 Can we do somebody yeah I think we have some looks like we have a little connectivity problems some couple folks have dropped an in and out so we'll just have to bear with that. But welcome to our third and final meet the question for the 2016 at-large board of director seat for the association thanks everyone for joining in today in all of your many many time zones so just a reminder a few housekeeping notes anyone who's listening in you guys are on mute to keep the background noise to a minimum and for our panelists you can also do the same you have a mute button for yourself feel free to use it in case you like me have a very loud cat who likes to meow and appropriately or children or anything else you can use that mute button but just because you're on mute doesn't mean we don't want to hear from folks so if you do have questions today feel free to use the Q&A button on your zoom control panel to ask questions of the candidates I will relay those over and then let's talk about how we're going to do this today we're going to have statements from the candidates first and you'll see them while they speak and when they're done we're going to go into Q&A we're recording the session so we will put that up on our YouTube channel when it's done and we will also put that link up on the election section of our site so look out for that and just a reminder that although we do these live Q&A sessions here for mute the candidates you can also interact with the candidates in an ongoing way on their profile page the candidate profile page so if you go to the elections area you can see all the candidates if you click through to their candidate profile page there's a Q&A section there so candidates keep an eye out there for those interactions and community feel free to ask questions there as well and so you'll have from now until March 7th for that Q&A format and then on March 7th that's when voting begins so please vote and encourage everyone else to vote as well those are all the housekeeping announcements and unless anyone has any questions are you guys ready to move forward you know our intro statements okay we will do that so like I said we'll go in alphabetical order so our first two folks definitely have some connectivity issues so I'm going to do my best to make sure we give them a fair shot and and they might take more than a couple of minutes to get this done so let's see how it goes but Ahmad if you're able to connect unmute yourself and share a little bit about who you are and why you're running that will be fantastic hopefully the connection can be stable to let me complete my introduction so this is me Ahmadine I'm from Egypt 23 years old I have founded the Egypt community for Drupal it's Drupal Egypt and also I have founded and co-founded more than two sources related to the web development based on Drupal and now I'm working I'm acting as a development manager in link development it's a multinational international company it's a big company in Egypt and we have a source open source department and we are using the Drupal as a main development framework that's oh I hope that he was saying and not about it because we just lost poor Ahmad okay we'll see if he's able to join back on in the meantime Ashraf are you there I am here I'm not sure why my video is not working with this program but can you guys hear me clearly absolutely yeah so why don't you go ahead and take it away okay um hi I'm Ashraf I have been a web developer for 13 years working in Drupal development for about five years I work at aquia as a technical architect but I also founded debug academy a company where I train people with any range of web development experience from none at all to you know senior programmers to use Drupal and I've encountered a lot of different people and different perspectives which I thought would be helpful to bring into the Drupal association on a regular basis so I regularly interact with people who are new to programming as well as people who are experienced programmers both of which are using Drupal for the first time that's it for the most part I enjoy playing soccer in the little spare time that I have I have a one-year-old son and you know I feel strongly that feel strongly about opening the programming or development field up to a larger group of people in terms of stripping out some of the elitism that there seems to be in the area I just think it's a lot more accessible than people who haven't tried it feel it is before trying it great thank you all right so Ahmad is back so we're going to try one more time for Ahmad to finish up his his statement this is me Ahmad Zayn from EED I have a certain that I am now working as a development manager in the next Egyptian company a lot of branches and all over the world I have founded the Egypt Drupal community for about up to four years now and I have founded and co-founded more than two companies based on uh Drupal as a main framework for development and my main activity is uh as I used to be uh developer from about it's now about uh 11 years old and the soul about me now okay I think we made it that's good and Ahmad I think if you uh I'm done so great we can move to the next we will do that and I think that if you turn off your video um that might help your audio just for the future okay awesome all right next up in the alphabet Danny why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself um so my name is Danny Norden I'm the director of user experience at Pegasus in Cambridge working on a Drupal team on several global web properties um I also have been an active design and UX contributor in the Drupal community um my most recent work um includes redesigning the Drupal.org user profile also participating while actually catalyzing the front end banana consensus or whatever the hell it is basically I pulled Morton out into a hallway with post-its and told him to talk it out and then we got the classy theme and the stable theme and things were pretty happy I thought um and I also run the design for Drupal camp in Boston every year um I think the things that I really do well are bringing people together and helping to bring consensus and helping to map out really complex things and make them a little simpler so I think all of those skills are things that I really want to bring to a role on the Drupal association board I also have an adorable daughter who a couple people just saw who is not watching Frozen so awesome I like it when we hear about the kids all right thanks Danny um and next up is Dave Hernandez hello hi my name is David Hernandez um I've been involved in the IT industry for about 20 years and working with Drupal for about eight years um as formerly a site builder developer and front-end person um the current job I'm working at FFW where I'm the manager of learning and contributions where I um create training programs for internally for the company to train developers and I also coordinate all of our internal operations for contributing to Drupal and contributing to open source in general uh I've been involved a lot with the Drupal community as a core contributor as a mentor as a founding member of New Jersey Drupal Group where I help organize all of our events our meet-ups our co-workings and I'm on the organizing committee for Drupal Camp New Jersey which we've just had our fifth camp so yay Drupal Camp New Jersey I've also been involved with governance matters for the Drupal Association as a member of the software working group which I was part of for the last two years I've also been a session speaker and pretty much involved in all areas that I can really find myself involved in in Drupal community I wanted to join the board because I want to make sure that we have a continued focus on local groups which is what I'm most interested in and I also want to make sure that we maintain a developer point of view on the board as well thank you nice thanks David okay next up Hilmar hi I'm Hilmar I call myself the Drupal Viking I'm from the land of ice and fire Iceland I've been I work as a senior developer for national broadcast station here in Iceland I also am a CEO and lead developer of IS project my own company here we do mostly small site development for people that not necessarily have the big box on but have really cool project that they want to work on so I do that in my spare time I'm also developing right now a university program for Reykjavik University based on CMS system in general and focusing really hardly on Drupal and showing people in the university area that PHP is no longer the big bat wolf which was PHP 4 we are now just like all the others just regular programming language and and I wanted to show people how awesome and cool Drupal is so I was able to put that in a program hopefully starting next fall I'm a co-founder of Drupal Iceland and I'm on the organizing team for Drupal camp Northern Lights which will be held in 2017 here in Iceland I'm running because the love of the community I found you guys first in in proc 2013 and ever since I have been very active trying to get into the community and and work for the community because as a whole I can just see we we I've never seen so it's a big family in any programming or yeah and I want to bring Drupal come Europe to Iceland so that's why I'm running thank you thanks Omar all right and John Kennedy you are up next thanks Ali my name is John Kennedy and I'm a product manager for Acquia I manage the lightning distribution which is an enterprise authoring distribution of Drupal I'm also the program manager for the the Drupal module acceleration program where we accelerate certain Drupal 8 modules in the community to to grow a Drupal adoption you know I've been in Acquia for a few years now I was also a head of solutions architecture for Europe for a while for Acquia for about 18 months and built that team up prior to that I was I worked at commerce guys managing their UK branch and built that up from from no branch to there being a branch and and prior to that I was running my own Drupal shop I think you know the I've been around Drupal for about 10 years have been around web for a bit longer than that I think the reason that I want to be on the board is there's lots of interesting discussions happening right now about where Drupal should go next and you know I've been encountering a lot of those in my work with the module acceleration program and and building a distribution in 8 you know what capabilities people want and you know I've had some good contact with some large organizations about this you know our big clients like Pfizer and Warner and and and others but I'd really like to do a proper consensus of the Drupal community about how they use Drupal and where they want Drupal to go and I think the Drupal association has the mandate to do that it could be a lightning rod for a discussion and I think by taking a spot on the on the board I'd be able to do that more effectively so some of my experience just to finish off I've been a a board member of the