 Hi, my name is Amy Degnan and today we're talking about contributing to Drupal as a small business and what you can do and how it is a win-win approach for both the business and the community. All right. Hi, my name is Amy Degnan and I'm the CEO of Hook 42 and I'm also a Drupal architect. I've been working with enterprise web technologies since a long time, 18 years, 10 years of the business arts, which is insert project management, business analysts, process improvement, that type of thing and a study that's Stanford for that work as well. I have six years of Drupal and yeah, I exist on Twitter and Drupal and email. Please email me and say hi. I am a CEO of Hook 42. It was co-founded by myself and my business partner, Kristen Pohl. She's been doing Drupal for much longer, Drupal 4. And we're in San Francisco, California and in about two years, almost instantly we were up to six employees and now we're up at 10. And we have various focus areas for our business because we know we can't do everything well. So we make sure that we really focus on search engine optimization, multi-lingual work and complex Drupal projects like automated workflows, big migrations, that type of thing. And we're also online, but more importantly, who are you? Okay, who here owns a Drupal shop? Okay, who is an independent? Okay, great. We're gonna talk about things that actually can help you as well. Who is an employee of a larger corporation? Okay, is that in the private sector? Like the real corporate stuff? Is it in government? Okay. How about higher education? Nobody in higher ed? Okay. Yeah, that's a good mix. And I think we'll talk about things that will affect all of your interests. So who has ever heard that term come for the software and stay for the community? Yeah, every hand should be up. My goodness. Okay, well, if you haven't heard it, it's all about Drupal, right? Why is Drupal special? And Drupal is special because of the community. And we as business owners have a responsibility to help keep Drupal special. And the reason why is that because it helps bring business to us. And it keeps bringing business to us. And, you know, yeah, okay. And as we look at, you know, and we come from the software and stay for the community, let me go through. But let's just be real, we're business people. So implementing the software, whether for product use or for our clients, actually makes the money. So what that means, it requires ongoing improvements to the core product delivery. Improvements equals fewer bugs and more features. That means that we waste less time. And we leave a positive impression on the clients that are using our site. But that also requires skilled talent to do that. So really, that sentence should say implementing the high quality software, Drupal, successful with good people makes money. So, all right, how do we do that as a business, right? How do we contribute to the community to make sure that we have high quality software and high quality people? Let's contribute all the things, right? I want to do everything, let's do it. I'm excited, I have energy. Well, you actually can contribute to all the things. It is a Drupal project, it's an novelty project that switches the buttons to say all the things when possible. But that's not really what we're trying to say. What you need to do is you actually have to put together a contribution strategy. And this is exactly how you would put in any other business initiative that you have for your company. So you want to make sure you set goals and you plan it and you execute. Well, first of all, this contribution strategy should align to your business goals, monetarily, morally, ethically. You want to make sure that you are doing something that is hand in hand with your business. And you want to identify the contribution methods that work well for you. And to do that, you have to quantify your team's skills and interests. Then you take the skills and interests of the team, the goals of the company, and you put them together and you create a road map of your community contributions. And this is your vision and it could have a stretch goal. It could have very, very simple, small goals to start. But it's something that aligns to your business and that you have an idea of what you want to do. And then you can budget accordingly. It's like, wait, I can contribute for free, right? Well, we'll talk a little bit about that. And then you just make it happen. And that sometimes is harder and has more challenges than just like, yeah, let's do it. But you have to start there. You have to start with that passion to make it happen. So first of all, as you figure out kind of what you want to do in the community, you have to know who you are. So even before Kristen and I made the company, one of the things we talked about was, what do we want to have our company be? What's important to us? And it wasn't, by default, we're going to make money, right? It's a business. And by default, we're going to be working in Drupal because that was our choice. But we really, really focused on a few things. One of them is we are an ethically good company. And we provide a high quality work for ourselves internally and for others. And we believe in ongoing improvement and education of ourselves and the people around us and community. So, and work-life balance. So these are core fundamental decision making mantras for us, for our company. We didn't say, oh, I want to make the biggest, fastest website ever. No, no, it's much more personal for us. And this was a wonderful way to start. But community is in the top five of the things that are important to us as a company, and having the company rooted very early in the community focus helped us make business decisions along the way, and it works great. And you have to really take a look at your skills and interests. And