 Hi, everyone. Welcome. We're here for the Drupal Association's Global Training Days webinar. I'm Lauren Shea with the Drupal Association. I'm our community outreach coordinator and I work on Global Training Days as one of my projects. And I have with us today Kenny from Anexus IT and Amy from Blink Reaction. And we're going to talk to you a little bit about Global Training Days and what that looks like, how you can incorporate that into something that you are doing as a trainer and how to get back to the community. Just a little bit of housekeeping. If you're listening from your computer, please select the mic and speaker audio option. You're going to be remained muted on the call. And if you have any questions, please put them into the Q&A window or not using the chat option on this webinar. And also look for our post-webinar survey that we'll send out after the webinar as well as a recorded video as this is going on. A little bit about the Drupal Association. Our mission is to foster and support the Drupal community so they can collaborate together as they innovate the project. There's so much and so many ways to get back to the community just as Global Training Days is. We host our Drupal.org and are building a tech team to improve the site and just hire Josh, our CTO. And we're also hiring for more positions. We provide grants for the community members to fund ways that grow the community and further the project. Like starting new camps in areas such as China or running multi-city road shows evangelizing Drupal. And we host Drupalcons which bring together thousands of people to work on the project and bond as a community. We even provide scholarships and help amazing community members from around the globe to attend the event. All of this is funded through our memberships, our Drupalcons and our partners. We also have some upcoming events, Drupalcon Austin. Again, this is our big event where a lot of different businesses and trainers as well as Drupal users and colleagues come together and meet and discuss some trainings as well as other sessions. It's really an exciting opportunity to see all things Drupal. We have our next Global Training Days which we'll be talking about that's coming up in May. And our next webinar is with Achieve Internet and they're talking about how Drupal integration can grow your business. A little bit about the Drupal Association membership. Like I said earlier, we're here to support the Drupal community and support Drupal.org infrastructure. We have some membership fees that help fund these programs and also provide you and your company with a way to grow and support Drupal. There's information here on individual memberships or organization memberships. And if you have more questions about that, you can see the link at the bottom of the page. And we also recognize our members in our Drupal Association annual report. Okay. So what is Global Training Days? Our Global Training Days is an initiative that we started to introduce new and beginning Drupal users to the code. The Drupal Association is partnering with training companies to make this happen. So once a quarter, we send out a call to action to our trainers around the globe to participate. We have two of our training companies and trainers that are doing this currently. And basically it's just an introduction for new people to get into Drupal and see how everything works. We have two different types of curriculum, introduction to Drupal, which is a full day of training on the basics of Drupal. The curriculum is built so that a newbie can build a Drupal site by the end. And it's ideal for people who are really exploring Drupal as a career option. Our second training, which a trainer can provide, what is Drupal is a half-day workshop. And this addresses just the basics of Drupal and gives an overview of those interested in evaluating and implementing Drupal. Each training company makes their own event and provides more detail on their website. And we'll talk about that a little bit later as far as where to sign up. Where is Global Training Days? So this February, we hosted and we had 20 countries represented from 34 different training companies with over 200 participants. So it's huge. One of our biggest events, we had countries in almost every continent. And it was a really, really successful show of how the global effort and global initiative being Drupal is really being adopted worldwide. And one of the best parts about this is that people are so excited about Drupal and building our core group of developers that it's a great way to give back and learn about Drupal worldwide. So now I'm going to introduce you to Kenny. He's a CEO at an XSIT and he'll talk to you about his Drupal Global Training Days and himself. Kenny, whenever you're ready. Perfect. Thank you, Stephanie. My name is Kenny. As you can see, I'm the CEO of an XSIT. We started working with Drupal. Well, I actually started working with Drupal back in 2007 as a front-end developer. And my role right now in the company is mostly on the administrative side. So management, client management, and recruitment training and all those sort of things. Our training involves basically Drupal basics, CMS comparisons, terminology, and some hands-on training as well. So if you can go to the next slide. Perfect. Thank you. A little bit about our company. XSIT is a Drupal consulting firm. We are based in San Jose, Costa Rica. Our company is five years old and we have around 25 people in our company. Around 20 of them are Drupal developers. Our clients are mainly large Drupal agencies within the U.S. and in Europe. And XSIT is our way of providing documentation code snippets and video training for Drupal. As you can see down below, XSIT is low. And then we have a typical, which translates into a typical dish. That's a dish that we have. It's actually hosted in Drupal.org and also in Pantheon. So you can download it and it has a bunch of models already installed as well as translation and those kind of things. Okay. Okay. Thank you. And now I want to talk about marketing and marketing a GTD event. Costa Rica has a very strong Drupal community and Facebook plays a very important role in bringing the community together. We advertise events both in Costa Rica group, Drupal.org as well as on Facebook. From this point on, different groups like Open Source, Initiative, PHP, Java and other seco events, time and money investment. We roughly invest around $100 basically for snacks and drinks. In time wise, we invest a small number of hours posting ads, getting things organized, answering questions from participants. And during the event, we have basically two resources. One person presenting the topics and the other be helping out during the breaks. Help Day versus full day training. We often work on their both concepts. The structure and topics for each actually vary widely. For help of the events, we have mainly two goals. The first one is to help others see how Drupal can be a good career path. We do this mostly for students and developers. And for the teaching makers, we try to teach them the basics so they can determine whether Drupal is a good fit for their projects. The thing is that we have found that a lot of people come to the training because they want to use Drupal, but they don't know whether to use the right tool for their projects. And number two is theory. We focus on Drupal history, Drupal basics, and terminology. Things like notes, CCKs, views, taxonomy, Drupal core, what else? Daming as well. And for full day trainings, one of the most significant differences, I would say, is that we focus on a computer. We work on a computer lab so people can spend half a day installing Drupal and its modules, learning about folder structure, then creating like CCKs, views, blocks, and such. And we usually have more people helping out during