 All right, well, thanks for joining us again. I am excited to have our second Meet the Candidates session. So for all of our viewers, I do want to run through a few logistics and housekeeping. So here's some notes about how things are going to work today. So first, everyone's on mute to keep the background noise to a minimum. And so for those of you who are panelists, feel free to also do the same. I see most of you have. That's great. But just because you're on mute does not mean we don't want to hear from you. So please do use the Q&A section of your control panel. So you should see that in your Zoom window to ask questions of the candidates. And you can ask something for a particular candidate or general questions that you want to hear from everyone. Here's how the session will work today. We're going to hear statements from the candidates first. So we'll hear just a little bit about who they are and why they're running. And then when that's done, we will go ahead and ask those questions. And folks will get a chance to respond. Candidates, you can respond to any question that you like. If you don't want to respond, that's OK, too. And all you have to do is give me a wave and I'll make note and call on folks and give you a chance to respond. So that's how that will work. And as a reminder, we're recording everything. So if you miss anything or you want to share with colleagues, you can definitely do that. We'll post that recording a little bit later today when it's done. And then as a reminder to everyone who's listening in, your interaction and learning from the candidates does not have to end here. Every candidate has a profile page on the association website where you can actually ask them direct questions there as well. So candidates, remember to check there. Everyone else, feel free to go post questions. Let's keep the conversation going. And I think the last thing I want to say is that voting opens on March 7th. So just keep that date in mind. Please do take the time to vote and encourage folks to do that as well. So those are our logistical announcements. Any questions from anyone before we get going? No. OK. I'm going to take one pause because Enzo just joined as a viewer and I'd like to make him a speaker. But he's not showing up on my list. So you guys give me a second because I can't multitask today. Just don't have it in me. And I will add him as a panelist. So Enzo, if you can hear me, I'm going to add you as a panelist here. In just a second, you're going to get an email to be able to join us. So close to getting this done. I feel like I need dramatic music as I race against the clock. There we go. So Enzo, you should have an email to join us as a panelist to let you log in directly since we can't see the viewers at the moment for some reason. All right. That said, we're going to go ahead and start with the introductions. So again, I'll give you guys two minutes to do intros. There's Enzo. Excellent. And we will start with Alexandru because we'll go alphabetical by first name today. So Alexandru. Hello, everyone. My name is Alexandru Badiou. I come from Romania. I've been a very long Drupal user. I started about 12 years ago. And until about two years ago, I worked with Drupal for almost every day. I co-founded the Romanian Drupal Organization in 2009. And I've participated in organizing the Romanian Drupal camps and various other presentations at different places in order to promote Drupal. I take a special interest in education. I used to teach programming courses at the University of Bucharest. About two or three years ago, I started doing the Global Training Days events here in Bucharest. And in about 10 hours, I will also start doing the first full semester Drupal course at the University of Bucharest, which is a bit scary. And yeah, that's about it. I'm, yeah. Well, thank you. I'm early. I finished early. 10 hours. 10 hours from now, you start that class. All right, we're going to have to make sure that you get some good sleep tonight. All right, after Alexandru, let's go to David. Hi, I'm David Hernandez. I'm in New Jersey in the United States. I've been working in IT for about 20 years in Drupal for about eight years. I'm a local group organizer. Haven't been one of the founding members of the New Jersey group. I do a lot of local meetup organization, help organize camps. I'm a Drupal developer and educator. I've spent a lot of time building websites with Drupal using it as a product. I'm also a core contributor, a mentor. And for the last two years, I was a member of the software working group, one of the governance bodies for the Drupal Association. My current role right now is a new role working with FFW, where I'm the manager of contribution and learning, where I'm focusing on education and internal training of developers and staff, and also working to manage all of the company's contribution efforts to Drupal and the Drupal organization and open source in general. So that's a little bit about me. I encourage you to go look at my profile on the association website to find out more, because I've obviously written a lot more there. The reason I'm running for the board is, obviously, we talk a lot about Drupal the product and a lot of the marketing efforts and things that go into really supporting its worldwide use. But I also want to make sure that we keep a focus on Drupal the people. A lot of effort goes into these local organizations. I want to make sure that the DA continues with that effort. I want to make sure that there's a lot more support available for the individuals involved, developers, everyone else, and that we continue having a voice on the board. Awesome. Thanks, David. All right. And then alphabetically, by first name and by username today is Enzo, who worked out magically. Hi, everybody. My username is Enzo. My name is Eduardo Garcia. I am a Drupal developer from Colombia, in Costa Rica. And I am co-founder of a workshop in Costa Rica named Anexus. And I am also co-founder of the Drupal community in Costa Rica. And I am commandant of the Drupal Project Drupal Council for Drupal 8. And I am running this year for Drupal Association to try to increase the possibilities to have more participation for emerging communities like Costa Rica or Asia on Africa. And right now I am in Singapore in the morning, 4 a.m. Because I am in a tour in Asia to try to encourage community to use Drupal 8, and especially Drupal Council. So I am participating in 18 meetups and a lot of camps in Asia in the next three and a half months. That's it. Excellent. You guys get, like, timely or untimely as we go. Good. Thanks, Enzo. And Jason, you are up next. Thank you. I'll try not to buck the trend for timing. My name is Jason Pimentel. I live in just outside Providence, Rhode Island, in the States. I've been working on the web for a little over 20 years now, and I've been working with Drupal for almost 10, so right around Drupal 5 and beta. And since then I've used it on a lot of projects, but I've also gotten really involved in doing off speaking at Drupal events, at Drupal Cons, the co-founder of the Drupal Meetup in Providence. I've helped at a bunch of camps, like Ned Camp, where actually Holly spoke last year, which was amazing, and the design for Drupal event in Boston, and also co-founder of the Talking Drupal podcast with a bunch of really good friends. And over the years, I just really enjoyed being a part of the community in any way that I can. And as a designer, I really would like to be involved in the board in order to help ease the onboarding path and participation for designers and just non-technical people in general. We actually had a great conversation on Twitter today about a UX designer in Red Hat, side Toronto who wants to get involved and didn't know how. So just being able to kind of loop people in and help ease that path into contributing to the Drupal product and the Drupal community is something that's really important to me. Great. Thanks, Jason. And you did not buck the trend. Right on time. Good. So, Jason, after that is Matthew. He's going to find the Unmute button. Matthew. OK, look. Yep. OK, he's got it. It's right there. There we go. Sorry. I've got that horrible beach ball going on right now on my computer. And it's, yeah. So anyway, my name is Matthew Saunders. I'm currently one of your elected Drupal Association board members. And I'm looking to be re-elected to continue the work that I've been doing. And I thought it would be helpful to sort of share a little bit of that. I've been chairing the Governance Committee for the last two years. And highlights of that have included implementing board member term limits, which is really important for people to not burn out, increasing the term of elected members to two years, and staggering those elected members' terms so they overlap. Basically, I'm a governance geek, and I very much enjoyed that work. And I want to keep doing it. I also helped craft the current vision and mission of the Association through a series of workshops that we had. And I helped in the fundraising for Drupal 8 Accelerate. Personally, I have nearly 20 years of technology experience and non-profit experience. In the Drupal world, I'm a project manager, and I've worked as an independent consultant at a small business center, as a tech leader for the migration examiner.com, from Colfusion to Drupal 7, as a leader in agencies. And currently, through Atnovation, I'm the engineering lead for Pfizer's health care professional portal. Why am I an ideal candidate? My time over the last nine years is focused on the community. I've been working with non-profits, non-profits boards, not just the Association, but with schools as well. Got a ton of experience with different cultures, working with a team that spans the United States, Europe, United Kingdom, India, Canada. I'm a citizen of Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. My master's degree is focused on non-profit governance and technology. Helped organize Drupal on Denver. Helped organize Drupal Camp Colorado for the last eight years. Spoken at a lot of different group events. And very much, I want to finish up my work as a community representative. So I'm hoping that I'll be granted that opportunity to serve for just two more years. So thanks very much. Hopefully, that was within the two and a half minutes. Yeah, you did great there. Awesome. And Michael, you're up next. Hello. Yes, my name is Michael. Or some, a lot of people actually know me with my username Schnitzel. So I myself have also a candidate profile. So if you want to know