when I say you, it's yourself, but also the company's combined skills and interests, and then also your team's skills and interests. So I'm going to give you some examples of ours. We have broad technical skills that are beyond PHP and Drupal and MySQL. We work complex issues with a vengeance. We love it. We have an extreme eye for detail. I still don't know how Kristin can get every typo ever. She's amazing. We have a large enterprise experience in both the IT space and also web content management space. We have a lot of business acumen, which is a nice balance to the technology. And both of us actually can write. This is a good thing to have technical skills, understanding of hard issues, and the ability to write it down and write it down clearly. We believe and enjoy the education of others. And it goes on with our ongoing improvement. We want to make things better all the time. And we're generally interested and excited about being part of the Drupal community. So this is our skills and our interests. But you should go through the same type of activity for yourself and for your team members to see where you align in the Drupal community. Because you may have folks that's like, I just want to contribute a core. I want to fix patches. I want to write tests. And you know what, that's okay. And that's great. But you just need to know as your corporate strategy or your small business strategy of contributing to the community. That's part of the facet that you add. So I'm going to get into a little bit more detail here. So how can you contribute? Really, you can contribute money. I'm going to start with the easy ones first. So you can contribute money, time, directly contribute to the Drupal product improvements. So this would be Drupal Core, Drupal Contrib, patches, documentation. Anything that's directly with the Drupal.org site. You can have some knowledge sharing, evangelism, sending Drupal out to the world, some fun swag. So hey, how many people have a Drupal t-shirt? Welcome on. Everybody in this room must have at least 15. Okay, I see. Well, it's important. So we'll get into that and why. Also, you can contribute leadership. Us as small business owners have actually put together a team. We've gone through the effort to figure those things out. We actually have to deal with sales and clients. So you have the skills to be a good leader. And this is where you can actually apply it to the community. And then also, you can create extended products off of the Drupal system. So all services, like hosting and that type of thing. And also product integrations. So I'm going to get into detail with a little bit of each of these. So money sounds so easy to do, right? But you have to have money. You have money to give money. But the best use of money for contributing to Drupal is you can sponsor events like DrupalCon. But no, if you can't afford a DrupalCon scale, you can do DrupalCamps. You can do Drupal user groups. You can do lunches, everything like that. And you can contribute directly to the Drupal Association. You can also donate resource time who saw the big article about chapter three in Alex Pott? Yeah, okay. We have a few, basically. There's a few companies that have hired dedicated resources to work on Drupal8. So they're not billable. They're not on client work. They're truly an operational cost. But it's 100% focused on Drupal8 and to get that out the door. So that's a huge amount of money. And it doesn't sound like they're directly paying Drupal.org because they aren't, but it is out of their operating budget. You can also create extended products. How did that get in there? You can actually contribute to extended products. So there's a product called Calibox which will run Drupal locally for you. It makes a nice little, it's like MAP but better and focused on Drupal. But they had a recent Kickstarter so you can go and contribute to these extended products. And then also I have this money and I say it directly to people. What that means is sometimes you're at a core sprint. Everybody's working. It's kind of getting to lunchtime. Nothing's been provided yet. Well, you know, Kristen and I, we went out and bought lunch for a bunch of people for Drupal Sprint. And that was good. It wasn't directly to the Drupal.org but it was directly to the people. It positively influenced their day for us to buy them lunch. And it was such a simple gesture. It was within operating budget because it's lunch. And it worked really well. And so, yeah, as Hook 42 we do all of these things. And the benefits, they're definitely measurable because it's monetary. You can budget clearly for it. So this is easy. You can then distribute to the community. Like if you're donating to Drupal.org, they can actually then distribute it out to the causes that need it most and at the highest priority. And so you don't have to go through that decision-making process. And it's a nice thing to do. It was great buying people lunch. They enjoyed it. Some challenges here. You can't give money if you don't have money. Yeah? So, but small gestures like the lunch or buying somebody a coffee or a drink because they've been sprinting for hours and they're thirsty. You can do things like that within the community and those gestures are great and they're good human things to do. Right after money is time because time is money type of thing. So it has the same contributions as money. But first of all, really, it's really important to show up. It's what I'm saying this to this group of people that have actually showed up for DrupalCon. But really, it's making sure that you do show up to the extended Drupal events and you get other people to show up as well. But to be active and present. So engage in conversation. Introduce, volunteer to help. This is perfect for Drupal camps where they need a lot of hands to do the