 Hi everyone. My name is Tim Doyle. I'm the CEO of the Drupal Association. This is the open board meeting. I'm going to turn it over to our board chair buddy in a second. I would ask if you're so inclined, I appreciate the fact that many people moved up. Obviously we're expecting thousands to attend this session. There's plenty of seats up front. This actually might be one of the largest crowds we've had for the public board meeting yet. So we'll do an official board meeting part and then we will close the official board meeting part and then we'll have time for questions and answers for the Drupal Association board. Buddy, can I turn it over to you? Good. Welcome. Thank you for the introduction. You might maybe think that this is going to be more exciting than it's going to be, but no. We are going to be doing two things in the public board meeting, which is part of what we do. So just to give you a brief, I'm going to introduce you to everyone or everyone's going to introduce themselves and hopefully tell us briefly who you are and where maybe you're working. And then we're going to go into the board meeting itself where we basically only have two agendas. One is to vote on our strategic plan that was talked about in the recent and also to talk about the open web manifesto that we're also going to vote on. Apart from that, that's going to be the public part of the meeting, but as soon as that is done and we are, you know, if we have any discussions about that, it could be otherwise that's going to end and then we're going to go into Q&A and allow you just to ask questions about the Drupal Association. So does that sound good? The harder the better. Of course. So I'm going to start. Tim, you were introduced yesterday. Yes. Briefly, you're the CEO. Yes, I'm Tim Doyle, the CEO for the Drupal Association. I've been on since October. Hello. Rosa Villana, I'm working in the European Commission in the Informatics Directorate. I'm head of sector for content management and as content management for public websites, we are just in Drupal and we have more than hundreds of sites in Drupal. And you live in Brussels and you are Spanish. Very close to Lille. Were you the reason we went to Lille this week? I'm Ryan Sarama, CEO of Centauro and I build and maintain Drupal commerce and e-commerce websites. Hi, I'm Lynn Caposi. I'm the former CMO from Acquia and if you were in this morning session, you met the current CMO of Acquia, Jen. And I'm excited this is my first actually board meeting but I think this is my, I think my first Drupal con was 2000, maybe 2009. It's quite some time ago, yeah, in DC. So happy to be here. Good. I'm Patty from Iceland, the chair of the board. Now since one and a half year. Otherwise I've been in the board now. This is my sixth year, meaning that my term is ending now and otherwise I have a company in Germany called Onex. I'm Dries, I think probably everybody knows me. But if you don't, I'm the founder and project lead of Drupal and also on the board of directors. Good morning everybody. My name is Mike Herschel. I'm a community elected board member. I live in Florida and I work for Agilina. Hi, I'm Tiffany Ferris. I'm the CEO of Palantir.net and we, I served as a board member for nine years from 2009 through 2017 and I'm now back for a second term. So I'm in the third year of my revised term. Hi, my name is Nick Vienhoff. I'm from Belgium. I work at GitLab. I'm responsible for the contributor success. So it means like people that want to contribute to GitLab to make them successful. It's kind of a common team here in Drupal as well. Also I'm the president of the local Drupal Association in Belgium, organizing events like Drupal Dev Days and other local initiatives. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. For those listening in, my name is Nicky Flores. I'm Monica Deer on Drupal.org. I'm your community elected board leader, the board member and I started last year. This is my second Drupal Con and my first was last year and I live in Lansing, Michigan. I am a technical project manager at Lullabot. That's all about that. Great. Thank you. Yeah, we have actually three. Rahul is missing. Maybe hopefully he's gonna join us. He came all the way from India to be here. We also have Oven who is in Australia, currently also due to family matters. He was not able to come here and then we have Nikhil from the state of Georgia and he also couldn't come and join, but they are heavily involved in everything and they're just gonna be marked as absent from this meeting. All right, then I think we can start by giving you a short introduction on what we are not gonna do today is actually vote on the minutes from our last board meeting. That was a little bit of technical failure on our side, so we were not ready with the minutes and we couldn't, we didn't send them out in exactly seven days before, so due to technical issue we are not gonna be able to vote on those minutes. But the good news is all our minutes are publicly available on Drupal.org. You can go there under the Drupal Association board and you find our minutes. We also worked on the minutes in the past and we published everything now in the end of last year or the beginning of this year. It used to be like that before then there was a short pause where that was not done but we just changed that and reversed that. So the minutes of this meeting and of our last meeting are gonna come up directly after our next board meeting. It could also be that we could do an electrical vote on that. I think it's gonna be fine. So before we start here what we do as a board we meet very irregularly and one of the things that we've been talking about in probably all our meetings that we've been meeting and including our last board meeting where we were not voting on anything related is our strategic plan and that is gonna be our agenda number one today and then followed by the open web manifesto. So I think we can just officially start and somebody is taking notes. Dana you're here. Thank you. And let's just give us. We'll jump into it. I'll give the presentation on the strategic plan. I will go pretty quickly through this. The board has been meeting on this for months and in fact this past weekend we had a board retreat. We were together for two full days diving into it. So this is for your benefit not the board. They're very well versed in this but I also realized that we can't go into details in a short time period. All this will be posted on our website and you can read it. So as I go quickly through it to give you a sense of what we're doing but not to really dive into details and certainly during Q&A would invite questions