systems administrator guild of Australia and I've been on boards of a another couple of smaller non non-profits and I've been around around tech for a long time so I hope that's enough thank you all right after John is Justin hello everyone thanks for this thanks for the time you're taking to watch as well as thank you for the potential candidates I appreciate your time also the Drupal community is such a fascinating place for me and and having been in the Drupal community for a relatively short period of time I can't say that I've ever been passionate as passionate about another community and not only because it makes me all of my money but also because of the incredible ability for each person to share so I hope to fuel that sharing process as most of the candidates will talk about really bringing the community together is something that that needs to happen is happening in its own natural form but expediting that process is something not only I'm prepared to do but also I'm passionate about doing so currently I serve with the actual Drupal users group to organize the actual Drupal camp every single year as well as this year we're bringing the first North American project management track to Drupal con New Orleans and I serve as the track leader for that and I'm incredibly blessed and and I'm happy to work with commerce guys in the United States and now a part of acro media as a operations manager and project manager so organization comes naturally and easy to me and I'm excited to bring those skills also to the Drupal Association but as a true project project manager I will um over deliver under time and uh go ahead and pass the mic on awesome thanks also you guys I'm being a terrible time keeper today so I need you to keep me keep me on task all right Ken your turn hello everyone my name is Ken Diller I am I have a privilege of having 17 direct reports I'm a director of customer care of a web hosting company for me this is not about passing on any information about what we do in our hosting it's about being able to take the experiences that I have on a daily basis because I'm me my team organization we're constantly dealing with end users of Drupal and they were also dealing with developers of Drupal and so we get a great uh a great gumbo if I can use that term of of experiences and feedback we're not talking from a chat board or from some sort of listing somewhere uh on the web we're talking real live people where I'm getting real live feedback so as Drupal 8 was being released got a lot of buzz a lot of feedback from that um and we passed that on as the opportunity presented itself the reason I want to be on this board and I think I would be an excellent choice is because I'm coming in with a desire to open up the uh the community base we have to be more inclusive as it pertains to Drupal we need a stronger international presence we need a younger group demographic to start getting with Drupal right now so when 9 is released they're already excited about and acclimate it we can't keep bringing the same group from 7 to 8 and then from 8 to 9 we got to grow the group and then more importantly we have to tap into our minority base and there are a lot of demographics that are untapped with Drupal being out there on the table so I'm very excited about that and I have a very clear vision about how to make that happen and also the other user groups that are around the world and in America make them a part of the community it's going to be a community it has to be a community where everybody feels like they're involved that's what I'll do well timed all right Matthew hey everybody my name's Matthew um I'm currently one of your elected Drupal Association board members and I'm looking to be reelected to continue the work that I've been doing um the big thing that I've been doing on the on the board at this point is chairing the governance committee and I've done that for the last two years um in that capacity I've been involved in implementing board member term limits so prior to prior to this board members were able to stand the board for an indefinite period of time that's helpful in terms of reducing burnout and bringing on additional you know creativity increasing the term limits uh the term of elected board members from one year to two years and also staggering staggering uh elected board member terms for the overlap basically I'm a governance geek and I've loved doing the work that I've been doing with the with the board up until now I also helped craft the current vision and mission statement for the association and helped fundraise in the Drupal Aid Accelerate program um so what how the way that I'm feeling is that I'm basically a proven effective member of the team already and I'd like to continue that work for another couple years I have nearly 20 years of experience in open source technology and nonprofits um and my first uh my first Drupal Con was in Barcelona back in 2007 uh in the Drupal world I'm a project manager um I've worked as a independent consultant a small business owner tech lead for the migration of examiner.com from Colt Fusion Drupal 7 I've been a leader in agencies and I'm currently throughout innovation the engineering lead for Pfizer's healthcare professional portal. Why am I the ideal candidate? Well I've got multiple experiences with nonprofits and nonprofit boards two years with the Drupal Association nine years with Drupal Camp Colorado four years with the Charter School in Colorado I've gone through board training with board source and uh with the Colorado Coalition of Charter Schools I've got a ton of experience with different cultures my team spans the United States Europe the United Kingdom India and Canada um and myself I'm personally a citizen of Canada the United States and the United Kingdom spend a lot of time in all three of those places. My master's degree focused on nonprofit governance and technology I helped organize Drupal Con Denver and Drupal Camp Colorado for the last eight years and I've spoken at numerous Drupal events since 2008 so I very very much want to finish up my work as the community representative and I'm hoping that I'll be granted that opportunity to serve just a couple more years. Thanks very much. Thanks Matthew. Uh Shamala. Hey hi hi everybody. It's um 5 30 in the morning here so excited to be with the Drupal community this morning. I'm Shamala here from Chennai India and director of my company Unimity Solutions. I'm actually a civil engineer from a very prominent institute here in India called IIT. I took a break in my career to spend time with my kids and then just jump back to idea after. Since then most of my time has been with Drupal. I've been an active member of the Drupal community over the last nine years and I've also been part of the initial year's voting for TA association which is a few participants. Today here it's so exciting that we have each of the candidates here so much to share about their contributions and up from different cultural backgrounds bringing in different skills and competencies. I think this clearly shows how Drupal has grown in the last years. I'm excited I'm contesting for the director at large post to the association board. So what do I bring to the Drupal association? I think I want to bring to the Drupal association a representation of one of the largest communities India. I want to bring to the Drupal association my skills a combination of having been in senior management community building and technology. I'm very confident that I'll be able to support the association in many strategic position making specifically with respect to increasing awareness fundraising and community building activities for Drupal. Having worked in multiple initiatives in the Drupal project I understand and align myself with the key goals of the association. Some of my community activities include having been with the mobile initiative as a project manager. This involved bringing and aligning different participations of different people with different skills having interacted with people from different communities. The Drupal.org redesign. I also understand the local communities and having been involved in fundraising activities for Drupal association specifically the Drupal aid acceleration fund. So what is the value that I'm going to bring as being part of the Drupal association that I can't do otherwise? I think it's very true that good or not I have some ideas on how organizations can support and facilitate and improving the quality and quantity of contributions and that's going to be my vision in the coming year. I feel this role could just give me a better visibility and make it easy for me to gain support from other organizations. Thank you all. Thanks Shamala. Okay and soon it. Hi everyone. Thank you for sharing this opportunity. I hope everyone has had a chance to look at the Drupal that we submitted online but really brief. I've been kind of doing open source and I'm dating myself here for can everyone hear me I'm sorry. Oh yeah you're good. For you know a little over 30 years specifically Drupal for us since while I started tracking Drupal in 2005 first failed project in 2006 and since 2007 it's been Drupal only. My background is tech. I've been in tech. I'm here I'm based here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Always worked for product companies. It's kind of like the first time I'm running a services shop we're a small you know 45 shop doing Drupal only Drupal and mobile. I've got a PhD in computer stuff a bunch of publications and and and nearly a thousand citations along with a patent stuff like that. I have some experience hurting cats as it were you know having submitted proposals to the ANSI SQL community SQLJ community and other you know other boards so to speak. I'm on the board of Immunize India which is currently now the world's largest free vaccine reminder system. Before I got into the world of Drupal I used to run a hundred million dollar business unit at Oracle selling business intelligence products. Why am I interested in becoming a board member after all these years being in Drupal. So I think that Drupal needs to think a little bit out of the box it needs to expand its vision grow markets as it were right. A few things every three to five years you know the enterprises tend to rebuild their website sometimes people win sometimes people loses so that's one aspect. Drupal can do a whole lot more than just build web websites. It can be deployed as an application server. This is something we have done as an organization for several clients. I think we have to try and do a better job of you know quantifying the Drupal economy. I think we should try and find some key lagging leading educators that give us a sense of where the Drupal ecosystem is for instance you know we can do annual surveys of companies you see how many people are employed full time doing Drupal. You know I want to look at you know how we can expand the Drupal ecosystem you know distributions were one way