 Hello, it's Rachel Lawson here again from the Drupal Association and after we've all recovered from DrupalCon, I've asked the Drupal 10 Rediners Initiative team to come back and tell us all about their experiences at DrupalCon North America. So I'd like to welcome Kristen, Chris, Gabor and Lowry. Hello, everyone. How are you doing? Hello. Talking about how you're doing, I don't know about you, but I always find DrupalCon an extremely intense period of time, not only the actual main week of DrupalCon, but the lead-up to it and the fact that we've had Drupal Fest this time as well, which has been much longer. So I'm sure that it would have been incredibly intense for all of you as well. So how have you been relaxing and distressing since? Lowry, you've been building a house. Yeah, that's definitely a big chunk of my focus the last couple of weeks. We're expecting to move in in June, so it's coming close to the end. I don't know if it's a shift of focus, but it's definitely not distressing itself. Yes, absolutely. So has anybody else been taking on any major projects since, and just generally finding different ways to work? Well, we moved in a couple of, less than a month before DrupalCon, and I'd basically been putting off a ton of different stuff that needs to be done in the house in preparation for DrupalCon. It's like, okay, I've got time for this many things. So yeah, so I had a trailer board of tasks that were building up. So as soon as DrupalCon was over, it's like, yeah, finish building a shed and building a furniture and all sorts of stuff. Certainly a distraction. Yeah. Anybody else? What have you been up to? Well, on that theme since we're talking about homes and whatnot. So I've been doing country living, and now we're trying to shift back to our normal house, which is not quite so country living, and have to restart our construction project, because it's been on hold for a year and a half. And it's really hard to find construction people now, because they're really, really, really busy. So yeah. So we're trying to do the friends and family thing. My niece's husband is electrician, so we bribed him to our house for a weekend and paid for him to help us. So yeah, so next is plumbing, and I don't know any plumbers. So people watching the video can reach out. Yeah, if you happen to be a plumber in the Santa Cruz area, let me know. It would be so funny if somebody actually does now. Pretty hilarious. How about yourself, Gav, on anything in particular? How have you managed to? Yeah, I took a week off after Drupal Khan, because it was so tiring. I've been involved with a Drees node and a bunch of other things. So I needed a sizable rest, spent time with family. And then just as I got back this Monday, I got my COVID shot. So that was interesting, because as I was about to get back to work, I got my shot, and then I was off for two days again. Oh yeah. Yeah, it can affect people like that, actually. Well, we probably should look back at Drupal Khan then, just for a moment. See, that's why I asked you here. So Friday morning's keynote at Drupal Khan gave you the Drupal 10 readiness initiative team a chance to speak to the whole Drupal Khan audience about the initiative and help move the Drupal project forwards. It's something we've never done before like that. Do you think you managed to say all of the things that you felt were important at that time and managed to get them across to the audience? And are there any things that you want to add that you didn't get a chance before, do you think? I think the project readiness for Drupal 9 isn't a very interesting area that we need to explore a lot more, that we have a lot of patches in the queue waiting and a lot of maintainers. We need to convince to accept those patches. So I think that's an area where we could still improve a lot and have more ideas and thoughts about how to improve that. And I think Kristin mentored various people in that area. But we definitely need to have more focus on that as well because we are way better than our update scale was from Drupal 7 to 8. We can always improve even more. Absolutely. It's always better. So really pushing that message is something that you want to do about making sure that everything that's necessary is at Drupal 9 because that makes Drupal 10 somewhat easier. I think inviting more maintainers to the contributions event would have been pretty awesome. I think one thing in retrospect, having done the contribution event, I think making it very clear that if you don't want to be on video to join, you don't have to be on video. If you don't even want to be on audio, you can just kind of hang out and watch, which was a new aspect, which I thought was really cool. And then if you wanted to jump on video, you could. So we had kind of a nice mix of people who were like different levels of comfort level of participation, which I didn't really know how it was going to play out. So I didn't really make that clear, but I think that might have been interesting to some people who maybe were hesitant. It's a good question. It's a good point, actually. It's not a question I'd really thought about before, but in terms of how we did contribution at Drupal Con North America, especially bearing in mind we had people thousands of miles apart working together. We used a fairly new platform and played around with it, and we changed how we did things as the week went along. And from what I've heard from people, the ability to have breakout rooms of video was useful. But what I'm hearing from you also is maybe there's something we can do about helping guide people who don't want to be on audio and video, but just want to co-work on things and know what other people are working on. Is that something that would be something we can better instruct people on or guide them? Yeah, I agree that highlighting the opportunity that you can just be a fly on the wall and observe how it's made and see what's going on and how things are done. And you don't need to necessarily dedicate yourself as I'm here contributing person is a good point that we should know we could emphasize in the future. Yeah, that's a good one, actually. Yeah, we can do that. Absolutely. And bring that out. I know we have a lot of people contributing for the very first time at DrupalCon. I noticed even there was one person, and I've completely forgotten their name now, but they were already commenting and progressing an issue forwards. And I think it was a Drupal 10 readiness one before their account was even 24 hours old, which was kind of cool. I was really pleased with that. True challenge of contribution at DrupalCon, though, isn't necessarily how many issues get fixed in that week, but how we attract people and hook their attention so that they keep coming back in the weeks and months following. Have you any thoughts about how the Drupal 10 readiness team can keep those people interested and engaged? So I think something that has worked in the past is having regular meetings with the community members that is sort of easy for them to join and participate, figure out what people are actually working on and where they could help at the moment. I think that that is something