about it you know to get the board you know to give you insight into what the board's thinking is on the strategic plan. To start with we're starting we looked at our vision and mission statements for the Drupal Association and we came up with a a newish vision. The vision is for web to be innovative inclusive and open and the mission of the Drupal Association is to drive innovation and adoption of Drupal as a high-impact digital public good hand-in-hand with our open source community. We reviewed our values and we've kind of redefined five values that we as an organization as a Drupal Association want to exhibit in our practices so we want to empower makers we want to act decisively so there's a sense that we need to act and decisively we need to you know bias for action equity inclusion accessible injustice is a value. Let's maybe stop there just go one back because this is a lot of text just want to give people one minute time to read it yeah just I think that's always good I know that it's not easy to read so much but I know maybe I can add something real quick so obviously we have the Drupal principles and values which is a document on Drupal at Oric and these are the principles or the values for the community at large and these specific values they're more they're for the staff you know so that's the nuance and the difference I'm not sure if that was clear but that this is how the staff will make day-to-day decisions yeah thank you trees so we have I said five we have six teaching and learning we we seek to build programs and events to educate each other on our community trust and accountability we have to trust each other's work and expertise and experience and in turn hold each other accountable and lastly gratitude I think this is you know very important to me that we approach our work with a sense of gratitude and the work that we do and the people we work with which fit to we could actually just start by saying I see the staff there's some of the staff can you raise your hand if you're from the DA staff so let's give them a good applause for doing a great job we could do more of this we could and also the social media too yes thank you so for the strategic plan there are you've heard these themes yesterday there are three objectives and objectives are our high level where we want to be in three years it's a three-year strategic plan objective one is innovation we want Drupal to become the most innovative and impactful web platform in the world by enabling makers and connecting with like-minded projects to advance the open web principles of open access open standards free expression and digital inclusion under each objective we will have goals these are our starting goals as they are achieved there may be new new goals added so under innovation we want a triple innovation of contributions to Drupal in three years we want the number of Drupal organizations that are makers like our certified partners to double in three years and we want 25 percent of the leaders in in in the community in three years to be kind of first-time leaders in the community bring in new leadership let's take the examples not to the examples first do you want to do this now we can then go on back okay so are there any anything from the board because we were just you know when I allow you to maybe tap in bring is there anything especially want to mention here you know these are than the goals that we you know these are pretty high what is high high level yeah and we are ambitious we're ambitious where it's you've heard of ambitious site builders we're trying to be an ambitious innovators and when we're talking about contributions and makers we're talking about the agencies the individuals organizations supporting actual code commits like Dries mentioned about innovation well to nuance the code commits we also non-code commits as long as it's in line with the innovation and where we want to go as a community where that is I think Dries also mentioned that in his keynote it's a thousand flowers and we'll see where that leads us and whatever like picks up but it's code and non-code contributions great let's go to the examples so two examples that we again these are examples of initiatives that we either have started or we'll be starting there will be more one is a contribution friction analysis look at our contribution process how someone the process we're going from not a non-contributor to contributor but then also from first-time contributor to regular contributor and we're the friction points in that process and how do we address those to make that a smoother process second it's individual organization contribution enablement invest in creating resources and tools to directly empower this is what Nikki was saying individual contributors and organizational contributors if you will pitch burgers example of this in a sense connecting resources with people that have ideas and and and how do we get financial resources with people who can do the work and can the DA play the role of matchmaker in that and I want to ask three speakers you set this in the weekend maybe you can also say it you know tell us here and we talked a lot about the the moment from when you log on to Drupal.org and then to your first commit and like there are others doing a better job here that we can learn from and this could be something we can do yeah I think so you know one of the things we want to try and do especially with the first item here is if you think about between the time somebody makes a contribution like creates a a merge request or uploads a patch to the time that patch actually gets committed that can be quite long in Drupal you know sometimes it's years but even for small simple patches it can take weeks or months now with some other open-source projects sometimes it's like a couple hours or a couple days from the moment a patch is contributed to the point where the patch is going to become part of the development branch of the project and so what we like to do is we would like to understand sort of that life cycle of let's I'm just going to call it a patch for simplicity here but like we want to understand you know how long it takes and what it's waiting for sometimes it can be reviewers accessibility reviewers UX reviewers architect reviewers whatever it is right we want to understand all the steps and then figure out what can we do to make these steps shorter because the belief is that if we can make that very short if you can go from contribution to commit in a relatively short time frame not only will we accelerate innovation but also it will become more appealing for people to start contributing to Drupal so it's