work. And also be very inviting to new people because the community will be stagnant if we don't get more new people in and don't scare them away with, oh, it's Drupal, it's so big. We just need to make sure that we're inviting to them. So really, you can invest time there. And I, yes, at this point you can say that time means like development and everything but I'm gonna get into that a little bit later. And we contribute on all levels at this. But we do invest volunteerism. Like we don't go and help set up for Drupal camps and things. And the reason why is because we're often doing trainings and sessions and so the time spent is preparing for those things. And we just don't have the man or woman power to be everywhere at once. And the benefits to this is there's a lot of human soft benefits. So it makes people feel good. It's good karma. It's also providing a very positive reinforcement of good behavior to other people. And so what that means is it's a very healthy community of people. And it's a great personal investment. If that's an important thing to you. And going back to our corporate values, it is very important for Kristen and I to have a personal investment in the community. And so it's good. Some of the challenges taking time away, it takes time away from valuable time if you're in the services industry. And also you have less non-Drupal lifetime. So who has children here? I can't raise my hand. I have cats. All right. So you have wives and husbands and children and the more and more that you're working on Drupal, the more and more you're in the community, well, do you see them less and less? Or are they part of the community too? It's a big deal. And you have to make sure that you budget your real life with your Drupal life and also where you make your money. All right. So another place you can contribute is the Drupal product development. So this is absolutely not making Drupal better via Drupal.org. So you can do, of course, we all know you can contribute to code. You can contribute to documentation. You can be actively testing patches, filing issues and giving a nice feedback to that loop. Who does that right now? Or who has people on their team that do that right now? Okay, that might be a better question. Good. I hope we all are because it makes the product much better. And for example, what we do is we're working with the board. Hi, you see them in the room. We're working on the Drupal 8 multilingual demo. So we're making sure that out of Drupal 8 core, you can see all the multilingual capabilities without installing any other contrib modules. So that's a combination of development, documentation and training. And if you guys wanna see that in action, come to the multilingual lab tomorrow. That's fun. And we also contribute documentation, patching and issues. And really the benefits of this, we all understand it. There's more features of Drupal, it's greater stability. It's much easier to sell and much easier to keep as a system because if it's stable, then your clients will be like, I like Drupal, don't take it off, because it's been a good product. And it's also easier to build. The challenges there, as we all know, is the deep knowledge is needed. Advanced skills in some points are needed to make sure Drupal is working and actually to contribute to Drupal core. And you have to know the Drupal way, which includes the large Drupal learning curve. So that's a big deal. And the reason why these things are in here is when you make decisions on where you wanna contribute, you have to make sure that there might be some overhead to start contributing in certain methods in Drupal. But everybody should. Okay, so you can also share Drupal knowledge. And this is to enable others with clear and correct information. And you can go through the core mentorship, like on Friday, they're gonna have the big core sprinting. You can be one of the mentors and help people get set up and first check in to core. You can provide training. Actually, who is involved with the core mentorship here? Okay, wonderful. How about training? Who provides training services? Are these for cost or are these for free? A little bit of both? Free, okay. Both, okay. That's good to know and we'll bring that up. How about blog posts? Yeah? Okay, good. I like to read them because sometimes I don't know how to do something and I'm happy that they're there. How about who speaks at conferences and in Drupal user groups? Okay, wonderful. And who grows talent? I would either internally or, okay, wonderful. And you're like, these are all basic things while you're talking about this. But you know that sometimes people don't know that these are true contributions, but it is, it's contributions of time, money, knowledge. You can, as far as training and speaking, at some point you can put a cost value on that and try it into your business. And at Hook 42, yes, we do them all because this is one of the core parts of our business. We like to share knowledge and make sure it's clear and understandable and the right information. For example, Kristen has written the Drupal 7 multilingual sites book by Peket and I'm writing the Drupal 8 one. Some benefits to this, you can offer, you can have any of these things as a business offering. So you see like DrupalizeMe has monetized training and that type of thing. You have public proof of skill and this is huge for both the Drupal community and also clients that are researching your work, right? So if you're publishing articles on the internet and people are searching for you and they're doing due diligence on your company, if they see that you're a thought leader and you're helping others actually do things better, this is fantastic, it helps the sell cycle. Also, more people get to know more Drupal and that means more business, right? So you can get more business in