thomas’s career.

More than twenty plus years later, Olivia has entered that same ecosystem herself. She now works in client success and digital strategy at Acquia, where Thomas previously spent years in technical leadership.

That sounds like a story about passing the torch. The more important question is whether the next generation will choose to take it.

Thomas entered a young open-source community where showing up, solving problems, and helping other people could gradually become a career. Olivia entered a mature technology industry with different expectations around mentorship, inclusion, career growth, flexibility, communication, and the role work should play in a person’s life.

Together, they will compare those two paths honestly. What made Drupal feel open and full of possibility in its earlier years? Which parts of that culture remain valuable? Which traditions have become barriers? What does the next generation expect from a technical community, and where might long-time members misunderstand those expectations?

This is not intended as a nostalgic history of Drupal or a claim that one family can represent an entire generation. Thomas and Olivia will answer the same questions from different stages of life, including the places where they disagree.

Their personal story opens a larger conversation about what staying in one open-source community for more than two decades actually produces. Not just code, but careers, trust, friendships, institutional knowledge, failures, second chances, and opportunities that cannot be measured in commits.

Drupal has become very good at preserving code, knowledge, and institutions. But communities survive only when new people can enter, belong, grow, lead, and eventually change what they inherited.

Passing the torch is not enough. We must build a community the next generation would choose for itself.

Learning objectives

Attendees will be able to:

1. Identify the community experiences that turn initial participation into belonging, professional growth, and long-term involvement.
2. Compare how expectations around mentorship, leadership, communication, flexibility, inclusion, and career development have changed across two generations.
3. Evaluate whether their own team or community is genuinely creating room for new people to participate, influence decisions, and lead.

Target audience

Drupal community organizers, maintainers, agency leaders, mentors, hiring managers, long-time contributors, early-career professionals, and anyone concerned with the future of the Drupal community.

Prerequisites

Attendees should have some experience joining, supporting, or trying to create belonging within a professional or open-source community. No technical Drupal knowledge is required.

Session approach

Thomas and Olivia will move through four shared questions:

1. How did you find your way into this community?
2. What made you believe you could build a career here?
3. What would make someone leave—or never enter at all?
4. What should the next generation inherit, change, or leave behind?

Each will answer independently before responding to the other. Their personal story provides the structure, but the conversation will continually turn those questions back toward the audience and the future of Drupal.

The session will close with a practical generational handoff test that attendees can apply to their own team, project, meetup, agency, or community initiative.

Attendee takeaways

• A generational handoff test for evaluating teams and communities
• Practical questions for improving mentorship and early-career participation
• A clearer distinction between inviting new people into an existing system and giving them the authority to change it
• Concrete ideas for making Drupal a community where people can still build meaningful careers
• A framework for deciding what the next generation should inherit, change, or leave behind

Speaker connection

Thomas Scola has worked with Drupal since early 2003 and has co-organized the Maine Drupal User Group since 2007. His career has included enterprise and public-sector delivery, technical leadership at Acquia, and founding the Bluefly.io Collective.

Olivia Scola grew up alongside her father’s involvement in Drupal and open source. She now works at Acquia in customer success engineering and digital strategy, bringing the perspective of a new generation entering a community and industry that were already well established when she arrived.

Together, they bring two connected but distinct perspectives: one from someone who built much of his career alongside Drupal, and one from someone deciding what place that community should have in the next generation of technology careers.