more about me, how the name comes, just look there. But I myself have been active for more than six years in the Drupal community, and I've done a lot of different things. So I know the community, how it works. But I also work with people all over the world. We have a company in three different continents. So I know the different needs and the different ways of communicating that people do in different cultures. And I also understand the struggles their local community has, especially when I go to the different places like Cape Town or others, how they see the community, what issues they have. And also I have experience as a board member myself. I'm a board member of AMAZ and also a board member at the Front End Conference Zurich annual conference at the Organize. What I would like to do during my term is make it easier for the community to engage with the board and especially the large members. I've seen myself, people asking questions, how can we interact? How can we bring our ideas? There is a lot of great ideas in the community to make the duplication better, to make the community better. But there's no real way to communicate that. So, and because there are only two community representatives at the board, I think it's really important that we find a way for people to get in contact. And I would like to do that with, that we have sessions and boss at camps where people can bring in their ideas. And maybe even as we talked yesterday about it, having a website like change.org for Drupal where people can bring in ideas and we can vote about them. And I think that would make it much better for the community to involve. So, that's me. Go to the website and vote for Schnitzel. Thank you. Thanks Michael. And Rajit, you are up next. Yeah, thanks Holly. Hello everyone, I'm Rajit from Mumbai. This is just hosted Drupal Corn Asia. I've been involved in Drupal community for last six years, six and a half years. And it's been an amazing experience. And it was kind of serendipity. I was working on an NGO site while I was in my college and that is how I discovered Drupal. And I didn't knew that time that Drupal would be my career. Later, I was working in a Drupal organization in Mumbai and I realized, how great is this community when I first met Riz in 2011 when he visited Mumbai. And that time, there wasn't a big community here in Mumbai but that time I realized that let's do something. We started a Drupal Mumbai community with five members in 2011. And now we have more than 700 persons in this community. I've seen it growing and I love the way Drupal community is so involving, great. I have taken several initiatives in Drupal community, Mumbai, like there's an education program called Drupal campus ambassador program, which I'm running right now, as well as we are also working on introducing Drupal to government in India. So that's pretty much about me. Currently working with Tata consultancy services as a technical architect, thank you. Thanks, Ratchit. Just in two minutes. Yeah, you did a great job, especially for 1.30 in the morning. All right, two left, Shannon, you are up and then we'll finish with Tom. Okay, on my profile, there's a lot more information about who I am and what I've done but just to give you a short overview, I've been working with Drupal for about six years. I immediately and very excitedly wanted to get involved in core and thought that it was an amazing opportunity to contribute back and so I did that for a while and now I really want to find a new mission. So when I heard about this opportunity, I decided to run so that I could try and put my skills to use. My background is in project management, program management and more important program creation. I feel like that's really where I can bring the most to this role as someone who has a lot of experience and has spent the last decade essentially building different programs for different people so that I can bring that to bear. So hopefully that's what I can do for you and I think I have one minute left so I'll try and be quick. I have seen a lot and done a lot in my time working on Drupal 8. I also feel like it really helped me to get in touch with the community and find out especially through the cons and camps that I went to and spoke at that there's a lot that needs to be changed and fixed in order for the community to have a better, more integrated experience in core and contribute projects. So I'd really like to focus on that and I know it's kind of vague but there's more information on the profile about that so I'll let you guys read that. Just sign off before I run out of time. Thanks, Shannon. And Tom, why don't you round that out for us? All right, thank you, Ollie. My name's Tom Grandi. I'm from Ohio and I work for a nonprofit that serves 23 different school districts and three county area. So we're a really very small shop which is basically me and one other person who wears many other hats. I think I got involved with Drupal around 2010. Like Shannon in 2011, Chicago Drupalcon was my first Drupalcon that I went to and at that time was just amazed with the amount of enthusiasm that people had at the time. It was something that we lucked out with by joining up with Acquia to transition a lot of school districts into something that we thought would have a long lasting value to them away from a third party application that we had. But anyway, I've been building sites since 99. Very small in my scope. I definitely haven't served on any boards. I haven't been part of a Drupal release. I'm just a guy in a very small shop building Drupal sites. So that's about it. Thank you. All right, thanks Tom. All right guys, we made it through phase one which was introducing yourselves. You all did a beautiful job. Congratulations. That means you're all winners and we're all moving on to phase two. Which is the Q and A phase. So continue today. Sorry. So the way that we'll do Q and A is I will ask a question. I've got some questions here for folks. We're also taking questions from the community but I'll ask those questions and then anyone who wants to respond just give a wave and I will call on folks and you have one minute to give a response and don't feel like you have to answer a question if you don't want to but everyone who wants to, we'll get it a turn as well. So that's what we're gonna do. And I'm gonna start because we have a good community question in the hopper. So I'm gonna start there today. And that question is from our friend Steve Perkis who says basically, our job at the association is to support the community as a whole. And we definitely, as Steve puts it, we seem to have a choice this year between different sort of minority groups to support. And I think what we mean is minority in the sense of small groups of people who have issues that they really want to see resolved. How do you use your role as a board member to support these groups that want to move things forward? How do you see helping the association navigate that? So ideas would be like, would you campaign for more at-large spaces on the board? The sort of Congress idea that's been brought up, what are some of the other, what are the ways that you help the DA negotiate the various interest groups that are coming to the association with agenda items to fulfill? Hopefully that made some sense. All right, Shannon, your hand went up, so I'm calling on you. I said this yesterday as well, but I feel like it's really hard to have a coherent response when there's a lot of people that are talking. And I think it's really important to have a centralized group of people like the board who are going to prioritize requests, but also be a sounding board. So when you're talking about minorities, they're heard and there's things to keep in mind. First of all, you want to make sure that they do get a voice and secondly, you want to make sure that there's not so many voices that it becomes too many things to focus on. So I think the important thing to do in that case is to get a network of people locally that will filter up information that's prioritized from those groups. And that way the minority does get heard and it's important to make sure that those networks are international and multicultural so that we cover all our bases. Awesome, thank you. I totally forgot to turn the timer on. You guys are supposed to keep me in check, but I'm sure that was fine. All right, and then I see Schnitzel and Tom and then Jason. Yes, I don't think that just putting more people on the same board will any help. Being a board member myself, I know exactly that just having more opinions doesn't help and especially a board should make strategic decisions. So you don't need a lot of people for that, but we need a lot of information. And so knowing, for example, about the German community is that at one point, I think it was in Prague, we all discussed like let's define one person from Germany that is like a bit responsible for that. And that completely backfired because we had issues and suddenly the community started to fight who is actually responsible. So I think having a lot of different groups is really hard to define one person is responsible, but we can let people themselves. At the end in a community like us, what we really can provide is time. So if people think they wanna spend time and they wanna bring the information from the community up, so we can make them ambassadors and say like, hey, that person, if you have time, go and speak to them and they can then talk to us, the large members, that we only need to in the board and can bring up the ideas. So I think we cannot really force it from the board point, we have to allow the community themselves to form but definitely find ways to bring the information back to the board. Okay, thanks. All right, I said Tom, Jason and then Ratchet and then Alexandru and I see you to Matt. So Matthew will do next, but Tom. All right, thank you. I really like the ideas that Shannon and Michael brought up earlier, as far as trying to get ideas from the community all the way up to the board, as far as growing the board with additional members, I don't think that's necessarily a good idea. Trying to have a Congress or people within different countries, I think is gonna be chaotic and hard to have any cohesiveness to. The idea of, I just really like the idea that Shannon and Michael brought up as far as having something like where the people can propose an idea, petition something and then have other people vote it up through the channels and get to the board for to take on as far as an idea. Otherwise, it would be very