and you can perform more business work because you have more people doing Drupal. And that's like the hardest thing right now is finding good resources. But the challenge is here, it takes a lot of time. It takes so much time to make sure that the quality of what you're doing is high and making sure that the messaging that you're sending is correct. As we do these blogs and as we do these trainings, it is our responsibility to actually research what are the best practices and not just go on making it my own because it kind of makes sense but I'm not gonna research it or whatever. You can do a lot of bad if you say not well thought out messages. So it's very important here that you take the time to do quality knowledge sharing. And once it's out there, sometimes it's hard to find. It's nice that you can connect your blogs up to Drupal Planet and that's wonderful. Thank goodness for search engine optimization. You guys should make sure all of your blog articles are highly SEO tuned so people can find them. But once it's, the Drupal knowledge is very distributed and so sometimes that's a very hard way to find the information. Also what you can do is you can share other knowledge and because hey, there's more than just Drupal? Come on. And it's funny because I came into the Drupal community after being with all of these very high-end enterprise proprietary CMSs and I'm just like, what is this? What is this community? You guys are all sharing blogs and you're nice. And I don't know what to do with it. But what's interesting is and very early I saw people coming in sharing other knowledge. So how to integrate Facebook with Drupal and what does Facebook mean on the back end? That was 2008 or seven, but it was cool. It was bringing more information into Drupal. And so how do you can do this? I have the business arts, so legal, contracts, sales, project management, Four Kitchens does a fantastic job on a lot of those fronts. More technology, I'll say Four Kitchens again because I know that they're doing this wonderful performance session here, but you can bring that into Drupal. Also other CMSs, WebChick and a group of people who are working on Spark and designing what the Drupal 8 back end needs to look at, they took a look at all of these other competitive CMS systems. This is also what they did for Drupal, the demo framework that Acquia put together, but you can see Drupal really fully charged and highly competitive to these other enterprise CMSs. And what we bring on this front is we have a large amount of enterprise scale use and died through the team members. We've actually implemented really big implementations of the most widely used CMSs that are not Drupal. So we see the problems issues and cool things that are in those systems and are like, hey, how can I get Drupal to do that? And also we bring out to the business arts, so how to run projects and how to write contracts and that type of thing. Some benefits to this, we have a more well-rounded community if we do this. It's not just about Drupal and how the Drupal way is, there's a lot of people that have thought a lot of time and done research to figure out the best way to do project management and the best way to write contracts so why not leverage that knowledge and apply it to our community. Also, this improves business a lot because it really gives everybody a broader insight to what's going on and you can speak to competitive markets here. And like I was saying with the whole spark and initiative is it does improve the Drupal product. Some of the challenges though, sometimes the community needs to be responsive and sometimes the community doesn't see or may need to know this information. Who remembers like this big push of project management sessions about two years ago? Like there's all this wave of tech sessions and things and then there's a double wave of project management sessions and now that it's business and now we're diversifying a little bit more. But what happens is you have to bring all these ideas in, test the waters, do it a little bit more consistently and then people will start understanding, oh hey maybe I need to do some business skills in the Drupal community because a lot of folks are just independence or just starting and they don't have the business argument or experience to do these things. And if they just get exposure to the information and exposure to some of the terms then they can go and find the information that they need. So this is, it's wonderful to bring an eye-opening experience to the team. Evangelism, yay. Really this is making sure that Drupal is out beyond the Drupal community and go to non-Drupal conferences, oh my gosh. Yeah sometimes they're weird because they're a little bit different, they're maybe smaller or bigger. The vibe is a little bit different, the people are different but that's okay. It's okay, it's good. Go to Hacker Labs, different meetups, there's corporate groups, there's educational groups, there's government groups. Anywhere that Drupal has kind of maybe started a little bit or looking at different technologies, please go there, talk to people and talk a little bit about what Drupal is. So on our end, we, for example, we went to the Front and Operations Conference and we met folks from Atom and we met folks from Four Kitchens there and so we're like, hey, look at, we're three companies that are like trying to reach out into this different tech, let's see what we're gonna do with Drupal. And that's good. Also, there's a lot of people doing children and women's coding groups. They're exposing children, women, and other folks into the new science and technology. So getting involved in those groups and bringing Drupal into that environment is fantastic. And it's Chris Shattuck, I believe, has put together a lovely Kickstarter to basically get Drupal into the