 Those people who are here from the AMUA, can you just come to the front? It's pretty informal. It's between us. I'm going to run a short presentation and then we're going to have a chat. But those who haven't yet left, it's okay. You're welcome to stay around. It's not only for AMUA members. Is anybody who's interested in contributing to Moodle development and proposing projects like you've just done? Okay. So, this is the Moodle User Association moment in the Moodle mood. This is Mike. Mike has been a member of the AMUA for a long time. I've been a member for a while. I've been a committee member two years in a row. I've only been a member for a couple of years, nearly three years of the AMUA and only a committee member this year. So, it's the first time I'm doing this. Clicking. Okay. So, what is the AMUA? First of all, the AMUA is not Moodle. It was launched by Moodle HQ originally, but it's a non-profit organization in the hands of the Moodle user base, and it's independent from Moodle HQ and Moodle partners. So it's the community users getting together. It's run by committee. We elected, we volunteered, and the committee is committed to the user base. The AMUA has got rules and statute as an association, and you can actually check them online. So our goals as the AMUA committee and as the AMUA altogether are to enable more core developments in Moodle and to get structured feedback from the user base. So the kind of exercise we've just done now with Martin, we're doing that all year long for the different release. So people propose projects, they have a voting system, we get them priced, and then we actually get them into core. So they are user-driven specification, and it's our chances as users, so I'm an individual member, but some people might be institutional members or as an institution to actually have a voice in the development. So it's a direct investment from the user base into Moodle core. So our declared goals are, we are for educational institutions and individual members, members be an annual membership fee, and I'll show you that in a moment. They are then able to suggest projects, they vote on proposed development projects, like I've just explained, and the available budget is invested directly into implementation. We are a direct line of communication from the user base to the Moodle HQ. We are trying to harness a synergy within the user base and trying to have exchanges between the active and the individual institutions as well, so go forums, et cetera. But we also have town hall meetings, monthly two town hall meetings to try and enable that as well. In summary, we are about creating a combined voice for Moodle using institutions. So the next part is about project cycles. So we have six monthly project cycles where it goes through different stages, got proposals, refinement, voting, and we get up to a stage where there's a detailed specification, and we can then have costing by HQ, and there's an interaction between the Moodle user association and Moodle HQ leading to implementation in the next version of Moodle. So far, these are the projects that have gone forward and things that you can now see in core thanks to the MUA user involvement. So Recycle Bin was the first project, the course overview block and the dashboard. Then we had the calendar improvements, an expanded question bank, fixing analytical tools for random quiz questions. Then we had the course overview, which has been implemented early in 36 with HQ, and then finalised for 37. And again, the advanced forum, which is panning against several versions. So these are the core projects that would have been too big for one institution to code, so they've been submitted by people who couldn't afford it on their own, but actually financed to be developed by HQ. So the membership, I've just mentioned about how to be a member. Some of you already are members. So why would you become a member? You have a direct impact on Moodle development. You have a contribution to the sustainability of Moodle, direct impact to Moodle HQ with Moodle HQ, constructive contacts within the MUA as well, so it's a community in itself, but also it's a fair and affordable membership. So what do you get? You can propose projects, you can vote on projects, you can attend monthly town hall meetings with some exclusive presentations from and direct discussions with Moodle HQ, so some of them are open to everyone, but some of them are just focused on just the members. You have candidate rights and voting rights for the committee selection, so you could be one of us, and visibility beyond the national borders, so it is truly an international community. Every time you are a member, you also get a badge like this one. So what does it cost? As described here, there are different types of membership. I've mentioned the individual membership, which is the one I have, and then the organisational ones, so we got bronze, silver, gold with the different voting points system depending on how many people are allowed per membership and how many points for voting. Does that make sense? Yep. So what are we doing and what are we hoping to do? So our goals at the moment are to enlarge the membership, which will obviously help us crowdfund more projects or bigger projects, intensify the cooperation with Moodle HQ, and we're working closely with different areas in Moodle HQ at the moment, enhancing communications with members. We've done that quite a lot recently, and we've done a lot of reorganisation as well. Small project cycles that have started, we are running our first one at the moment, and if you're not yet a member and you join, you can actually still vote on those. The MUA, as a crowdfunding platform basically, with more members, obviously you've got more power to develop either more expensive plugins or not plugins functions, or more of them if we go for smaller ones as well. So