 It is 9.40 and I'm excited to introduce to you Mauricio, a former current Drupal developer and a very active member in the Drupal community. You guys are here to learn a little bit more about his first year in WordPress and the transformation he's made, the conversion that he's made to learning WordPress and he really values the open source community. He's presented it over 25 countries. He's from Nicaragua and done dozens of full-day workshops. So he's a very experienced speaker. I'm excited to introduce him. Please help me welcome Mauricio. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for being here and for welcoming me here. This is my first workham and the first time that I am speaking of course and I'm really excited about that. So I've been doing Drupal for the last seven years and mostly motivated to build community in my country. I also got involved in WordPress and from then I have learned some lessons that I want to share with you today. Mauricio Inarte, my name. I am Dinarcon in Twitter and pretty much anywhere. If you want to get a hold of me, you can send me an email. I am from Nicaragua, beautiful country. We have beaches like you have here and we also have a lot of volcanoes. Some of them are active. So if you want to go for extreme vacation, it's like a two and a half flight direct, you know, direct flight there. So you're very welcome. And if you want to have a sneak peek, you can go to that website and you can actually see like a documentary when they almost touch the lava. I work with a company called Agaric. It is based in Boston, but I work remotely in Nicaragua and we are actually distributed like in Europe and America. And I am very, very passionate about teaching. I have been doing Drupal sessions and workshops for a couple of years already. And very soon I will be launching a project to teach Drupal, mostly motivated by the fact that sometimes it is difficult to have localized content. So I will produce content in Spanish, English and French. And I am already studying in German. So hopefully German coming soon I guess. So if you want to learn Drupal, check that out in a couple of weeks. So I would like to know a little bit about you. So if you can raise your hands, I will assume that being at work, and most of you have a lot of exposure to workers already. So I'm going to focus the questions on the Drupal site. So who here has used Drupal at all? Maybe for exploring, for building a site on their computer, but never publishing it. So about, yeah, a good amount of people. Who has launched a project in Drupal? About the same. Who considers themselves like Drupal, you know, dive deep into it, like site builders, civil developers? Anyone? No one, that's okay. Who goes to Drupal meetups? Anyone has gone to a Drupal meetup? Okay, no, one. And who has ever go to a Drupal camp or work camp? Okay, a couple of people. So I want to share a couple of things. First, like personally, I'm going to talk a little bit about the skill building, but to be honest, this is not the most important part. Like we can take, you know, read a documentation, we can pick a book, we can do a lot of things to learn how to use one platform or the other. What I'm interested in is in the community part. So I'm going to go through this one very quickly. So, you know, one on one, read the official documentation. Many, many times, people struggle and especially at the beginning because they don't know the terminology, for example. And that usually is like one hour, two hour reads from the official documentation and you're all set. Once you know the basics, I highly recommend going to meetups. When I started in Drupal a couple of years ago, I remember that it took me about six months to learn what now in the trainings that I present, I can teach in about six hours. And when I was starting, like I started on my own and it was like until later that I got involved in the community and it was pretty evident that I needed to do that more often because like, instead of spending three, four, five days banging my head against a problem, I would simply ask someone with more experience than me and in five minutes I would have the answer that I needed. So those connections not only, you know, give answers to these questions, but they also like can be your next business partners or employees or employers. You know, there are a lot of things that come about meetups and workshops. Also, where do you find them? So I assume that most of you know on the WordPress side, I'm going to guide you a little bit in the Drupal side. If you want to get involved with Drupal, there is a page called group.drupal.org that has groups of interest. For example, if you live in Florida, there is a Drupal user group for Florida. If you speak Spanish or French, there are user groups for those languages. If you want to learn about SEO or any other specific topic, there are groups for those specific topics. So in WordPress, I have seen that for the most part, you use Meetup. In the case of Drupal, we have these website groups.drupal.org and that's where you can find people that share your interest. Also, I highly recommend watching videos. I know this is being recorded on live stream. So in WordPress, you have WordPress TV. In Drupal, we don't have a centralized place to do it, but we use YouTube. So I would recommend that you go to Drupal