hard for somebody at a level like mine to actually get an idea that might be very good into the ears of the board. So thank you. Thanks Tom. All right, Ratchet. I feel the voice of minority should be listened. It's what Drupal community is all about, inclusiveness. So the way it can be done is the Drupal community representative could get in touch with Drupal association or the board member to pitch their voice like it's been done or the community leaders. I think that's the way we can include them and also based on the kind of impact they're gonna bring on Drupal community and Drupal project also makes a way for it. Great, thanks Ratchet. I skipped over Jason. So we're gonna do Jason and then Alexander and then Matthew. Okay, thank you. So I think Tom does bring up a good point about the idea of a Congress, but I'm not sure that I'm ready to give up on that because I think that this notion of representing groups across the Drupal community is a really important one, but I think it might be interesting to give it some more thought and is it necessarily just geographic or are there effectively like representatives from other groups, people who like to write documentation, people who like to work in design. But I think finding a structure for these different groups and constituencies in our community to have a voice I think is really important. I think geographic is certainly a natural starting point, but I do like that sort of second round that form of people involved in the board but not necessarily on the board that help make that conduit possible from the community at large, filtering things up in a way that is meaningful and manageable. Awesome, thanks Jason. All right, Alexander and David, I'll get you too. I see you. Sorry, the Zoom window popped over with logging in. I kind of agree with everyone else. So I'm going to echo their ideas, unfortunately. I think the biggest issue here is making sure that somebody who maybe is not, let's say very big in the community or very active can actually have a good idea, can collaborate with other people on that good idea and that idea can actually surface to the association. So maybe improve the group system to allow for more collaborative tools and make it easier for people to self-organize because trying to enforce groups or electing leaders can go bad. Yeah, and I guess it's close to what I was talking about last time about electing some sort of groups or associations from different countries starting with that and then moving forward. Thank you. All right, Matthew and then we'll have David. So really it's core, this is about giving people a voice and it's something that I've been struggling with, not struggling, it's a wrong word, it's something that I've been engaged with with Pfizer where we've got community members who are from all around the world ranging from Egypt to the US, from France to Spain, from the UK to Australia, just all over the place. And every single one of them wants to have changes made to the platform that we work on. It's distributed and shared across the entire community. What we've done there is we've created these small groups that go to each of the markets and they identify the changes that people want and they bring them back to a change board which I sit on and we meet on a weekly basis with these different community members and talk about what their specific needs are. And it goes through, and some of the markets are really small, some of them are tiny. And the ideas that come from some of those tiny markets are some of the best ideas. So we ended up in a situation where everybody is getting equal voice regardless of whether they're from Morocco or whether they're from the United States. I think that's really important. I think we could do something quite similar with the association. Okay, thanks Matthew. David? Hi, so I just wanted to add a few things. I agree with what most people are saying where not necessarily adding more people to the board because really adding more people into our room full of people trying to make decisions is a good thing. And I agree that we definitely have to find a way to make sure that the ideas that are coming from these local organizations can bubble up so that even individuals can get their voices heard and if they have great ideas, it can find its way to the DA and to the board. But what I think is also equally important is I think the board could do more in the way of outreach and making themselves visible and communicate with people because I think that doesn't happen enough. I bet if you were to pull most people involved in the community, most people that have Drupal.org accounts don't even know that the board exists, don't know who's on the board, don't know any of the things that the board actually does. And I find that just being visible, going to events, talking to people and creating a conduit for communication is one of the best ways to actually find out what these ideas are and find out what the problems are that are affecting people in a lot of these organizations. And I would really push for the board to do more of that. Great, thanks. And so did you want to weigh in here? Yeah, sure. To be honest, all the proposals everybody say is really good. So I don't have anything else to summarize. That works. All right. I just want to make sure we give you a shot there. Good, all right. Well, I'm going to dig a little deeper into this one because I think that the issue that Steve referenced in his question is one that is pretty interesting. I'll put it in the chat as well. Here's the title of the issue. So it cracks me up. It doesn't crack me up. It's not funny. It's not like that. It's just I think it's a really good example of the community and the association and the tension that Steve's question raises. So the title of the issue is Push to Get the Drupal Organization to Update the Drupal Forums by Petitioning to Move the Forums to Stack Exchange. And I think that the sort of you can read the entire issue started about seven months ago. It's got some several hundred comments by now or something. But I think that the just the issue is that the forums need some work. It's not on the prioritized list of Drupal Association work on Drupal.org. And to date, we have been slowly working on improving tools for folks to be able to contribute to Drupal.org from the community. But it's really it's just it's not easy because the site is really complex. We're not a typical Drupal site. So there's frustration out there. And the association's been trying to work to manage that and give folks wins where we can. But again, it wasn't on the prioritized list of work that was prioritized with the working groups and the board. So where as a board member, where would you feel like it's right to step in and in either help this group get heard and take action? Or do you feel like that's an association call and that's a staff move? Or what's the role of the board in helping resolve these kinds of issues? Call it, Matthew, I'll take your hand. I think that this is getting into the weeds. And the specific technology like this really, really falls to the staff does not fall to the board at all. The staff should be an institution where they can listen to some of these challenges and help us prioritize what the level of anxiety is around the challenge and then raise it up to the board as a strategic issue rather than the board getting into the weeds. So I think that our role here is to listen and then ultimately strategize and pass on the decisions that we've made to the staff to implement on. But we shouldn't get into the weeds. All right, thanks. And Jason, I think I saw you and then Alexander. Well, I feel like I land somewhere in between the premise of that question and I think what Matthew was bringing up. Because it's true that if the board tried to weigh in on every single one of these issues, it would be crippling. But I think that establishing an easier framework for which these things, in a way for these things to get sorted out, I mean, it could be something where that could be an opportunity for someone to do a little fundraising to develop money and time to address one of these issues. And I think that's an entirely legitimate similar to what we were talking about the board doing to strategically provide funding for certain aspects of development. So I think it's important for us to help create pathways for these things to happen, more so than to necessarily weigh in on getting involved and doing them directly. Thanks. All right, Alexander, and then I see that you want to respond Shannon as well. So you'll go next. I don't think that the board necessarily needs to weigh in on these issues. What I do think needs to happen is one for the board to try to make sure that at least the major issues are taken into account. And second of all, to try to mediate between the people who are requesting these things and the people who actually know more about those things and have the technological or the more knowledge about it. Because even if people, for example, in this particular case, people are very well-intentioned and they say, ooh, you know, Stack Overflow is really nice. Let's move to forums. As you said, it's not a simple Drupal site. You might not see everything that's behind the scenes and it might not be a viable solution. And maybe the association doesn't know that, but there are people inside the association or the people who the association knows that can mitigate and can know how to address that issue. I'm gonna stop now. All right, thanks. All right, we're gonna go Shannon and then I saw you, David and Tom, so you guys will go next and then Ratchett. Okay, I wanted to say that I agree with Matthew that discussing which tool is getting a bit into the weeds. That said, I think that there needs to be, the UXer in me wants to ask the question, why? What's prompting that discussion and is there a way that maybe, is there something that we're missing that the community needs that we're not meeting or addressing? And that would be my response to that type of question, not like, oh yeah, we should change tools, but tell us why this tool specifically, because maybe there's something that we can do on the board to influence, sorry, Jason, influence what they're really looking for and not get so much into a tool debate of which tool is better than what. Yeah, great. All right, David. So as one of the few people that's actually been neck deep in those conversations, having gone through the experience of doing the prioritization work for Drupal Network software and particularly