science and technology schools in the United States. So the benefits as Drupal is more highly recognized. Our community is represented. So be nice when you're out and be a good member of the community so they have a good feeling about what you are and what you represent when you represent Drupal. And also, these people will come into the community and so we need more, we need more people to grow the village. But some of the challenges come here is you might not have enough time. And you know what, Drupal community is a lot about recognition, right? You guys just don't know that you've done this and do they need to know? Well, sometimes you need to be recognized by the community because you're like, well, why were you doing this thing over here? Well, I was doing this other thing. So it's hard to be recognized. So that's why you actively tweet. Maybe you write a blog article and you tie what you learn together to Drupal. So you have to take an active role in tying the things that you've learned somewhere else and pulling it into Drupal community as well as pulling Drupal community out to other people. It goes, it's a two-way street, but it's very necessary. Okay. Another way to contribute to the community is have fun swag, right? So how many people have Drupal stickers? Which, I think you have all of the Drupal stickers, Kathy. I have, yeah, so this is just some of our stickers. But you know what, like swag, t-shirts, toys, stickers, these things provide a very fun and friendly group community and group culture. You know, I'm walking around in Amsterdam and I see, hey, I saw somebody wearing my multilingual shirt. That's awesome. It's like, hey, Drupal, multilingual, yeah. And you see Drupal shirts and what happens is you don't need to actually know that person, but if you're in line and they're wearing Drupal, you're like, hey, you're Drupal and you have like an instant comfortable friend next to you. And it's really fantastic. So you as a small business can contribute things like stickers and t-shirts and everything. So it's good and I promise not to pronounce swag incorrectly. Sorry, it's the European thing. Okay, also what's good for small business owners here is we're natural leaders. We lead our group of team. We lead our projects and we are visionaries for our business. So Drupal needs leaders, right? The Drupal community needs leaders to put together events and to put together Drupal user groups and to motivate people and get things moving. Now, and what we do, well, Kristen, very early on, she's in a lower part of San Francisco Bay Area and she started essentially started the Santa Cruz Drupal user group because she's like, hey, I wanna hang out with people that do Drupal. So she started that and she still keeps it maintained and she also has a lot of other people helping her and it's been a wonderful group. It's a very tight community and they're all good friends now, which is lovely. So I take care of the scope of our team. So there's a lot of leadership involved in taking care of your team members but also making sure that their goals are aligned with whatever they're doing in the community. And this is back on our future roadmap so we'd like to get involved in helping things like that camp. Bay Area Drupal camp is a big camp in California. And the benefits of this is, you know, someone needs to start and sometimes the hardest thing to do is start, right? And it's good to unify people because that makes the community and also once again, someone needs to start. We need to have some people say, hey, there's a hole here, let's fill it. And some of the challenges is someone needs to start. It's the same thing, someone's gotta do it. And also location logistics. So if you have an office, this is where you can have and host your meetups. And also where's the beer and where do we sit? So that's also contributing to the group by buying beer or lunch or dinner. So that's your monetary investment and also your leadership investment. What you can do is also provide supporting products. And what, like this is hosting, like Apria and Pampion, this is training like Drupalize Me and build a module and lyta.com. This fills a community need that Drupal doesn't have the capacity to do because it can't do everything. What we do is we support via donation and the use of those services. We partner with some of the supporting products and then we write documentation on how to use the tools and blog posts of case studies that have success with Drupal and their tool. But we have more on our future roadmap to do this. The benefits is what we were saying, that Drupal community can't do everything so it's wonderful for these other businesses to jump in and fill these gaps. But these are also then, these are businesses, these are monetized services that come into play. So beyond that, it's an increasing exposure to Drupal. They're increasing the talent pool by hiring people and making sure that they know enough Drupal to actually integrate their products. This is a good thing. And some of the challenges here though is they have to really be vigilant about maintaining alignment with the state of core and contrib. And what happens is a lot of these businesses do have targeted people within the core and contrib like module space to make sure that they do keep up to speed because things change fast. And if they change fast and it impacts their business and it impacts their bottom line and all of their employees and they're highly dependent on triple success. So I'm gonna go a little bit faster. So also there's the other extensions and integrations. So these are things like, hey, I've got this video player and it wants to have a plugin into Drupal. I wanna manage a company that owns this video player needs to make the Drupal plugin and will contribute to the Drupal community. So you as an extended