Association YouTube channel and that has lots of recordings of really high quality material, but also if you just type anything you want to learn about Drupal in YouTube, there are plenty of content available. Also, and this is one of the things that I found confusing at the beginning, because in Drupal, we have a centralized code repository that is Drupal.org. If you want to download a module, a theme, or anything related to Drupal, this is the place to go and there are many reasons around that, but one of the most important one is this is the only place where Drupal has a security team from all over the world and this is the only place that they offer support. So if you want security support for Drupal, you need to go to Drupal.org and that's the only place that we have that coverage. When I got into WordPress, it was a little bit confused like where do I download from? Because yes, there is WordPress.org and you have some plugins and things there, but there are so many third-party developers that they have their own sites and they produce their own code that I just find it hard. Sometimes, which is the best way to do it or where should I go or where should I not go? Because there are people that do bad in the world and they can inject bad coding in the theme or the plugin that you might download. So not being sure that the code that I have is secure, it makes me anxious a little bit. Now talking about community, a little bit about camp organization. So last year, again, I got involved in WordPress because I wanted to do community. Last year, I was a volunteer in work in Manawa, which is in my country and this year I am also volunteering. So I have learned a couple of things which are also kind of different from what we do in Drupal. So the first thing that I was surprised is that work camps need approval. So in Drupal, you have three people and they want to make an event called Drupal Camp, they just do it. In the case of work camp, there is work camp central, you go through an application process, you get an approval and they offer support. And I am not saying that that is bad, I'm just saying that it is different. And just this fact that you need approval and you get some mentorship, it's a big difference between both communities. Financial support. So in work camp central, once the camp is approved, they will give you some money to fund the event. It is not that they will give you all the money, but you have some money out of the organization. In the case of Drupal, we have the Drupal Organization, but they do not offer financial support. You can apply for grants if you want to organize an event, but it is not guaranteed that every Drupal camp is going to have financial support. It's an application process. So depending on many factors, it can be easy or it can be very hard to get funding. What about the kids? So when organizing work in Manawa in my country this year, I was surprised that they came about this kids camp. I have never heard of kids camp and I know that there is one happening here right now, so I wanna go check that out. In Drupal, we have had kids speaking on events and I know in this event, there is also a kid speaking, but there in the all the events that I have gone, in Drupal, there is no specific session for kids. And I find that fascinating. I like teaching and I like teaching the young, so I really want to check that out. Camp mentors. So in Drupal, organizers share with themselves, but there is no direct mentorship from the association. They offer some resources, but for the most part, it is camp organizers from different cities helping each other. In the case of WorkCamp, I know that WorkCamp Central assigns a couple of mentors that will help you through many of the things related to the event organization. And one of the, probably for a speaker, more difficult things, it's timing. How long are the sessions? So in Drupal, for the most part, sessions are one hour long and I have presented events that are maybe 45 or 40 minutes and it just gets me so confused because I have my sessions already timed and when the time is reduced, it's like, what do I take out? In the case of WorkCamp, most sessions are 10 to 30 minutes long, which is like a different challenge for me. I guess you are used to that. But that, in my opinion, is good because that gives more opportunity to more people to speak and to share more ideas and different points of views. So I like that and in fact, we are doing the same in Work in Manawa this year. So let's talk about the specific things. I come from Nicaragua and I want to talk a little bit about the community in my country. So how the WordPress and the Drupal community are interacting together now. So at the beginning, there was a bit of confusion. Like, why are we talking about WordPress in a Drupal Meetup? Or why are we seeing Drupal announcement in the WordPress Slack channel? So at the beginning, people were confused. And if you want, there was a bit of resistance, but that was very easy to come over. What started to happen then is that speakers started to go to both events and present at both events. So someone from the WordPress community will come to the Drupal community. Someone from the Drupal community will go to the WordPress community. And we share many things that sometimes are not obvious. But like, if you want to talk about UX, if