the conversations around the form issue, I agree with what everyone else is saying that the board's not gonna get that involved, but the board I think definitely needs to pay attention because those are the types of issues that generate a lot of passion and vitriol and can eventually cause problems. But I think people from all sides need to be mindful of the fact that those are that issue and a few others like that are the kind that will have no real happy answer for everyone involved. And that's one of the things I think people are gonna have to realize is that, especially with prioritization work where even if people agree that certain things are important, it's not always feasible to do it within a certain quarter or within a certain year and yeah, it becomes one of those things where you have to have tough conversations and maybe come up with solutions that aren't always optimal for the people that are involved. True that, thank you and Tom and Michael, I see you too. I have to go back to agree with Matthew and Shannon as far as getting into the weeds, but there are people who feel vehemently that they would like to have something like this changed and as a board member or as a board, you can't ignore the fact that those discussions are going on. To actually bring them into a discourse of some sort is important for some subcommittee way out there, but at least to make people feel like they are getting their voices heard and it may be a better tool, but I don't know, as far as board members are taking action on that, I don't think that's the time or place. Great, Rache. Yep, so I believe the voice that comes from the community has to be carefully evaluated on what kind of impact it's gonna bring. If the forum stack flow or flow kind of forum is gonna bring the big impact, yes it should go higher on the prioritization and how we can do that is, maybe we can find ways to tap the power of community. Like somebody was referring, maybe generate some fund and take it as a separate project. Maybe DA do not take it directly, but community does it. So it could be a community initiative. Thanks. And Enzo? Yes, well, I think maybe this start for the board look cool as I get into the quiz, not to say, but the burden is we need to, as a board, we need to look a little more behind because this kind of initiative is like a, the community trying to transmit the message. It's the same, that looks like, and is my opinion, like about the forums in the same way the IRC, it's technically functional, but it's not really getting engaged with the community. That is the reason because in other countries, I could have said half examples, in China and in Japan, they use a really alternative network to try to communicate with the local community. And that is because, that is because we don't have the proper channels and dynamic enough to try to generate this engagement with the rest of the community around the world and with the local community. So I think it's beyond the forums we need to discuss about what is the proper team to do to try to facilitate the communication in several levels. Great. And Michael. Yes, thank you. I think I had now enough time to scroll through and I mean, one of the really interesting comments that I see there, and I quote this, so many good ideas all completely ignored by the Drupal organization. And I think that's for me, that's the most of it. It's not about people wanna change something or not wanna change something, it's just clearly misunderstanding of how a system works, how that just not replying doesn't mean like destroying an idea or so. And I think that's the board's responsibility to make sure that people that have ideas or heard that they get an answer. It even starts, the whole thread starts that something has been dropped without telling. And I think definitely are not a community in any way that tries to do something without telling each other why. I mean, I see so many discussions of people explaining each other why things are like they are. And that's really good because only then we can really make sure that everybody understands. So I think we're missing a bit of way of explaining people that some things cannot be the high priority at all time. And I feel the more and more I think about change the Drupal.org has to happen. So I think something where to see where is the current status of something really cool. Yeah, so I have a follow up from Steve in the chat actually. So we do have the community initiative process that we've been working on this, right? Trying to figure out how to empower the community more to do things. And that's also a choice, right? We can choose to spend time doing work directly on Drupal.org to make improvements or we can choose to put some or all of our resources into making it easier for the community to contribute to Drupal.org. Where do you think we should be prioritizing our time? All right, Michael. I think if we look at how the Drupal cons are organized it's a really good way. So I've been multiple times part of the content team that chooses the sessions. And there, the hard work is all done by volunteers. So let's say the community initiative is there. Wait, did you just say all the hard work is done by the volunteers? No, no, I'm just teasing you. I'm just saying about the session selection. Yeah, yeah, okay. The session selection is completely done by volunteers but the staff make sure that all the information is there, that the stuff can be decided, that everybody knows. So it's basically the facilitator between the volunteers. And I think that's why, where I see, and that's also a lot of hard work, even sometimes even more hard work than just choosing some sessions. But it definitely has to be the place where volunteers can go and say, yeah, I wanna help, how can I help? And then it's the staff or the globalization that connects them. The problem is though, we have to get rid of hoping that things are done in specific time because at the end it's all volunteer based. And we cannot expect from people that they spend hours every day to work on something. And because if we do that, then we end up in me giving sessions again at Drupal Conservoir Burnouts and how to prevent them. So, but I think the Drupal Association can be more in the place of making sure that volunteers and the community can help them. Thanks, Shrevel, sorry for interrupting you. I know what you do, Eri. All right, I know you know. All right, we're gonna take Shannon next and then Matthew, I see your hand. I actually think Michael said a lot of what I was gonna say. To recap, I think there's a way to let the information trickle up about what needs to get done. And if you're going to focus your energy, it really depends on what's being asked. So that question is tough to answer because in certain cases, it's good to focus your energy on doing something if it's going to make a big enough impact. And then other cases, it's best to try and enable the community. So my answer is gonna be kind of tricky in that I would say it really depends on which type of system you're talking about. Did I lose you guys? Sorry, I'm getting that unstable connection. No, we got you there. Okay. Good, I'm gonna go ahead and move on to Matthew and I see Ratchet and Zo and Alexandru. So I 100% agree with Schnitzel on the whole burnout issue. We've seen it. We've seen people who've left the community because of it. We're gone away for periods of time because of it. And I think a big part of what we need to do as an association is create opportunities whereby people can contribute. And maybe those contributions aren't all volunteer contributions. We've got an amazing example in D8 Accelerate where when we've got somebody who's carefully organizing what needs to get done and lining up the people to do it, we can actually pay people to do some really amazing work and accelerate projects in astonishing ways. Tons of other open source communities engage in fundraising for these kinds of things. And I think this past year, we really proved that we can leverage the community in really positive ways like this and that's what I would encourage us to do. Thanks. All right, Ratchet? Well, I believe it has to be a balanced methodology where Drupal Association gives the guidance, shows the path and community, where we get all the community initiatives. We get them all the right resources so they do their job. A very good example here is what I've seen as Drupal Campus Ambassador program where D has provided all kinds of resources and help to move ahead. So D is not directly involved, but it is helping us to execute that. I think that model works. Great. And Enzo? I think the Drupal Association Board obviously has a mixed kind of decision. So the first one is we need to check out what is the needs, the borrow vision about the future of the Drupal community, taking account the staff and the budget they have to try to secure some ideas. And also, but the community has always been there. So maybe in some specific matters, obviously we need to take more participation of the Drupal community, but in others it could be completely independent. So it's just a matter of negotiation what is in the table and what is the budget we have, what is the staff we have, and what is the level of participation for the new initiative. So in some projects, we could take more advantage of the community and in some projects we could be more independent. This is an open source project so the community will be there. So we just need to choose what battles we need to fight. Thank you. And Alexander? I agree with Shannon and everyone else. I don't think we should focus on one or the other. I think there should be a balance specific to each case, but I do think on the other hand that it probably would be a good idea to give some sort of voice to the local communities because they could bring up and surface situations that are local, for example, and where people who can and want to contribute but don't know how. And they could bring that to the association's attention much easier than trying to go for groups, forums, or whatever. Okay. Good. All right. David, Jason? You guys want to weigh in? Are we good? All right, David, and then Jason, sorry. So I think I'll be the one person that maybe disagree. Having been involved with this for the last two years, working on with the software working group and the changes for Drupal.org, I can tell you that it's not a particularly easy task to get volunteer contributions in to make software changes. And it's one of the biggest challenges that I think the DA staff faces