 All right, so I'll go ahead and get started. And anyone who is not here can just miss the first part of the session. I actually know most of you, so I feel like this is going to be talking to people that I know. So I will have time for questions at the end. Hopefully, not all of this is super new to you. This is Recruiting and Rotating Delicated Volunteers. And if this is the wrong room for you, then I was a time to get up and find the appropriate room that you're supposed to be in. My name is Stephanie Elhage. I'm from Amazeelabs. And I'm going to talk to you about Recruiting Volunteers. So you're at Drupalcon. Maybe for the first time, maybe not. But this is actually my ninth Drupalcon. And it's the first time that I have had nothing to do with any of the planning. I started with the Drupal Association in 2000, I believe, 12. And my first Drupalcon was Drupalcon Denver. Since then, I've attended every Drupalcon, I believe, except for India and Bogota. And I have all the pins to prove it. My background is in marketing and advertising. But my professional background is actually in events. I first started out with the Software Association of Oregon in right out of college. And I worked with seven to 10 special interest groups in technology, so anyone from CIO level, devs, all over the board, nonprofit. We did anywhere between 30 and 70 events per year, all with a volunteer base. After I worked at the Software Association of Oregon, I came to work at the Drupal Association, where I helped put on Drupalcon. When I first came on, Drupalcon was run mostly by a volunteer team of anywhere between 20, 40, or 60 people. It was quite a group effort to make Drupalcon happen. When I took over, it was a team of two paid staff, and now I believe it's somewhere closer to five. But still with a dedicated volunteer team. Currently, I work for AMAZE Labs as a project manager, and I thought that the transition from running events and dealing with volunteers was gonna be super different from being a project manager. And fun fact, it's quite the same. You still have people, you still have processes, and you still have a start and end point, so quite a lot of similarities. The reason I'm talking to you about volunteers is actually slightly ironic. I ended with the Drupal Association last year. Mid-camp happened, and I submitted a session thinking, you know, I've always only on the organizing side of sessions, it would be kind of funny to see what would happen behind the mic. And when I submitted this session, it was almost more of a memoir, being able to close the book on that chapter of my life, and here I am presenting the session again. This is one of my favorite pictures. It's Minions from Despicable Me. What this is to me is a lot of people coming together, all sharing the same vision, and all very happy to be doing so. And if you look at this picture, it's actually quite the same. This is a picture from Drupalcon, Portland, where we had about 3,500 attendees. This was the Drupalcon that happened as a result of the DA coming in and kind of taking over more responsibility, and it happened really well. So one of the greatest success points about this event is it was a really good chance for us to put all the processes in place that we came up with as a combination of volunteer handoff and staff involvement. And it was quite a success. Lots of happy, smiling faces, super gigantic Drupalcon. So to start off, let's talk about what volunteers are and what volunteers are not, because I think this might be a point of contention for both volunteers and for organizers. First of all, these are what volunteers are not. These are servants. These are from Downton Abbey, if you've seen the show. There's definitely a hierarchy of who's in charge and who makes breakfast. You do not want to treat your volunteers like this. If you treat your volunteers like this, you will not have volunteers for very long. This is a team from Austin. This is what you want to treat your volunteers as. You don't want to treat them as paid labor. You want to treat them as colleagues, as a team, as a group of people who all come together, who you respect and who respect you and want to be together at the end of the event. This picture was taken in 100 degree weather after the event was over. And if you've ever run an event, the last thing that you want to do is this. You want to go home, you want to sleep, you want to recover. But instead, they were all so proud of the thing that they'd come together and done. All they wanted to do was be with each other and enjoy the camaraderie of that. So I like to share this picture because this picture sort of represents the diversity and just the broad range of individuals, talents, interests, whatever, that is the Drupalcon Volunteer Base. So in this picture, you're looking at multiple countries, multiple skill sets, multiple levels of involvement. Some people sent a tweet. Some people ran an entire marketing campaign. But all of them come together as equals and it's just a really good thing to strive towards. This is kind of end point. Now we're gonna talk about my philosophy for volunteers. So I'm gonna tell a story. It's called Stone Soup. And actually a lot of cultures have this same story. So you might have heard something very similar. But like I will say in this talk, your mileage may vary on a lot of these talking points. So Stone Soup. What this story is is generic country, generic war, generic war, generic soldiers coming into generic city. They're poor, the villagers are poor, the soldiers are hungry. And all they have with them is a cauldron. And they go door to door and say, we are hungry, we're soldiers, is there anything