actually quite common for larger organizations to really study that process that life cycle and to try and optimize it to continuously optimize it and make it faster and better and sometimes that can mean a process improvement and how we make decisions sometimes it might mean who a lot of patches get stucked and I'm just gonna make up an example it's not based on real data but you know who a lot of patches get stuck on accessibility reviews well maybe then we need to figure out how do we create capacity so we have more people able to do accessibility review so now it's more of a people or a capacity solution you know you get the idea maybe to add to that what Risto has mentioned that's my day job at GitLab and one thing that we're doing there is to do a study a user study on first time contributors on where they get stuck or how do they even enter I think also the learnings from a study would be very useful for Drupal to figure out like how do people even get there before they create the patch or before they create the issue or create the merge request we don't know a lot about that I think Alejandro or Alex is also here maybe I don't know if he's here joins recently the Drupal Association and I believe that he will spend like a lot of effort and time into exactly these kind of yeah challenges yep that'll be his role so that's that's objective number one innovation objective number two is around marketing and the Drupal brand or the objectives for the Drupal brand to be recognized as a platform of choice among ambitious end users in business the public sector and beyond we have four goals Lynn and Tiffany and Rahul are on our marketing working group if I could put you on the spot have you speak to what thoughts are on this objective sure so as part of the plan we will have you know as Tim said a very specific objective around developing a marketing plan but also just want to make sure that we convey that we're going to be doing a lot of work in between so it's not like we're going to wait a year for a big plan to drop on the table right we're going to be have this marketing plan who we targeting how are we going to get there what are we doing for exposure and so forth so I think it'll be important that we'll be able to have specific goals over the next couple of years that will be into the plan and really anxious to reinforce the idea of a marketing maker it's not just code right it's also marketing as well so and involving a lot more people from the community so these are the goals that we set out and we'll continue to monitor them on both the monthly and then yearly basis you know one thing I just wanted to highlight with this is it makes it very clear that part of the focus of the association is product marketing we're not just marketing ourselves or marketing in Drupal con the entire strategic plan makes it existential the success of the project to the success of the association we're tying those much more closely together than we ever have before no thank you that's a great point I'm also you know I think what's being pointed out is we have a great board we have a lot of expertise in all these objectives that we you know that we need to pursue so it gives me a lot of confidence in our ability to do this the third objective let me give you two examples oh look we're gonna show a video this is the new d.org I forgot this is in the presentation let me just show that so we are rolling out the social again there we go we will be rolling out a new d.org by the end of the year and this gives you a preview into what it will look like part of our efforts will be focused on taking this from the where it is today this visually this is how it will look or something similar to this but really focused on the different audiences we're trying to reach Lin mentioned marketers when you come to d.org how are they welcomed into that how are they mark how do they find a website you know for what they need and what they need to do to convince their their folks to invest in Drupal this is all our design partners thanks to them for doing that again we hope to have this launched by the end of the year let's go to objective three fundraising so we have innovation marketing objective three is a fundraising and the objective is for the Drupal Association to participate in a leadership role in the Drupal project with a philanthropic approach to funding that advances the project and the community there's really two pieces to this one is that we that the Association has an active role and a see-it-the-table in the Drupal project roadmap and in second is the tripling of our our budget in three years it's pretty ambitious but the goals that the board has that they've made very clear to me very ambitious goals we need a very ambitious revenue source to do that to fulfill that so that'll be a big part of our ability to deliver on the strategic plan is getting the revenue sources in to build a fund the things we want to do that's the strategic plan and then we have two examples I'm meant to give examples for everyone one is we are hiring a new director of philanthropy whose sole focus will be on developing philanthropic relationships that's a funding source that we have not explored in the past so it's not just grant writing and receiving grants yes it's that but it's also building the philanthropic relationships and turning the DA into a association that is philanthropic-minded so we have the shared values of the folks that are that are funding us and then second and we'll talk about the open web manifesto in a second is really talking about what the Drupal what the social impact of Drupal you know I think we all know this but how do we one trees mentioned our designation as a public good that begins to communicate to the outside world what is the social impact of Drupal the open web manifesto is a statement about our belief about the social impact of Drupal and those are important for funders and that's that's the strategic plan so we need to do we do need to take a vote yeah so first maybe are there any discussions or questions or anything we need to add from abort we just need emotion so we need emotion you have to make the motion first right to do what Mike I would like to make a motion to adopt second and is everyone in no all in favor all in favor I I find these traditions amazing like I a motion favorite I know but that means that that's done right yes thank you everyone nobody was against this thank you no objections all right all right have that noted my data all right so the strategic plan is approved how will we communicate it to the rest of the world is that planned yes so we'll be posting the strategic