Thomas Scola (flux423)

I’ve been building with Drupal since version 4.3 in 2003, which means I’ve watched the ecosystem reinvent itself several times. My Drupal.org account only dates to 2008, but like many people working with Drupal in those early years, I was shipping sites long before I got around to creating one.

I’ve also co-managed the Drupal User Group of Maine since 2007.

More than two decades in, what keeps me here isn’t the code. It’s that Drupal solved structured content and governed access before most of the industry understood how important either would become. That discipline matters enormously now.

I’m the founder and CEO of Bluefly.io, a senior-only collective of Drupal and cloud-native practitioners working on complex migrations, scalable architecture, and governed AI agent systems. We build with Drupal 11, Canvas, Single Directory Components, Drupal AI, MCP, and ECA, delivered through GitLab-native workflows.

We also dogfood the standards we create. OSSA-defined agents operate the OSSA ecosystem itself. If a specification can’t run the systems that publish and maintain it, it isn’t ready.

Before founding Bluefly, I was a Technical Account Manager at Acquia, where I managed enterprise accounts and led technical solutions for Professional Services engagements. The work included CMS replatforming, large-scale migrations, and decoupled Drupal architectures for organizations where an outage could become a news story. I’ve also written whitepapers and technical tutorials on decoupled architecture and GitLab CI/CD.

At GitLab, I worked with enterprise teams on pipeline architecture, security, and deployment velocity while serving as a subject-matter expert supporting product development. I left GitLab in March 2026 to focus full time on Bluefly and the open standards work.

My current focus is bringing open agent standards into Drupal.

I created OSSA, the Open Standard for Software Agents: a vendor-neutral specification for defining portable, framework-agnostic AI agents. Think OpenAPI, but for agents. I also created DUADP, a federated discovery protocol that allows those agents to be found across organizational and platform boundaries. Both projects are licensed under Apache 2.0 and have been submitted to NIST.

The problem is simple to state: agent systems are fragmenting across IDEs, model providers, MCP servers, workflow engines, GitLab, Kubernetes, and private enterprise platforms. Without a shared contract layer, every integration becomes bespoke.

MCP connects agents to tools. A2A connects agents to other agents. Neither defines the agent itself.

OSSA does. DUADP makes it discoverable.

The Open Standard Agents module, `ai_agents_ossa`, brings that contract into Drupal’s AI ecosystem. It imports OSSA manifests as configuration entities, derives Drupal AI Agent plugins from them, and maps OSSA capabilities onto Drupal’s Tool API, with integration points for ECA and Canvas.

Drupal is an implementation target for the standard, not a dependency of it. That distinction is deliberate. The moment a standard requires a particular runtime, framework, or vendor, it stops being a standard.

What I care about is portability, community ownership, and the ability to prove what an agent did. Drupal has been practicing that discipline for more than twenty years.

The agent ecosystem is about to learn why it matters.