 Hi everyone, I'm Jamie Schmidt and I'm a Drupal developer and website delivery manager and I'm based in regional Victoria, Australia. This is my dog Stella and she'd like us to fix all the things. I've come here to talk about the changes I'd like to see in my local community. I don't think any of these problems are unique to my area. I bet you can come up with a long list of things you'd like to see change to in the communities that you care about and the list can get pretty long. Sometimes the work seems insurmountable, so where should we start? I like to start by making a graph, you know, that's pretty normal. So here's a list of things that come to mind that I think need to change. Crimes pretty bad, being a teacher and nurse is not very fun at the moment. Ignoring waste of plastic food talent and there's so much doom and gloom and destruction and lots of things going wrong, but this list isn't very helpful, it all feels out of my control. It doesn't help anyone for me to worry about issues, so what can I do? So carrying on from Laura Bell's keynote yesterday about being an optimist, I think this quote is relevant. It's from an article that came out a month ago in The Mandarin. It's a news website for people who work for the public in government positions in Australia. The author, Possum Hodgkins, writes, we are moving towards using AIs to help us make decisions and get things done. AIs work by reading what humans write about and making connections from that writing, so if we write and think more positively, the AIs should return more positive results. He says, start visualising those positive futures as hard as you can. Science is an amazing habit of following science fiction. Unleash your childlike wonder and joyful imagination. And let's give the AIs some great futures to grow into. Now I identified a lot of my worries, it's time to dream up that wonderful utopia. We can shut our eyes and start thinking about all the positive ways that we can change the world. So it's very hard, there's a lot to focus on and things like that. And I know I want to help create resilience and revitalise my community. And I reckon that comes down to making sure all our needs are met, not just my needs but everyone. And because I love charts I can imagine another chart like this, but with tick boxes and making sure every person has one of those and there's a great big green tick next to each of those things that got enough food, employment, housing and things like that. And I bet all of us sitting here at some stage have worked in one of those fields that are listed up there, you know, tend to things that are important to us and are useful. And there's really amazing people out there doing stuff the best they can to get these jobs done. So still what can I do? I guess I need to ask what they need to start getting more change happening. And I do have some influence. I can choose where I focus my energy, what project I will work on, how I'm going to spend my time. I know lots of cool people around the world who are very smart and really tough. I've got a few skills on my own, like project management, I can pull things together and get things delivered. I can write code for Drupal, I can learn new things, I can provide training, gather requirements and what needs to be done, make sure things are for high quality, write documents. So, you know, I can feel like I can get some things done. And it shows me that there's a lot of opportunities out there where I can make a difference if I can look around and listen, use my ears. And it's a great chance for me to practice networking with everyone I come across, talk about their passion project. I can start building relationships and connecting those people to each other. I can help find solutions for what's blocking them and take the next steps. But so far all I've done is sat around staring at my own belly button. Haven't done much yet. So thanks very much for listening to my resume. And what I have tried to do is just chat to people. So, you know, after yoga, sit down with a cup of tea and just chat to anyone and see what it is and they all have something. It's quite amazing. Everyone's working on something amazing if you really get down to it. So, so far, I've complained a lot and turned it into a positive vision. I figured out a way where I can focus my time and energy using the skills I already have. My mindset's now more positive. I'm not just thinking about the things I can't control. I've assessed my skills and my ability to be influential. I've started listening to people out there. And I can make reasonable change because using things like my Drupal skills, I can also join people together and give them more technology. And like many people here in the conference, I hold a lot of power and privilege. I've had a great education and a great career already and I feel like it's my responsibility to use my powers to help. So, I know that taking small steps achieve big things. No matter how many times I see it, I'm still amazed that the tiny actions can add up so quickly and make a huge impact. So, while I've been chatting to the change makers, for example, yoga, that yoga, I've met Leanne who wants to start a cancer support group. Her next step is applying for funding to get space and the resources she needs. Ah, I actually know some people that have gotten funding before for their projects. I can connect her with them and they could mentor her. I could also teach her about chat GPT prompting and that could help her, you know, flesh out a grant application that she can then go through and fix up. And, yeah, everyone I've met has exactly the same kind of thing. They're stuck on something or feel like they don't have time and don't know what to do next or they don't have the right connections. So, I reckon immediately people can, in my regional community, can benefit from getting some AI prompting skills. Because it already has become so important. I reckon right now it's as impactful as Googling was it over the last decade. And it would be great for her to have an online space where Leanne can go and connect with others that have the same goals, same values and