 Gynnydd eichincir o'i cais wytru eich cyflogad i gyfrannu i gyda'r dwybarth o'r ystodol. Rhywb fy modd hyn i gyd. While there was a thing about a man, someone said, there's no women role models. I just spent 5 minutes on the internet looking, and just rolling off, woman after woman after woman, and they were doing amazing things in computer science and it was ridiculous. Everybody in this room probably has a mobile phone. I can almost guarantee everybody in this room is running a mobile phone with a processor in it that this will be invented. It loads these people around and to actually sit on, God's sake, to sit and design something completely new. To do that in only 18 months, this is everything about a processor and to deliver it on time and for it to work first time. I probably shouldn't have been making that sound amazing. It sounds like I can't make things work first time. I think it's amazing. I'm really it. Comments about one little body based brother wasn't a single female speaker and the general comment was that another lady would make a little body. So we were starting to discuss whether we could actually start every session with a slide of one woman as a little follow and take. I originally said three, but I'm sorry. Don't worry. I've only got one because I forgot all about it and I didn't do it quickly. I think different ones. That's the whole point. Anyway, I better start. Thank you for coming. I freelance work developer doing Drupal these days, but I've never worked for an agency, actually. I came from a big pharmaceutical company before I started doing Drupal. In my history of them teaching and I've worked for a defence company doing crazy stuff down in London, which is kind of fun. I'm based at the Ministry of Defence headquarters, which is kind of hilarious and escorted everywhere. It's almost security claims came through and I get involved in and this is a picture. The backdrop is a picture from what we were doing the core mentor sprint in Dublin and I love it. I absolutely love it and I'll come back to more of that in a minute. So a little bit more about me. Just a little bit of sort of a little story about me. I can't run. I've really, well, I used to think that. I decided I was going to try running a year ago, well just over a year ago. So I went to the park run and if anybody said park run, it's like 5K run all over the country. Quite a few other countries as well now. And I think I stopped about four times on the way round just because I just couldn't do it. But I met some people there that I know through other things that I do. And these two lovely ladies invited me to come to their little non-competitive running club. And said yes. And they inspired me to really, really put the effort in. They encouraged me, they were honest with me about a few things I need to change. They kind of guided me, mented me for a better description. And I'm not here tomorrow because I'm doing the Cambridge Half Marathon. And I'm hoping to get a reasonable time too. Well for me anyway, it's my first one. So I'm doing it for cancer research. But I'll stick that up at the end. And yet, what would do us? Anyway, so it was with that story. I kind of mentioned a few things there around mentoring and basically turning me from someone who couldn't do something into someone who can do something. And that is a challenge for all agencies, agencies, sort of Drupal related companies. Well right. How do we get people who can bring along the rest of the staff, who can provide that leadership? So I've been sending out questionnaires and stuff to various companies and bits and pieces over the last couple of months. Trying to get some idea about how they go about actually getting their senior employees. Where are they getting these people from? And asking various questions. And the difficulty is they have filling those roles. I didn't say any more than seeing your roles. That was the only term I used. These are some of the examples, things that were coming back from then. I was amused by the term, the most massive shortage of decent talent. I was like, ouch, that hurts. But there is a shortage of Drupal people to basically hit the ground running. But not only be good, but help the rest of the people in that company be good. Because that's what you need. Everybody hates recruitment agencies, it's hilarious. So there was all those kind of quotes, but one of the things that really came up over and over again, that's okay, you can pay double, was the term leadership. And looking for leaders within their business. And it made me think about when I was a nap pharmaceuticals, which is the company I used to work for in pharma. What makes a leader? Because when you've got the size, when you've got like a thousand people or a couple of thousand employees, you can spend the effort and you've got the resources to spend time on growing your own leaders within your company. You've got that time to do that. If you've got 10 people in your work agency, or 20 people, or 30, that's harder. That's really hard. And then you've got to think about what makes a leader. Now, all the things I'm going to talk about today are pretty much taken from the things I learned at SNAP down in Cambridge. So, they have a leadership programme that they called it. To remind me of some of this stuff that I'm going to put up here, I