full day trainings in case someone gets stuck during installation or something. So we can move on while the other guy gives a hand. And I want to give a quick testimonial here. Back in 2011, I just held a training session in a coastal town, college, close to the beach. And we went back to the campus two years later to try and find prospect interns. And to our surprise, a few of the people we trained were actively building websites in Drupal for small business in the region. So we even ended up hiring two of them and they are actually part of our company. So for example, with them, we got to avoid the learning curve and they jumped right into a client's project. And just to wrap up, I would like to talk about giving back to the community. As a developer that started working with Drupal at an early stage, I was able to witness the whole software state for the community spread behind Drupal. And as a company, Anexus continues to make efforts towards keeping it that way. We feel that giving back to the community is our duty and it has proven to benefit our company in others in many ways. So that's it from Anexus. Thank you, Kenny. That's a really great story. I didn't know about your interns that you trained. That's exactly what Global Training Days is about, building our core group of new developers so that training companies obviously can have new talent but also to spread the information about the project. So thank you for sharing that. So we have some upcoming dates. Thank you again. We have some upcoming dates. We have Friday, May 30th, Friday, August 29th and Friday, November 14th. We also heard from several community members that Fridays were difficult to arrange for full day training. So now you can utilize the Saturday after. So for instance, Friday, May 30th or Friday, May 31st, if that's better for your community to utilize a Saturday, totally fine. And now we're going to hear from Aimee. She works with Blink Reaction and she's also been really active in Global Training Days and spreading the word about that in North America. So Aimee, whenever you're ready. Hi. My name is Aimee Cham and I'm the program manager for the Blink Institute of Blink Reaction. I have been around Drupal since late 2007. I've had kind of some mixed involvement. I've been on both the site building side and also on the business side of things, mostly marketing. I am now focused on training. In general, my focus is on end users and new site builders. The Blink Institute as a whole goes beyond that. We do a lot of customized private trainings. We get into not only site builder, but also the theming and the development side of things. So, you know, some sympathy training and things like that. I can be found pretty much everywhere online as Aimee Cham, Drupal.org, Twitter, Skype, wherever you're looking. I'm probably Aimee Cham. Blink Reaction is a full-service Drupal-centric agency along with the training division, which is the Blink Institute. We do a full delivery of Drupal-related services from the strategic consulting through implementation and support. You can see some of our client lists here. We tend to emphasize long-term relationships with our clients. And along with the consulting and delivery, adoption and training services are a big part of what we offer our clients. For our global trading days, we go with a half-day program, but we do it twice. So, we'll offer, we usually use the Hello Drupal curriculum, and we offer that at, say, 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. We do this in New York. We have a trading facility in Soho that we use, and sometimes we offer it remotely as well over the meeting. We use the curriculum, but the emphasis is very heavily on discussion. We try to make sure that people are getting the understanding that they need an engaging person to person. We think that's really important for, you know, we want to get more people using Drupal. We want to make it less mysterious, make it friendly. And, you know, definitely when we have new Drupal services, we want them to feel like this is something they want to continue being involved in. As far as promoting our global trading days, I think we use probably the usual channels. We use our own site. We post to the Aquia training site. We are one of Aquia's training partners. And we use, you know, the social media sites, you know, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. But we found that most of our sign-ups tend to come in through the Drupal.org listing for global trading days. So we definitely, excuse me, you know, we definitely try to, you know, point people in that direction so they can get a real sense of what global trading day is about. As far as the cost, I think we run about $500 per instance. That's mostly in our venue fees. And as far as what comes out of it, it does lead to some paid trainings. I know I'm working with a private client right now who was in not the most recent global trading day, but the one back in November. And we definitely get a lot of new Drupal is continuing on. You know, we just had a nice camp over this past weekend and I saw a couple people that I had met before in global trading days and they continued to engage with Drupal and the New York City community. So that was really great to see. And obviously, it's great brand awareness for the organization. That's pretty much what I have. Great. Thanks, Amy. It's nice that you got to see some of your former students at Nice Camp. That's really great. Yeah, it's nice to see people continue on with the technology and engaging with the community. Great. So moving on, the big question, how do you sign up? We have a form on associationdrupal.org listed here. Also, you can type in webinars or global training days and you can see where that's located and ask some basic questions about your company, you know, what the site you want it to link to so that people can register on your site and just some information that we can use to have some metrics to measure our global training days and our successes. So it looks like there's no questions listed here. I just want to talk really quickly about some of our curriculum that Amy had mentioned earlier. We have some curriculum available. Though we are forming a committee of trainers in spring 2014 to combine some efforts and make a comprehensive and easy to use curriculum. The curriculum that's available is really in depth and it's very well made. It just could be a little overwhelming for something like a half day or a full day of training. So if there's anyone in the community that's interested in participating in that in particular, you can email me later about that. And again, a reminder of our upcoming events. We have DrupalCon Austin coming up. Like I said, Drupal Global Training Days in May. You're more than welcome to sign up for the future dates in August and November at the same time so you're already set. And that way we can host you live on our site to make sure that people are seeing your website and going there to register for Global Training Days. And a reminder, our next webinar is Achieve Internet and they're talking about how Drupal Integration can help grow your business. And then just some more information about becoming a member. Check out our membership page for an organization or for an individual membership. I know those badges are really great to have on your sites and it also helps fund more scholarship grants and servers for the community. Thank you everyone for participating. Thank you Kenny and Amy for being our presenters. You guys have been doing this longer than most people and your expertise is really valued and we appreciate you being on the webinar today. And we hope to see you at DrupalCon Austin but also participating in Global Training Days in May. So thank you very much. Thank you guys for the opportunity. Thank you. Thank you.