when trying to make these changes to Drupal.org that people don't really realize. Because Drupal.org is a big, fairly complicated site. It's one of the largest Drupal sites in the world. And people don't realize that it's not just a question of getting volunteers to show up and do a certain amount of work and then put a feature in. There's a lot of work that goes into the staff side of that in deploying features, but also having to do code review on all of that work that's done. And that's some of the things that take away from their time working on other initiatives that are being asked for. So it's a very difficult balancing act that I think a lot of people don't realize. But it's definitely not something that I think the staff are gonna ignore going forward because this is what those community initiatives are part of and that's why they're being posted there. Just sort of figure out a way to really get those volunteer efforts in and make them more effective. But you have to be really careful about how it's done because it's not as simple as just having people show up to code and then submit the code and we're done. Awesome. And then Jason. Well, I think I can keep this pretty brief because I think there have been just a ton of really great ideas put forth, but David does bring up a really good point about that sort of rubber meets the road getting those changes in. But where I think the association can provide some help and guidance is in the weight for the community to voice and vote for things that are important to them and then establish a funding goal. And actually use that as the mechanisms. So if it's really important to a segment of the community to make improvements to the forum, establish a goal for fundraising for that and then that money can go towards resources directly controlled by the staff that run Drupal.org to augment and tackle those things. And so that way you don't get into, okay, we had somebody work on something and hacking away at this, but now we have to review the code. We have to integrate, we have to do all of these things, but channel the funding in to the people who are already there doing the work to increase that capacity. Awesome. All right, Tom, I think I wanna make sure I didn't miss your hand. Sure, I think some of this goes back to the whole petitioning idea that have a good idea, put it out there, see if it comes to the top, see how many people vote for it. And that way you have some feedback from the community to decide on, or at least give the board some feedback on what could be done or what should be done. And then the board can either take action or allocate funds as needed. If they think that's something that the majority of the users that are the community thinks really needs to be taken care of then it should become an initiative. Awesome. Okay. Well, I think I've played enough bait the candidates with complicated issues today. We'll give them on some other topics. Those are really good. So another question for you guys. We, one of the things I'd love to hear from you guys is what is a bright spot that you have seen in the association over the last few years, something that you think is exactly what the association should be doing and the way the association should be doing it. What is, you know, do you have an example of that? Something you wanna see more of? And what does that more look like to you? All right, Jason, and then we'll go Schnitzel and then Tom. Well, I think we've been talking about the DEAT Accelerate thing, but I think what is more, I think, broad and important at a grassroots level is the way that more resources have been gathered up and made available to run small local camps. And I know that it's still, you know, it still can require a little bit of persistence to get the funding part to work out, but I know that's been a huge assistance for a lot of camps to be able to get sponsorships and things like that run through the Drupal Association and it's made it possible to get better sponsorship contributions from a lot of, a lot more organizations. And so I think that that's been a real highlight in enabling more of these events to happen with a lot less work on the part of the individuals that are trying to put them on. Thanks. All right, Michael and we'll do Tom and Shannon and then Ratchet and Alexandru. So I basically could exactly repeat what Jason said. That was my initial idea. I think I was one of them was was really longly pushing for the Drupal Association needs to support the events and the camps specifically. I know we had a lot of discussion with a lot of different people. I think we're getting there. So I want to take another point, which is I have to say when Drupal Aid launched and the website Drupal.org changed, my mind was blown. And then later on I figured out how much work that actually went into it. And I have to say I'm really proud of the Drupal.org website now. It is much better in explaining what Drupal Aid is about, what it is and it's getting better and better in not showing also focusing for people that want to decide about Drupal, not only that want to write an issue and upload a page and something. So I have to say I was really impressed of the work that Drupal Association did there. I think we can still do more. There is still more improvement, especially I would like to see more case studies on there because when I see a lot of people decide about what is already built in Drupal, so show me that. But we are making a huge step forward what we need. So good job Drupal Association. Okay, thanks. That's better than being called a rotting fish. Yeah. Tom. Sure. I think as everybody has said, the D8 Accelerate was an excellent first time to see something like that. Take an idea and push it forward and make it actually succeed in a very short period of time, relatively short period of time to make something succeed. I would like to see that Drupal Association take on some projects that might not have been thought of before. Kind of like, yeah, the funding for some of the camps and whatnot is wonderful, but like Ratchett's idea where he's doing the Drupal Ambassadors program, I think that's wonderful. I think that's higher education level. We're possibly looking at even the secondary level for the rest of the world, the high schools or whatever you call it in your country to try and get, there's a lot of Drupal, or I'm sorry, Co.org going in and a lot in the United States, a lot of trying to get computer programming back into the curriculum and possibly if Drupal can, the Association could go hand in hand and try and make some of that happen as well with funding. That would be awesome and I'll be quiet. Thanks. Good work. All right, Shannon. Sorry, I'm back. So I was basically gonna say everything that everyone else said as well. Classic when you go at the end, but basically I do really feel that the Association has had a big impact on people getting to camps and cons myself, especially the Drupal Association gave me a scholarship and sent me to Australia where I got to present and impact community there and do all sorts of fun things. So I've experienced it firsthand and I would like to see them do more of that because I think that it gets people more involved in the community and it also creates more opportunities for them to do stuff. So having more scholarships, having more impact on camps and cons and getting more speakers and even speakers outside of our community would be great. And I think that that's one way that we can really move things forward. Thanks, Shannon. And Racha, Alexandra, and then I saw you, Matthew. So I think engaging local communities is something where I've seen drastic change in last one year. So something that we're discussing last year in the same time in the board elections. I've seen the approach of Drupal Association in which reaching out to local community, understanding their voice and initiatives and actions they are taking has been really encouraging in developing certainly at Drupal Community in India. Really appreciate that. It can done in a more better way, maybe understanding local community to better. Maybe Enzo is traveling, I think on Asia tour and, so maybe he can stress more on that, but I've really seen that making good impact in community. Thanks, Racha. Okay, we're gonna go to Alexandra and then Matthew, David and Enzo. So I'm gonna pick two. The community cultivation grants is something that I really liked. And also the Global Training Days events because from my experience doing Global Training Days, it helped me reach people who otherwise either never saw Drupal or saw Drupal once and got very scared. And people who would have never come to an even local Drupal camp or meeting because they were so scared. But the allure of having a free day of training and it really helped them. And these are the two if I had to pick two, I would pick these two. That's great. Thank you. And Matthew. So I'm gonna choose something that most people here wouldn't have the opportunity to see. And I think it's a tribute to a certain extent to you, Holly. And that is the fact that the organization is now being run on metrics. In the past, the organization was being run really, really through get feel, does this feel right because it does not feel right. And at this point, the metrics that have been put in place allow for forecasting, really smart forecasting around what's gonna happen in the organization as we move forward in time. And that's allowed for thoughtful governance behind the scenes, excellent fiscal responsibility and challenges that have produced great outcomes. That's what I'm the most proud of. And it's something that people don't see. And because they don't see it, they don't know about it. And if it weren't working right, everybody would hear about it. So good on you, Holly. I appreciate that with the work that you put into it. Thanks. See, I asked this question just so I could feel good about myself. David. Yeah, I was just gonna say, was this question planted just to get praise? No, I just thought, you know, we've been talking about problems for the last half an hour. Let's talk about things that we want to do more of that are working. Yeah. So yeah, I was gonna say something slightly different that having seen this from inside and out, I really appreciate how patient most of the DA is and DA staff because I think a lot of people in the community don't realize that you Holly and a lot of other people pretty much just take crap from every single direction. And most of us don't like having one boss, but most of the DA has about 