you can give to us? And each door that they go to, the people who open the door say, no, we have very little and so we need it for ourselves. And so they close the door and they go onto the next house and the same thing happens. They knock on the door, we're hungry, is there anything you can give us? And they get that same response back. We have very little, we have nothing to share with you, try the next house. And this continued on until they'd gone through every house in the village and had nothing. And the villagers thought that was it. They thought that the soldiers would move on into the next village. What actually ended up happening is, the soldiers set up that pot in the middle of the town square and they built a fire. And into the pot, they dropped a large stone and they filled the pot with water, mostly to the brim. And they sat there, stirring this pot filled with water in the morning. And eventually the first villager came out, curious, wondering, what is it that you're doing? And the soldier replied, we're making stone soup. They said, I don't know what that is. Well, if you bring me something from your house and contribute to the pot, then I'll tell you. And you can have some. And so the first villager said, well, I don't have a lot, but I have a wrinkled carrot. Can I bring that? Yes, you can bring that. And so he put it into the pot. And the next villager came up and said, what are you making? And they said, we're making stone soup. And then the villager responded, it's the same. Can I have some? What is it? And he said, yeah, you can have some, but you have to give something first. And that villager said, well, I have a small scrap of meat. It's not much, but it's what I can give you. And he said, that's fine. Go ahead and put it in the pot. And the same process continued one by one, the villagers came to the pot and contributed what it was they had. Maybe it was some beans, maybe it was some carrots and turnips, maybe some wrinkled onions, until soon the pot was bubbling and that wonderful smell was wafting through the village. And at the end, everyone had hearty bowls of stone soup. And this analogy is exactly what it's like when you are working with volunteers. Individually, people might not have much to give, maybe limited skill set, limited availability, limited interest, maybe they are only wanting to help as much as they can. And when you bring everyone together with a shared goal, you can do stone soup. You can combine everyone's abilities and interests and you can make something really magical happen. So I think if you kind of have this mindset when you go in, you can only do well. So now we're gonna get into the tactics, the process. How do you take your idea and put it into practice? So first thing is you need to start out with a plan. So let's say you're running an event. You wanna know what the goal of your event is, is it a Drupal camp? If it's a Drupal camp, where is it gonna be? Who do you want to come? What kinds of things do you want to happen at your camp? You wanna have a game plan so that when you go out to recruit people into your volunteer team, you have something to get them to sign off on. You don't wanna just go out into the world and say, I wanna do a thing. I'm not really sure what that thing is, but I want you to spend time making that thing happen, whatever it will be, because you're not really gonna get a lot of buy-in if you do that. So make sure that when you, it's like a business plan. You need to go out showing them that you've done some legwork to make it happen. Once you have your business plan, you need to figure out the volunteer rules that you need to make that plan happen. You need to have your roster. You need to do a draft. And in this instance, you take that same plan and you figure out all the things that you can do and all the things that you can't do or don't want to do, or maybe that you shouldn't be doing because you're already spread too thin. You make a list. If you're running an event, maybe you have a marketing team. Maybe you have a volunteer team or a registration team or a speaker team or a sponsor team. There's all these different roles that need to be owned by someone. And if you were the only one owning those roles, you're going to be very busy. So make that list of what you need done and also make a list of what kind of skill sets you think might match well with those roles. This will make it really easy to pair people when they come to you and say, yeah, I wanna help with your event. What can I do? If you don't have this list ready, you can't match them. And if you don't have a list of skills ready, you can't help them match themselves. So it's really good to just get that down so that the next part is a lot smoother. So this is my ideal recruit. This is Samwise Gamgee. The things that make him ideal is dedication to the cause. So what you want is someone passionate about the event or the thing that you're gonna be doing so that they can carry on the crusade just on their own. It's really hard to be a cheerleader for everyone. You want them to kind of be a cheerleader for themselves. Willingness to jump in is huge. If you're wanting to participate but you never quite get off your couch, you don't really help anyone. So you want a group of people who not only are excited about the thing you're doing, but they're excited about it enough to get up and do something about it. You also want someone with a potential for leadership. And I'll talk about this a little bit later, but this will start to come out more and more. So they might be where they are currently and don't take that as face value as the end of what it is they're gonna be able to