where is the MUA around the world? Currently, we have members all around the world in all continents, and the committee members are from Spain, Canada, the USA, UK, Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland and Australia, so truly dispersed geographically. In numbers, I don't know if that's up to date, but roughly, close to about 10 gold members, 22 silver members, 25 bronze members and about 220 individual members. In total, that's 200,000 votes, but also an annual budget of 200,000 Australian dollars that we can contribute to the MUA projects. So next step, if you have any questions, ask us now. Also you can use the email at info.moodleassociation.org. We can help you if anybody wants to apply for memberships, or also we can have a conversation now if you have any ideas. Okay, so just out of curiosity, over the past X number of years that the Moodle Association has been going, what's the membership numbers been like? So do you have a graph that shows the peaks and troughs of the membership numbers? I don't have that. Mike, do you have an idea? We don't, but that's a great idea. I can tell you that it has been growing. So there would be very few depths. It would be more of a fairly gradual slope. Yeah, it's getting stronger, but we don't have a graph for the data. It'd be nice actually to add that to our site and to show users. So this morning, Martin showed that really Moodle now, Moodle is different from Moodle Corp. Like when we talk about Moodle as products and services and stuff, you can see where this is going. So in one of the town halls I presented out last year, I asked, I come over who was, I was chatting at the time, whether the MUA was just for Moodle Corp or if it was for all of Moodle's products and services. And I wondered if you had an answer yet. So far, it's really been, I mean, Mike can answer this, really it's Moodle Corp. This is what we've been contributing so far. It would be at this point, yeah, absolutely it's only been for Moodle Corp. So to extend it to other Moodle products, we'd have to go to membership first off to see if that interested them. I think a problem, for example, with Moodle for Workplace would be the members can't access it, so that wouldn't be right. MoodleNet, that's an interesting thought. Again, I think we can easily present that out there and go, is this something that you really want to throw your weight behind? We talked this year about potentially starting to fund plug-in development. But at the end of that, we kind of went, well, that's not really the goal. I mean, it would be great to be able to get more plug-ins, but ultimately the whole point of it is to get stuff into core. So getting more plug-ins isn't necessarily a solution. Yeah, so the focus has been core and the members, overall, when discussed, have always tended to stick to core because there is a feeling as well that you've got all the resources behind that. You've got more power to, you know, you're more empowering. Yeah, but it is an interesting concept. And it's something, essentially, we would just have to go out to... We have the ability to change our rules. We have the ability to change our focus. You know, as long as, basically, as long as we're honest to the members. Yeah. Sort of a response to that. I think as a member for, I think, certainly in terms of supporting things like MoodleNet from a development perspective, and put it that way, it's maybe definitely to members. But I think, in principle, I would love to see the Moodle User Association be one of the first people actually federating MoodleNet as a provision we use to actually curate that. We are the Moodle User Association. So actually using those tools and being part of that federation right from the start to actually kick bootstrap that process is sort of eating away on dog food. And I think that probably doesn't need consultation with the members because we're not supporting it in terms of money and things like that. Now, I would say to reinforce that is, as a member, this is something that you feel you want to be part of, like, you know, being able to, you know, test right things and help giving feedback and being constructive towards that. But also, promoting it to the other Moodle Users. No, part of your point there, as committee, we can make decisions like that on our own. We could say, hey, we're going to use MoodleNet for this. That's, you know, the membership will speak with their votes next year. If they went, well, that was a stupid move. We don't want you back and we won't get voted in. But it's only rule changes that we really have to go to the members. So something that would change our focus saying, hey, we're going to let you vote on MoodleNet customizations or core work. We really have to get that in the rules because we have, we're bound, right now we're incorporated in Australia, I believe. Yeah, it's association rules from Australia, which are very strict. And they're some very strict. So any rule change recently that we are trying, we've tried to apply has been more lengthy than you'd expect. But we have to obey by those rules while the MUA is bound to the association rules from Australia. But specifically to MoodleNet, I mean, Doug did actually invite all of the committee members into the beta testing or beta, beta, alpha testing. Yeah, this is not a rule thing. No, so we've seen it and we've used it and we can, yeah. I understand. I understand. Where the rules, that can be easily changed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so I've got one comment, one question. My comment would actually be just a little bit to carry that on. Sorry, just one thing. I would be interested to see some of the Moodle User Association votes and funding going towards the developer certification. So actually going towards the NBC, but a slightly different version of that. So I think that's where it could be used. Because