plan on the website and there'll be a blog post and a communication out of the new da strategic plan all right second I ready to go the second the second thing we're gonna vote on is the open web manifesto this the next five slides also have a lot of text so again the manifesto itself will be posted on our our on d.org and there'll be a message about it I'll go through the slides a little bit I'm not going to read them let you I'll go slowly so you can read them the manifesto won't be in a format of a of a presentation will be in an actual document the reason for doing this was to have a public many open source communities have a manifesto of some sort as we pursue as we pursue philanthropic funding we wanted to capture what what you know what is the Drupal associations believe vis-a-vis the open web and why are we here and we saw that in our in our vision of the vision for an open inclusive web so we really have kind of five statements an open web that help us define what we believe an open web is it's built on freedom it's defined by decentralization it thrives on inclusion it requires participation and it exists for empowerment these are the kind of the high-level principles that we assert an open web is all about if I can move on so to live up to that definition of open web you know we believe that you know we must our efforts in supporting the Drupal project and Drupal is that Drupal must be designed to protect and exploit data personal data it must enable the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs to compete effectively and it must be resilient to a changing world and not controlled by a select few the open web must be more than an ideal set of principles to achieve its full potential as a global digital public good the open web must prove it's better it's a better web so not just an open web for the sake of an open web but a better web if I did when we're going the board has seen this so this there's anything to say from the board I was actually to chime in but again the board has seen this so this is not new to them our global community makers and users create the code solve the problems and form the bonds and sustain it our creativity enables flexible seamless digital experiences our diversity unlock solutions and new opportunities and our integrity ensures independence inclusion for all so you know the open web manifesto is really designed to be a statement that the association is making on you know in a sense on behalf of the community for for the for the for those of us out or those outside the community those of us who are you know want to understand what Drupal is about again from a social impact state sense we identify who those end users are government educational institutions not for profits enterprises companies the other stakeholders are the makers that contributes to Drupal and really that the public that use Drupal every day so most people don't know about Drupal even though if they're using every day through websites hey Tim yes one of the things I want to call out about this particular slide is that this is the closest I've at least in my tenure at the association that we've ever come to defining the community I think community means something we intuitively understand what that is but this is us really defining it for the first time great point thank you for that that's a that's true one of the things that excites me about the open web manifesto is that it helps me situate my company and my vision for my contributions to Drupal within a broader mission and we've always said that Centaro powers the future of commerce without compromise where merchants go to market on their own terms unconstrained by their platform and empowered to do what's right by their customers and that's you know a loaded kind of vision or mission that's that that is pitting us against proprietary platforms where you know trading the private information of my customers is like the cost of doing business on Shopify and so so like my hope is that that other Drupal companies and agencies contributors will also begin to you know actually use this language to communicate their own visions and their own missions I think that will that will kind of breed tighter alignment and hopefully you know I can be part of what increases contribution to like Drupal as a whole that's a great point and as this is published you know exactly we're encouraging companies to use this language in their own in their own work maybe a very short comment too maybe you can tell us a little bit about how the process was you know just remind us like how was the process of creating this document sure so we we started with internal conversations at the da then we went out to the community we did a survey in I believe January went out to the community I don't know off time I had how many we got a lot of responses that informed 90 percent of this document then we went to the board we cleaned it up we tried to put it into an organized cohesive document and that's what you see before here so for anyone in the audience that participated in that survey thank you that we you know we started with what we thought and then we got lots of new ideas and lots of new language which was very helpful so this really was a a kind of grassroots initiative in terms of getting input from the community and then finalizing thank you and maybe just the the point is like none of this stuff probably surprises anyone because this is what we've been living you know throughout the values and principles of Drupal and just how we're doing things but we now have it written right we can actually you know so should we then is there any more questions or discussions that need to happen should happen good I move that we adopt the open web manifesto I'll second that uh is any everyone in favor any opposed okay thank you then that means that that's also there that's passed yes voted on so at this yes Dana registered thank you so at this point the we can end if with approval of the board we can end the official board meeting and move into q&a unless there's anything else we have exactly 20 minutes left this is great thank you Susan to bring your little one yep can I ask the question yes so just let me know the official board meetings over at 1159 thank you um so that ends the official board meeting now we'll go to q&a there's a microphone um at the at the center and you can bring a baby up if you want so I'm excited to hear that there's a marketing committee on the board and I'm wondering what the marketing committee's plans are to collaborate with the promote Drupal initiative on the marketing strategy that you have thank thank you for the question