 recording okay so so everyone who is from the community that joined just a big thank you for joining us if you got up early thank you and hopefully this time zones helping others in India join us as well we'll definitely do this again next year and so for the public board meeting the few items that we have are just approving our minutes from the last public board meeting which was September 28th Megan could you zoom your screen slightly for peers can you see that now perfect great and then I'll just ask the board if they have any updates to the trying to get down zoom so big it's gonna take me a few minutes I put our dashboard in there and I just wanted to see if our board had any specific questions that they wanted to ask in the public forum and then we scroll back up what's big and then there's the the technical advisor committee wanted to give an update we wanted to be more transparent now that we're moving forward with the technical advisory committee and working on our tooling and Angie Byron has joined us she's on the tack and we have put out a block post announcing this and kind of talking a little bit about what we're trying to achieve in the tax meets in progress they want to talk about the roadmap and some of their assessments we will be talking about this more an executive session but it'll be just more about getting some more direction from the board so we make sure we're all aligned on the next steps and then last but not least we want to thank Denise and Rob for their years of service on the board and giving us a lot of guidance and insight and so trees will be saying those thank yous as well so with that I just need to ask the board if kind of to start the motion to approve the meeting minutes from September 28th and if you recall I'll just link to them it was primarily an update in the public setting at Dublin where we covered updates on Drupalcon and membership and the Drupal.org front page do we have a motion to approve like I moved to approve the the meeting minutes all right everyone approve him yeah it's everyone not in favor second okay so the it's moved and seconded that we will approve the meeting minutes of the last board meeting anyone in favor say I if if not in favor say no please hi hi all right so I can just confirm who that was I definitely heard Drees and Denise. I shall know okay also me Addy. Hey okay thank you. Thanks everyone um well we do have an executive session where we're gonna be diving quite deeply into a few different areas where we're just gonna discuss how to move some things forward but what I'll be sending to the public after this is a blog post with this board packet and our dashboard that will just give them all an update of the work we're doing in our progress towards it and you'll recognize this dashboard and you know I know I give this out to the board every two weeks just wanted to see if there are any questions that you had for me at this time. Nope looks good to me. Can I just confirm real quick and sorry I see I'm just catching up with the minutes see some errors on the line. Samir did you support that previous motion just for my knowledge? I was there okay thanks Samir. Sorry Megan. No no worries right so just checking in to see if you had any questions so far Addy has said no anyone else okay well then what I'll be doing with this is sending it out to the public in that blog post and then if the community has questions about our work then I'll be answering it through comments there alright and with that I'd like to hand it over to I'm gonna stop sharing and I'm gonna hand this over to Angie, Angie Byron who has generously agreed to donate time to be on the technical advisory committee so first big thank you to Angie really appreciate everything you're doing for us. Thank you I'm happy to help. Good so maybe you could just give a quick overview of what the tack is and your charter and and then kind of go through your presentation of your where you are in the process and your findings so far. Sure yep so so the tack was formed the tech stands for technical advisory committee we were formed when the Drupal Association went through some organization changes and no longer had a CTO and reduced you know some some of the technical staff we were there to sort of do a multifaceted number of things but you know one is look into options that help the community tools be more sustainable another is to kind of help Tim who's now leading the engineering team over there you know like work on prioritization and you know validation of different things that we're working on and making sure that you know that's just just validating that that's you know the best way to help the community we also are there to help you know any questions that Megan might have you know about the way the technical side of Drupal.org works some of the strategic things that we you know can help with that that way so it's sort of a blended approach we help we're just here to help basically we can with with Drupal.org or with other technology decisions in lieu of and lieu of having someone on staff who you know helps at that level you know and obviously the the technical staff that we have there are awesome and doing great work on Drupal.org and improving it and things like that we sort of help out just at a little bit higher level higher strategic levels so yeah that's that's kind of what we do we super appreciate it yeah thank you we we appreciate being asked to to help so I think if I do this and you guys see this okay yes we can excellent okay so what I wanted to do is just give a short update on where we're at with various things so on the gigantic roadmap here actually some background what we're talking about in this in this presentation is the Drupal.org development tools so as most people know we host our own development tools they're written in Drupal other than the test by is written in a bunch of different things they are costly to run we have to upgrade them every time that there's a new version of Drupal you know various things like that and so the board asked us to look into developer tools stuff and see if there might be other options that we could explore that maybe would be would still you know give us the things that we really need to make the you know community well functioning because you know obviously one of the Drupal Association's biggest roles is empowering the contributor community but see if there are ways to do that through you know partnering with other organizations or you know through you know different types of investments we could make in that sort of thing and so this presentation is about that so just to give a general idea of the roadmap we're still pretty early on in the process as you can see what we've started doing is we've started researching different options we have actually had a nice two-day retreat in Portland a couple weeks ago to you know dig in with the staff more and figure things out and now where we are at is we're presenting our research on the various options to the community for feedback we're not yet making a recommendation but we are we've done enough stuff right now