Kristen Pol
Salsa Digital, Drupal AI Initiative Program Manager & QuantCDN, Co-Founder
Santa Cruz, California, United States
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Kristen Pol has been focused on Drupal since 2004 and is Program Manager for the Drupal AI Initiative and the Project Lead of Context Control Center (CCC), the governed context library for Drupal AI. With 25+ years of open source and web experience, Kristen has led teams as a technical lead, architect, product manager, engineering manager, CTO, and co-founder, and focuses on clear roadmaps, welcoming contribution, and AI that site owners can trust.
Area of Expertise
Launch your design system into hyperdrive with Starshot’s Experience Builder
Slides: https://bit.ly/kp-xb-ds-atlanta2025
Drupal CMS, born out of the Starshot Initiative, has been a major undertaking with many sub-initiatives and focused tracks. One huge piece of the puzzle is Experience Builder (XB) which, among other things, lets you build flexible landing pages using easy and intuitive drag-and-drop tools.
At DrupalCon Barcelona, the Driesnote and the XB session demonstrated how a design system can be used to create a landing page for your website. Those demos looked so amazing, some people didn’t even think they were real. Believe me, they were!
As the project and tech lead for the Starshot Demo Design System project that helped power the Barcelona demos, I got a unique opportunity to be at the bleeding edge of XB’s early development. We took the CivicTheme Design System and extended it for the demo to make it the first design system on Experience Builder.
Let’s dive in and understand what it takes to adapt a design system to work with XB and what you should consider when creating new design systems. We’ll explore:
- History and benefits of design systems and reusable components
- Approaches for creating Single Directory Components (SDCs)
- Thinking about component architecture, props, and slots from a UX perspective
- Trade offs when using specialized vs generalized components
- How to leverage all the power of XB, now and in the future
Experience Builder is a game changer.
Add a robust design system and launch your website into hyperdrive!
KEYNOTE: Drupal CMS Spotlights
Dive deeper into the latest developments of Drupal CMS and the AI Initiative in a series of lightning talks. The speakers are not only experts in their field, but they are the ones leading each area of development or research.
By engaging directly with the experts spearheading these efforts, you’ll have the unique opportunity to join the groundbreaking efforts currently redefining the open-source landscape and play a direct role in building the next generation of the web.
Keynote: Bricks to Bits: How LEGO's reinvention can inspire Drupal's digital transformation.
What's the connection between our favorite web development framework and the world's most popular toy? We don't want to give it away, so you'll need to come to her talk to find out! You won't regret it.
Although raised in Central California, Kristen calls the Bay Area her home, so she's super excited that BADCamp is coming back. With more than 20 years of Drupal experience, Kristen is a familiar face in the Drupal community. She's presented many sessions and trainings at BADCamp, and is thrilled to be keynoting this year! Kristen has been active in many Drupal core and community initiatives including the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative (D8MI), the Bug Smash Initiative, and now, of course, the mega initiative: Starshot.
Drupal AI Spotlights
Dive into the latest advancements in Drupal AI through a series of fast-paced lightning talks highlighting the people and teams shaping its future.
The spotlight speakers are not just practitioners. They are actively leading the work behind Drupal’s AI capabilities, from core features to emerging areas.
This session offers a unique window into how Drupal AI is being built in the open. It brings together perspectives across innovation, product development, design, and real-world implementation. It is an opportunity to connect directly with those driving the work forward and to play a role in shaping how AI evolves within Drupal and the broader open web.
Drupal AI Initiative: A Year in Review with Panel Q&A
With the launch of the Drupal AI Initiative approaching its one-year anniversary, now is the perfect time for a critical look back and an exciting preview of what's next.
Building on the significant announcements around AI revealed in the DriesNote, this session offers a comprehensive exploration of the Drupal AI Initiative. Attendees will gain an in-depth understanding of the progress achieved so far, including recent developments in AI integration within Drupal, as well as the roadmap for upcoming features and improvements.
The session will include:
* A detailed overview of the current capabilities enabled by the Drupal AI Initiative.
* A forward-looking discussion of upcoming developments, including opportunities for community contribution and experimentation.
* An open “Ask Me Anything” segment, providing participants the chance to engage directly with the initiative’s technical leads, clarify technical questions, and explore integration possibilities.
Context is Everything: Configuring Drupal AI for Consistent, On-Brand Content
AI can generate landing pages, service pages, and blog posts in seconds - but without the right context, the results feel generic, off-brand, or just plain wrong. Context is what takes you from AI-slop to content that is authentic and resonates with your audience.
In this session, we'll show you how to configure Drupal's Content Control Center and Canvas AI to produce content that actually sounds like your organization. You'll see how simple markdown files defining brand voice, tone, and content structure can dramatically improve AI outputs.
Through demos, we'll walk you through creating a landing page, service page, and blog post to demonstrate how different context rules and guidelines can be applied in various applications.