product business can contribute to Drupal by adding these plugins, but they can also donate to, and there's a lot of people that are doing sponsorships of DrupalCon and DrupalCamp that are these external tools. They're just integrations. One of the, a good sample is lingo tech and smartling for translation. That's huge and they do a lot of work in the community to educate how their products integrate into the system. But also they are working on Drupal contrib bugs and Drupal core bugs to make sure their product is working very smoothly within Drupal. And we do some work with some of the partners, but that's on our future roadmap. It's on, the Drupal book is done on my part. And then this is benefits is what happens is Drupal has been supported just as well as these other leading CMS systems. So it becomes a competitive landscape when these enterprises look to use Drupal. And you're like, hey, I don't work with enterprise clients, should I care? Yeah, you should care because it also benefits people that aren't enterprise. So it's quite good. This also creates business. So it hires more people that then directly can help Drupal community. It improves the Drupal feature set, right? It makes like lingo tech and smartling make multilingual fly. And it makes the end-to-end business workflow process for multilingual just fantastic. Some of the challenges here, it's hard to maintain and also someone needs to start, right? And actually at the business summit, one of the folks who is a product owner was having a rough time trying to say, oh, hey, I really want this module created, but how do I know? How do I find a good small business partner to create that module and integrate it well and make sure it's ported over time? So who helps other products like make up like a Drupal module to integrate products with, yeah, okay, yeah. So it happens, but the folks that are new coming in, they're like, I have no idea how to find that right group of people to do it. So maybe they're gonna go through Acquia and the advice that we gave to the man at the table was go to the Drupal association and they might be able to route you to partners and that type of thing, because it's hard. And also just general challenges, you really need to make sure that you don't contribute beyond your means, so beyond your budget, beyond your physical means, you don't wanna have burnout, you don't wanna kill your company, contributing too little. So there are times when you can't contribute for life and budget and that's okay, but don't get complacent with it because we as a Drupal community do all contributions from all the different scales and even if you personally can't contribute, make sure you enable one person, maybe two people on your team to actually still contribute because you then are allowing that extended contribution. What's actually a crazy one is policy constraints, right? So who has ever worked in a company that says you can't contribute patches back to contribute? Yeah, or an education system? Yeah, this is a big deal and I don't know if it's as big in Europe as it is in the US, but it's a much bigger deal in the US and so that really is a pain. You're like, I just did this great work and I fixed this horrible bug and I can't contribute it back. So that's just, it happens and you have to work through it. And you know, the challenge is how much time do you spend now versus how much do you spend in the future? I don't remember why I wrote that line so I'm just gonna skip it. Oh yes, basically, it ties into budget planning. So how many people know how to budget for community work and how many actually budget for community work right now? Really? Wow. For the record, that was like one and a half arms wiggling. And one of the other challenges is maintaining this billable, non-billable work because you're a business, you have to make money so you can't just only do stuff for free. You always have to make sure that you maintain that balance. Balance. But you know what, it's well worth the effort. So I'm gonna talk about how much to budget and it depends on your business. My business partner, not Kristen but somebody else on our team, said I don't tell them it just depends. That's a hard answer, but it does. But for your resource time, if you're gonna donate resource time dedicated to Drupal work, what you can do is plan on a percent unbillable for your work and you apply that to your project scheduling and you apply that to rates. An industry standard from the Project Management Institute is roughly 15% of work time is just admin time overhead. They're getting coffee, they're talking around. So if you have a 40 hour work week, 15% is normally just stuff, meetings and things. So for us, we plan on 25% time unbillable. That's a large amount of time, that's 12 hours a week. Within that time, I have admin time. That admin time includes progress reports but really what it does is it has a lot of time for education, internal education and internal training and internal projects. Those things are done at the same time as we do at Drupal Contributions. So if somebody's learning how to use feeds, they're gonna make a blog article of how to use feeds. It's an end to end part of some of bio learning programs that we do. But you have to adjust your billing rates accordingly. So if you don't know how much your employees are costing you and how much they need to work unbillable per hour per week to actually pay that and make some profit, you should go and open up Excel and spend some time. And we spend a lot of time before we started the company to make sure that we allow a fair wage and a fair rate for our business. And then actually then you can budget for your resources but then you can start budgeting for your monetary contributions. They can say, oh, I know that there's three, there's two columns and one