of expanding Drupal's reach but really embedded Drupal with decoupled Drupal that becomes a whole lot easier. New products new capabilities should be built on top and we should you know move away from distros. In short we want to create the kind of ecosystem that Oracle, Microsoft, other product companies have done for their products you know and then look into like you know what does it mean to monetize Drupal for the greater good. For example you know just make to have marketplace for modules actually create bounties for specific connectors or modules or other capabilities and so forth. That's it my two minutes are up. Thanks unit. All right and we have one more Tom Grandy round things out for us. Thank you Holly lots of excellent candidates here tonight thank you all for taking the time to join in. My name is Tom Grandy like I said I am in Ohio work for 23 different school districts both public and private. I'm basically a one-man shop with one other person who wears many hats so it's very very small group doing a lot of work. We do have a graphic company we work with as far as doing some front-end development for us but for the most part it's just a very very tiny shop. So as far as having a hundred million dollar projects we don't but we do represent what I think is a lot of the fringe element. A lot of people who are either in small shops or doing Drupal work by themselves and I would like to represent that community on the board and make sure that they have a voice. I think we have some excellent candidates that are there already. I also think we have an overabundance of people from the United States so me running as somebody from the United States I'd like to see more people from other countries better represent the Drupal community. Looking at one more minute I'll say I'd like to see some sort of initiatives and since I do work with schools K-12 specifically that when we talk about you know co.org or STEM programs trying to get Drupal into the secondary maybe middle schools as well no reason why that can't be done. Cisco did it why can't Drupal so thank you. Thank you. Okay those are all of our intros thanks for doing those so now we're going to move over to the Q&A section so just a reminder for our live listeners you have a Q&A button at the bottom of your zoom screen feel free to drop questions in there for the candidate I'll be happy to pass those along and get them answered for you but why don't we get started with something that we talked a little bit about in the last two meetings but from a slightly different frame and let me just go back to at Drupal on Asia Denise Cooper one of our board members and you know very significant open source contributor did the keynote on day two of the conference and she referenced well one of the things she said is that Drupal has one of the most likable communities on the planet open source communities on the planet which I totally agree with I think we do have one of the most likable communities but one of the reasons that she she attributes for that likableness is the the diversity that we have in the community which she you know feels like is modeled by the diversity in the core team in particular women inciting you know Angie's prominent role in core uh core development uh you know making Drupal more accessible for other women who want to participate in the project so so we've definitely we've talked about this kind of diversity bringing different people into the project uh for a long time but we've also talked about how hard it is so what like concrete steps would you like to see the association take to make the community more welcoming for you know not your typical engineer and we'll start with Shyamala and then I'll go to Tom I think um with the current consciousness being across countries the kind of setting the tone that Drupal has actually reached out to a large uh larger base of culture background and bringing in different skills and competencies the strategy would be that um we have Drupal association but I don't think at any point you can have representation from all communities in the board or the association but the strategy must be that you work with local representatives in a more frequent periodicity today it's only happening during camps and events like such but we probably need to go beyond that and have meetings with local representatives and this would really make it more inclusive of a larger base of community awesome thank you all right we're gonna go to Tom and then Ken and then Danny thank you you mentioned there at the end you know not only just diversity between genders diversity between cultures but also diversity between the your specialties you know not necessarily just engineers and if I look at the many hats that I wear I'm not your PHP coder type you know I'm a project manager some days I'm a graphic designer um so I kind of see it all but you know where I see us falling a little bit short and I said it before a bit was you know having enough representation from all of the different communities and triple serves and it's growing as we expanded to other countries you know in triple con Asia you were there you're suffering from the jet lag right now Holly um it was a huge success from what I've heard I wasn't there but you know soon we're going to see other countries you know maybe China um that's gonna they're going to be coming on board as well and how do we get them to to represent well obviously we're going to bring some of their communities on board but how do we get that all the way up to the board like sorry I'm always saying we can't necessarily have somebody from every single country represented on the board but to get the the word up from what they would like the board members to hear we have to come up with some sort of model to get that done and currently we don't have that so thank you thanks um all right Ken and then Danny and David I saw you as I stated in my intro I'm I'm fully prepared to just walk in and tackle that that's that's my baby to make Drupal more diverse to make it a more international presence but diversity is one of those things where it's great to talk about it looks great on the t-shirt it's wonderful on a company banner and it looks even better on a bumper sticker but if you don't have someone that's actually committed to making it happen someone that is really looking to for real change then it's no more than a good slogan on a email letterhead that's all it is and so again I opened up my intro by saying that's exactly what needs to happen if we look at Drupal right now Drupal is continuing to bring along the same types of personalities and groups that it is bought from six to seven to eight if we're not growing we're dying so we have to now start looking at how do we market Drupal to a younger demographic regardless of culture how do we market to a younger demographic and then how do we bring aboard more minorities it has to be made a priority and not just talk or rhetoric or something that just sounds good to say in this moment so again it's something I'm prepared to do regardless if I'm bought on board or not I will help someone do that awesome thanks Ken and Danny then one second sorry and then I know David and then I see Matthew's hand Hillmar did I see yours too yeah Hillmar and Sumit okay all right so um I mean the one thing obviously I run design for Drupal which is specifically account for people who are in Drupal as non-developers so every year we bring 200 some 200 plus people who are designers project managers manager managers of people who are building Drupal businesses to get together share best practices share knowledge and just sort of commiserate on what it means to be a designer in a developer's world um it's a great personal source of satisfaction for me and one of the things I get on a soapbox about and I do get on many soapboxes um I think when I think of the stuff that I would do beyond that one of the things I always turn back to is growing up um poor on the south side of Providence and seeing people in my own family struggle to lift themselves out of poverty and knowing what potential there is for Drupal I mean it's certainly changed my life and helped me get myself out of poverty and I think of things like girls who code and all of these different things that you know help people learn really marketable skills and so I feel like apprentice programs that actually focus on lower income youth could be a really valuable addition to the Drupal community and something that more Drupal businesses should sponsor. Thanks Danny okay so going from Danny we're going to go to David and then Helmar and then Synet and John oh and I forgot a Matthew in there too what sorry go ahead David I'll just say I agree with everyone saying so far I mean it definitely requires leadership but I think beyond just a leader what we really need are leaders and I think we need to find a way to promote um not just um finding ways to create diversity that come from leadership top down but from bottom up as well and promote a lot of this in the local organizations and find ways that we can really um develop ambassadors and mentors within the community people who can be highly visible and really recruit that sort of next generation and expand Drupal into those areas that we really want um and to add to that I also think that we shouldn't undervalue communication in the way that we communicate to people not just how we outreach but the way we say things just some simple examples that things that I've done in the past is simply by renaming events that we have we've noticed how that affects the number of people and the different types of people that show up to those events you know changing things from sprints to calling them community days and things like that it really changes a lot of people's perspective and their expectations to something that we want which is to create something that's more generalized and will promote a greater number of people and a greater range of people from showing up awesome thanks David um okay let's go Matthew and then Helmar Tuna and John there's Matthew looking for the mute button he found it yeah I've got it my my computer appears to be under underpowered for the for the video um which causes that little beach ball to come up so I think one of the big things that that we need to be focused on is is helping helping communities whether it's minorities or women or or or project managers or designers have a voice and one of the challenges that we've had in in the past is that is that Drupal while people say code is gold often I think that that's shifted because I think that when you when you when you you look at the the community as a whole most people stick around in the community because of the people um the people have become very very important to the uh to the to the uh to the energy of the community so I think that we need to find ways to to provide a voice to to those who who are not coders um again across across different areas but to that end