You'll leave with a practical starter framework for building your own context files, plus clear guidance on how to apply it to your Drupal site.
Context Control Center: Bringing AI Context to Drupal CMS
AI in Drupal only looks “smart” when the model knows your organization’s facts, policies, and constraints. That knowledge typically lives in Slack threads, PDFs, and ad-hoc prompts, so outputs can drift and contradict each other. The hard problem is not picking an AI model; it is keeping truth structured, current, and attached to the right workflow.
Context Control Center (CCC) is the perfect context layer in Drupal CMS: a place to author, review, translate, and reuse context items for AI features and agents. Instead of everyone pasting their own detailed prompt, Drupal assembles the right context from one governed library per agent or AI feature. That same library can power help desks with accurate facts and escalation rules, automated emails with required policy text, personalized experiences with region-appropriate guidance, forms where AI follows shared definitions, and site search with clear terms and synonyms.
We’ll cover:
- Creating context sources (guidelines, best practices, expectation docs) that keep agent results more relevant while flowing through CCC governance, scoping, and token limits
- Context scopes, such as language, site section, and use case, that ensure the right context is applied, so support answers never mix with marketing messaging and personalization doesn’t affect the wrong experience
- Context consumers, from agents to automators to translation and validation features, that can be configured to use the most context items relevant
- Best practices for structuring, sizing, and maintaining context so it stays usable and effective alongside Drupal’s AI safety and monitoring tools
Context Control Center: Bringing AI Context Natively to Drupal CMS
AI in Drupal only looks “smart” when the model knows your organization’s facts, policies, and constraints. That knowledge typically lives in Slack threads, PDFs, and ad-hoc prompts, so outputs can drift and contradict each other. The hard problem is not picking an AI model; it is keeping truth structured, current, and attached to the right workflow.
Context Control Center (CCC) is the native context layer in Drupal CMS: a place to author, review, translate, and reuse context items for AI features and agents. Instead of everyone pasting their own detailed prompt, Drupal assembles the right context from one governed library per agent and request. That same library can power help desks with accurate facts and escalation rules, automated emails with required policy text, personalized experiences with region-appropriate guidance, forms where AI follows shared definitions, and site search with clear terms and synonyms.
We’ll cover:
- Context scopes, such as language, site section, and use case, that ensure the right context is applied, so support answers never mix with marketing messaging and personalization doesn’t affect the wrong experience
- Remote context sources (documentation sites, analytics summaries, trusted APIs) that keep context fresh while flowing through CCC governance, scoping, and token limits
- Best practices for structuring, sizing, and maintaining context so it stays usable and effective alongside Drupal’s AI safety and monitoring tools
Accelerating Innovation: The Drupal AI Initiative
AI is reshaping how we build, manage, and scale digital experiences—and Drupal is stepping boldly into this future. The Drupal AI Initiative is a community-led, strategically funded effort to accelerate the adoption of practical, responsible AI in the Drupal ecosystem.
This session will share how the initiative came together, the problems it aims to solve, and the vision driving its roadmap. We’ll highlight funded work tracks—including AI Core, Products, UX, and Marketing—and showcase early results like intelligent content tools, generative workflows, and developer productivity features.
You'll learn how AI is being thoughtfully integrated into Drupal to empower site builders, content creators, and developers—without compromising on flexibility or control. Whether you're curious about contributing, looking to adopt AI features in your projects, or simply want to understand where Drupal is headed, this session will get you up to speed and inspired to get involved.
How a community-led open-source true design system was adopted by the Australian government.
Should governments build and maintain technical solutions, or should they contribute to and support community-led projects?
This potentially controversial statement highlights a choice the Australian government recently faced in their pursuit of improving the digital experience of its citizens.
Learn how they solved this by adopting an open-source design-system created and managed by the open-source community.
The CivicTheme is an open-source, atomic design-based, true design system developed by the community to help government agencies quickly and efficiently build websites.
The CivicTheme design system consists of three layers:
1. Design Layer: A Figma-based visual design system enabling rapid prototyping and high-fidelity designs.
2. Technical Layer: A fully functional set of parity-mapped companion components available in Storybook, designed for seamless collaboration with designers.
3. Theme Layer: Over 60 fully functional components initially developed as a Drupal theme.
This approach might sound familiar; however, it has some fundamental differences in delivering public sector digital projects.
CivicTheme distinguishes itself with a framework of three key governance and compliance pillars:
1. User Research Evidence-Based Framework: Used to assess new component contributions for project giveback.
2. Accessibility Framework: Ensuring compliance with WCAG standards.
3. Security Framework: Ensuring relevant security policies, conventions, and best practices are integrated into the design system.
4.Community led steering committee: with members of the open source community and key government organisations to grow and guide the project.