contribute. Always look for opportunity and interest that you can cultivate later on. And the final thing is availability. And I feel like sometimes this one is a little bit overlooked, but it's definitely the one that can come back and bite you if you don't consider it at the beginning. If someone's really excited and they want to help, but maybe they just had a baby or they just got a giant job promotion or they're gonna be launching a project in six months when your event is gonna be happening, you have a disconnect. And you don't want to put pressure on that person. You wanna have someone who's available and can give you the time that it takes to make whatever it is you're doing happen. So now that you have your game plan, now that you have your list of roles, now that you kind of have your ideal volunteer in mind, now you need to hit the streets. You need to recruit because if you sit on your couch or behind your computer screen and you expect people to know that this project or event is gonna happen, you're going to end up with just yourself on your volunteer team. You need to actually get out there, go find people, talk to them and recruit them on to your cause. This is kind of the part that can kill projects is because oh, you have to go talk to people. No. So to get started, these are some resources that you can look into. Half of these are just general volunteer warm bodies. And that's totally fine. Like if all you need, like let's say you're putting on a race and all you need is for 500 people to show up and hand out water or full of t-shirts, be there to congratulate people at the end. These are really good resources for that because those are the kind of people who just wanna give you a small amount of time and that's great. But if you want a more targeted group of individuals, you can try things like meetup. Like maybe you have your Drupal user group on meetup. You have people who've signed up to your meetup group. Those people are potential volunteers. You wanna reach out to those people. Maybe you have a Drupal user group set up. Those people who have subscribed to that user group, potential volunteers. And the reason they are great for that is because they've already subscribed to whatever it is you're gonna be working on. So let's say you're doing a camp in Texas. You wanna go find all the groups that touch Texas and go plug in. So shameless plug. We're gonna be doing Drupal Camp Texas in Austin. And what I've done to make sure that we have buy-in from the state is to go to Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin and talk to all the different user group leads and let them know the event is happening and let them know that you're encouraging them to spread the word about the recruitment process and that it's gonna be happening and that people should get involved. So already we went from having just a very small group of people knowing that it was happening to suddenly a big network of people who now know that it's happening. It's quite easy to make the jump. So in addition to that, you're going to have to get up and go talk to people. And this could be talking to people in your user group, but it could also be recruiting from within. You can talk to your friends. You can talk to your family. Sometimes when it comes to events specifically, they don't have to be bought in. They just have to be bought into you. And you'll see this as you get into events that not everyone who's a great fit because they hit all those criteria points that I mentioned before. This is from Monty Python. They're recruiting people to come with them on their quest. If you have not seen it, they summarize my points quite succinctly. My favorite way to recruit volunteers is the referral method. So this is from How I Met Your Mother. This is Ted Mosby, a perpetually single individual. But one of the things that they do in the show is constantly introduce him to people to date. And when you're looking for volunteers, you kind of want someone to have this mentality towards you. You want people to send you warm leads, to send you referrals because you already have that point of contact of saying, I know this person. I know this person is good for X or Y. And that's really good because it's a lot easier to start with a group of people who already have someone vouching for them versus just someone that you found on the street or in an ad or whatever. Because when you start to get random submissions for your event or project, you just don't really know what it is you're gonna get. So if you've not seen Labyrinth, this is Jarith the Goblin King. He is offering his services as a babysitter, which if you've seen the movie, he also steals babies. Maybe not the best fit for that particular role. And this is the kind of thing that you need to watch out for is you're gonna get people who say, yeah, I'm interested in helping. Just always take that with a grain of salt. Having worked with at least 20 volunteer teams, I can definitely tell you I've been burned by people showing up and not having someone vouch for them. I've also found really great people this way. So it could work in either way. And for this reason, you want to take that person out for coffee. You wanna have a conversation with that person before you fully recruit them into your project or your event. And this is really good for a variety of reasons. For one, it provides just a stop point where you can talk to this person, figure out what it is that they're into. Why did they contact you? Why are they interested in this event? What are they hoping to get out of the event? And then also you can share with them expectations. So things like time expectations, things like