that one then, if you've got a developer certification, that's then itself going to feed into Moodle Core because you've got more developers doing things correctly. Yes. So my question then is, in the past, the Moodle User Association have concentrated on single big items and I've noticed you've did the small cycle. So does that mean that there is a shift or an addition of lots of little things? I think it will say it's more in addition. So we're not going to stop doing big projects and we are still doing those. But this cycle, we've devoted to small projects and also gives an opportunity to those people who kind of didn't get the votes because it wasn't big enough in other areas to actually re-propose things that were easily done. And actually we're still thinking through, to be completely honest, how it impacts the implementation in the different cycles because we were just again talking about it today. We had a committee meeting today and we couldn't take part because we're here. But it's about trying to... So if we have small projects and we can put them into the next version rather than waiting to the end of the normal cycle we would have with the implementation of larger projects, then can we get them quicker into the, let's say, 3.8 rather than waiting for 3.9? It's great to be able to spread our share and come to the agreement. Yeah, and if it's physically... If it's feasible, why can't we do it? There aren't any rules saying you have to wait 11 months to implement that if you can finance it now and HQ is ready to... I've got staff and resources to code things then they can't be done. Building on that, because there's a kind of marketing aspect to that for the MUA because the idea is to get more members so you can have more purchase power so that you can do more. And so if you can demonstrate that turn, that's great. And the other thing is if you can be telling people who are trying to get things through Tracker and they're trying to get votes on Tracker and they're trying to get that through and they're trying to get resource to put to that, if you can say, well, actually, this is a mechanism where you can do this because quite often when you put a proposal in you're linking it to something in Tracker. So for relative to the little cost you might get a huge amount of votes and you might get some revenue chucked at that which you wouldn't otherwise have. And I think that's quite a powerful thing. Well, I'd like to see all 20 old projects that were there in the next cycle of the MUA proposals. Do you think you're spending the money? Do you think you're spending the money? I think we are. What do you mean? Can you explain that? Are we using the membership to actually fund the next thing while we're holding back money? Is that what you're asking? Kind of. I mean, ideally, I think you want to be not on the bread line but close to it in every cycle. So it's like, yeah, all the money we've got we're spending out. And I think it's really hard because you kind of you don't know what the income's going to be for the next year so the temptation is to hold some back. Well, the trend has been increasing anyway. But we actually have addressed that in several times. We look at our funding all the time. We are spending the money. We don't hold much back. We have concerned ourselves once in a while well we take a risk when we go at this because if half the membership decides not to renew then we're in trouble. But that hasn't happened so that's why we have these sessions. Part of the reason we decided to do the small projects one wasn't because we didn't have the funding it was because there were a couple of big projects being proposed that were likely going to take more time than we can do in a cycle and more money and all these little ones have been boiling over and we kind of went well let's spend the time and do this and the membership thought it was exciting because you get more things in there. We're not going to do that every time but we've also been discussing with HQ I don't remember who we talked to at HQ who's our contact right now? That's terrible. Is it Sander? I think it is. We've been talking with him about how we can manage the project cycles better so additionally we might be able to take a project that's going to take more than one cycle and actually spread it over two cycles. We've had projects land I think or this should have gone over multiple cycles but that wasn't actually hard choice. That was because HQ had already jumped on top of that one earlier and actually had a whole bunch of it done and then we only had to fund the rest which was kind of nice. I hear you and that's one of the key things we're always looking at are we spending the budget let's make sure we don't overspend and so far we've been fairly careful. This is the reason as well we're looking at this one coming up a cycle we don't know how many projects small projects will win because it will depend on we'll try and spend as much as we can for the small projects with the budget we have and they're all under a certain amount of money for sure because it's small enough but we might have two, three, four we don't know how many will go forward. You said three. Yeah well it said three but it should be it was two to three it was two to three if I remember that's what Richard posted but it could be that there's a few more if they are small enough or they might not be. What we did was we set a maximum amount that the projects could be so if HQ came back said no that's over that we just dismissed that one it's going to be too big we haven't got the final proposals yet we assume that some of those will come in less than the maximum amount and in which case we might actually be able to do more than we planned so we have to wait and see what those proposals are. So you're essentially saying that we could spend this amount of money right that's not