had to call up somebody I used to work with chasing up and getting to send me some of the documents because I couldn't find them anymore. I'm not working there. They had different aspects of leadership. I'm going to come on some of these a bit later on how they apply within our industry. But, some things here about intellectual capacity, you might have various ideas of what that means already. So, we'd like to get down into these areas, and there's some more as well. So, there's all these different aspects. If you really want somebody to be a leader within your business, someone to actually take your new staff, your new people who are new to Drupal, who are new to development, who are new to all those things, and help them grow. How are you going to manage that so that they become your next leader in your company? Because that's cheaper than trying to get it externally. You can grow them yourselves and you can make the most of that. Getting them externally is expensive and hard and guesswork. So, we've said those aspects and the things that you need to be able to do so that you've got great people, but you've got your small company. You're never going to get the chance. You're not going to be able to do it very easily as it is. You can do best efforts, etc. But lots of community that help and really help. It might be that you can use the rest of the community to let these people practice and learn things. You can spend time giving them the opportunity to work with people through mentoring, core contribution, and so on. It gives them the chance to go and use and practice and learn the skills that make them great leaders. Going back to some of those things that we were talking about then, if we think about people coming along and acting and giving them the opportunity to get involved in mentoring, other people within the community use their skills. All that. I said about the intellectual capacity earlier on. Unless more than just, how do I do PHP? This is actually a wider thing than that. This is things like, have they got the organisational understanding of Drupal to the Drupal community and the way Drupal works to be able to put people in the right connections. So we're talking here, do they know people? Can they understand how to take a problem that they are having and get other people to understand the problem that they're having and to then get them involved in helping and doing the thing. Being able to say, ah, to solve this, I need these three people to work together and being able to arrange that. That's organisational savvy. That being able to have that strategic insight, being able to see the whole of your business and therefore an example of that would be to see the whole of the Drupal community and being able to see how that works together. They learn that through talking to other people. You need them to talk outside of the small little group within your company, within your agency, needs them to talk wider. The best way they're going to do that is by being involved in things like mentoring and contribution. Drive is, well, I kind of know what drive is. People who get results hold themselves accountable. That's a great thing. If people are actually getting involved in project-led initiatives within Drupal in actually in the community rather than just doing their work as well, give them that opportunity to get involved in things that are going on, initiatives. Give them that chance to do that. Help them grow and become the leader that you want. Within your business. I really wish I got one of those particular things now. Honestly it was an interesting one. Being able to communicate openly, I can't really get any more open than the issue cube. It really is open on sometimes and honest. But it's also how you behave within things like the issue cube is really important. You can see the people who are mentoring others and the leaders within the Drupal community because of how they actually write things in the issue cube. They don't write, but they're also capable of breaking on this news, telling people hard news. It has to be done. I know Jess has broken all your patches today. Because we're changing how arrays are written in the coding standards. So that's hard news. That means a lot of people are going to have to go away and do work. Which has been pretty straightforward about it. And I'm honestly getting on. So it matters how you do that task. Respect goes both ways. You need to learn to respect people you're working with as well as just sort of reminding it. Being able to actually deliver on things you promise is part of respect. It's actually saying, if I'm going to say this, I need to deliver it to you because you're hanging on it. Quite often. Also something that has to take place within the Drupal community on a fairly regular basis. I'm also within businesses as well. And I've got it written down here because I want to get the words right. Makes appropriate decisions even when it makes them unpopular with others. Can sometimes be a difficult thing to learn. It's not something that's easy to do when you've only got a very small business. But it has to happen. It's something that people need to get good at doing. Give them the opportunity. Very much do give them the opportunity to do that. And to learn those things in the community. And to see people involved