this past year um at Drupal Camp Colorado what we did was we we uh took our our our profits and half the profits um uh half the profit that we made went to the National Council of Women in Technology with the idea that we would be uh we would be bringing um funds to to to young women who who wanted to um learn how to code and be part of technology community awesome that's a great example Helmar yeah thank you guys I totally agree on on what everybody has been saying also what I want to pitch in is my thoughts on how Drupal has been displayed as a huge learning curve with almost impossible to learn and unless you have a university degree which I do not agree with and I think that we should focus a little bit on uh getting uh getting Drupal out as as the the best choice and the good choice for for a website like WordPress and Joomla and and just uh uh shake shake off that that bad vibe that we have in learning curve and uh by doing that by showing the community and showing the people how our community is working and that you can always get somebody to help you and I think that is a great asset that we have and we need to show that a little bit more I see you too Justin all right so a couple of things right um I think there are two aspects to Drupal doing good or you know getting Drupal out there in the community helping people um uh one is you know all these you know global training days and other kinds of programs that several of us just mentioned uh where we're you know teaching people how to use Drupal and and um and you know do useful things with Drupal um so for instance uh and Drupal uh Drupal Mumbai we just launched this thing called Drupal campus ambassador program and the idea there is to you know create more awareness um of Drupal and of course you know uh more skills uh around Drupal you know I just mentioned the learning curve and I think a couple of other people mentioned that it is a painful learning curve we all know that but it is what it is and we got to find ways around that um the other aspect of Drupal doing good is you know where you can build simple solutions um I think you know in the in the questions uh uh John asked about changed out or another example with uh you know where I have first-hand experiences is the Immunize India platform so Immunize India is is started as a back home reminder program for India but it has now been adopted by the World Health Organization and so forth and it's going to be rolled out globally the entire backend is run by Drupal uh you know uh and in fact in a couple of weeks I'll be meeting with Code for America specifically around Drupal uh so a lot of things we can do yes awesome uh I have to hear more about your Code for America meeting uh good let's go to John and then I'm gonna we're gonna make time for Ahmad and Ashraf and then Justin and then who am I missing anyone want to take that one too okay I think we're good so John hi okay so I think you know actually we we have a lot to be proud of in Drupal about our diversity you know I've I've been attending the the European and US Drupal comms nearly all of them since Chicago and I've spoken at camps you know in in all across Europe and and some in Asia and and in the US and I think I found a community of people who are open and who are sensitive and who um and who accept new people um and I think that's really important because I think a diverse Drupal is a strong Drupal um I think you know getting down to the nuts and bolts there are going to be some initiatives that could really help um I've worked a lot with Drupal um with companies that have you know vested interests in Drupal that are building Drupal I think um you know a program of professional exchange between different countries of developers could be something that would be really interesting and and might spread that diversity I've worked in large non-profit exchange organizations before in Australia and I think that's been very successful in in kind of bring bring diversity and bring cultural awareness and communication so you know I I think it's very important that we we think about diversity and that reach out into into more of the world um but I also think that we have a great set of people and a great starting point um yeah awesome thank you John all right come on hopefully uh there you are okay yeah uh okay guys uh all the candidates they uh they are covering all the points I uh I was uh attempting to uh talk about but uh I need to focus to uh two main points or maybe three uh the first one it's the uh minority or reaching uh other demographic places or something like like this uh especially uh on the biggest scale it's a very good example that we have uh Drupal Koneji in India I didn't attend it but I I'm following the news we really need to reach other cultures and other languages with more activities you know we have insufficient we don't have any Drupal Kone in this region uh or maybe uh the global training the the other point is uh the the learning curve uh maybe it I'm going to look at look to the another look at to uh from another perspective uh which we when we are going to apply the have uh like uh uh you know uh kind of uh Drupal Vest is uh Drupal Vest is uh uh WordPress and uh who uh very very clear or very so every day uh but uh in the other regions uh or another uh places we have uh no clear support for uh uh Drupal uh with the uh professionality uh they need the companies need to have an expert from uh you know from many from uh aquia from uh another country or another brand uh so uh I think we need to reach or focus on uh other cultures and other uh you know new tax or new level of simplifying the the materials or the knowledge or Drupal to a lot of levels of media for starting from the developer and the designer and also to access the marketing sector uh maybe from the station it will be uh very helpful for the the Drupal community and the future for for the the Drupal future in the upcoming years thank you ah thank you all right Ahmad thank you for battling your technical difficulties uh Ashraf I think we'll hear from you and then Justin thank you um so I feel I have a lot of direct experience with increasing diversity in the community through the debug academy class that I teach um 40 percent of the students in the class are female in the current semester um over 20 percent are African American um like I said previously the backgrounds are very different in terms of work experience coming into the class and that actually plays out quite nicely um because when we tend to work on real client projects for non-profit organizations most of the time and when you have those diverse backgrounds different people learn different things some people come out of it as potentially a content editor um everybody actually leaves at a higher level than that but some people may enjoy the content editor side of things um people who are already developers can leave the class having already contributed patches to the community um I think I think growing programs like that across the country would be very effective and also picking up modules that have a status of seeking maintainers and having the classes work on maintaining those modules which is something that we are doing and trying to expand would help the community and help people you know learn to contribute um and have a sense of ownership of Drupal modules thank you thanks 100 percent women that's great um Justin why don't you round us out here sounds great as a minority and a person under the age of 30 I have to say that the uh the most appealing part of Drupal has been by far the immense amount of talent that I've experienced and I've been able to work with I believe that you'll find that the attraction to Drupal isn't an initiative accomplished by a board member posting tweets every other week or a scholarship or two going to Drupalcon I can only imagine the best route for Drupal to continue to create incredible software or is to create incredible software to attract a diverse crowd the community should continue to be tight and really open and also should create more opportunity and allow that opportunity to be publicized for anyone that wants to get involved to be able to get involved so I by far think that diversity is kind of a gauge of the health of a community and Drupal so far has has astounded me with its its level of diversity and openness and I can only see that trend uh trending upwards into the future I will say as a last point to attract the younger community I'm posting a link into our chat I am uh very close friends with the rapper miraculous and he uh has released a Drupal rap so if you haven't seen it you should watch it and I look forward to arranging him uh to to present if you will or perform at the Drupalcon if I'm allowed to awesome I have to say one of my favorite things about this community is how multi-talented we are from like you know Campbell's for Tessie's opera singing to uh gosh I gotta tell you that there was like this Bollywood dance at Drupalcon Asia and we have some really good dancers in the community so next time you talk to jam if you'll please and jammer Campbell remind them that I I do do sing opera and I was tapped to sing this year but I wasn't able to okay I'll remind them all right we have a we have a question here from the community so um here it is okay so John who's on the call says my own modus operandi is to use Drupal to improve Drupal and its community in other words we try to eat our own dog food right to make Drupal better and this is part of the reason why all of our issue cues are in Drupal we don't use github and those sorts of things right so um what in the a couple of calls go in the last couple calls actually we talked about creating a tool to bring more um the the ability for the community to reach out to the association more by creating kind of like a change.org for Drupal for example but what are some other novel ways that we could be using Drupal to improve itself so how can we use Drupal to create a better Drupal any takers on that one all right Ken and then Shamala and then I got you Tom one of the things I think that's important and it's already been alluded to here is to find out what people are needing we understand just because the module is being used we have to find out what direction how people are using these modules what are they using them for and what do they see on the horizon we can create the best module on the planet but if the end user doesn't use it it's just the best module no one has ever heard of so we have to be able to be able to talk to our end users say hey what do you think about this module how's it helping you uh what are some of the things what are some of the uses that you see for this module and then be able to get that feedback right back into the hands of those that can do something about it again that's a conversation I have every day with our end users as well but it's something that it's free information people are more than happy to give it to you but we have to