are working towards the same thing. And the space could be a hub for everything she needs to make changes and take the next step. So, it's part of change. Collaboration is very important. Teamwork has definitely been the key to reaching the goals in the projects I've built with Drupal. And its collaboration is what has made Drupal itself so amazing. It's allowed us to have different perspectives, enhance problem solving, increase productivity, communication. It fosters innovation and gives us the ability to learn from one another. And it generally improves the chances of success and the longevity of the project. Collaboration, therefore, will lead to effective change initiatives. To keep making change, we have to have a clear vision of what we want to achieve. I find it pretty motivating to have an internal drive knowing that I'm taking the steps in the right directions towards my goals. This chart, the Five Ys, was developed by Toyota. And it's really about figuring out why something went wrong, like why did it go wrong, why did that happen, blah blah. But I find it quite useful just to jump in the same format and why am I doing this? What are the values behind what I'm doing? So why number one? To help reduce the digital divide for women in regional Victoria. Why? Because there's masses of unused potential in this group of people in this area. Why? Because a lot of funding, jobs and effort is put into people in the cities. Companies love people who can go into the office and sit there full time. The world's been, why? Number four, the world's been changing and there's a great opportunity right now to train women up and young people in the regions. Why? Well, I'm in this situation as well. I live in the regions and I'm definitely not being used to my full potential. And pretty much everyone I know is in the same boat. Oh, they're just stuck or they want to have big goals and dream. So the important thing is to put the community in as a goal in the project from the start. And you can use this in anything where you want to have a community-based website or a project. We need to keep the members' needs and wishes in the forefront of our mind. When done effectively, community building can be a powerful catalyst for change. To help make sure we're developing the most useful tools, it's important that our community members are involved in the decision-making process from the start. Even if not everything's agreed upon, they should at least understand what went into making the decision and what got traded off. You have to be transparent about our intentions, structure, finances. As people come on board, it's crucial that they feel safe. We have to have an environment where everyone is authentically trying to help each other. When people trust each other, they're more likely to work effectively and collaborate towards common goals. We need a sense of community ownership, have pride of the space we're collaborating on. We'll make sure, and that will make sure, that they will be our top supporters and champions have stewardship for the space. When people feel a sense of belonging to a community, they're more likely to be invested in its initiatives. They'll contribute their time, resources, ideas to help bring about change. And it's important to create excitement, opportunities to grow together. We can celebrate the achievements of the community as well as the individuals themselves. This will help encourage participation and engagement. And these interactions and keeping the people involved is not just something we'll do at the beginning. We need to just do this ongoing. One of the most important aspects of the sustainability of a project is keep bringing new people in. And this is really challenging. So to get the right audience, we've got to start by saying, what's the community all about? What benefit does it offer its members? What makes it unique and valuable? And this will result in harrowing a clearly defined. I found that chatting with all the people I have, people are starting to gravitate around the ideas. But you can also use social media, existing networking channels, community events, or you can create your own event. So now we've got an idea of what we want to work on. And people are starting to come together. We can set some common goals. What do we want to achieve first? What are the challenges we're going to overcome? By working together on a goal, members can mobilise collective action and create stronger impact than they could as an individual. With a supportive space and a group to work with, this is going to be a powerful force for change. So I've got the start of my team. Members are slowly starting to be interested. And together we're going to create an organisation for change makers, mostly women, in regional areas. So we're going to build an online space where they can gain confidence in their AI-prompting abilities, be mentored and ask questions, work together to create solutions, and share their successes, and even gain micro-credentials so they can prove to others that they can do this. They'll work on getting funding, collaborate on strategies, increase the skills of their teams, learn to amplify issues on social media, and improve how they collate, filter, and understand the information that's out there. And most importantly with AI, they need to understand the risks and limitations that they themselves are the expert and the AI is the tool, and they are responsible for what they're getting out of it. We can make sure women in the regions have the digital capacity, the know-how, to have impact on their causes with technology that's now going to be disruptive and everywhere. We also have to be careful about the assumptions about women and people from the regions and people from different backgrounds. For example, just because someone isn't doing something right now doesn't mean they can't. Finding out what they need and moving them towards having the skill could be as simple as sitting together and understanding where they're at right now and presenting that information in another way. And a lot of people that you meet are going to say they're not technical. They're