mentioned anywhere it's just I think there was the budget project a few months ago and it was about two hundred thousand. This is it. Right. So we're going to spend this and so I think we have to point one and finally not move one but two or three so so we need so I hear what you're saying is we've missed out on communicating that particular aspect of this one okay so we can fix that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah just a comment about communication we're talking about communication could there be some kind of like orientation pack for new institutions joining because quite honestly it feels like a little talking shop that it's quite hard to break into you don't really understand how it works you go into that website and it's like okay now what and then you go so where do I go now what do I do do I have to join something how do I join something everybody seems to be chatting so everybody feels like they're in their little like worlds talking to each other but what about all us people who struggle to get the funding to join welcome where to start where can I do this we were talking again yesterday about the site and we know there are massive improvements to be done on that part you member and you know if you join any kind of association and membership you get a oh hello welcome this is where you can start getting involved and do that so that's a really good idea and I think I'll bring that to the committee we need that side policy in this offensive manner is there like why do we have that side policy in such an like enforced manner everywhere when you try and follow a link that you get stuck by the policy because you're not logged in and you log in and you can't get to the form post you have to click the link again we've agreed the policy when we logged in initially why do we like so aggressive about it so the site itself does need a little bit of love we've got several tasks already assigned to try to get the site cleaned up we have to work a bit with HQ on that because they're currently our service provider so we're working with them to get these problems solved that's one of them there's a number of other things like don't go look at the site on a mobile right now because it's awful sorry Tim you have one some of that is configuration you guys can figure that out some of it is a custom thing why is it a custom thing but we are talking about making changes whether information needs or if you go on mobile without the app on a normal mobile so we know that on this for the orientation how about the calendars I know I did that I will have eventually so I think it was a positive development that proposals started going into the Moodle tracker except that where a project wants to propose something that's been the tracker for years you guys insist on making a duplicate and often you'll make what it just looks like any other duplicate bug report and I go in and triage it as a duplicate and then I get told off that you can't close that it's an MUA proposal so if you're not going to follow the general rules of the tracker for MDL issues should you have a separate issue type or could you just follow the same rules as everyone else and not create duplicates when you're proposing something that was proposed years ago no no so I agree with you Tim as somebody's been using the tracker for a long time I understand that we're actually doing what the HQ developers asked us to do they didn't want us to create they didn't want us to have a separate area they didn't want us to have a separate project we do have a label and they didn't want us to take an existing issue that wasn't an MUA issue they didn't want us to use the tracker and make it something different I don't know we're still working on that I think this is the first year that we've kind of been using the tracker for that purpose I think we'll be able to sit back and review those now with them and go okay see some of this isn't working some of this is and I think there's some opportunities there to even take perhaps what we really need to do is almost have a separate we can just move that item out of the one it's in and into a new one there's always a one-to-one relationship between the issue that might have been there the MUA project which may have other sub tasks so the idea was you link it to the original I think it should be in the main MUA it should be linked but maybe it's just it shouldn't be in as any other feature maybe you should have a bug you've got improvement, you've got feature maybe you should have MUA proposal yeah yeah I think we'll definitely review that at the end of this year yeah yeah and I think that's what's going to happen at the end of this year we're going to go okay what's the problems what are the benefits of what we did and let's fix you know let's fix the issues and I hear your pain general principle I think there was an issue I think you have to review if we do something like that there's guidance so that people can see and search and leave because all of a sudden you will still be able to fix they want to understand it so we need an answer we need you to play around with the instructions any other over here working my way back so it's actually because Martin's here and it's really that opportunity to ask you is from Moodle HQ's perspective and not the committee is the Moodle user association working in what you and visitors did it's been four years and I was looking back through my membership bar just to see it it's now had its legs underneath the table for a while so I'm super impressed with how it's working generally I think what's missing is probably the marketing and we've been talking about that how to market it better I think Moodle Core should have MUA ads pop up when you install it and things like that we have to make it more part of the fabric it should be on Moodle.org, it should be in the tracker it should be everywhere