in the community. And especially in helping with the mentoring programme, if you like. Is a way that people can do that. I almost like that. I probably don't need to explain innovation because it's what we do all the time. But being able to get up there and do it is a big deal. It's important. It's also another thing to think about this. Or why to think about this. Innovation is something that you need to be prepared for as well. Say, in the Drupal community, something like Drupal 8 and the way that things have changed a lot. Things have changed a lot between Drupal 7 and 8. And being able to deal with and to embrace change is a great leadership skill. That you need to give people the opportunity to kind of learn. Change in a natural way is quite scary for many people. And you have to learn to deal with how you do that. It's something that is inevitable, but how you deal with it is a big deal. Give people the opportunity outside of the things that you do in your business to get on with that type of stuff. Passion. There's plenty of people within the Drupal community that certainly have passion demonstrating energy and enthusiasm. But it's also aspiring to develop and enhance your own performance and the performance of others as well. The actual want and need to be better is part of this. And it's also been the want and need to bring that out in others matters. And the people skills. If you're in a very small company, I did need to ask a general size to say it before I started, but I forgot. Sometimes it can be very hard for people to learn that type of stuff. They can sit in the corner and not really get involved in decisions. And have to do that brocering that needs to take place in a wider group to actually achieve that. Giving them the chance to seriously get involved in things in the Drupal community, contributing and mentoring particularly, is a way that they can practice those things. Sometimes they'll get it wrong, sometimes they'll get it right and hopefully they'll learn over time. But they've got to get it. It will never happen if they don't have the opportunity to practice. It's something that we are as a group of people within the contribution area we're getting better at slowly. And it's something that I think those of us that get a chance to be involved outside of a small agency type thing, get more chance to do. I think I very much want to encourage people to do it. So, there's all those things that Drupal community and getting people involved in mentoring and so on, can give you, but we need people to start. We need people to take the opportunity and see contribution and particularly mentoring as not something that... There's a company owner here. Anybody? Yeah? I imagine quite a lot of company owners. When we talk about Drupal contribution, we talk about co-sprints and we talk about that type of thing, think of it as something that they're giving back to Drupal. Like it's a duty, shall we say. I very much see it the other way around. I very much see it as something that the Drupal community is giving back to the companies. Because it's giving them chance to get together like this was taken in Dublin as well. This is the group of people who volunteered to help out as mentors on the Friday co-mented sprint in Dublin. And work really hard. They were a fantastic group of people. And the thing is, they thought they were going and giving something, but the reality was they were getting so much more back. What they were getting back was working with those teams that they did, working with people they'd never met before. They were making connections, professional connections. They were being seen visibly as someone who kind of knows something about Drupal. It's important things, so they got back and the companies they worked for, there's a few people there that work for different companies, and were getting something back as well, because they were getting back bigger people than they went away. Now, I particularly bring in Friday up because one of the hardest things, I must say, we were kind of working as a couple of sprint leads on the Friday, well all week actually. And it's quite frustrating that we've got the opportunity on the Fridays at Drupalcom to do the mentored course sprint where there will be people who are coming to get involved in the community for the first time. We have this opportunity to do so much more, so much with them. The hardest thing is having those people to mentor them, to take them on, is so many companies are booking flights for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday at Drupalcom. Just for the sessions. And I can absolutely tell you now, the biggest part, the biggest part of Drupal world, your staff will get the most from it, does not happen Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. This is the biggest part, okay, the Friday. It's a place where people will get to do something they probably won't have done before. Be that, because it's the first time getting involved in a sprint, it's the second time when they actually might even do something useful, or it's the third time when they come along and they say, hey, I've done this before, I'll mentor. And we will run them through what we want them to do. They don't just jump in, we do a little bit. And they will walk away feeling I've done something pretty epic, I