camp and three Drupal users groups and you can take all of those and say, oh, they're distributed over time and how much money can I spend per month? Or that's my yearly conference sponsorship budget. We use that as marketing. It's a marketing expense for us. Yeah, it's interesting. So you just have to, it depends on your business. It depends on how much money you have and it depends on how you're contributing. But you have to have that process and go through that thought and budget accordingly. Yeah, and don't forget travel costs. It's expensive to come to Europe for us US folks. Wow. And what's happened is people are really creative about the distribution of costs and I'm noticing my little animations are out of order so here where I'm just gonna do this. What we do is when it all possible, when it all possible, if we can identify in a client project a moment that we can, first of all, get the permission from the client to contribute back to the community, all the patchwork that we do, that's fantastic, that's in our contracts and our terms and conditions. The second one is hey, we've identified something that you're asking for in your project that doesn't exist. Would you like to have that contributed back to the community and you have a sponsored, this module has been sponsored by their company name and it's good exposure. And then also just, it's mostly is making sure that you get their permission to use, to patch and work through their issues and also see if they'd like to sponsor a modules. Some of us think, some clients are receptive, some aren't and it depends on their corporate policy. Then also, this is when I was talking, this is when I was talking about employee training. Part of our costs for our employees is have a certain amount of money for training. So this is why if we do an active training plan with them for their roadmap, we tie it to what it should be in the community and they don't need to have a lot of skill level. For example, one of our Drupal noobs wrote about being a Drupal noob, a new person at Drupal before we went to Austin and he said, it was a nice blog article about how him as a new person prepared his machine, prepared his sessions, prepared for travel and getting it all together into the Drupal community. So you don't have to be super advanced to do any of these things. You can contribute at all skill level and all, yeah, it's our levels of use of Drupal. You just have to be very creative about it. And then also, let's see, oh yeah, if you have that described to Drupal user group sessions and also through mentorship programs, then sometimes the trainings are free and the topics are free to cover and so that's actually really nice. You're not paying out of pocket to get that information. Yeah, does anybody else do anything different to the distribution cost? I guess I didn't put funded Kickstarter on here, like the Drupal 8 Rules Initiative got funded by community contribution, but that's one way to do it. Does anybody else do anything to offset their contribution? So now, another question, is all about work worth it? Yeah, yeah, it is actually. Sometimes it's hard to put our number on it. It does take time because it's a long-term investment but being able to have one having an active lead channel come to us, we don't have to worry about going out and finding work. It's because the people find us for such an organization from all the Drupal and for Drupal and that's because we speak, that's because we are publishing blog articles or partners with certain sources or our name is out there, we're visiting Drupal. So that comes into play, which presents itself so good. So if you have a partnership with FDA or a company on a long-term, or it's handling, or if you have the best amount of partnerships with another company, I don't have a partnership with another Drupal company. You're partners with another Drupal company. Well, it's not resource identification, it's the skills of the company. That's a lot of people for the record. That's awesome. And that's a testimony that I'm happy about what business community is. But there aren't those words that you need to find such a strong amount of agency when I'm in the sales process. I don't have the worry that they think that we don't know Drupal. Right? It's because they don't know Drupal's shop. We've got clients that don't know a lot about Drupal. What happens is you can sell a hand, you know, use your support community, and get active on your phone or in your email address, and also be helping other people use it and get paid for the bids, which you can see in the sales, and that's good. You know, so I get paid for the bids, I respect. And that wasn't my respect, but I'm just trying to show you how it works. So this is up to all the development of all the development resources. You know, see, I see how we're at the end of the time, and we see that it's not only coming down to our music, we see that we're better, and so and so we've got better and better innovation to work with us. So we're also going to send out new money to the sales process and we're just going to make it happen. We've got better products, honest lives, lives. Wow, wow. We're going to send out the data that these researches are on in this organization. They do, they do, and that's there, it's here. And we have a sales slide in there for you. That's from the Secrets of Association that can start you at the play space. But I'm having an IOS platform working, but you can go to the U.S.A. group. The business side, IOS is great because you can see different businesses from our shapes and sizes. And please talk to me about the sales hours. It's how to open a number of conversations. People will not talk to you if they don't have plans for you in the Secrets about your business, but people will be helpful. And while you're doing