10,000 bosses and it's a really difficult thing to balance when you have so many different priorities and so many different people yelling at you what they want when they want it and why isn't it happening now? And everyone that I've talked to from you, Holly, Josh, everyone else, I always see smiles no matter how difficult the conversations are or last and that's really a welcoming attitude to have. Awesome, thank you. And though. Okay, I think one of the big hits of the Drupal Association is the organization of DrupalCon, especially starting from DrupalCon France, I guess, Paris because that started beginning of a change in how big and how engagement with the community and companies are there. So this is a big success. But I want to see more changes in terms of how initiative to bring the community. So one thing I really want to see in Google.org is officially webinars in multi-languages hosted by community leaders that could be shared in the mother talk because that will be embraced more people like officially we are doing more stuff online for an introduction. And the cause of that could be minimal because I am sure we could find volunteers to lead this kind of session with good quality in Japanese, Korean or whatever language you want. So and that will be generated initiative. So this kind of stuff I really appreciate and will be thinking about in Drupal Association. Thank you. Okay, I'm just going to point out for anyone who's watching the recording or listening in at this point that the webinar chat might be the funniest thing that's ever happened. I'm hoping that I can post that alongside the recording later. I really appreciate the Shan Anagans pun. So thank you guys for coming to the chat, so entertaining while your answers are so thoughtful. It's hilarious. Okay, next question for the group. I'm going to shift a little bit. We all know that the community has to keep bringing new people into the Drupal project to keep it growing and vibrant, to replace folks who have to move on from the community. So we need to bring those newcomers in and you guys may have seen the user research that we did. David's raising his hand to, he wants to answer this question first. I see that. You guys may have seen the user research we did where we talked about what did newcomers want from the site, for example. So there's the Drupal.org aspect and then there's the whole larger community as well, the way we represent ourselves in cons and out at other events, et cetera. So how do you feel or what role do you think the association should be playing? How can we promote welcoming newcomers into the Drupal community? What should we be doing? And I'm going to call on David first because he accused me of never seeing his hand and then I'm going to go to Enzo and then Jason. Right, so I actually have a session submission for New Orleans about this for a core conversation if anyone's interested and want to push and get that accepted. We can talk more about this in New Orleans. It's something I've been analyzing for a while and thinking a lot about with community growth and how big our numbers have gotten, but in many ways I feel that some of those numbers aren't good enough because it masks some of the problems that we have with a limited number of resources to do certain things. So we do have a lot of developers but we also are limited in numbers of developers that we have who can actually work on certain problems and most of the work for core for example is still done by an actually small number of people. And we do a lot of things that are sort of casting a wide net like the really large sprints that we do during Drupal cons. And I don't want to take away from those but I would like to actually see more effort put towards supporting local groups because I think that's where most contributors actually come from. I don't often find myself motivated just randomly by something that I see on Drupal.org. I'm motivated by working on problems with other people that I actually know locally and that's how I've gotten involved in doing core development. And I'd also like to see us really think about possibly a real one-on-one mentoring program for developers and contributors to actually take that sort of next generation of people and get them from being the kind of people who contribute every once in a while but are motivated and have some of our top flight people to really mentor them and turn them into a much better contributor so that they can be that next group and expand that small group that's at the top. Thanks, David. All right, we're gonna go to Enzo next and then I see you, Alexander, after Jason and then Tom. I think as we mentioned in the previous session, multilingual is one of the key. The second one in my mind is half-webinar in multilingual but maybe the most important for me is we could benchmark for other open search projects that have a multilingual manual and not translated documentation. It's like I have a kickoff start like a house to start, how to configure until to get a coin where you get hooked with the tool because when you are newly in this and you are doing search in Drupal, it's hardly difficult to try to be in contact with local community because the newcomers, obviously they came from here for the internet, right? If a person from, let's say from Romania is going to Drupal.org and he is totally new in Drupal and he could find some initial information in Romanian to try to get in into a point. He could get a Drupal functional and running. This person will be joined to the project more easily if instead of he find a war in his beginning. Thank you. All right, we're gonna go Jason, Alexander, Tom, Ratchet and Matthew. You know, as someone who's been involved in running a local meetup as I'm sure many of us are but one that really struggles to get people to show up, I think that's actually an area where we as a group could probably do more to provide materials and strategies. I think that's really the key. It's getting people in the door, people who are using Drupal but not taking advantage of the community because just installing it really gets you only half of it. It's once you find the mentors, find the people that can help you answer those like crazy little questions that there's no documentation for and obviously those things can be better but there's really nothing that beats the enthusiasm of someone sitting down with you right then and there to say, hey, let's solve this problem for you. And it's some of the most successful things that we've done in our meetup have been ones where we actually ask people to bring the problem and they put it up there and it's like, I can't figure this thing out and then everybody's there. So resources to help get people into local meetups I think is really one of the best ways. Great. Shannon, I noted you too but we're gonna go to Alexandra now. I think that two approaches could be useful here. First of all is improving the Drupal order website because if you go to get started right now and you end up to the installation settings you get the pages for six, seven and Drupal eight. So it's all very confusing and it's not really easy for someone who doesn't have any idea what Drupal is like. Reorganizing that documentation, making it more user friendly like, okay, here's what a block is and what a node is and what an entity is rather than just dwelling into the administration as the second step after installation. The other one is supporting local communities, I think. Supporting local initiatives at a global level like global training days, I think it's really, really useful. The local Drupal camps, we having one in April where we have half a day of free Drupal training for everyone who wants to join. And things like that, even if it's a monthly meetup, a small Drupal camp, a global training days, a free course, a free two day event or something like that. Great. And Tom. Yeah, when it comes to onboarding some of these people, I think there's a huge number of Drupalists out there like myself who've been to many camps and have stood on the sideline and have gone to sprints and tried to understand. And if I've been doing this for six, seven years and still I'm a little intimidated by the process, then what about that person who's just found out Drupal's really cool and I want to become a part of it. And they try to get started and they look at it and they think, I don't get it, to make it simple, whether it's through mentoring, but the fear that I find and that people have expressed to me is they don't want it to look stupid. They really fear that, there's all these super intelligent people, they really know what's going on and I'm gonna end up looking like a total idiot. And so they don't contribute, they don't speak up and somehow to address that, I think would be ideal because that seems to be an overwhelming consensus to people that I talked to. And all right, it's not fair. Great, Ratchett and I see you, Michael as well. So my point is on, of course, getting started. So from my last six years of experience with Drupal community, most of the newcomers are interested, how do I get started with Drupal as a software? They're not aware of, there's a huge community that they can tap. So maybe, like it was mentioned that, getting started leads to installations and all, that is the place where we can have maybe some kind of video and more information, data point which shows the real power of Drupal, the real power of Drupal, the community, as well as where the software is going. And that's, I think the first way to engage people and connect it. Great, and Matthew. Yep, I got you too, Shannon. Matthew's trying to unmute. I can see he's really working on it. Thank God for video. Ah, there we go. So I think that we've got two problems. The first is short-term problem, which is the immediate attrition that we're seeing, where people burn out and even so forth. But, and I think there are lots of things that we can do to address that. We've talked about a bunch of them already in terms of camps and having trainings and stuff like that. But I think that the real place is the long-term fix. I think that really means that we need to start working with people who are younger, catching them as they're learning earlier. And a great example of that is Matthew Tift and the work that he's done with school-aged kids in the school district that he's associated with. If you go to the 2015 Drupal Camp Colorado site and look up his keynote, I think you'll find that it's pretty astonishing the kinds of work that they've been doing. But I think that that