think it was a pretty amazing time, wasn't it? They will walk away with more contacts, they will walk away having learned a few of those skills, or improved, or practised some of those skills I was talking about earlier. They will have made connections sideways as well between their other peers in the mental group. It's a big deal. How do we take that forward? I think the minimum I want you to walk away with today is thinking, if I'm sending a staff to DrupalCon, I definitely want them to go on Friday. If that's the minimum everyone does here today, I've succeeded. But how can we make it better? How can we take it forward then? As a Drupal company, can you help? Because you're getting a lot back from it. If you're getting your staff to get involved in mentoring, you're getting something from that. You're definitely getting something from that because they're growing as people. So if you take your non-senior people and they're getting involved in Drupal mentoring, you're making them into people that you're going to have as your senior staff in a year or two's time. You're gaining. That's a hell of a lot of recruitment agency money that you've just saved. I don't know all the answers. This is the first time I've done this. I don't know what happens next. But I do know, I do know, we keep saying come to the code state of the community. I do know that, and it matters. We now have the code. We have to replay. It's fabulous. It's nearly fabulous. But we're getting pretty good with it. You've been seeing it this weekend. You know it's good. I think it's time we started spending a bit more time on that. I'm thinking about the people because Drupal isn't just the code. It is how you lot work together because nobody in this building today knows all of Drupal. OK, Daniel might. No one can know everything there is to know about everything. You need to interact. You need other people. You need your senior staff. You need your junior staff. You need people that are going to take things on. People that are going to bring that inspiration, that innovation, that leadership into your company. We need to grow them now. That's the next bit because Drupal is more than just the code. I'm just going to shout out an idea now because it's the only thing that comes to mind. It's maybe something that we need to start thinking about. We've got camps out there now. Camps that concentrate on code. We've got camps that concentrate on business things. I think it's time maybe we started thinking about activities. It's not necessarily camps. I just put mental camp up there as an example. I've got no more planning than that by the way. I don't start thinking I'm going to have a date. I think we need to start thinking about what it is. And how we start to grow the people within Drupal. Because that's something that we can do as a community that is very hard for individual companies to do on their own. We all need it when every single company has the same needs. But for one company of say a dozen or 20 or 30 people, that's really hard. That's really really really hard. So let's do it together. Let's start thinking about how we work together to help start making those leadership bits and pieces that help grow staff. But rather than just trying to do it on our own, let's talk about it together and take it from there. I think that's something that we can start now. Largely... I'm a bit fast aren't I? Largely that's all I was going to say. I wanted to give a lot of time at the end for questions. Discussion largely disguised as questions. Because I'm not going to answer anything. But I will take answers from the floor as well instead. I can't give you answers. I don't know the answers. I know this is something that I care about. But I don't know what the answers are yet. I'm going to say something silly like Mentor Camp. So that's all I'm going to say. I know I've just kind of blown you something and just shown you no code or anything like that. It literally is a case of something that I wanted to say. Definitely do not forget Friday matters at Drupalcom. Get in your staff there. Give them the opportunity to grow. Encouraging them to go to the Friday. Do you know what I don't care if you don't go on the Tuesday Wednesday Thursday. Go to the Friday because it's free. I didn't say that. Friday's principle free. Did you not know that? I know someone could kill me. But no. It's a big deal. Say get them to Friday. I would love. I'll think about this afterwards and try and figure out something. If anybody wants to get involved in trying to work out how we can get some leadership stuff together. And I know the person who wrote all that stuff for now. Has actually just got turned into a consultant doing it for himself as a business. So I'm sure I can talk him into helping us. But. I want to start that conversation now. And are there any questions? Oh yes. I'm really inspired by what you say. I have a company. My biggest challenge is actually getting people to engage with this. You know they co and they do that kind of stuff. But the biggest barrier is the community process. And feeling confident with engaging with the community process. So when you say mentor camp. It's not really a C idea at all. I think it's absolutely fantastic. And when you say let's start now. I think let's start right now. And put something like that