yes and I usually always do I'm really sorry I left it I had a lot to talk about but I should have been you know we shouldn't be having it it shouldn't be at our part yeah potentially yeah it could have been looked into the program better I agree good point so actually as part of the current committee they split it, how many committees have we got now, six or seven anyways the key point here is one of them is actually a marketing committee so they're focused on that they've been working with HQ to do some of the things Martin just said because we've identified that a whole thing it's like we've been going for a while now and it's kind of like okay people don't really know enough what this is and we need to get that out there and part of that really the committee is to fix the site make the site work a little better as well one of the things I noticed is I intentionally let my membership go right to the end because I wanted to see what happened and essentially all that happened was they said well sorry to see you go and I kind of went well that's not really good there's some calls to action here that probably could have happened before then and I think you know it makes me concerned how many individual members have we lost we just went oh well if I'm gone I'm gone so you know there's a lot of things we've got to do that way I did have a question asked me this week somebody said well I'm just an individual member I'm really not sure I want to renew I really feel like my votes don't count because an institution comes in and they have their favorite issue and they vote all that in and I really didn't do much and I said okay I get it I feel it I know what you're talking about but one of the things you can do is if you've got something you want in you can make a proposal right it's an individual an individual has just as much power to propose an issue that every organization wants and get it in that way so to me that's the bigger one it's like yes you've only got your 100 votes as an individual but if you're voting if you've convinced everybody to vote for the one key thing that you think is important well that's great and then when we implemented the smaller ones this time there's a lot more people who are getting those things in just so they come from individuals and then they just the institution to go I like that one I'm an individual member and well actually my party was the first party to go through and I kind of support that point even though my votes are less than the big institution it is not about the votes it's about the idea you have and if your idea triggers the other people around you and I think that's what Miu has about if you have a good idea post it do you don't know how to do that talk with the people who actually already done it we're going to talk about it about your idea and I'm going to help him in how he can do it I'm not saying I'm a success story it is just about we talked about it two years ago in London as well being an individual member shouldn't be like oh my votes don't count and that's ideas and I think we all have pretty good ideas I think we just saw it on the roadmap as well I was on the original committee and at that time our vision and I think it was similar to Martin's is that this was the golden thread between the community and Cor and it was individuals in that community and what's key is that quite often you've got people who are working on their own and they've not got a lot around them to say what is what I'm thinking right is that can you reaffirm me or I've got this idea where do I go with it and that was really a big part of what I saw the Middle Use Association being and I think that is what it is I think there is a great community and I'll tell you a point that it's hard to kick off but actually once you're on there you know some of the discussion threads are great and you know you put up a discussion about changing release cycles and that got lots of responses from lots of different people some people liked it but it kicked off a really confident and interesting conversation and you as an individual member can do that anyone can do that so if you hear that one I think it's a shame of those discussions that were happening in the MUA because those kind of discussions about when does when does Moodle release the releases come out that wasn't really a MUA specific thing and it's a smaller group and it feels like there's potential for more interaction there but it should have it kind of became a bit behind closed doors kind of thing but I think what I don't know whether it's improved is how we get to refining the projects so that they get done right the first time because once they've voted then I don't think anyone really interacts with the proposals to get something which is going to work for everyone everywhere rather than just a single use case which might not work at scale again I've been on the receiving end of this as the person who knows most about how the quiz works where MUA have voted for some things that have clearly focused on someone getting their pet use case fixed and have not considered the wider picture and at this point Moodle HQ has committed to making a certain change at a certain price and I have to work with the HQ people to work out how the hell we actually deliver something that meets what MUA is paid for that isn't going to destroy the quiz statistics for other people as a quiz maintainer you should have been involved with staff in the short term I would have thought so we don't need to that's a mistake what actually had none happening was some good changes in the quiz staff so that's important and I think the committee is more aware now of the advance forum is one of them the communication with the proposers and people involved in the high school few projects because if you have them with your idea to quiz what happens with my project when it went to the HQ