going to say, I don't do computers and I don't understand, but they really do know more than they realise, and they're using it a lot more in different ways than they think we use it. Investing in regional women's technical skills is going to foster innovation and creativity. It's going to bring together people with diverse backgrounds, experiences and skill sets. Communities can generate new ideas and approach complex problem-solving. The positive effects of adding these unique perspectives and voices to our projects is not only empowering these individuals, it's going to empower the communities themselves. The effects are going to be returned and flow from there to their children, to their families, to everyone. And it'll probably come back into the project and the software that you're building as well. It's really community building needs to be an essential part of anything where you're trying to promote positive change. So, it's time to build the site. I've got sort of the gist of what we want and I like to look at open-source options, but I also had a hunt around to see what's out there and what might meet some of these criteria. I want something that's going to build a community and have an online space. I want people to cooperate and collaborate. I will probably want them to do training modules. I want to be able to show their micro-credentials and have strong profiles of who this person is and what they've achieved. I really want a transparent financial structure. I want to make sure anyone that's putting in work is getting paid. If we're earning some income, I want that income to go to everyone that's built it. And yeah, I just want it all to be open and using best practices. So, I jumped on and had a look at things like Thinkific, which is like a training thing, it's instant. You know, you can do stuff with that with YouTube, Vimeo. It's lots of open-source tools. But as you know, Drupal is going to win because I've been using it for over a decade and it's super easy for me to build a Drupal website. And it's just so highly customizable and sometimes you just got to do what you know. And we can just tailor it to everything that we want to achieve and to the specific needs of this community. There's modules and plugins, you know, the functionality and there's just stuff we can just keep building forever. So, decided to give a go to the open social distribution. It provides heaps of cool stuff. You can have like activity streams. You can have people sharing and commenting and adding attachments and messaging and you can limit it or throw it as much as you like. It has groups and group structures. I've added web forms so that we can grab the first expressions of interest and we're going to then advance that to have registrations, grabbing information from contributors and partners and sponsors. And we'll want to collect information on there. Have tool comparisons, be able to review things, add best practices. We'll be able to tag content with like what areas it relate to, what kind of AI, is it to do with education or politics or children and that kind of stuff. So we can set up all these relationships and I set up a sub theme so we can make the side hours and work on our own branding, which again is very important for collecting that correct, that right audience. And Drupal just makes things so fast and at a high standard and comes out of the box with the right tone for engagement and people, you know, join and feel like, oh, this is a serious, so deal, serious organization. So we popped this together. It's called We Prompt and right now we're just taking expressions of interest and talking to everybody, but of course, you know, fiddling around with technology in the background and the idea I think is probably to get about 30 women signed up that are living in the regional communities and who are working on something they're very passionate about and just need the next step. And as I said, it's going to be member guided but to start with, we'll probably introduce large language models, we'll dive straight into prompting and getting good results from what they're asking the AIs to do. We'll review what AI tools are out there, what the risks are that they should be aware of and any concerns they have that they're aware of the experts and we're responsible for what's coming out of the AI, not the AI when they tell us something, we can't just take that as fact. We'll collect and tag and discuss resources and we'll showcase our successes with prompting and find what useful results we've managed to get back from a range of tools. And from there, the members are really going to decide where we go. And how are we measure success? When you create a goal, it's super important to have a way to measure if we've reached it. So to start with, we'll just, you know, the usual website stuff, we'll measure how many people visited, how many people signed up for the submissions, how many members joined, how many logins, how many active users, how many posts did they create and how many prompts did they share? How many successes have they logged, how many credentials have they added to their profiles? These are the sort of things we can set goals around. Like, I think our first goal might be like get 50 people signing up and saying they're interested and then we'll pick 30 of those if we get 30 people active in like a four week, 10 week group to work on these. Yeah, it's weprompt.ai. It's very new, we only started all this a few weeks ago but of course it's something that's been bubbling up in the minds of the team for a long time. So, yeah, we vaguely sort of planned out how the thing will go but the real results will depend on the community. And I think it's pretty good experiment. It's kind of like prototyping this kind of community. And I'm planning to be pretty scientific about it and share the results of how we go and any modules we build and code and I'll update back to OpenSocial and I'll hopefully teach the members how to do those things as well and we'll improve things as we go along and we can create with this like prototype you could build any kind of online space where you wanna create