together. Because I've got people who I want to put on it. I put myself on it. I myself have experienced friction with engaging with the community process. And lots of full starts. And it's about kind of hooking up with mentors. And dealing with confidence issues. And stuff like that. And I really want to do it. That's great to hear. I think that I completely recognise what you're saying about lots of full starts. I think that looking back at my own contribution journey shall we call it. I had a couple of full starts. Where I just couldn't work out what was going on. It was all weird. And it was because I went to Front End United. In Copenhagen. Was that three years ago? Something like that. Four. God. Thanks. I don't really feel all of that. And there. There was actually a lot of things that went wrong in the camp. And lots of wasn't charged. But it kind of held together in a really kind of really amazing way. On what we ended up doing was. This time when literally there was about 20 of us in a room on a big long table. And all we did for a whole day was sprint. But because I was sat in between. Lauri was down the end. I was sat between Christina and Christine from Spain. I can't remember who it might have been. No, Lauri was down the end. I can't remember who was to my right. But I was sat there. And these are people I looked up to. And how they treated me that day. With respect. And actually encouraging. And belief in me. Even though I was basically an idiot. Mattered. And it totally transformed my confidence. That worked. So. Fits and starts are okay. It's just creating that natured environment. It's just creating that natured environment. To get started. And to do that. We need to make sure that people are capable of doing the nurturing. That's why I'm thinking something where we spend time working with mentors and make mentors. Have the skills they need to do that. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm talking about. But yeah, let's start. Anybody else? Anybody else? Anybody else? Anybody else? Anybody else? It's a really interesting topic. Yeah. Personally, I always believed and still believe of training your own pair. Instead of going anywhere and finding a really good... Oh, absolutely. Because when you train someone to be your... That's why I've decided to be your pair. Not to be a leadership. Because what we want to do is a community. It's not like a period. I love the thing of training. And can you make your point into having the mentor come? If you see the numbers or a contest, like a group of contests, this one, we have 35 people talking and 465 just listening. There is no interaction at all. The interaction we have is on the corridors, on the spin pool, which is normally empty just on the Fridays. So, this is my opinion. This is the community with the contest. Never. Unless you go to the spin pool or you don't attend any of the sessions. Because a personal relation, the system is a bit of a time of interaction. We don't have it. It's amazing. I thought about it. I was there and I thought, why don't we have the sprint which is really important in the middle of the conference? Yeah, I said that before. I thought about it. Maybe we'll stop on the afternoon on the whole night. Then the next day we have 40 rooms of people calling or mentoring or just chatting or the next day. Okay, I want to learn. I've got this room there teaching something. It's on the workshop. In the middle of the conference. It's because the company is going to pay for that. I know that. This is the problem. It's like this. This is training. This is under the sun. This is training to come off the training budget. Particularly on the sheet. They're all happy. Soon as you put code and stuff like that in. That's out of the box in HR. They're all happy. That's why they all have the same form. That's why all conferences are in our box. I don't agree. If we put that as the reason it's been said, is because when you do something pairing with someone else, you learn much more. That is actually a two way thing as well. The mentor and the mentee both learn. That's why particularly for that type of scenario you're discussing very much is how we sell the mentoring. That's almost exactly what I'm trying to say. Is how we sell mentoring. It's not about, it's not about, it's not about, it's not about, it's not about you as a company giving something to Drupal. It's not. It's about Drupal giving something to you and it's explaining that to the accountants on what we don't do at the moment is do that well enough. As a community, because the companies are doing it wrong. What we should be saying is, look, we're doing your training. Yeah? When people are coming to contributions, we're doing your training. The good thing about Drupal community, but first of all, actually the fact that we have the sprints and have the mentoring is something that's already quite specific for Drupal. And I think that we have so many camps that are organised by different people in different ways is the point to try this out. One of the ones that have so much top-down organised by the Drupal association needs it as a fundraising event. So I think trying to change Drupal when and how it works is not a place to start, but trying to try out the different camps. And one thing I think that is also necessary is because you spend a