the role that we're looking to fill are this, this and this. Do those match the things that you're interested in? And it's just really good because when you have this meeting, it gives you a head start in the actual planning. This person now has been recruited and told all the things that it is that you want to achieve and they're one step further down the onboarding process. The next thing is while you're having this one-on-one meeting with them, you wanna set expectations. So they might hit all those criteria points that we went over. They might be willing to help. They might be into your cause. They might have time and availability. But there might be a mismatch somewhere along the line. Maybe when you're explaining what your goals are, the timing is off. Maybe when you're explaining the goals, they interpreted it in one way and when you talk to them about it, you realize that maybe you're not quite the best fit for this project. And just being open and honest at this point will save you lots of headache down the road. Being clear, being transparent, always, always good to start with rather than end with. And that said, when you have all these people that you've gone through and talked to and interviewed and talked about this great event, you're going to find people who are not a great fit for your project. And this is one of the things I feel like volunteer leads specifically have a hard time doing. It's okay to say no. It's really hard because the people who are coming to you are coming to you of their own free will to donate their time, their money, their ideas, whatever. And so kind of where do you get off telling this person they can't do that? You need to overcome that hurdle because if you let that person in and they're not a great fit for you, it's gonna cause problems later on. So now that we have our team, now that we have our game plan and the team that you have you're confident in and you think that you can do really wonderful things, now you need to kick off the actual planning or coming together. Let's say you're doing a project. This first meeting, this first kickoff is super important because it sets the stage for everyone as a whole. So you had your individual coffee conversations, now it's time to bring that all together. So now that the team is all on the same call or in the same meeting, you want to walk them through everything all over again. Go through the goals, go through the timeline, go through roles and responsibilities, ask questions, get them to ask questions also, start that collaboration process early. Just because you had a conversation with someone over coffee, maybe someone else would be interested in that same answer and they weren't with you when you were having coffee. So repeat those kinds of things to make sure everyone is aware and on the same page. This is huge because the more everyone is on the same page to start with, the easier it will be to actually get into the process. One of the first things I like to do when I bring together teams is team introductions. So when you're joining something for the first time, maybe you know one or two people and that's great because you're probably starting off better than some other people in the group. So what I like to do is kind of level the playing field and make sure everyone gets a chance to do introductions, announce themselves, announce why they're there, what they're hoping to get out of it. A lot of this is repeated from that coffee conversation but it's reiterated now as a whole group so that everyone can be brought onto the same page. This is really good for a variety of reasons. The biggest one is it starts to help people feel like they're part of a group and it also helps get over that hurdle of how do I start to talk to these people who I have something in common with. We have this event in common but we don't really know what the other commonalities are and that just makes it easier to just get rid of that barrier and get people already working towards being comfortable enough to have open conversation during these meetings. Another thing just on a really simple level is if you have people coming in to your event and all they're gonna do is like fold t-shirts, still do introductions because it makes people feel so much more valued that you took the time to say hey, you're gonna do a t-shirt, this is Bob, he's also doing t-shirts, you can fold t-shirts together and they'll already be so much happier. I've seen it happen time and again. It make introductions, you've already won them over. Like I said before, get everybody into the boat. So if you've done project management or anything like that, you might have heard this metaphor of get everyone in the boat so they're all rowing in the same direction. It's that same thing. You just reiterate again and again your goals, the mission and make sure everyone is in the boat. The next thing that you wanna do is prepare your team. So you could do everything yourself but like I mentioned before, it's not something that you really wanna do. What you wanna do is you wanna train your team to kind of function on their own and be independent and autonomous and feel like they're empowered to contribute and make the team that much more effective. So one of the things that you wanna do is train them. Whether it's a training on how meetings will be run or how frequently things are due or how the things are due or resources they can go talk to to learn how they can do things. All of these tips will help your team not recreate the wheel. One of the things that I've run into is that when some teams get started, there's no base for where to start working and so you have lots of ideas and people