put ourselves in a position where we can get that information from them and again get it to the community awesome thanks Ken okay we're going to go to Shyamala and then Tom and then Sunit sorry for spamming the answer I didn't know the same button was working don't worry so um yeah I think we should we've always been using Drupal to improve Drupal like it's been a selling point for the Drupal community that exists on Drupal.org to demonstrate how well Drupal could be used as a community tool we are getting in lovely features in which we're gathering more stats I think one way is to demonstrate Drupal's personalization capabilities to be when you log in it should be able to throw up more prompts and custom messaging that motivate you to participate more that's an important direction that we should take in moving Drupal towards also key is having a mobile app and having to demonstrate cross platform capabilities and integration capabilities of Drupal and reaching out to more people and more devices and and more options okay great thanks okay so give me one second Matt I see Matthew and I see John did I see David I see Danny and Helmar all right we're gonna go to Tom next thank you Ali I brought this up the other day and first of all what what Shannon and I'm not sure who else brought it to the table was when they were talking about the ability to vote up ideas out of the community was something like change.org awesome idea but if we're looking for other ways of using Drupal to improve the community one thing that I think with Drupal 8 on the horizon or actually on the horizon for people like me there's a little bit of trepidation as far as how to onboard or make that transition and I brought it up yesterday I'll bring it up again the possibility of having a light version maybe it's a distribution of Drupal 8 that already has some stuff built into it so that those who don't want to start out with a completely vanilla installation could learn their way through without starting from scratch yeah Drupal's got a curve to it you know I've been playing this game in Drupal for six seven years now but using Drupal to onboard people by making it simple might be a good idea so thank you thanks all right in it I think one is that the feedback module could possibly made a product for and anytime you throw up a page you know using the templating system you automatically have you know the feedback option right there you know for those of you as you probably know you know it it'll take a screenshot kept at the URL where the issue was found and and send it back to whoever needs to go that's one thing I think the other thing that we should probably look at and I think somebody just mentioned you know collecting more stats but I think the stats that are collected by say the develop module or other modules in core Drupal should be sent back to Drupal.org for further analysis and what kind of analysis etc we would you know need to figure out but these are some you know a couple of quick things that we can do I really like the idea of you know of creating a mobile app to showcase what more Drupal can do so just just those those are my thoughts that's what I have all right thanks unit and we're gonna Matthews and John then that's all I can I can't read my handwriting now give me a second Matthew and John so I feel like this is built into our DNA already you know a lot of ways and we can do things better for sure but you you look back over the last over the last 12 15 years and we've been iterating and improving Drupal and using the learnings that we've had from previous versions each and every time you release a new version which is the reason that you know we had this whole idea that we want to be backwards compatible and always be moving forward and looking how to improve the the platform and not be focused on on rather not be stuck on on on on features that maybe maybe should be dropped I love the idea of doing a mobile app I love the idea that we could use more more headless Drupal to show how Drupal can be used as a as a as a back end to do all kinds of amazing cool things I think these are all terrific ideas but and I think that that really what we we need to do is be paying attention to all the cool things that are being done to showcase them have more case studies and and really help ourselves iterate on the on the platform as it exists now just continue to improve it thanks thank you okay we're gonna go John and then Danny see I was reading Dan and I was like there's no Dan on this call what did I write but it was Danny and then Hilmar and Ahmad and I've got David and Justin also John all right one of my one of my big lessons of my time in Drupal is used Drupal you know what it's good at what it's good at I think it's it's a great web application for certain purposes I think the Drupal community is effectively using a lot of other channels of communication as well to coordinate I think Drupal is really strong has really strong community features and I think there could be more we could do on Drupal.org to connect people and enhance kind of communication on on Drupal.org itself which I know Holly is to mammoth task and you are striving to do no you're right that you're right that but you know I think the change it all kind of idea we had a couple of sessions ago I'm I'm really excited about because I think that's something that we could execute very quickly and I've been talking to a couple of the other candidates about and it's something that we could accomplish and then have people bubble these ideas at the top because we tend to have discussions deep in issue threads and you know it's great to point to them a lot of people lose the context when they have to read through you know five pages of notes to get to the issue and I think the format that we could bring with a change on Drupal.org could actually kind of eliminate that difficulty and allow more people in the community to engage in those really important issues great all right thanks John Danny you want to tackle this one too I think we lost Danny we lost Danny okay I'm going to circle her Hilmar what are you yeah well one of the things that can can be used is trying to use Drupal I sort of like the incredible machine where we use Drupal to teach Drupal as a distribution system so you get almost like a next next finish set of of distro where you then learn with real-life examples and and I think sometimes that is that is one of the things that we have troubles with when we are teaching Drupal is that we we have a lot of set we have a lot of videos and books and stuff about things that are well maybe a little bit real life but at the same time we don't go into into deep details and I think that we can build a distribution that can work on that so we are integrating both the the conventional video teaching and also using Drupal to teach Drupal wait thanks Hilmar Amar okay at the main point I need to talk about about the real localization features and be really implemented in the Drupal DNA you know I'm one of the members of Arabic translation I'm not to speak talking about Arabic especially but it's a the feature of localization in Drupal itself I think we need to enhance it to be more flexible and you know sometimes we have a lot of technical issues with the translation and with localization this website of this portal need to be multilingual so localization needs to be enhanced this is one of the points I need I think we need to enhance it in Drupal DNA the other point is the mobile app is a very good idea but I need I think we need to make it more more clear what we need to point is reaching the other other Drupal a lot of companies don't care from from some kind of view the other point is a leak of showcases you know the companies okay the companies need to be need to have a very clear showcases with a lot of varieties like like integrating from migrating from SharePoint to Drupal and it's a very big case need to be clear thank you all right case studies are always important for sure all right Danny are you back I want to go back to you I am hi you want your crack at this one seriously it was very tragic yeah so when I think of using Drupal to help Drupal I think of the person who is sitting next to me at the Boston ladder who was trying to figure out how to update help documentation in Drupal and learned that she would need to learn how to do a get push and pull and write a patch and roll a patch in order to change a comma and the person who did who commented on the survey that I sent out a couple years ago for my thesis research who basically made the same statement I shouldn't need to like know how to roll a patch to change your help docs so when I think about the ways that Drupal can sort of help itself I think we put a lot of barriers in front of really intelligent and smart people in terms of helping people figure out how to use our software great point uh David so um if the question is aimed at I guess specifically Drupal.org in our particular ecosystem I actually would have a bit of a dissenting opinion where I think that we've seen over the years when we constantly wait to find a Drupal solution for every problem that we have it doesn't always work out and we shouldn't always look at Drupal as being the one hammer that will solve every problem we've definitely gotten away from that and I think getting away from that is actually a good thing but we can stick to Drupal's strengths and one thing we may want to start exploring is um how do we use multiple uh Drupal's multilingual capabilities which is something that's inherent in the product and we know that Drupal does really well and maybe we should start um bringing some of that into Drupal.org so that we can have more translations and reach a much larger audience. Great thanks David uh Justin and then we'll round out with Ashraf I think. Thank you I think that every site that we build in Drupal um that's that's made excellently that that demonstrates a new edge of technology that really brings people's imagination to the forefront in Drupal um that's what we do to use Drupal as a tool to build Drupal. Every module that bridges the gap over a solution uh that that increases increases the potential for future developers to do something even more amazing to me that's the most interesting part of Drupal and it will continue to grow and to be uh better used every single time somebody does something amazing in Drupal regardless once again of what the Drupal association does. Now what we can do with the Drupal association is highlight those those extra uh phenomenal sites those um imaginative interesting ways that Drupal is being used and share that with the community as effectively as we can um only only once the Drupal world realizes all the capabilities of the Drupal world uh that's that's when we find the perfect marriage of marketing meeting actual boots on the ground um when it comes to giving Drupal a better name for Drupal. Great thanks Justin and Ashra if you want to round this one