research groups, like camps and the commas, talk more. These are the classes where the business owners are going to be out, and it's good. And also, I'm joining with the four sprints in your mentorship group. But I need a lot of work there. I need a lot of hands there. So if you, as a small business, have a couple of very keen developers on your staff, point them in that mentorship direction, and that's fantastic. So it'll take a lot of skills you can contribute at any skill level, and you can do that in many ways. And you can contribute at your own pace. And you can align contributions to your profitability by productizing some of your contributions. Please find your niche, or niches, and contribute and enjoy that. The process is fantastic. And the role in that, the contribution, does take effort, but in the end it's worth it. And it'll maintain balance, right? We want to have everybody here for the long haul and not just for that short sprint, right? Because the community needs to exist over time. It's a living, nurturing thing. All right, do you have any questions or comments or additions? Oh, come on. The microphone is right there. Thanks, Kathy. Hey, so when you were talking about directly attending like sprints and getting involved with the mentor program and listing the kind of roles within a company that people might have that would be good to do that, include also like project managers and people who are good at marketing and any kind of like artists or photographers because we have like in terms of core, we've got like 2000 something people contributing to Drupal core like committing, you know, like writing things that end up showing in code. What we're really lacking though is people that don't work with code, right? So we were disorganized. We can't prioritize. We can't communicate with each other and we could really use some project managing like that would be excellent. In terms of like organizing sprints and getting some features done, sometimes things like that require money. Like we have to pay for locations and we have to pay for internet at those locations. So sometimes what we need are people who are good at marketing who know how to like ask for money and make business proposals and talk to other companies about things because the people who are there like working like some on some of the issues, they suck at that. But businesses have those people on staff and probably good people, right? Like you're proud of your like marketing people and you're proud of your project manager. So they're good at their jobs and we suck at that. So we could really use those kinds of people too. Yeah, how many people in this room would be interested in having their supporting staff come and help the core mentoring team? Okay, that man, yeah, see the lady with the crazy awesome hair? That, yeah, connect. But I didn't see that many arms raise up. Oh, we have one, question. Okay, good. Oh, please. It's a little more tactical, but following up on, you know, we are a service industry, we're tracking hours and all that kind of thing. Could you talk a little bit more about how you, I guess, segregate that time? You say you have a percentage. Are you tracking that as part of, you know, annual reviews? Are there specific tasks that you're assigning to them? Or you're like, hey, you get 10% Drupal time, knock yourself out. Could you go a little more detail on that? Yeah, and I'll also give you examples of other companies, because, you know, putting this together, this just wasn't, it says a community information. That's just, that is not us. So, a little company called Caramona has Fridays off. So Fridays are not client work days. So Fridays are internal projects, Drupal projects, that type of thing. So they quantify their 20% of contribution, or 20% of non-bubbles one day per week. So they just segregate it like that and they keep it simple, because it's easy to track. Somebody in the business summit yesterday had like a full company hack day on, you know, one day out of the month. My father worked at GE and he's the one who trained me to have 20% of my time as research and development and improvement. So I carried that through the business. We, it varies because, you know, sometimes if people go to DrupalCon for a week, then okay, well you just used up all of your time for this month, so we do lots more billable work, but then we're gone for DrupalCon for a week, right? So you just have to put it on the calendar. We do track that time, actually. We have community involvement, we have attendance to Drupal users groups. You know, we're working on patches and bills. That's mostly part of project work, because we're fixing something for someone else. So that's just tracked within the project time. But yeah, all of this other's time is, I call it administration time. And there's sub-buckets for it. And if you don't track it, you'll get last. And like, a lot of the agencies don't track it, and you should. So yeah, no worries. Anybody else have a question? I couldn't have answered everything. Okay, who's gonna do something different with their business after this? Have you guys, yeah? What are you gonna do? Okay, great. And just to repeat for the video and for the audience, he's going to take a more formal approach to set up and plan his contribution efforts. So that's good, thank you. Anybody else? Any ideas of new ways to contribute that your company might do it? Sold a hat? How helpful would this be for a company that's coming into Drupal? Like, new? Do you think this would be a nice overview about how you can actually communicate? I can't talk. I think I need less coffee. Okay, so anyway, it sounds like it's going to be useful for some people, probably the normal person market. Okay, anything else? Okay, we're done. Thank you guys. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.