you want to talk about SEO, yeah, of course, there are some things specific to Drupal or to WordPress, but for the most part, it is general content. It is general knowledge that everyone can learn from and benefit from. Scheduling. So one thing that happened when we started to collaborate is that we created a spreadsheet that we put all the events. And the goal is that we don't conflict with each other. And sometimes we would move from the dates of one or four events, so the other community can have theirs. And in that way, no people can attend both if they want. And these have led to more events, like many, many more. So this one happened in January. And the one thing that I like is that now that WordPress and Drupal are collaborating, other communities are following. And in this event, for example, there were like seven communities, open source communities working together to make this happen. So I really like the dynamics of how things are going. And next week, we are having another event like this one where again, not only Drupal as a WordPress, but many other communities are going in efforts to produce these events. And what are the results? What have we seen? The number of volunteers have increased. The Drupal community in Caragua is relatively small compared to WordPress. And I've been going to a lot of WordPress meetups and I have put like 15 volunteers to help with WordPress and vice versa. Now volunteers work in both communities. We also, as I said before, help with the event organization. Like I'm being a Drupal community, I help with work and organization and there are a lot of members in the WordPress community who help with Drupal camp organization. And not only like the work camps and Drupal camps, we're like regular meetups or workshops that we do together. This also gives exposure to the attendees of the events. Sometimes you go to an event and you not hear only about Drupal or only about WordPress, you hear about both. And then people have a choice. They have, okay, WordPress is a good fit for this project. Drupal is a good fit for that project or maybe Django or Rails or something else. It's a good fit for yet this other project. So I think this benefits a lot to the people who come to the events more than the people who are organizing them. Also, we're getting university support. It is not that it won't happen before but because we are now bigger, it is easier to have access to rooms or labs for different type of events. And in fact, now universities are reaching out to us directly. Before we were the ones requesting the spaces, now they are the ones requesting that we can come up to the university to do something. And as I said before, there are more communities involved in producing events for example, in the one that, the event that we had in January, there were sessions about posters which is a community that is just starting. There are intentsions to start a JavaScript community and many more. So just by two communities working together and trying to coordinate, a lot of other communities are like, hey, I wanna write that same boat. I wanna do the same. I wanna join forces and let's do it together. So, the benefit is not for the organizers, the benefit is for the people who attend and we see these spaces as opportunities to develop the country. We are teaching students, we are teaching a lot of people how to use technology to improve their lifestyle and to help in the development of the country in many ways, in individual ways. So, I know that you are very involved in the workers community, so I want you to invite you to the Drupal community. There are different ways, as I said before, in groups that Drupal.org slash Florida, that's where you have your state community. If you use Slack, you can go to Drupal.org slash Slack to get an invitation and then you use the general channel or in particular the Florida channel. If you like to use IRC, we are on free note and you can use either pound Drupal or pound Drupal dash Florida. We are a big community, probably not as big as workers, but very welcoming as well. And I did my part already. So, I came from Nicaragua, I am from the Drupal community, I want to share what I have learned and now I would like to request you to go to a Drupal event and talk about WordPress because, again, there are a lot of things that we can learn from each other and this will only benefit both projects. So, it's now your turn and I would really appreciate your feedback. So, anybody have any questions for Mauricio? Mauricio, I think it's outstanding that you've come out here to the word camp to explain to us about Drupal. What Mauricio is doing, you guys may be thinking to yourselves why Drupal at WordPress, but it's more than just about code and it's more than just about software but it's about the community, it's about the learning and even reaching out beyond a country, beyond a system to come talk to us and share with us how we can look forward. Let's give him a big round of applause. Thank you. Mauricio, do you have anything? Well, if there are questions, I'm happy to share about the Drupal community in general. I will also be in the speaker launch or the happiness bar, which is new to me. I need to find it and I have cards which I am supposed to hand out. So, if someone wants cards, come to me please. Very much. Thank you. Thank you very much.