that we you know know quite a bit and then as you can see there's a bunch more stuff after this we have to make sure staff's on board we have to make sure that you know we give Megan enough information in order to you know approve whatever the leading recommendation is and then when we get the the process approved then we have a whole bunch of work that you have to do to you know figure out what the project entails figure out what we're going to need in order to get it done this kind of thing so so we're still early on in the process but we are making progress so that's really good news the last update we made was a public blog post on Drupal.org where we you know kind of inform the community we're doing this at the tack existed that this is you know what we're doing we're looking into different options since then and that was maybe a month ago maybe a month and a half ago we narrowed our evaluation to basically three options either one we we kind of double down on expanding our existing tools so that would be the concept of issue workspaces that Ryan over on the Drupal Association tech team has been working on for probably pretty much as long as he's worked there so it's the idea of getting pull request like functionality into our existing developer tools tech the second is a partner opportunity with GitHub pretty much everyone in the developer sphere knows who GitHub is they're they're a big deal and then the third option is GitLab and GitLab is really interesting because they're an open-source GitHub alternative and Elyran from from GitHub or GitLab I'm sorry actually came to DrupalCon to talk with us and that was a really awesome meeting and then as I mentioned before we also spent two days deep-diving with staff on all of these different things to try and you know get them kind of assuage their concerns that they might have and you know get get them to you know look into any hard blockers that would prevent either of the partners from being explored and that went well so just gonna quick whip through some high-level things so our existing tools look a bit like this it's very Drupally it's very well integrated into our site you know everybody logs in once all the stuff is right there but on the other hand it is our special snowflake stuff and so it prevents a it presents a barrier of opportunity or entry to to people who know the other tools really well so the the biggest pro I would say with our existing tools is that they're really built around this concept of collaboration versus forking collaboration is really part of our DNA we have a lot of volunteer activity that happens and so it's very very typical for someone to start a patch you know in 2012 and then get busy with other things and go off the map and for someone to pick it up again in 2013 a completely different person who doesn't know the first person and keep working on things and slowly get the thing through to our resolution we also have a really kick-ass issue queue that has great tools for categorizing issues searching you know pulling up lists that kind of stuff and then obviously since this is our our bread and butter the staff that we have knows this stack really well and knows where they can push it and this kind of thing on the other hand we have a bunch of cons I'm not going to read this whole slide to you but you know some of the things are you know because it is our special stack it's it's really hard for new people to get you know on board we also lack some of the modern things in other developer tools like a lot of modern developer tools have like in place editing of or in line editing of the code file so you don't even need to do anything with git and like for example when I helped Megan with her patch at Midwest developer summit you know that took about five hours or something and had we done that on you know something like github it would have taken about four seconds so you know things like that especially for documentation theming contributions to stuff like that is a big deal and then the patch-based workflow and say is probably the number one blocker it's it's it's just very clunky compared to what people are used to and then they the sunk cost of having to upgrade the tools every so often where we do a whole bunch of work that no one can see any user-facing benefit of that's that's hard pills to swallow every three or four years github looks like this it's really kind of slick nice looking it's got some nice stuff like you know inline diffs and the ability to comment on pull requests this kind of thing it's pretty sweet probably the biggest pro of github is it has seven bazillion users that's a you know a metric number I take a lot of time to measure that and then pretty much everybody out there has a github account at this point I don't think that was true the first couple times we were looking at these options but it's definitely true today you know one of the the cons that we have is it's a it's a closed-sourced proprietary system it's also remotely hosted so we have very little control over you know the feature roadmap of this thing because you know we're not the biggest you know fish in their pond by a long shot they also have pretty limited issue Q compared to what we're used to which that's not great and for the most part github hasn't really been innovating rapidly for the last few years up until recently and the recent changes have been really great but but you know it's sort of like out of our control how fast or how slow the roadmap goes so that's a little bit get lab is the the next one and they largely are why github has been innovating lately because get lab as you can see looks pretty similar to github it has a lot of the same you know developer patterns and things like that which makes it a good alternative it's also open-source which is really great it's written in ruby so not PHP but our own tools being hosted in written PHP hasn't really led to a mess you know bunch of people contributing to it so that's not that much of a barrier it's also cool because it can be remotely hosted or it can be installed on-premise if we wanted to do that ourselves easy onboarding because it looks and works a lot like github and then another cool thing is we can potentially offload test spot on this thing as well which is a kind of recurring monthly cost that we have because of it's a very close replica of github it pretty much has the same contents github we found the performance of get lab comms hosted projects a little bit suboptimal but we also you know could could work with hosting our own instance perhaps and get around that so those are the three options we have this like incredibly big I was gonna call it the spreadsheet of doom but I was informed by Megan that now we call things spreadsheets of opportunity so we have a spreadsheet opportunity that compares in contrast all of the different functionality of these different services and it's still kind of getting some touch up so we we're not sharing this publicly yet but but rest assured that myself from the tack as well as you know all of the DA tech staff sat down over a couple days to really