goes as far as supporting things like days of code in schools and so forth. And a really great example is my daughter this year decided that she was going to do a coding class in high school. And when she got to the coding class, she realized that there were no open source tools being used by the teacher. And she's been fighting the teacher basically the last four, six weeks to allow her to use open source tools instead. And the more that we can encourage kids to do those kinds of things, the more likely it is that we're gonna find that our community grows. I think that we need to start the younger group. Great, and Shannon. I'm gonna go back to my own experience with this as a person who had just entered the Drupal community and, first of all, didn't understand even what Drupal was as a whole or how it worked. And I had to try and kind of wrap my head around it. I agree with everyone who said that we need to improve some of the content on D.O. It's amazing and it's wonderful, but it's not geared towards idiots like me. And I need the idiot page that says, this is what Drupal is, and this is what open source community really does as a whole and how we can all work together. And this is how you, as a newbie, can come and get involved. I think that that was lost on me until I talked to Angie and she explained to me that like, oh, I could actually do something and be helpful. That's incredible. Wasn't till I went to a con that I actually learned that. And I would say finding other channels to reach people is important and being able to reach them by interest is important because you don't wanna only reach out to coders. We should be reaching out to designers. We should be reaching out to all different types of people in the community. And I feel like that's also really, really hard right now. Finding those people in different skill sets is a challenge. So I would say improving the different channels for reaching them and finding new and fun ways to reach people in different job types. I'm trying to find the right word, but it's not coming to me. So that's, I think I'll probably stop because I'm running out of time. Oh, goodness, perfect. And Michael, I think you're gonna round us out here. Yes, I wanna mention one other point. I fully agree, we need to make it easier for people to understand. I myself feel sometimes really hard in talking to people that I feel are better than I am. But I think that's more personal. One other thing that I see, especially being an organizer of Global Sprint Weekends, the first year where we organized it, we just wrote emails to the developers that they should join. And not a lot of people came and then we realized we actually have to explain their bosses that they should send their employees to these events because we have to understand more and more Drupal gets just a regular job for people. It's a nine to five job for a developer that does Drupal. But they also wanna contribute and when their companies don't support that they can contribute with paying them to go over the weekend at a Global Sprint Weekend and declare that as regular job work, it will not happen. And in the second year, we actually did that. So we sent emails to all the bosses and tell like, hey, please encourage your employees to come to contribute. And suddenly they came without needing to explain their wives, their children, their husbands that they're not working because they're working and they can take another day off. And that changed a lot. And suddenly everybody was very interested in contributing. And I think that's one point that we should not forget is that it's a job. People have other lives and we need to make sure that they can contribute during their regular job work, even maybe it's on a Sunday. Great. Okay, I think we're gonna do at least one more question here. The next round of questions, the next round of conversation, we run this question, which is, so Drupal 8 just came out and it's the first major release to really incorporate in a very major way, a wholly different open source project in Symphony. So we've talked a lot about how proud we are of getting off the island and incorporating other projects into Drupal 8. Now we're having headless discussions and talking about headless discussions. That sounds funny out of context. Now we're having conversations about headless Drupal and integrating, exactly, thanks, Michael, integrating other JavaScript frameworks, et cetera. It seems like collaboration and cooperation with other open source projects is in our future. How do you guys feel about this and where do you think that the association could focus its time in forging relationships? All right, Jason. My strategy worked. I get to go first so I can say everything everybody else wants to say. Yeah. You know, just coming from my own perspective as a designer and someone who probably spends, you know, as much time or more just in the general web design world as in the Drupal one, I think it's fantastic the direction that we've been going in because it's giving us a tool, a platform now that can live in a much happier way amongst all of these other sort of more, sort of pure HTML, CSS, JavaScript world of what everyone thinks web design or development should be. So I think it's a huge step in the right direction and I think it's really important for us to keep that going forward because I think it lets Drupal be great at what it is in the back end for modeling content and all those sorts of things and still bring in the best of what the rest of the web world has to offer in how this stuff gets put together on the front end. Great. And then I saw Alex, Alexander and Michael. So I think it's a two part discussion here. I think that looking at incorporating other stuff in terms of PHP could be very, very useful but I wouldn't do it very, very often. The move from seven to eight has been very, very disruptive, I feel, for a lot of programmers. And speaking of that attrition from before, I think it's, you get scared much more easily now than you used to get scared at six or seven but I agree that it was a necessary move and I would see us going forward. On the client side, however, I would be very, very careful about adopting a JavaScript, one of these new cool JavaScript frameworks. For the last two years I've worked almost exclusively with JavaScript frameworks and I've seen how the cool thing now goes away in two months. You can look, Angular one was the best thing since sliced bread, then React came, then Angular two, then Oradea, then all these other new frameworks that are more React than React and so on and so on. So I think it's worth looking, it's worth incorporating when it really makes sense but I don't think it's worth picking stuff just to be modern and just to please what the current cool framework is but I agree, at least, Headless Drupal, Drupal 8 in general, the way web services work now for example and all these things are really, really awesome and it was a very good move. Okay, thanks. We're gonna go, Michael, then David who has to respond his comment in the chat and then Matthew. Yes, I think it's great that we do. I mean, Drupal already had dependencies and other tools anyway. I mean, like we never bundled a web server within Drupal. So we're used to using other tools and depending on other tools. I think the Drupal Association can even encourage that with like one thing that we already do, we have a PHP track at Drupal console. There's nothing about Drupal at all. It's just about PHP. So I think that's one really great step of bringing the community together and because suddenly Drupal people talk to PHP people that are maybe doing send framework or symphony and realizing, hey, we are the same. We have the same problems. Let's work together, let's do that. But I also think we can encourage people from Drupal to going to other places, like going to other PHP conferences, speak there, maybe just the Drupal Association, maybe not specifically providing funds but more like connecting people in between to allowing them realizing that there is so much more than just our really great Drupal comments but there is so much more out there that we can learn, we can teach each other. So I think we as Drupal Association should definitely be more connecting dots between the communities and finding cool things that we can work together. Awesome, thank you. And David, you get to go next. So the whole framework thing is a big heated discussion which I won't get into. What I wanna do is give the proper political answer which is that the board and the DA are not really involved with the director of the project and that's really up to trees and the other people that are specifically involved with court itself. But what I do like, what I would like to see more from the association is reaching out to other open source communities and creating bridges on the community level. There's one of the questions that always happens when there's discussions is well, what do other people do? And I've had discussions like that at work. So like when we talk about things like burnout and local organizations and how governance is run and things like that, well, there's lots of different groups out there that exist and we can see what they're doing. We can work together on the association level and I think that's a big role that the DA can play. Great, thank you. And let's see, I think I said Matthew next. Any other takers? Did I miss you guys? All right, Matthew. Look, my mute worked. I agree with Schnitzel in that adopting modern, modern technologies as they make sense is really good for the project, not just from a platform standpoint but also from a cross-pollination standpoint with other communities. The more that we can be engaging with other open-source communities and working directly with other open-source communities and merge and meld and blend with them, the better off that we're gonna be, I think that cross-pollination ultimately is gonna be critical to our success as a project. And keep in mind, we're what? Quite a few years in, we've been quite successful because we haven't said, you know, Dougar heals in and said, we're not gonna change. In fact, the philosophy has been to not be backwards compatible, to always be looking forwards. And I think that that has been painful but also really helpful to us as a project. Thanks, Matthew. Shannon, did I miss you? Did you wanna weigh in? Not pipe up, pipe up's the wrong way to say that. It went down. No, I actually, to be honest, I missed the question because I had a momentary interruption. I was just listening