that's worked in the past. Just like with the regular DrupalCon format, and I think the same works in this case. I don't think that has 30 changes. Yeah, I think for us, it's we have a lot of different areas of work. So we have regular meetings on CK editor. We have regular meetings on general Drupal 10 readiness and other things so that people can find their niche or their specific sub community to get involved with that helps with staying around. So if you had a message for anyone watching this who was thinking, well, I kind of want to get involved again and continue. What should they do at the end of this video? Where should they go? We are assembling at the Drupal D 10 readiness channel on Drupal Slack. So they can join there and be a fly on the wall and see how it's going and get involved when they feel comfortable. We have discussions on every other Monday. The next one is coming up next Monday. So well, depending on when the video goes up, the next one is coming up on May 10th. So we have these discussions there. Anybody can come and raise questions that they think we need answered and we can discuss it there. Wonderful. And there's never a wrong question. It's always everyone is welcome and everyone is welcome to say and give their input to anything. Absolutely. Yeah, I would say one thing about the mentoring aspect and I think that for some people that's super critical, being able to have someone there and so one thing, I mean, I don't, Chris maybe can chime in too on the mentoring part, but I know in the in the distant past, we used to have regular mentoring office hours. I don't think that's been a thing for a while. Rachel, you know if maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so. It's true. We stopped doing the mentoring hours. We weren't getting the take up at that time. However, now that there are more directed ways of working and a lot of the initiatives and things like that, maybe starting that up again would be really cool, would be a really great thing that we can do. And I know I was chatting with Ellie last week, one of the core mentoring coordinators and Chris has just joined us as a core mentoring coordinator, which is really cool. Thank you, Chris. Is how we could be training up more mentors to make that take place. And one of the things we're looking at is maybe having a contribution event where we train mentors purely for not for actually fixing any issues, but helping people think that they can mentor others and so on. So it's something that we're looking at at the moment. So yeah, it could be fun. Sorry, I just want to say one of the other things that we definitely try to do when helping out when mentoring somebody is try to at least to some extent engage a sort of mental mentee relationship where maybe you get the slack account details and you chat to them and later on after a few weeks, whatever, hey, how's it going? Did you see the the issue that you worked on? It's gone through well done. You know, if you want to take a look at another issue, I can help you with that. Trying to sort of carry on that. And in person, it's a lot easier when going to multiple events, if you run into the same person again, you could be like, oh, hey, I remember, you know, I helped you out with some stuff. How's it going? That's obviously a lot harder virtually, but but yeah, at least on Slack, we can kind of reach out. Yeah, I mean, I did tell people, you know, DM me totally fine, reach out of the blue. It's no problem whatsoever. But I haven't heard anybody. But I mean, that is something that not everybody is comfortable with. And so yeah, I guess trying the reverse might be interesting as well. One thing that I thought about doing because for the, you know, couple mentioned it about the the D8 to D9 readiness aspect of this is I was thinking about trying to become a co-maintainer on some of the ones that we actually moved forward during the event so that at least I could get those over the hump. There was just a handful, but that would maybe show them, oh, no, it can work and it can get, you know, get all the way through. And that might might help, you know, inspire them a little bit more rather than having stuff sort of just sit and then be like, well, what did I do all that for? Yeah, it is a challenge. It is. Yeah. And I'm sure we can help with that and make sure that the message just get through for getting co-maintainer. And maybe if anybody else wishes to volunteer to, I don't know, join you in that mission, that would be kind of cool because it's a bit of a big thing to take on just as one person, but if there was a few of you as a little team, that would be great. Speak to Kristen, you know, that would be great. Okay. Just one more question then. So we know we Drupalcon North America, we took a slightly different approach and we had these different initiatives on different days, which meant that we were looking at some things related to the strategic objectives of the project. But we couldn't cover all of the strategic objectives of Drupal, because, well, there's quite a few. So if we were to do something similar to this again, and concentrate on a small number of initiatives, are there any particular initiatives, either existing ones or ones yet to be thought of, that you think we should include for a day? Box Smash Day would be interesting. For what? Sorry, Box Smash Day? Yeah, Box Smash Initiative. Yeah, dedicated. I mean, they were co-located with automated updates this time, but maybe a more dedicated, highlighted day would be nice. I think there's a lot of important work done by various groups. For example, the accessibility team is really great, and Drupal would always benefit from more people with more experience and accessibility to helping out in various areas. So that would be really great to further improve on. Also, I think there's a lot of other initiatives that are not necessarily Drupal core initiatives, like the events organization group would be, I think, an interesting one to highlight and have workshops and knowledge sharing and more things about events, because I think scaling more Drupal events and sharing experiences and involving more people in them, that would help a lot in terms of reaching all the other goals that we have. And actually, similarly, Rachel, you were saying a mentoring initiative as a focus. I think that's fantastic. And having that first day is being more of the orientation. I know we kind of scrambled to get that sort of in place, but having more of an orientation that first day. And actually, something that Rachel, because you had an issue on open social itself, I think would be a lot of fun to work on open social and kind of fine tune that a bit better for everybody, so that just everything else is more effective. Well, I can't see the open social team complaining about that idea. They would love that. Yeah. Well, thank you very much, everyone. That was that was fantastic. It was really good ideas there. And I'm looking forward to hearing how Drupal 10 has been so successful in really not that long. It's not going to be long now, is it? Yeah. Okay, well, thank you very much. I'll see you again soon. All right, thanks. Thank you. Bye.