dig into this and figure out so we make a good decision here so I think that's what I've got oh next steps next steps is we're gonna prepare the community communication to kind of just give a community update on this is the three options that we're looking at and here's why and then we're going to be recommending that staff be allocated to continue familiarizing themselves with the various options because you know it's one thing for tech to make a recommendation but staff is the ones who are actually gonna have to you know do the legwork on this stuff and so it's important that they feel good about that and feel like they had answers to all their questions and this kind of thing and then yeah as the executive just director makes her decision we will be there to advise and answer any questions that's pretty much our updates did anyone have any questions looks good thanks Angie all right great thanks everyone work awesome yeah I can't wait to see where this goes next yeah likewise oh that was cool I'm so excited about to win nice to see you again enjoy your vacation Angie okay well we have one last item on the agenda and Dries I think he wanted to say a few words to Denise and Rob who are have their seats are expiring and they've done some really great work with for us in your commute typical sorry no yeah it's kind of a sad time in many ways because you know Denise I've known for many many years and has been with the Drupal Association for I don't know six years now I think five years and it's really really helped us I think transform if you think about all of the changes that we've gone through in the last you know five years and more you know her her expertise in open source our expertise in open source leaderships and communities has really helped us I think we've learned a lot from other communities and we've learned that primarily through Denise and so she was being she's been our gateway to the rest of the world I think in many ways and that's been very helpful more most recently she connected us with open source organizations like the Linux Foundation and really helped us you know get close to them so we can learn from them and talk to them she has educated about educated us and the staff really about open source licensing lots of fun conversations there and you know has as yeah generally done a lot to help us out so you know thank you Denise for for everything you've done in the last five years and even before I had a great time thanks everybody yeah you will be missed but hopefully we'll see you again in the future and then thank you yeah if anyone wants to add something or not just having thanks you guys know where to find me the next person is Rob I don't think Rob is on the call unfortunately but Rob has been with the with the Drupal Association for three years so for one term we recruited Rob because we wanted to have more inputs in how large customers think about Drupal and how we can do things that help large customers you know adopt Drupal and Rob at the time came from NBC and the media space in general and has done exactly that you know it's helped the Drupal Association both the board and the staff to understand and welcome large organizations large customers of Drupal into our community which is a non-trivial thing we're a special animal and it's not always easy to understand how open source works and how they can contribute to open source and so Rob's help with that has been tremendous one example of that is the media summit that he created at Drupal cons where he sort of championed that and brought together leaders from the media industry and entertainment industry and get them together to talk about Drupal and open source and how they can collaborate and so that's been very effective I would say as demonstrated by the fact that most media companies use Drupal so thanks Rob said you're not here but maybe you'll you'll listen to the recording maybe send him a nice quick email after the call if you guys want so yeah thank you and I just wanted to add that you know just especially whether I was in my previous role or my current role I just really appreciate your support Denise and and Rob will tell him separately but I've just learned a ton from you and you've just opened up a whole new world for us to see into and to understand just how to navigate and that's just so important for us and these kinds of roles to figure out where we go next and I just want you to know you're always considered part of the family we'd like to give you a Drupal con pass for life so that way you can join us whenever you can nice thank you yay Angie you're gonna get one too we're gonna get give it back to old board members too really oh sweet anyway cheers Denise this is all I got but you know like anyway thank you Angie I know there's life after board service I hope everybody else that's hearing this takes advantage of the term limit idea if only for a year to recharge it's it's a big deal to take the time off I know you know that Angie I do know that back in anyway dog just kidding you well but that's it's by design right but you've had a year to do other things and not then and you come back fresh yeah that's kind of the point it's good so when are you coming back to anything so a year talk to me next year one of the great things that Denise brought to the table so I'm just thinking reflecting and it's like you know as we all know there's ups and downs right some of the ups are you know high up there I think Drupal cons are a huge highlight and then the downs can be pretty down as well and I felt like one of the things you always brought to us Denise is like this this idea like you know there's all these other projects and you know what we're not the only ones that have some challenges and maybe sometimes are even better off than other projects so that's been that's been really helpful at least for me yeah no generally Drupal Drupal has done really really well and you guys are looking in your own fishbowl it always seems like things are dire you know but but actually you do pretty well you make a fair amount of money for a non-profit to keep the lights on and everything and and streamlining the tooling is really going to help make that money that be spent effectively which is great and and the other thing that I feel like I have at least a part in that I'm pretty happy about is the issue credit idea which started as oh my gosh we can't give organizations commitments and turned into this other this other whole thing that's actually driving some interesting good and bad behaviors but they're but it's driving behavior and that's pretty interesting so I really I had a great time I learned a ton and got to try some ideas out with you guys and all of that is is really fun for me so thank you awesome thank you you will be thank you thanks everybody all right well thank you again and also that concludes our board meeting and now we'll be moving into executive session so for those who are not on the board or the staff or volunteers who are on the agenda this is always that awkward moment where I'm like thank you so much for joining please hang up