tend to just run in circles and nothing really gets done. What you wanna do is kind of get rid of those barriers to everyone kind of working together and make it so that the directive is clear and how to get there is also clear. And again, you can also relate this to t-shirts. If you have people coming in to just fold t-shirts for your event, show them how. Like you assume that everyone knows how to fold a t-shirt but if we like handed out t-shirts in this room and asked people to fold them, you would get a lot of different varieties of that. And that's not to say that some people will do it wrong. Some people could do it in super creative ways but if you just start in one place and say, hey, start here, do this, then you can grow from there rather than having to corral everything back to square one. The next thing that you wanna do is start a rhythm. So the rhythm is super important because when you get everyone on the same page working towards an end goal, the thing that you wanna do is maintain momentum and get all the things out of the way that could derail progress. So one of the things that I really like to do when I kick off a team is to say, okay, we're gonna be meeting every two weeks. We're gonna meet Thursdays at noon. We're gonna take meeting notes in this way. You can contribute in this way. We're gonna make decisions in this way and having that kind of process with the team that everyone knows about prevents issues down the road where let's say you all decided on a logo and then two weeks later, someone says, well, I was thinking about it and I really don't like that logo. I think we should change it. And if you don't have a process to say, well, we made a decision, so maybe change the logo next year. You can end up in this cycle where you continually have discussions over things that were already decided and that's hugely wasteful for the whole team because the people who were involved in that first decision suddenly feel like their input wasn't valued and you wanna do as much as possible to make sure that when people contribute that it doesn't get undervalued by things like that. If you're interested in how to structure your meetings like that, you can look up Robert's Rules of Order, which is actually used by the US government and lots of other organizations worldwide of just how to set up your meetings and how to make it so that people know the process for those. And they've also got smaller versions of that because it's quite a thick manual. Now, you have your team. You have the game plan. You know what you're working towards. Everyone's all on the same page. So what is it that you as the leader are doing? What you're doing is you're playing coach. You're running alongside the team. You're providing direction. You're getting distractions out of the way. You're getting blockers out of the way. Your job is to make your team's life as easy as possible. And this is especially important because they're volunteers. They're not getting paid for this. And so they might be making time for your event in their spare time. They're breaking into family time or recreation time or whatever. So you wanna make sure that you make the most of the time that they have to give you. Super important. This is also a way for you to know to kind of keep the team on track of what the direction is gonna be. And also, because when people are working on different aspects of the project, it's always good to have one person kind of having the game plan that you're constantly referring to and keeping everyone on track. So now that I've said that, there's also the next part of it. So on the one side, you're providing leadership. You're providing guidance. You're providing direction. But in events specifically, things go wrong. Shit explodes. It happens. What you wanna be able to do is jump in when that does happen and provide help. Get your hands dirty. Jump in and fold those t-shirts or move those chairs or call in and fill that person's role for the day. Maybe they couldn't turn in something. You can show up and finish that project for them. You get to kind of wear a lot of hats as a leader and you need to be flexible enough and have offloaded enough responsibility onto others so that when something does go wrong, you're available to actually jump in without making anything else break. Also, this is from the Little Rascals and I think it's adorable. So now that you have your team, you have your game plan, you have a process, you have a rhythm, you're providing guidance and everything's just working well or maybe not. The thing to remember is that, regardless of what happens, whether or not the event goes really well or the event goes badly or the event goes badly, but no one can tell on the outside because your team banded together so well, the important thing is to remember to finish as a team. This is from The Avengers. It's in the end-to-end credit so you won't see it as part of the full part of the movie, but what they're doing is they're having shawarma. And to me, this is one of the most important things you can do for your team and as a team once the project's made it to the end or even whenever something really bad happens. It's your way of getting everybody together and healing as a team because when you go through events and events specifically, things can go wrong and if you leave it up to one person to go and make themselves feel better and resolve that on their own, you've broken your team. If you bring everyone together to sort of bond and say, wow, that sucked or just say, wow, that was really amazing or wow, we should probably do something totally different next year. You're still doing that as a team and that's really