and we want to work with the group immediately so it's one of our to-dos actually so I'm going to catch up with you before we go so definitely want to be make sure that we kind of pull those groups together okay and work together great thank you and the third item in the second objective um was specifically around building capacity and we see promote Drupal as a key part of that capacity so making sure that the there's a lot of alignment between the effort and in and the vision for where this is going and Christina on the Drupal Association staff is the staff lead for the working group and you know participates and promote Drupal so it's specifically tasked with coordinating with those groups next question hello George Demet so I have a question that I'm going to try and ask a kind of a tough and complex question so I absolutely love love what I'm seeing up here this is a really fantastic strategic plan I'm really really happy to see that fundraising is included as part of it this is not the first strategic plan that the Drupal Association has had and it's not the first ambitious strategic plan that the Drupal Association has had and historically it seems like the Association has struggled in terms of being able to execute on past strategic plans due to lack of resources funding etc so I'm curious given the ambition ambitious goals here how you're going to be measuring progress against them what kind of KPIs you're looking at how you might make adjustments if it looks like certain things aren't coming in where they need to be let me and I'll invite board members to chime in too but George great question one thing that was left out of this PowerPoint that is part of the strategic plan we do have specific measures so we so those will be published and you'll see those so and I can talk about those in some detail as we need to so that was left out of this presentation but those are in there I don't know if any other board member wants to chime in on like the larger question of or if you had a larger question about how ambitious this is and can we do it I can so it starts and ends also with funding so the part of the the third part is a little bit you know we have to do if we are going to accomplish number one and two we need to figure out a way to get funding and we've been successful in the previous years to to be on you know in a very lean budget we can run on almost zero do Drupalcon things to Drupalcon here in North America we are actually we normally have profits so we can fund the engineering team we have our supporting partner programs but we are also seeing that we need to go and look for something more and there are grants out there that we haven't even tried to certainly like apply for and that was also why we need to have something like the open web manifesto written down so we can actually go to these grants institutions and ask them for if they want to help us to accomplish this what we are trying to do does that answer your question can I jump in a little bit yeah I think you know having been through many of those strategic plans that we put out there are a couple things that stand out for me about that was different about this process so the executive committee worked to start to flesh this out and used it as the basis for the hiring process so Tim was specifically hired is you know if you were in the the Dries note you might know some of the reasons why we saw Tim as a fantastic CEO to align and to execute and to to bring about the reality described in the strategic plan that was a very different part of the process previously the the board would be asked for input and then the strategic plan would come back to us and obviously some of the strategic plans were limited by resources and so the ambition was really tight and others were very blue sky but but lacked the ability to execute in on it so I think that the coupling of the the CEO search with the development of the strategic plan was very important and it was it was board driven so a lot of the key top lines came directly from the board before Tim was even hired and he was hired in specifically for the strategic plan got it thank you um yeah next question hi my name is Wim um I work for aquia and I have a bunch of questions actually but I'm gonna just ask one so everyone can ask them I this is the first time I'm attending one of these and I actually love that pretty much all of you pretty much every one of you actually chimed in at some point that was really cool to see um my main question is one of the things that came up were an analysis of contribution friction but to my knowledge at least one of the things is actually known that I experience every day and it's the transition to git lab which in and of itself is fine but because the triple dork instances are not using the best practices for git lab actually a lot of problems arise along the way so I would personally think that addressing those first which is a known problem would make a ton of sense so curious if there's insider plans around that maybe before we answer as a board I would suggest you talk to Fran and Brendan over there because that's also their day job and to make those decisions autonomously on like what to do first how to act on these emergencies that doesn't mean that if you look at a three-year plan it's not like it's strategic to look beyond those convictions and then to understand like once we have that migration what's next should we and that's a good question that was asked in Slack earlier should we change some of the Drupalisms or should we keep them having issue forks for example is very specific to the Drupal development cycle but that does not exist in the git lab or github world that doesn't mean that it's bad maybe we're just very innovative and we should keep them but that's not a decision for the board to make anyway but I should talk to Fran yeah but what we are actually deciding with this is that we are giving the DA staff priorities so they actually and one of the priorities is to enable the contributors and make them you know so so it will align to exactly what you're saying and now the DA staff will know okay we this is a priority from the board right and that's something that we are really excited about because that has maybe not been before a priority makes sense thank you and maybe to add like one small thing there although I don't have decision power on what goes into git lab I'm happy to be like a liaison between the two and to figure out like where can we land the team that I lead at git lab also and I started with the community fork which suddenly exposes problems in the product that are very similar to the challenges that