lot of time preparing for the sprint and mentoring sprints as well and finding issues for people to work on. And quite often there's a lack of time to do in a day just to understand how the issue queue works, that you should say in a comment that you're working on something. And it needs lots of small issues. So I think it's also down to lots of people to make sure that when there is a sprint coming up to make sure that they don't say all right and fix that one after time then they have enough time that you make an issue to say this haptase needs changing or there's a typing error there. I mean that's an issue as simple as it sounds but it means somebody leaves the scene having figured out how to do an issue fixed it and get it committed. Always leave it as it is. And the first time you see yourself in a commit message is just nice. And I tell you what seeing your name in a commit message for the first time is nothing compared to seeing somebody you have mentored name in a commit message. Actually mine's here. Where was it? I'm stood down. Because I couldn't stay till the end and heard that yours had got committed but I was in tears. It was weird. It was really bad. I was actually sat there crying when I found out. When I... I think we should talk from the camera. When I talked with Alex and I said I used to do track meetings in Italy every year. It's a big community of folks. People... They find it difficult on anything. It's so IT. It can be data. It can be a video house from space. Just curiosity. For each of the meetings we have a platform where we can chat. Sometimes it's an ISV channel and sometimes it's a channel. It's just a poll. You go there and write a name and then I'll be here. We do have, on my RC, the Drupal Mentoring channel. It shows that which I don't have on my RC. Which is for mentors to talk with each other. Which is maybe a start towards this. What I want to do is take that much further and give mentors the chance to grow as mentors. Because that also has the added bonus that we're helping our companies. Because that's what your company is full of. It's full of mentors. But it should be. Anything else? Just a question of interest. If you have any plans, if you're ready to have those, just the statistics on how many people on the ratio of how many people go to Drupal compared to the ratio of people actually attending a spring. It does vary a lot. You tend to get, Drupal Con has more than you might think. More than you might think people sprinting. The rooms, particularly on the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, they are busy. I cannot remember off the top of my head now what the numbers are. We do have numbers and they'll be taking more numbers in Baltimore. One thing to bear in mind in Vienna is there won't be sprinting at the weekends this year. The DA won't be providing room for sprinting at the weekends. So the sprinting will be in a much more concentrated format Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and then the Corvent are meant to sprint on Friday. So things are changing around quite a lot. Quite a lot has changed about Vienna to be honest. Just thinking about today, walking past the sprinting room a few times. I've never really been tight to go in there. I just want to do something we can do just to stick outside the door and go like this is what's expected of you. It'll take this much time. I think for the last couple of years in London myself and Emma have been kind of dragging people in there a little bit. Not literally on occasion. Nine livers have been able to do that this week. I've been doing this and I'm not here tomorrow so I've actually stayed just in case anybody hasn't noticed. So everybody who's in there is probably self-starting on about the description on the sprint. Maybe we should make an effort or a mentor set up for next year. That would be a great thing to do. Maybe you'd like to volunteer. I was just going to agree actually that it's a pretty fancy and simple marketing but I think that the sprint in London haven't really been at the highest level of thing for the last couple of years to be honest. Me heckre will find in the room last year. It wasn't my peach. It was my peach. I did. So it's a big deal. It's a good deal. I'm not going to say it's a big deal but I'm going to say it's a big deal. I'm going to say it's a big deal. So it's kind of one of those. Different camps want to work in different ways. I'm not on the camp organising committee so I can't comment further. But I think that it's something that if I was organising a camp I would find it very important. It depends, doesn't it? I'm getting the wind-up message. So thanks pretty much. I hope not to have told you everything but to make things start working in your minds. I would love to hear your thoughts. I'll tweet about this. I'm sure it will be on the thing. Let me know what you think. Let me know if it's something that as a business is interesting to actually take this further and start thinking about how we can do something that benefits everyone and start thinking about how we can do proper training of mentors, training of people in the community rather than just within companies. I hope there's something in it I really do. That's something that matters to me. Thanks very much. How much money did I make? Shall we unlock the doors?