healthy. The next part of the session that I'm gonna go into is how to maintain your team now that you've survived together. So if you've never done this, if you're in the project management or you are a part of a dev agency, this is called the post-mortem. They're very important, half of them. So now we're going to be into the kind of cultivation part, the retaining part of volunteers. And Oprah is really great at this next aspect of it. She loves to celebrate wins and that's one of the things that as a leader you need to really be cognizant of and really actively do. Celebrate the wins before the event is over, celebrate the wins when the event is over. And also celebrate the wins in a way that makes that particular volunteer feel like you cared enough to figure out what makes them tick and what makes them happy. So some volunteers are totally satisfied with getting their name listed in the book or mentioned from the stage. And some volunteers would rather be up on the stage with you celebrating that win together. Other volunteers, they're only in it because maybe they just need a job referral and this is a really great way of proving that they're a great person and really fun to work with. And all of those things are fine. You just need to know what they are so that you can kind of meet that need for them. So celebrate the wins and celebrate the wins in the way that best fits that person. Also Oprah. The next thing that you wanna do is you wanna cultivate leadership. So you have this team, you have people who you've seen in the trenches and it's become apparent that some of those people are just really good at what they did. And so you wanna reach in and kind of pull them out of the regular team and turn them into leaders. And you can't really turn someone into a leader but you wanna have that mark on them of I'm gonna focus on you and see just how much we can cultivate you and just see how much more responsibility we can put on you and see what it is that we can put you in charge of and see how you can grow that area. And like Alba says, not everybody who is going to be a leader is looking for that. And so it's your job as a leader to find those skills and those little gems of potential and to pull them out. One of the things that I've found with DrupalCon is that it's good to rotate in the volunteers. And so one of the things that we've done is kind of keep a base of volunteers who've, we call them globals, who've been there before and who can train kind of the new roster of individuals. And these globals over time have just become really good champions for the cause. They've seen how all of it's done. They've seen the historical information. They know what works. They know what's been tried. And they kind of help bring that new person up into the ranks through sharing. And that's really, it's been really helpful to have that structure within DrupalCon to help maintain just the health of the volunteer group. The next part of it is mentorship. So Ron Swanson is from Parks and Recreation and he's an incredibly reluctant mentor. But if you've watched the show, he's actually a super great mentor just by being honest and truthful and sharing his opinion, which may or may not be right. But it's really good for people who need someone to look up to or need a direction to follow to have at least someone there who can provide some measure of mentorship. And mentorship goes a long way. So with the DrupalCon Globals, this mentorship is used to bring in the new guard. And we've had Globals, I believe, since 2012, if not a little bit longer. So now our global pool is like over 70 people. That many people who know how DrupalCon is run, who know how certain aspects of the DrupalCon program get produced, who knows how the social media thing runs. So now we've built this gigantic web of people who can step in if needed. And we also have this big network of people that the new people can go and talk to for all these different aspects of running a conference, which I think is pretty valuable. In addition to mentorship and training and all of those things that you want to do with your volunteers, one thing that sometimes gets missed, especially in the midst of all this process, is listening to your volunteers. So in another Parks and Rec situation, a measure was gonna get passed that this particular person disagreed with. And he tried going through the normal channels to say, stop that, I don't like this, please stop that, not my favorite, until the vote was finally about to happen. So he showed up and filibustered by doing a super awesome eight minute ad lib Star Wars plot pitch. But what you wanna do is you wanna prevent someone from having to make a gigantic gesture, a big disruptive gesture so that they're heard. You wanna listen to them early so it doesn't explode in your face. So this is more of an example of what not to do. Listen to people early, let them contribute. You don't necessarily have to take everything at face value or accept all suggestions, but the part where you just took the time to listen can go miles into keeping everyone happy and healthy. The other part of it is along with mentorship, along with listening, is you wanna encourage ideas. So my background is process, I love process. In another life I would have done supply chain management and that kind of process and routine and structure is very technical, very straightforward, very A to B. And when you're dealing with a team, you have emotions and people and opinions and those two things don't really go together. So this is kind of the crux of where you take the strong process that you have and you allow it to be flexible enough so that people can contribute