change or just use the pieces and we can, yeah, build our tool sets that are gonna be custom for this and just see what happens. So the future, these are all AI-generated images. Whoa, they make creepy images. It's always the night cafe that gave me nightmares half of this stuff so I picked the less creepy and the more clothed people. So after this initial phase we're gonna have an active community and we're gonna have a great example of the tools the community needs. We can then integrate the learning platform and run workshops and short modules and hopefully make them reusable. We can approach supporters and contributors and just generally people that know more than us about anything that the group needs to know. And I'm guessing the members will wanna build their own websites and focus entirely on their passion project and build communities around that. So it'd be great to maybe as a side from this build another community that's just about the resources to teach. Women about Drupal or just about community building, not just. So it brings me to the thoughts that how does this relate to change and resilience in the Drupal community? Many of us grew up with Drupal. Now I started in 2009, I just had a server in the corner, I chucked the PHP files on, I just logged on, I ran it live, I started by P. I ran email servers, I was hacking away, just making changes live, people were joining groups and sharing files and all that kind of stuff. It was very easy to do a dev environment, just use Notepad live on the server. And now we've got like a million Drupal sites out there and Drupal's seen as this enterprise level system. How does a young person learn and jump into that? How do they set up their development environment and get running? This is how are we gonna make sure all the websites that are out there keep getting maintained and don't just get dumped for the next high budget? And yeah, who's gonna fill those roles? So there's so many people that are using Drupal and have been using Drupal that we've kind of dismissed in the community, like the content managers, designers, people like that. And I think it was a big shame that we've lost a lot of people by just thinking, oh, they're not Drupally enough or they're not Coder enough or something like that, we really do know a lot. Like they might have been in the content like, I don't content, I don't go in and click around. I'm just writing code. So they know so much more than me about interfaces and things like that. And yeah, they end up being the decision makers and the people that decide what tech we use in the future. So I guess this is a whole other talk, but yeah, it comes back to how do we keep momentum and keep people useful and use people in the best ways we can. So yeah, I'm Jamie Christine Schmidt and you can contact me, LinkedIn, I'm on Drupal.org and I'm Jamie at Ginger Robot. And if you're interested in Drupal, AIs, chat.gbt, creating images with AI, prototyping, builds, teaching women and young people, building communities, people in the regions, come and chat. And yeah, if you have any ideas or this is sort of your jam about how to use AIs to make change and how to use Drupal to make change, come and talk to me. So that was my thing. And then I've got, when I put it up, I'll pop some of the references and things there. Any questions? Thank you very much. Thank you all. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, so I sort of thought I'd put my thought process into it rather than the tech because my students here know how to get a site built. But the idea of having your community at the beginning and keeping them in mind and included all the way through and not making the decisions for them is a little different to me. All right, yes, Cindy. Yes, so it has not been hard. As I said, I just sat down at yoga and people like, has anyone heard about AI? My husband or my other school has mentioned it. They say their kids aren't allowed to use it and things like that, right? And then one lady was like, oh, you know, I'm just a support worker. And when I'm around people, we just end up talking about our passion. And eventually she's like, oh, actually the other one was having a few wines with a friend and we've decided like in the disability support area, it wouldn't be great to have a handbook that you could just hand out to new people that join with all the best information. And I don't really have time to work on it, but I'm with the education department and they're with NASPA funding. And I'm like, okay. So I sat down and said, well, let's introduce you to chat GPT. And just put in there, like, you know, I'm wanting to apply for a $30,000 grant from the New South Wales Education Department. And it just wrote like, you know, 10 paragraphs of really cool stuff that you could easily just then go back and edit. And then I was like, okay, well now let's find the top five resources for people in the Northern New South Wales region with sense three issues. Just came up with that. And you know, she's the expert in this. She can read through and check the links and make sure it's all correct. But no, it's gonna flash out the handbook for her. And it's not gonna be so overwhelming because you can see how productive you can be. And as you gain these skills and then, you know, she's gonna tell something. And it's just gonna grow. It's like so far every single person I've met is like, yeah, I could probably give that a go because they can see. Yeah, they can see. Yeah, yeah. And we're not planning to keep any of this. This isn't a business. It's an open idea. So as we build it, we'll share and you can just go make it. Yeah. Yeah. And then the first tech bro, of course, I talked about it. He goes, why don't they just Google and figure it out like I did. Good luck. Because everyone has said, oh my gosh, I have so much on my plate. I'm trying to create all this massive change and it's so overwhelming. I don't even know how to write a grant. I don't know how to write a code of conduct or what's the best practice of creating an organization where you don't have to have a committee and all those sorts of things. So yeah, thank you very much.