Drupal has so hopefully that will lead to a better world from other open source projects as well right I'm curious what comes out of this next I mean like the other friction points but I'm glad to hear it that you're well aware of this wonderful thank you no thank you for your question hello my name is Matthew tift and one thing I can tell is different is we're not lined up in chairs around you in a table in some small room like we have been in previous year for open board meetings so I can tell that's different and with the strategic plan my question had to do with how different organizations do strategic planning differently and oftentimes if you put a ton of emphasis into a strategic plan they'll use it so you can literally print it out and the fundraising folks can go to perspective donors and it'll be like a 10-year plan that they stick with for a long time period do you have a time frame with this and or do you see this more as like a strategic plan that might evolve and be a little bit different next year it's a good question it is a three-year plan um and but I according to my experience with the Drupal Association you know when things change we will adapt so I do think that if we figure out in one year from now that this is not a good plan then we should not stick to the plan just because we had to stick to the plan if that's a you know but that is today as of today this is a three-year plan starting starting now right and we use the OGSM objective goals strategies measures model and the objectives probably won't change ideally there's so much thought these are the objectives goals generally don't change but they can change if certainly if you achieve them you can move on strategies and measures will change you know how do we triple innovation contributions let's try a that's not working that's a strategy oh that's not working let's try b that's not working but the goal the triple and the objective of innovation probably won't change you know that's how the how we're thinking about it you know and to build on your your concept of the of the timescale right we had a board member for many years Don Benjamin who really wanted us to make a hundred-year strategic plan right so I appreciate the the the timescale question three years felt about right given you know where we're coming out of this pandemic and we are specifically staking ground around both product innovation and product marketing so we want to see where that goes and then I think you know at the end of that we can reassess where we're at and and whether we're ready for a five-year or a 10-year or a 25-year maybe in Donna's vision a hundred-year plan but I think right now this felt like the right the right timescale to see how we're going to do those things and make it really clear that there is an urgency to this and we need to be successful for a vision of success in a relatively short amount of time thank you all very much I'm smiling under my man thank you hi I'm Lawrence longtime DA member first time meeting attendee thank you board meeting attendee I should say board meeting attendee my first Drupal con was San Francisco I just real quick if if pitchburg or something like pitchburg were to happen again who should I contact or what Slack channel should I get on to volunteer to help administer that because I do have some experience I'm also in the association space so we have a competition that's about you know a few tens of thousands per applicants gets down to a few dozen that's awesome you should contact me right now that's easy he did right so I'd love to get with you all right you just contact me I'll come see you after yes exactly thank you thanks for offering to help yeah and I was I was gonna say you can reach out to me I'm am Herschel and Drupal Slack if you just want to throw ideas and I can I can direct you to the right person too hey hey thank you for this opportunity my name is Anup John I have a question to the board around specific things that we are trying to do as part of the strategic plan to enlarge or broaden the community and its abilities as it stands we are facing a lot of struggle in terms of organizing contribution so how are we as a formal body trying to put together the structures in place to help community organize themselves better so that we can contribute better to the Drupal project and community one and then are there specific measurable goals that we are after around the specific community aspect are you like can I I'm trying to understand exactly are you trying to are you asking how we are going to be working on a plan so we can actually get the community to execute no how are we how are we supporting how are we planning to support the community in terms of structures and systems and systematically putting together things right that will help a community organizer say how do we bring new developers to the table how do we how do we make Drupal more accessible to new students in universities why are we not bringing students from say CMU here right like how are we actually reaching out not just to the consumers but also to broaden the community and reignite the kind of passion we had maybe ten years back so I think one thing everything you're saying I think is is really important they're very important questions about how we're going to do things and it's important to understand that we are a strategic board and what you're talking about are tactics so the board doesn't direct the staff around those tactics what we do is we set out and we say these are the objectives and these are the goals and this is how we're going to measure it and we absolutely trust our you know the the general association staff to use appropriate means to get there so this board can't answer that Tim and the staff I'm sure will be answering those questions over time in a public way but it wouldn't be appropriate for the board to weigh in on that got it got it but I wanted to ask specifically whether community itself is a big part of the strategic plan right and are there goals in the strategic plan that specifically addresses the community aspect of who we are so I think I'll weigh in on that there's a couple there's not a there's not a specific goal about about what you're asking about there is a there is a goal if you notice on new leadership into the project and into the into the community that is designed to bring back some bringing in some energy some new ideas to innovate so that's that gets to it but when you see on the strategic plan that doesn't mean the day-to-day work of the Drupal Association stops and all we focus on are on these three things so as you know we run a lot of things to support the