ideas. And this is really, really great because to use that T-shirt example, we're providing a base of fold the T-shirt like this and maybe someone has an idea of, maybe if you roll the T-shirt instead of folding it, they won't make as big of a mess and they're gonna be a lot easier to pull out when people ask for a certain size. That having that kind of flexibility allows your project to grow and it allows you to be more agile in picking up new things that can make your project or your event that much better. This is Ms. Frizzle from the Magic School Bus, constantly encouraging children and everyone to learn, to try stuff and to get messy in. And one of the things that I really wanna encourage you is that to continue doing that. Get your hands messy, make mistakes, it's all good. And at the end of the day, you're doing an event. Like you can come back if whatever it is that you're trying fails. DrupalCon has done this for the last couple of years. We've tried things and sometimes they don't work. We've tried other things and sometimes they do. The summits are a result of a volunteer coming to us and saying, let's say the government one, I really wanna talk to other people in government but I'm not really getting that from a session. How can I bring other people in government together and have that one on one time? Summits. We've also tried other things that have failed miserably and that's why you don't see them on the schedule. But having the flexibility of making those mistakes gives you the opportunity to make awesome things happen. The other thing is when you have open collaboration and when you have open sharing and people coming with ideas and people having differences of opinion, you're gonna have disagreement. You're gonna have potential fights or just negative conversation. And what you wanna do from the get-go is say, this is a super open place. You can bring those things to us. You can talk openly but you must do it respectfully because if we can't have respect in a team who's working as hard as we're working and producing the thing that we're doing together, you don't have a place here. When you have respect on a team, you can do so many magical things that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. If there's that one person who constantly pipes up and kills the conversation or commandeers the conversation, you'll start to notice that other people on that call have stopped talking. And that's what you wanna avoid is you wanna avoid the people who are being stifled and whose little lights are going out. Their interest is dying because they're not being heard. They're not getting a chance to contribute. Or when they do contribute or raise their voices, they're smashed down. So you wanna be an active cultivator of healthy dialogue. Also, this is kid president. If you don't know kid president, go look him up. The other thing that you wanna do is something that the Drupal community as a whole has a problem with and this is burnout. And so in addition to making sure that your team is communicating well and has a good mentorship structure, you wanna go and find the people on your team who are maybe working too hard or who maybe something's come up in their life that they probably should focus on more than the event. And going to them and saying, hey, I see you're struggling or you've got a lot of stuff going on right now. It's totally fine if you need to take some time and not be on the project. And this is really hard for that person to hear usually. Otherwise, they would have already stepped out on their own. That's why it's called burnout, because they're still there. So what you wanna do is one-on-one go to them and say, hey, I see a thing. Let's talk about it. And a way that you can help that person accept your offer to step down is by providing backup and say, hey, if you leave, the thing that you're doing is still gonna get done. Or hey, if you leave, you can come back later. This isn't the end of your time here. And sometimes just hearing that lets people decouple and gives them enough that they can go and focus on whatever it is that they need to go focus on. Otherwise, people get really attached to whatever it is that they're doing and they don't wanna see it fail. They wanna see it through to the end and you just need to help them make that jump. Another group of people who you want to help make that jump with are the people who maybe have worn out their welcome on the team or who are those people who are very loud during calls and make it really difficult for people to contribute. And this happens. Over the course of time that you spend with people, some people will become really great at the whole team mindset and are really healthy and wonderful for the team and some people will be less so. And it'll become very obvious who those people are as you work more and more with the group. And so in addition to helping people step out for burnout reasons, you also wanna help people step out and prune your garden. This is really good because it helps cultivate the people who are still there. It shows them that they're valued and it also helps those people who wouldn't step backwards on their own to make that step out of the group. And this kind of goes back to that first slide that I showed you where it's okay to say no. It's okay to say to people that you are no longer welcome on the team. And it's a really, really hard conversation to have. Over the course of my seven Drupal cons, we've had to do it, I think, three times. And in each instance, it was worse than firing someone at a job because it's very emotional. If you don't have dollars on the line, it's a little bit easier to be more clinical