during that part. Okay, good. So, but if you do wanna weigh in, the question was, are there other open-source projects that the association should help connect with now, you know, so we can bring our communities together, you know, that sort of thing. That's why you posted that, I see now. Yeah. Okay, yes, I will weigh in. I kind of wrote it in the text in the chat, that's fine. I said, basically, yes, I think that we should be looking at what other people are doing. And everyone said that. So we all agree again, yay for us. And I would also say that I wouldn't limit us to just open-source. If there's things that people are doing in other communities that are really smart, that are really working for them, why can't we take from those ideas as well? It's, to me, a natural thing to try and do what works without failing first. Sometimes you have to fall on your face in order to, you know, figure things out. But if we can avoid it by looking at what other communities are doing and not just open-source, then we should. For example, I think WordPress is doing a lot of things, right? And in one of Dries's recent blog posts, he mentions, you know, switching things up and turning Drupal inside out. And to, not to go too far into that, but my response to that was, yes, why can't we, you know, pre-configure some things for certain user groups and try and make it easier for them? This is what WordPress does. This is what a lot of CMSs do. And it makes it easier for people to onboard and get involved. And I think that it's a smart thing and something that we can take out of a non-open-source example. So yes, we should look outside our open-source bubble as well into what other communities are doing. Any other takers on this one? Okay, one more question then for the group. And that question is, speaking of other open-source projects, what is something that you see happening in another project that you wish that we could emulate? We could say proper names? Yeah, you can say proper names. Yeah, can you repeat the question, Holly? It does not add out on me there. Sure, so speaking of other open-source projects, what is one thing that you see in another open-source project in their community or in their, in their, the way that they, you know, handle their issues, et cetera, that you would like to see Drupal emulate? So I'm gonna go, Aksandru, and then Matthew, then Enzo. Having worked with WordPress for a bit, I must say that it's horrible when you start writing themes and actually writing code for it. But what I've always admired at them is the attention of detail for the UI and how easy they make it for completely non-technical users to install modules, write blog posts, upload images, and everything like that. And this is something that I would like to see Drupal doing, make it much, much easier for new users and non-technical users to get a very good experience out of the box. And yeah, so WordPress UI, the UX would be my answer. Great. And then let's see, we're gonna go with Matthew, Enzo, and then I see Michael, Ratchet, Tom. Okay, there we go. So the thing, I'm gonna go on the other side of the issue, then code and experience, then talk a little bit, I think, about the governance side of things. I think that when we take a look at, for example, what Mozilla and Wikipedia have done in terms of fundraising, I think it's awesome. They've successfully generated large sums of money that allows them to do the kinds of things that they want to do by leveraging the community a little bit better. And we've been gun shy about this, and I think that we can be less gun shy about it. I think the experiment, again, going back to Google Aid Accelerate, I think the experiment that we did last year has proven that people, if they see the need and they see the value, are willing to pitch in with dollars, and I think that could make a huge difference in their success. Okay, great. So then we're gonna go ahead and go to Enzo. Okay, from WordPress community, I'd like to have the, if you check the website, the documentation as initial manual for newcomers is translated in six languages. The other thing is they have a mentor assistance for new community leaders. So if you, if I want to start a new community in Costa Rica, they provide a person to try to lead that person to try to become a successful community in each country or region. So those things I would really love to have in Drupal community. Awesome. All right, Michael, you are gonna head out. You're gonna go next. I have something a little different. What I saw is a really, really cool initiative that I super cool is called Rails Girls. And the Rails Girls is a community initiative from the Rails community that said we wanna empower women. We wanna empower women to understand that whatever the tech is that is really man dominated right now, which is really, really sad. They can be part of it as well, that they can learn how it works in a safe environment. So what Rails Girls does, they organize events where women that are interested can go there and learn to code. Not specifically about Rails, it just came out of the Rails community. And it's really great. I had own friends going there, not knowing how to code and they learned within one day what coding is and they came back and they felt so much empowered and they actually applied to tech jobs because of that single day of experience. And I think that's super awesome and I would like to see more of that also in the Drupal community. We actually as a lazy support the Rails Girls because I just think it's an awesome initiative even though it has nothing to do with Drupal. Awesome. All right, let's go to Ratchett. So, adoptability of Drupal to non-technical and semi-technical is key to success. I mean, so we took an example of WordPress where WordPress cannot be used to build that complex application, but yes, adoptability, yes, it helps. So maybe that can help if more and more non-technical people use it, you know, out of the box to do things simply and documentation. It is good, but it needs a lot of improvement. Okay. Excellent. David, did you have your hand up? Okay, good, we're gonna go Tom, Shannon, David. Okay, what it's worth, I think it would behoove us to have, you know, almost like two versions of Drupal 8, one for beginners that has a lot of things ready to go out of the box. Another one for developers of just one of vanilla start that they can build from scratch. For people who are new adopters to come in and download a Drupal 8 install and try to figure it out, I think it is very overwhelming. And if there were a lighter version to allow the new user to have a lot of these built in, like you were saying in some of the WordPress UX, just a little bit different presence, it would at least get them to adopt it in an easier fashion, and then when they're ready, they can take the next step over to the full blown version. Can that happen? I don't know, but there are some initiatives out there that seem to be trying to address that, the complexity of D8 for the new user. Great, okay, Shannon and Jason, I see you too. Okay, I'm gonna be really quick because I've got to run, baby needs me. So I think I'm gonna repeat what was said before and say that I really agree that there is a huge technical barrier for people who are not super technically in this personally, and I would like to see that fixed because then maybe I won't be so intimidated by Drupal sometimes. I still am, even after six years, I'm still really intimidated about this technology sometimes. When I start up a new project or when I start up a new site, and I was like, okay, deep breath, you can do this. And I think that that's something that we can do better on and it's something a lot of communities have done better on. So I'm full steam ahead against, well, behind that solution, and I wanna see that fixed. Great, and I have to go. Thank you everyone. Thanks, Shannon. All right, David and Jason, I think you guys are gonna be the last two. Yeah, I just wanted to piggyback on what Michael's saying. It's not a software issue. As far as the DA is concerned, what I would like to see is more supported, not necessarily initiatives, but programs, which I don't know if the DA has ever even done in the past of things like Rails Girls or any other programs that don't even necessarily have to be run by the DA, but could be run by dedicated, enthusiastic volunteers but have some sort of official support from the DA and are empowered to act whatever their particular mission is. And Jason. So amazingly enough, no one's actually said the thing that I wanna talk about, but I think it kind of builds on Michael because I think one of WordPress strengths is out of the box, you can do a thing. And it happens to be that you can really only do one thing. I mean, that's oversimplifying things, but it's very easy for a very non-technical person to fire it up and publish some stuff. And I think that's actually where our opportunity is. Now that we have things like views and core, you download Drupalite, you can actually build a great website. So having some, and this is probably a lot harder to do than I'm making it sound, but wizard-like things to create the piece of content and then be able to make lists of that content and blocks and stuff. So finding a way to step people through that process after they've installed would really allow people to start to get a lot more out of Drupal right away. And I think it would be a great learning tool. Excellent. All right, did I miss anyone there? I think I don't understand that. Matt, Matthew, did I miss you on there? No, you got an answer in. Okay, good. Today I took notes in who was talking with Kranz. Let's see, I did keep track. All right, so that's it. I think we're gonna go ahead and conclude things now, but I just wanna say thank you all for spending so much time to talk with us on a wide variety of topics. It was great to hear everyone's views and also have a few laughs along the way. That's always a win. And tomorrow we will have our final, our third Meet the Candidates session. That takes place at Four Pacific, which is, I don't know, midnight UTC. Am I still getting that right, Schnitzel? You'll be asleep. Yeah. I will be asleep. Yeah. But we'll do that. In the meantime, I'll get this recording up and just appreciate everyone's time and candor. It's definitely gonna be a really exciting election. You guys are really smart and fun to talk to you. So thanks for everything and I'll see you later. Have a good one. Thanks, Holly. See you, Holly. Thanks. Bye. Thanks, everyone. Bye. Go to bed, Ratchet.