out for us. Sure so to use Drupal to help improve Drupal one thing that I'm I that always crosses my mind is meetups Drupal local meetups tend to be organized on meetup.org or however else and I think that that's one thing that we could definitely handle through a subdomain on Drupal.org maybe the subdomain itself isn't important but maybe a way for people to um to essentially go to Drupal.org and say I want to create a local community and by doing that maybe they can be creating um a multi-site or at least be using a Drupal built Drupal powered event uh website for us to publish events basically lower the barrier uh for someone to create Drupal events while also um centralizing where local events are listed. Great all right thank you for that okay. Do I miss anyone? Are you guys ready for one more here? Okay yesterday we, David is not speaking. Yeah it's true you're not and I did call on you and just check my list. All right so um so yesterday apparently I needed a little love so I asked uh candidates on the call to identify a bright spot in the association that they felt like we should replicate or do more of so we talked about that um today I'll go the other way and say what is a low light what is something that you've seen in the association and you thought that was really crappy and I never want to see that happen again uh you know and so let's uh never want to see that again here's how I would fix it. Could you rephrase that one more time? Yeah sure so what's something you've seen from the association where you thought that should never have happened here's how I would have handled it. All right Matthew you can go first as soon as you find that mute button. It's not a matter of finding it it's a matter of it uh after I click it it's doing what it's supposed to do. Okay um I I think that one of the one of the sort of low sad difficult um all around was um Morton's uh Morton's uh uh decision to leave the board and all kinds of uh of reasons around it but I feel like there's a ton of uh of spin um and and that uh it was just tough all the stuff for for for the association it was tough for um it was tough for for for Morton in terms of making that decision it was tough for me and I feel like there could have been some ways that that um uh perhaps that could have that could have uh that could have ended in a in a less less um difficult way to have any specific any specific um strategies around it except to say that it's communicated um I feel like I feel like we're in a sort of flood like um okay Matthew just uh for future answers too I think you may want to turn your video off unfortunately that face all right any other takers on that question David was like that bad that I've heard a lot of complaints about from people is the way that sometimes the international events are run and I think that can be improved on a lot of times um especially with the the marketing focused how sometimes the uh like the Drupal cons outside the US are not always communicated and marketed in a way that's um the same way that someone who's in that country would do it um and I found it confusing for example that um like the Drupal con and Bogota which was a completely local event to the Spanish community in South America was an event you know run entirely by the DA at a portland with a website entirely in English with events and sessions run entirely in English and then people surprised why you know the attendance was much lower than it possibly could have um so I would I would like to see maybe the DA um put a better focus on um having a lot of those events um not entirely run by the local communities but maybe a far greater amount of input by them great Shamala and then Ken um I think one thing um DA is doing uh in terms of recognizing talent um maybe we do that at Drupal cons and other um events but recognizing local talent is very key and we need to have a constant strategy to make sure that um we don't just recognize talent that is overall but more local because we need to constantly strengthen um more regional and local participation so have come up with a strategy where we're able to recognize and bring showcases of community activities and participation which is local in age great thanks Shamala uh we're gonna go to Ken any other and then John and I see you Justin okay um I'm gonna say that I think the release of Drupal 8 could have had a lot more fanfare could have been done a could have been done a bit bigger um I don't think we give ourselves enough credit uh for example the the Olympics is coming up their primary website is done in Drupal nobody knows that and it's a pretty hot website but if we don't find ourselves putting more energy I mean we say we love Drupal we say we're excited about it I just don't see it I don't feel it I hear it but I don't feel it so I just don't I think we need to find where that energy is and and I would have liked to have seen Drupal 8 come out with a lot more bang a lot more boom and a lot more uh press uh more so than it did okay great John and then Justin probably gonna dive right down to the weeds because um that's the thing that I can think of I generally love all the Drupal cons I go to and you know lots of people I talk to are passionate about Drupal so maybe not in touch with some of those other problems but you know I think um we talked a little while ago about how to make um kind of Drupal contributions a little bit more accessible to people and one of the uh one of the actors I think that was talked about about altering um Drupal.org a while ago was um you know making a little bit more like GitHub or a little bit more like another development platform where uh there's the ability for people to contribute either you know through through an inbuilt editor or you know or the GitHub way which is you know some additions like call requests and things like that and I know that um those the last time I spoke to the the association there I thought there had been a decision made um to actually integrate the ability to to point to GitHub um you know and to kind of integrate that functionality that way which seems to make a lot more sense than trying to replicate it all in Drupal code which would be huge and hard um and maybe the wrong the wrong technology basis but then that didn't get done and I don't I don't know the details of that and you know I think it's a little bit unfair Holly because maybe you don't get the chance to respond to all these but what I think I don't think it points to is um this idea of getting consensus about an idea and then going for it um you know and I I've talked about that in terms of Drupal's direction I think that that may be um something we can work on as well in terms of hard technology and and community decisions um is being dare being more daring um but and maybe that comes through you know some more consensus initiatives awesome thanks John okay Justin I will say that um I think Drupal Association could work a little bit harder to have youth in leadership especially working towards appealing towards a useful more useful demographic um but other than that I have to kind of rally against this question a little and also rally against some of the the kind of ethos of the community in that we as users of Drupal and we as people who have made our entire livelihoods also Drupal um we kind of want to put blame on on another organization for a lack of excitement or sometimes events being poorly planned I've talked about this before but Drupal is very much a duocracy when somebody wants to see something happen they do it and when everybody else has nothing but criticism instead of hard work to put behind that idea you'll see that one person kind of rise to the top in leadership over that so I believe that when Drupal uh when the Drupal Association allows itself to take blame for um the community having a lack of excitement then that's a mistake that each member of the Drupal community needs to kind of pick up our own work and make sure that every single one of us is doing everything we can to publicize to evangelize and to carry forward um the cause of Drupal uh that's that's the most interesting thing to me instead of blaming someone else making sure that we're all doing everything we can to push it forward I appreciate that but I will also acknowledge that sometimes we screw up so that happens anyone else want to take a stab at this one Danny and then Helmar all right I'm sorry I really have to call BS on duocracy I just do um because when you say this is a duocracy if you see something do it I watched a person try to just do a change to documentation and she couldn't figure out how I tried to make a change at the last contrib sprint in LA to a page called community so I could write and do what I do really well I couldn't figure out how and then I was told not to so when we say the Drupal is a duocracy and we say that if you see something fix it if you don't give people avenues to actually do the work to fix it or you somehow stand in their way well then you're immediately creating something that's no longer a duocracy so sorry so box I'm going to be on it for a minute I just got to go there you you mentioned that you do climb on top of one of those everyone I enjoy them really cathartic and entertaining Helmar what about you and then I feel you too Tom well thank you Danny you actually said what I was going to say I think part of it is that we we still have a big problem with having people to to start contributing it's a it's a huge learning curve and I have tried twice is starting to contribute in for core and I failed which I don't feel it's it's a good thing because I think that I can really contribute for those projects and and it was really hard for me not to not to be able to do that and I also think that the DA needs to be one of the the well no sorry that's not part of DA actually so yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna skip that one all right thank you thanks so much Tom thanks Holly one thing that I saw would have been in Chicago the Drupal con in Chicago that was the first one I ever went to and it was super exciting you know D7 was on the verge of coming out or coming out and it was all new to me but I was looking around and the people who were there was a very young crowd people running around their camos and their hard drives and their khaki pockets and it was really cool I mean I was the old guy walking around but then as each progressive year suits started showing up and people who were checking things out to see if it was a worthy worthwhile investment and the number of kids started disappearing and then we started getting older and we were saying everything's wonderful and then the kids disappeared and I thought okay I've been going all these cons where did they go and I can't answer that one but maybe that's something that I can say when we said in a bubble we say everything's going great we lost some of those people and I don't know why to look into that and try to bring them back in because there