community those things will continue these are our those guys kind of keeping the lights on type of work that we do these are the strategic the strategic goals about where we want to go with the things that the board fell are most important to work on with the project and with the community I think also to give a slightly higher level answer I think what makes a project compelling to more people and specifically to people early in their professional career I think is one a great innovative product right people want to work with great products and they want to bet their career on a product that is growing is used a lot seems to have the right momentum so that's innovation so that is a direct tie to that strategic objective and the other piece is people want to be part of something engaging and fun and you know all those things right like and so that is tight also to innovation but obviously also to marketing so I do think the innovation and the marketing focus should lead to attracting more people to the project all right thank you thank you hi my second question was about taking a seat in the triple product roadmap was one of the things that was mentioned and I found it really interesting I was wondering if you could expand a little bit on like how what would that look like concretely like where would the what information source would be used to choose to influence it in a certain way so to have a seat at the product roadmap that's you know how are we going to do that I think that we we do have a seat in many decisions that are being made in the triple project because we have to you know that we provide the infrastructure right so but there is not necessarily you know we are not necessarily we are maybe today the engineering team is being called in when they are needed and they are then asked to do the job and but the engineering team then of course also sometimes struggles with maybe is that what's then a priority you know are we going to do that in front of that in front of that and being part of those conversations and having a seat at the table when the core committers and trees and the those who are running the strategic initiatives if there can be an official way of that we can have a seat at the table and listen and understand so we can actually make plans so the dual association staff can make plans of how to actually execute that that's going to reduce the friction as well because the core committers including you probably sometimes it's hard because you're blocked by the Drupal Association and vice versa so I think that just being part of that process would help a lot in both directions yeah cool interesting I didn't realize it was about that reducing friction aspect I thought it was more about introducing new directions for Drupal so that makes sense I mean I could see a future if the Drupal Association is able to build capacity through like fundraising efforts etc like today we have like what 12 to 14 core committers I forgot the exact number but it's something something going 12 but I could see a future where you know there's maybe several core committers additional core committers or maintainers or you know like accessibility reviewers full-time employed by the Drupal Association in addition to the existing ones not as a replacement of the existing ones but in addition to the existing ones just to help us accelerate a variety of different things so that could be an example of a example I'm not saying that's necessarily outcome but that could be a possible outcome that translates to having a seat at the table all right cool that sounds all very interesting curious to see how it will play out thank you thank you hi um Christof Weber I'm with Matthew Tift I'm all smiles under my mask the one thing I noticed today and sort of sensed is that there's a much tighter coupling between the board the Drupal Association at the community at large and I really love that aspect of what sort of surfaced and bubbled up from everything you showed and talked about today and I'm hoping this is your secret fourth objective thank you thank you thank you and I'll just say I'm glad you noticed it because I feel that there is a lot more coupling and it's being new I knew I came into a board that's very aligned in where they want to go and but to see it coming across as they're also aligned with the community and and with the association is very gratifying so thank you hi there Doug Green I have two questions I'll see if I can get them out the first I notice there's a change between having a managing director and a CEO and I'm not sure if the strategic initiative intentionally came out that I'd like to hear more how that decision or what that change actually means and the second question has to do with finances I went on the website to see what the latest financial reports were and the last one I saw was 2021 it seems you know I've seen the board or the Drupal Association go through as tight times and it seems that you're in expanding time and you've got a great vision here but I'm wondering what your cash situation is and how much how much of a runway you have to execute that based on your cash position because it appears to me that you're starting to ramp up and start to spend more money and we're just coming out of the pandemic and I know that Drupal Cons have been a major source of finance and we're you know you were probably heard a little through that so the first question about why did we change the name from a executive director to a CEO that was actually part of it was internal the leadership team there were they started to use the the naming of a CFO and COO and the the person who was then in charge was always called an executive director so one of the things that we also thought that that would maybe just not fit to how how they were talking about themselves in the leadership team that it was a CTO and a executive director so we felt that it was normal good secondly what we also thought that we would also maybe attract a little bit different type of people when we were able to put out the ad when it's just an ad on I'm not saying that was the reason but when we were searching for a CEO and now I've been part of this process now twice I was also part of the the search for the executive director that was before Tim and I do think that that helped in the process when we were searching for a person that we actually put out the name CEO out there it's a little bit more attractive sometimes to people on the other hand people that are very familiar to non-profit organizations they think that or they are maybe more you know used to executive director so it's a little bit of a touch it was not maybe