But first, let's really address the virtual elephant in the room: Is CivicTheme really that different from the USWDS? Well, yes and no.
We’ll discuss the differences between a community-led design system versus a government-led solution, their pros and cons, and how an alternative solution can be highly successful in delivering government websites.
Website failover and disaster recovery strategies to help you sleep better
Failure happens. We’ve all experienced failure, and it's not fun. But, it does give us the opportunity to learn and, ideally, to plan better for the next time disaster strikes.
The web technology stack is ripe for failure because there are often so many pieces at play. Web servers, database servers, content management systems, third-party plugins, caching layers, networks, DNS… not to mention all the people who can bring a website down with the touch of a finger.
Those of us in charge of keeping websites running need to mitigate against potential disasters as best we can so we don’t get a panicked call in the middle of the night.
So let’s talk about…
* Scenarios that bring websites down
* Disaster planning so you are as prepared as possible
* Best practices to lower risks and increase resilience
* Monitoring and testing your website for vulnerabilities
* Failover and disaster recovery options and strategies
With the right preparation, tools, and oversight, you can sleep better at night!
Secure, Performant, Scalable and Green: The big wins of a static Drupal website
Drupal is the swiss-army-knife of content management systems. It provides the flexibility to build pretty much any site you want. This is why so many of us choose Drupal for our backend technology.
**Jamstack vs Static**
You can find tons of resources on Drupal with React, Gatsby, Next, Vue and Nuxt, yet not so much static-focused non-Jamstack content beyond using the Drupal Tome module (which is a great tool!). Why are JavaScript frameworks such a hot Drupal topic yet simple static frontends not so much? I think static Drupal has a marketing problem!
**Benefits of Static**
Drupal provides the tools and workflows that content editors want. With Paragraphs and Layout Builder and Views, there is much to love. But for many sites, they would also reap the benefits of having a fully or mostly static frontend such as:
* Enhanced security
* Increased performance
* Better scalability
* Less CO2 emissions
* Higher Lighthouse scores
* Improved user engagement
It’s often more cost-effective too!
Although you can’t use static for everything, it’s not unusual to be able to leverage a static frontend for a good part of your website while routing dynamic pages back to the Drupal backend. This provides the best of both worlds:
1) Drupal with its flexibility and features, and
2) static with its speed, security, scalability, and better environmental footprint.
Let’s discuss how to leverage a fully or partially static frontend for your Drupal website for all the wins!
How to make big things happen in Drupal
Always wanted to start something new in Drupal or find a place for your coworkers to contribute with a big impact? Join this panel discussion where (former) initiative leads and funders of initiatives discuss success stories and areas to avoid for the benefit of all.
Drupal 10 Readiness Initiative Keynote Q&A
Drupal 9 is expected to have the shortest Drupal major release lifetime in recent history with Drupal 10 planned to be released in the middle of 2022 and Drupal 9 end of life by end of 2023.
In this keynote, we will review some of the highlights from the Drupal 10 initiative. We'll also cover what we learned from the Drupal 8 to 9 transition (so far) and how we plan to make it better for 10.
Drupal Community Events: Organize Locally, Contribute Globally
Gathering our friends, colleagues, and community members together for collaborative learning experiences has been one of the primary ways of growing the Drupal Community throughout our 20 years. Organizers have been working together more closely over the past few years to make it easier for us all to keep events of all sizes moving.
Now, you too can know what we know. We’ll discuss some key resources that can help you help the community grow:
- The Drupal Event Platform helps organizers build an event website out of the box, because a Drupal site shouldn’t be the hardest part of a Drupal event.
- The Drupal.org Community Events listing is the place to share your Drupal event with the world, and you can help us make it better!
- The Planning Drupal Events Contributor Guide is a treasure trove of playbooks and guidance to help at every stage of the event process.
- The Contribution Events Initiative supports promoting and organizing contribution events worldwide and crediting all involved.
Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1P_NuMph4LvtcJKxgBdmEbDk4jyAR2wctw_84OXXd83c/edit?usp=sharing
Community Summit
The Community Summit is open to anyone at DrupalCon, and is designed to connect our amazing community with one another.
It will be a full-day, with morning Working Group/Initiative Keynote Sessions from many of our community leaders and an afternoon Unconference dedicated to exploring the issues that matter most to the Drupal community.
This Summit will be shaped by you - The Community.
For the full detailed schedule of the day, visit: https://events.drupal.org/pittsburgh2023/community-summit
BADCamp 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
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BADCamp 2025 Sessionize Event
DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 Sessionize Event
Bay Area Drupal Camp 2024 Sessionize Event
Drupal GovCon 2024 Sessionize Event
DrupalCon Portland 2024 Sessionize Event
DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023 Sessionize Event
Kristen Pol
Salsa Digital, Drupal AI Initiative Program Manager & QuantCDN, Co-Founder
Santa Cruz, California, United States
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