were some great kids and I don't know where they went that's all thanks yeah thanks Tom okay I want to hear from Ahmed and then Justin we're gonna have our first ever rebuttal on one of these calls okay the point I'm going to say it's about the contribution I have just it's a case happened with me you know as a community manager maybe I'm just a kind of a reference to some guys need to be a contributor with with Drupal modules or something or maybe the Drupal core but the the main feedback it's you know some some people need to be more similar to be able to contribute with the modules or of the four modules for Drupal maybe some maybe I can see see it it's okay and it's easy but we need to consider other guys especially the newcomers when they say it's a little bit hard to contribute it's a very bit complex process some kind of points like that's okay thank you all right Justin go for it let's see what happens sure so Danny I can't I can't express to you how impressed I am and appreciative I am of your passion and candid response to my answer and Drupal experience is a is a kind of paint by numbers you get a different experience everywhere you go and I will say that the first and really best experience I have in development is actually contributing to Drupal 8 core because I happen to have a community around me and I understand how difficult that might be for somebody that doesn't have a world class or an experienced Drupal 8 developer right next to them helping them through the steps so you know that's been my experience is having somebody always in the community ready and willing to help and jump in and I'm sad to hear that somebody in the Drupal community might not have had that experience so I apologize if I overstepped my boundaries but at the same time I've been welcome to a huge amount of resources always available always willing to reach out to me and help me whether it was in IRC chat channels whether it's the incredibly detailed resources that are available on Drupal.org to be able to contribute whether it was YouTube videos that I watched on how to even download IRC and to contribute I have been easily I've had easily accessible resources in Drupal and so that that's been my experience so I hope that that you forgive me for maybe speaking out of line Danny. Let's go back to Matthew. Yeah thanks Danny let's go back to Matthew. So I mean I think there we go that's better that's better so I think one of the things that we tend to forget is that contributions come in all shapes and sizes contributions aren't always code they aren't always they aren't always documentation contributions can come in the form of an organization acting as a fiscal sponsor for a camp contributions can happen as a designer trying to help out do a better design for a campsite or for the overall Drupal site itself. Contributions can happen as people who put on camps who set up circumstances where folks are able to do code days with kids all kinds of different things so I do think that that that while the idea of deocracy is a little a little bullshitty like Danny said that only only is the case I think if you if you're if you're looking to perhaps contribute in a new way that you're not accustomed to and I really wish that there was better ways for us to help insert people into those kinds of contributions but I will say that there's still tons of opportunities and and we should we should embrace our strengths as much as possible and and improve on our sort of weaker areas as we're able. Thanks and then I'm soon it I think you've had your hand raised for a bit. I think you know for the community grows as people are more engaged and literally contributing to code in other ways is a way to grow the community and just one of those things you know as you grow beyond a certain point a so-called tipping point you start you know having to create a little bit of a bureaucracy putting rules around things you know best practices things to do things not to do how to do things when you do them and so forth. The challenge always for any any professional organization is where do you draw the balance between you know having people contributing willy-nilly succeeding not succeeding or you know versus making sure that everything that is so far does not break and it's it's a balance there is no good answer you you got to try a few things you know throw things on the wall and see what sticks as you work that's that was just more of a comment rather than anything else that's all I'd say. Thanks unit okay did I miss anyone anyone else want to weigh in here? I forgot what the original question was all right um that happens to me. Yeah Mali actually the original question was what did the DA do bad? Oh yeah okay that one thanks we were like the world remembering the question they were asking. Yeah well I'm going to blame the jet lag um yesterday I tweeted at myself and this morning I went to Starbucks and got a cup of tea got to the office and made myself a tea so coming back from India is hard work. Good well let's even get one more one more question in before we finish up for the day so what I would love to hear from you is you know what do you think is the most critical issue facing Drupal today and what do you think the association should be doing to address that what's the most critical issue for Drupal the project whether that's the software or the community or any aspect of the project what should the association be doing to help address it so we'll go Matthew, Hilmar, Ken and John. Attrition attrition attrition we're losing people um and in fact we've got this has been going on in a back channel a little bit here in the in the webinar chat and I think we all agree that that we need more young people coming into the project and engaged being more engaged in the project I think that what we've seen is our our overall age has gotten older over the years over the last decade as I've been involved in the project I've seen seen a lot of us grow up and have families and we lose people because of burnout and we're just not replacing those people in the same kind of way I think that we need to find ways to to attract attract attract younger people who might might be interested in more cool technologies or perceive cool technologies Drupal ate I think will help some with that but a big part of what we need to be doing is is going to schools and and engaging engaging young people doing stuff like Matthew Tift has done in his in his his community where coding is directly part of the curriculum in his school district now so I'll I'll leave it at that and let somebody else talk. Thanks Hilmar. Yeah thank you. One of the things that I've been working having some troubles with is that we we need to find a better way to get the modules that are running working with bug fixes and and not waiting for a huge release on every module instead of just rolling out bug fixes for it so very often you will have to go into the discussion threats to find a patch or something that will fix the problems that you have with the module and or that you will have the patch in in the death phase and not rolled out to the production until sometimes two years later and I think we need to find a way to to get people in the mindset that we need to roll out bug fixes for the modules as much as we need to roll out modules and that really bothers me a lot because there are a lot of modules that I use that I have problems with just because of that and I have to have fixes all over the place and I'm scared to upgrade them when real upgrade cups. Thanks Hilmar. Okay I've got Ken, John, Tom, anyone else? I see you David, I see you Shyamala so let's go Ken. I was asking you on chat Holly would you please repeat the question? Oh I did type it in there question is what's the biggest issue facing the project today how do you think the association should address it? Okay now as far as Drupal itself I think where Drupal is right now there are more than enough smart people to help continue to move Drupal forward. I really think and and this has been a recurring thing tonight I really believe and I'm convicted on the fact that we have to start planting seeds now even though Drupal 9 is nowhere near being released we have to have a younger audience prepared to receive Drupal 9 and carry that message on here's an example I'm gonna date myself people don't judge me all right so I like Facebook my daughters do not they use something completely different because they've since moved on from Facebook it did not keep up with their particular demographic so they came on to the scene and started using something completely and totally different whereas me still using it still does what it needs to do Drupal is a lot like that right now only because it has not reached out and started planting those seeds into the mines and into the hands of the developers and the designers and coders of tomorrow it's something that absolutely has to happen and if it doesn't again technology is moving we have to move with it so that is what the community should be focusing on the technology piece will take care of itself okay excellent thanks Ken John I've got you too Sharma and soon it I've got you also I think we have to be brave as a community you know Ken maybe you were talking about your daughter's using Snapchat I think you know what we talk about now is the millennial architect that has a has hundreds of tools they can use to build experiences and Drupal has a real has a real risk and threat that it can be left behind as an architecture if it doesn't stay relevant and if it doesn't move on I think you know we've seen big parts of the community even fall off and fork because they're afraid of what we will become and I think some of that has led to a stagnating I think you can see in Dries's blogs recently where he's reaching out and saying what about this and what about this and how about we go in these directions there's lots of interesting ways we could go we actually need to pick a direction because we can't be everything to everyone and and that's what I want to see okay and Tom sure what I see is being the most critical issue right now is a fear that I have that Drupal is going to become a platform of the privileged in other words your large corporations embrace it and those of us who were really cool on six really cool on seven all of a sudden say you know what maybe Jen Lampton was right and we we go over and do her thing don't want to do that you know I want d8 to be something that continues to grow a community but there is a fear that I have that it's it's going to be your megacorporations that embrace it and the little developers like me might have to move elsewhere and I really don't want to see that happen thanks Tom uh David, Shamala, Sunit, Danny, look at that all right um so I'll kind of agree and disagree with what everyone's saying um um yes we do have attrition we've always had attrition but it may not be as big of an issue as people think um I'm I probably spend the most time in