more details to it than that so that was the first question but no real change in responsibilities it was kind of a no there was not a change in the responsibility of the executive director and the CEO it was just a name title change but the second question was towards the financials so let me answer at a high level but you should know that our we just finish an audit we get audited every two years and as a not-for-profit we may we are required to make those audits public so that will be public soon it's called a 990 audit or not yeah the IRS 990 form which is public and then we also just publish our our internal audits also just for a good practice but to your point of question I think we're out of the pandemic with very stable finances it's lean it's not sufficient to fulfill the ambitions of the board but we have nine months in reserves there is a 200,000 there's actually 200,000 and a board-designated fund and that's where you're seeing things happening it's starting with that board-designated fund that was you know kind of set aside for new initiatives so we are in stable financial condition uh and which I really appreciate the previous executive director and CFO that really stabilize the finances through through the pandemic and we have a little bit of money to begin to invest on some of these initiatives but we'll need to raise more to hit to hit the ambitions yeah so the the Drupal Association made a decision to invest 30,000 in Pitchburg it came from the board-designated funds to kind of spur that idea we are out of time but we have two more questions if that is okay uh otherwise please approach us afterwards so thank you okay okay thank you my name is Isaya Jokonya ah mine is not a question it's a compliment yeah I would like just to thank you the Drupal community and the Drupal Association about the newsletter it's so informative it always stay up to date so the newsletter is really helpful with the information on it I really appreciate it keep me stay up to date every weekly and the other one it was the about the open web manifesto yeah I really enjoyed it it's really a powerful the point which I really liked is the one for its existence for empowerment the one it says the open web is fueled by humanity collective quest for information connection and progress and strengthening every individual right to choice privacy and security thank you for that it's a compliment thank you thank you thank hi everyone my name is Arun Baker from the drop times and uh yeah I do want to commend the board on the open web manifesto uh it does mention the word world and global reach I believe in terms of its impact so this in itself is quite ambitious given that Drupal is probably has the most traction in North America in North America so I did meet a young man from South Sudan who's participating in DrupalCon thanks to I believe sponsorship from the Drupal Association and this is quite commendable and is probably an example of some of the work that is being done that some of us are not even aware of so my question is is there you know are there strategic initiatives or objectives that will bring Drupal to parts of the globe where it is currently being underutilized this person from Sudan said that it's not being used used in his country for example so as a digital public good you know how is this being addressed is my question um I have one point the new website is gonna is going to be multilingual as I understand it right so that yeah that is correct we want it to be yeah okay well I apologize so maybe the question is a little bit more again here towards the staff in a sense of like are there any things that we are doing to to get like Drupal more adopted and that we can get more right developers and and contributors yeah so outside of the United States and Europe yeah so as I said yesterday I've been talking to a lot of CEOs of our certified partners the ones outside the US have you know raised to me that there's a sense in the globe that the the Drupal Association itself can be very kind of US focused so we are making steps to try to be less US solely US focused and to invite kind of global you know the global community into the work that we do you met Daniah who's a state department fellow that worked with us for six weeks and and we were able to provide a scholarship to come here we have our Discover Drupal program which is currently just running the US but the hope is that we can run that and that seeks to bring folks that would have obstacles overcome to get into Drupal to train them up on Drupal and bring them in you know the ultimate goal that would be to make that global and I think in the initiatives of tripling innovation I think just inevitably we're going to have to look outside the US we're going to have to look global of how do we get there so part of the process will be identify what other specific strategies that we want to have that will help us triple innovation or marketing and I'm very confident many of those involved how do we expand the reach of Drupal to areas of the globe that are not you know it's not the adoptions not there or the contributions not there I want to I want to say something like there is one thing that actually is on my heart regarding that what you are explicitly talking about when you go and you talk to the community you realize that there are so many things happening in the community where we at the Drupal Association we could actually take and learn what they are doing so one good example is in Finland in Finland they are actually teaching Drupal in universities they have all kinds of programs of like teaching and and they have like and then they're basically after that they go into the job market so they created a model that works in Finland to get people to be excited about Drupal we at the Drupal Association we need to have those conversations and we need to have people in our staff that can have all of these conversations take these programs and then bring them out to other countries and see how we if we can be successful there and that is also one of the things that we are talking about here and I think that we are not doing enough of that but we should be you know we are hopefully going to be doing more so thank you for the question thank you so thank you we have to conclude the Q&A I do want to thank the board for for this for participating in this session but also for the retreat we had over this weekend I am as I said before very gratified to have such a strong board so if you help me join in thanking the board I appreciate it thank you thank you thank you so if you have any questions you feel free also to come by and ask it here thank you