and say, hey, your KPIs aren't being met or whatever, versus saying, yeah, you're kind of a jerk and people don't like working with you and it's probably gonna be best if you just don't show up for a while. It's really hard, but it needs to happen. And finally, you as the leader, you've created this base of people who have been brought up through the ranks, who are now leaders in their own right and you've trained all these people of how this event works, how the processes are done and how to run things on their own. And you've trained the people that it's okay to step out when there's burnout. It's okay to step out when it's a mismatch of skills or interests. But you've maybe forgotten to take care of yourself in that process. And one of the things that you should do as a leader is to say, I need help. And if you've created that baseline of people who are brought up through the ranks and know how to do things, it should be a lot easier to say, I need to also prune the garden and take myself out of the situation or maybe just take myself out of the situation for a while and have those people kind of step in to fill your place. And this is really good also because especially when you're doing camps or things like that, it's really healthy to say, hey, I've brought this camp to where it is now, I'm going to pass it on to the next generation and the next group of people who are going to take over and see what it is that they can do. And it's really good because new blood is good. New blood is healthy. It can help sustain a project or an idea longer than one individual can on their own. And it's also really good because it shows people who may have burnout later down the line that if you as a leader can say, I've had enough, I'm done, I need to take five, that they can also do that. And I'm going to end on this, Amy Poehler, is a really great inspiration to ladies everywhere and just people in general who want to make a positive impact and kind of change the way that people collaborate in the workforce and just collaborate in general. Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them and it will change your life. No one is here today because they did it on their own. And I can say that 100% for all of my events. If it was just me, I wouldn't have been able to do them on my own. And if you look at DrupalCon in 2012 and look at it now, the changes and the growth and the processes and all the good things that have happened happened because it was not just me, they're doing it. And if you take this mindset into whatever event or thing it is that you are doing and go through these steps, the processes, the soft skills and the cultivation, you could have this same kind of happy growth at the end of it. These are all the pictures that I referenced earlier. Any questions? Question. Thanks, Jeremy. I want to build sets needed to run, like let's say there's an event that's had a lot of maybe particularly technical things or things that you have certain knowledge holders. How can you utilize volunteers or should you have to pass along a lot of that knowledge? Is it worth taking the time to teach them knowing that that's maybe an investment or? I feel like you answered the question. Yes, it's that whole thing of like hit by a bus. You want as many people to be competent in that thing so that if you get hit by a bus that they can step in. And I hate the analogy, but it's really funny. I want to fill in, we should figure out the initial copy that you sit down with them. But then you need to follow up with them that it's actually resolved. And as a coach, you would want to make them successful in a meaningful way as soon as possible, but not too soon. It's like have to challenge them, but then ensure that they are successful as soon as possible so that they get that positive feedback and that they can charge up for the work later on and then get into the cycle. So I do have a process for that. It was kind of in the Dory slide, but I skipped over it a little bit. It's called a running buddy. And running buddies are crazy successful, so it could be either in the global term where this person has done it before or it's that simple thing of you both are going in brand new together and just having that point of reference, I found to be super successful because then you're both already looking at like that issue already. So you know to watch for it and you know who to ask questions and who to review or who to just have the conversation with directly with that person and it doesn't put the leader in that position where they need to be that bottleneck. They need to be that person checking on that. But yeah, a buddy system with a mentor is always more effective, but it takes more lead time to get that off the ground and everybody onboarded to how that's gonna work. I would try that. Running buddy. Yeah, there's other stuff out there, but it's that kind of thing of your miles may vary. One of the things that I really like is go find someone who does something similar to what it is that you wanna do and go eat their brain. Because then you get it more targeted to the thing that you're trying to accomplish and you don't have to go through the process of saying okay, here's a book and then try the whole book straight through before you have to start pulling things out. It's a lot easier if you can say hey, you're running an event, I'm running an event, let's sit down and walk through the whole thing together and you can tell me what worked and what didn't work. But I'm very efficient like that, I don't like to, yeah. Anything else? All right, well thank you for coming and if you have questions you can talk to me after. I guess stop recording.