court issue queues maybe that anyone here and I also participate a lot in the core mentoring program and I'll tell you that we do have a huge number of contributors but the biggest problem I think that's going on right now is um and what's not been addressed is we have also a huge skill gap I believe we have a lot of people contribute but we don't have enough people who are contributing at that top level who are able to put in a significant number of hours and actually have the skills necessary to solve a lot of the bigger problems especially as time goes on and core has become dribble itself has become more sophisticated and more complicated um so what I would like to see is maybe the DA participate a little more in supporting mentoring programs for contributors and participate participate more in supporting education and training so that we can take that really small group that exists at the top who are able to solve the really difficult problems and expand that group as much as problems so that those people are not the ones who are relied on to do all the heavy lifting which leads to all the burnout that we see in those people great thanks David Shama I think the key to the Drupal project is that we should as much as we're going to be focusing on attrition is that the project itself stays current in the way it provides solutions so as much as we strengthen what is our key competency in terms of content management system and integration capabilities I think the direction the direction that we continue to evolve and change and be current move to something that's like device agnostic solutions and user experience that are consistent with the need of the current audience is key to the project's success the need to evolve with what is contemporary and I also second David that we need to focus on the quality of contributions as we scale in terms of number of contributions we also need to focus to see how we can enhance quality contributions as well great all right Shama we're going to go to Sunit and then Danny who was next oh soon it's you you're ready hi so I think you know when you when you look at the history of open source projects and the very first open source project was Berkeley you know UNIX BSD more than 35 you know about 35 years ago very very few projects or products in general have longevity Drupal has had 15 years Drupal either needs to evolve in new directions which is what Shamla and others said or it is simply going to phase attrition I concur with Tom that Drupal I mean to my team from what I'm seeing seeing anecdotally and we've done over a hundred projects in Drupal is that Drupal is becoming you know a product for the elite as it were for the Fortune 500 were increasingly adopting it given its learning curve etc I'm seeing a lot of small companies smaller smaller organizations moving away from Drupal they're either going to word price or you know Joomla or whatever but mainly word price is what I'm seeing to to so continuing the evolution and I strongly believe right this is where Drupal embedded things like embedded Drupal Drupal as an application server these are all important directions for Drupal Drupal can already do this there's no rocket science per se to this but it's a question of positioning you know what what I mean if we keep thinking of Drupal as a web content management system well there's plenty of competition and the other systems have now had time and I'll specifically I'm going to talk about AEM Adobe experience manager at this point Adobe experience manager is a superior product in a number of important ways the only place where it is not superior is its price you know compared to Drupal why this has to do with you know the fact that its middle tier has is effectively like an application server that are connectors so all kinds of things inside the enterprise which Drupal simply does not have today and I don't see that happening and that is something I certainly would like to inform so if I could wow that was that was my point why Christian you gotta grow the pie thanks you need okay I've got Danny and then uh and then I'll stress so I I'm a user experience designer and one of the things I know as a user experience designer is there's something called a learning effect there is a buildup of knowledge that you gain from using a piece of software from for a period of time and one of the things that we have unfortunately done with every major release of Drupal is we have basically completely changed the game on the people who use it I told people when I started using Drupal in Drupal 6 you cry your way your your way through the first three sites and then you love it if you know if you're not a developer I should say um Drupal 6 to 7 completely changed the way you develop sites completely changed the way you theme them Drupal 8 is going to do it again part of the reason that people started to started dropping off after from Drupal 6 to 7 was because of the increased complex complexity on the back end developer side and now I'm seeing more that happened on Drupal 8 one of the things that we have to respect in our desire to innovate is our is the knowledge that people build up over using this stuff for a period of time especially given that we work on the web where deadlines are really tight a learning curve we don't have time for the amount of learning curve that Drupal throws at people from version to version so I feel like that's one of the things that's going to hold back the project over the long haul okay thanks Danny Ashraf second pair hopefully Ashraf if you can hear me I'm giving you your moment on this one there we go one moment sorry don't worry it's gonna come back in this has definitely been our most technically challenging thanks everyone for hanging in there all right sorry about that so I'm gonna build off of what Danny was saying a bit which is so from a different angle when in a lot of the interviews you'll hear Dries talking about whether he would pick PHP as the language to build Drupal in again and he always says yes because more people know PHP and it's easier to learn with things like Drupal 8 it seems like we are almost directly countering that by bringing symphony in we're increasing the complexity significantly and we're losing the ability to bring in people who are at a lower level of you know at an earlier stage in their careers as programmers and instead we're almost making symphony a prerequisite for developers at least people who know symphony are already working in symphony and being paid well and happy with it in my opinion that there's a lot of people who fit that description and for them to pick up Drupal they're just going to have to learn a lot more with benefit but with the risk of you know Drupal 9 who knows what it's going to do or how much it's going to change and how much more they're going to learn I don't think there's that much incentive for them to drop symphony or to pick up Drupal before for example the contrib space is very much developed at least so I think I think we almost have like two conflicting messages one of one of them is Drupal is more easily accessible because it's built in PHP so people earlier on can start with it and then we have the opposite message which is Drupal 8 now needs it's harder to understand that wordpress naturally but it's actually much harder because you need to already know symphony or you need to learn symphony and I think if we're taking an out approach we are restricting ourselves to enterprise companies who are willing to train their own staff and we're not making it that feasible for people to teach Drupal themselves in their own time okay thanks Ashraf okay I think I made it through everyone and I've been a terrible timekeeper and I apologize for that but I appreciate everyone being brief and getting through the questions with us did I oh I didn't know Justin's like no you forgot me sorry Justin I promise I'll keep this short um I think the issue hits close to home for me I sit actually in Asheville on several commissions working with the Asheville City Council to bring jobs and talent to Asheville as somebody that you know I'm 27 years old but I started the technology business when I was 24 and at the time had opportunity to go into Ruby had the opportunity to go into Python a lot of really interesting companies with other interesting technologies and Drupal was the most appealing because it had the best community for me and that was what was important I would say that the that vision is skewed though that most of the young people in this community or in the development community are interested in the biggest and coolest things that they can build it's less about the ease of use it's less about the somebody said money you're right it's most times it's not about the money it's about the lifestyle and the ability to build something that will last or build something that is cooler and newer than anything else so um I would completely agree uh with Ashraf that the kind of the learning curve there is two different problems we're talking about Drupal's ease of use and also Drupal can do really cool things well sometimes those don't meet on the same spectrum so really having a strategic look at where Drupal can go and what holes it can fill within the current other CMSs and languages that's the hard question we need to ask ourselves that and then move in a direction for the betterment of the language and I would be excited to do that qualitative and quantitative analysis awesome thanks Justin all right anyone else want to let me know I didn't get to them going once going twice okay you guys thanks so much for sticking sticking with us and answering these questions it's great to see such a diversity of opinion there it's really hard to sit on this end and not share my own opinion but um you know when one of you is elected we'll get all the chances in the world to do that um so thanks again for your your time here tonight just as a reminder I'm going to go ahead and post the recording in this session up on the website probably tomorrow morning because tonight is knit night you guys go to knit night probably get that up tomorrow morning and then we're going to go we're going to have a whole week of just q&a on your candidate pages so I encourage you guys to go ahead and share your profile pages out you know using social media and on Drupal.org everywhere else get people to get engaged and ask you questions there and for our audience to make sure that you guys are going and asking questions there as well and then um last reminder is that voting starts on March 7th so get ready for that and make sure you encourage everyone in the Drupal community to vote and David I did not get my scarf back yet so fingers crossed I'm about ready to like take out the airport see when the plane comes back in to search myself um all right well thank you guys so much and I really appreciate the great conversation and I will talk to you all soon thanks all right thank you bye guys bye bye thanks everyone