 All right, I think we're gonna go ahead and get started now that we've had time for people to jump in and join. So welcome again, my name is Tim Lennon. I am the CTO here at the Drupal Association. And today I'm gonna give a preview of the attendee experience here at DrupalCon for the first virtual DrupalCon that we've ever run as an organization. So I'll be talking a little bit about how that impacts what you're used to with DrupalCon if you're a returning attendee and if you're completely new to DrupalCon, I hope I'll be able to give you an overview of what that experience is like and why it's something that we as a community dearly love so much. Quick reminders again, because a couple of folks may have joined. Anybody who has questions can use the Q&A feature. We'll have a Q&A section at the end and you can certainly use the Zoom chat feature. All right, we're gonna roll right in and get started. So firstly, I'd like to acknowledge that we wish we could have joined everyone in person in Minneapolis this past May as was originally planned before the COVID pandemic broke out. It would have been wonderful. We wanna thank the original organizers in the local community in Minneapolis for everything they had done to try and help make that event successful. And indeed a lot of their work has then gone into the process of making DrupalCon global successful. And while it's unfortunate that we couldn't be there in person, this is also in some ways a really exciting opportunity. We've never tried a fully virtual conference before and the ability to open it up to an audience from anywhere in the world is a really great opportunity and really exciting. I imagine we're gonna have people who never before had the opportunity to join us at DrupalCon. And so it's gonna be just an invigorating time for the community and a really great time to bring in new voices and new people into the whole experience. On that note, what it's also allowed us to do is partner with a lot of organizations to just incredibly expand our scholarship program. So these are a number of the organizations that we've partnered with including the local association leads of all the local Drupal associations throughout the world. Organizations like FOSS Asia, Shikot Africa, Programeria, all of these others that you see here. These organizations do great work to try and lift people in underrepresented groups into spaces in tech that they might not have been able to reach on their own. And we're really happy to be partnering with them and helping to bring more people to DrupalCon. To give you an idea of the scale of the expansion we're able to do at a typical DrupalCon because of the travel costs and the hotel costs and the ticket prices and everything else. We can usually do somewhere in the region of 20, maybe 30 scholarships on the outside. We have given out more than 140 scholarships through these partner organizations and we're thrilled to be able to do that with this virtual event format and welcome so many new faces. So if some of you who are joining today are part of the scholarship program, welcome. And I hope this will give you a great introduction to what you're going to be able to see and participate in in just a couple weeks here when we get started with the conference. What's also exciting about this is when we call this DrupalCon global, it really is going to be a global event. I think as attendees, we should all be prepared to welcome folks from all over the world. This is some of the representation of people from that scholarship program. We have people from Burkina Faso, from Nigeria, from India, from the Czech Republic, from Malawi, Vietnam, all over the world. And it's really exciting to have so many folks, new faces joining us for the event. So thank you again for, as a community, supporting this effort and this work to allow us to transform the event into a virtual one and to reach out to all these new people. And I'd also like to address this concept of how do we hold a global event for an audience all over the world and yet still create live engagement and interactivity? So something that's been important to us is that we're working on a 12-hour program schedule. If you've peaked at the schedule so far, you'll see that. And we have overlapping content across the major time zones from areas of representation of the attendees that we're gonna have in the program. So you'll see that regardless of what time zone you're in, there's featured content, main stage speakers, sessions, BOFs, exhibit hall time, all of that's available, as well as an on-demand content library that's available 24-7. And we're even doing extra things like running reruns of certain main stage content. So there'll be a time to watch the Drees Note early in the day and then a rerun appearance of the Drees Note later in the day as a way to make sure that people in different regions of the world get to have that experience and share together. In addition to that, we have been encouraging people from various local associations that if they want to set up, let's say the Indian community wants to set up a kind of pregame before the official programming kicks off, they can get together and gather as a community to start DrupalCon early. And then perhaps our Australian community can do the kind of closing out and after-party in the evening for that 12-hour schedule. So we're really excited about this and very happy to be able to try this global reach. So what's in a DrupalCon? If you are a repeat attendee, this will seem fairly familiar to you, but I'll be getting into the details of how we're executing this differently using the virtual event platform. So bear with me if you've been to a bunch of DrupalCons before, but particularly for those who are new, I wanna just make sure we go through this. So some of the key components, of course, are our plenary sessions or keynote sessions. So of course we'll have Drees joining us for the Drees note as we all come to enjoy and expect at every DrupalCon. Mitchell Baker, the CEO and chair of the Mozilla Foundation is gonna come and talk about the open web and the impact of open source in the current age. I think that's gonna be a really exciting talk. Our own executive director, Heather Rocker, will be doing the introduction to the Drees note and remarks from the Drupal Association public board meeting. And then we'll have a Drupal initiatives plenary that includes all of the kind of leads of different major Drupal initiatives that are going on now, either report outs on what's just been finished up as part of the great push to the release of DrupalMind or the upcoming changes that are coming in the next generation of these individual initiatives. So those are just a few content highlights not to miss. We also have featured sessions from a number of people, Grace Francisco of MongoDB, Stu Karoff from the Asian Penguins organization, which is a Minneapolis organization that works with the mom community and high school students to help work on introducing kids to Linux. Leslie Mack, the founder of the Ferguson network, Lev Kay of CredSpark and actually a couple other featured speakers that are just coming in as well. So it's gonna be exciting from that point. And of course, there's the approximately 100 sessions from the community that are gonna be available throughout the event that you'll be able to join. So again, I'll go into the details of how you'll manage that schedule as we look at the virtual platform that we're gonna be using. In addition, there are summits. The summit content, if you've been to a DrupalCon before, summits are effectively a place for to network and learn with peers from a particular field. Often these are industry related summits. So as you can see, there's a summit for people in the nonprofit space, in the government space, libraries, healthcare, places that tend to be really strong holds for the Drupal project and where people have a lot of perhaps common challenges that they like to share with each other. So typically these in the past at the in-person events, these have been separate tickets and they've had limited space and they often sell out. And this time they are completely included in the regular ticket. They're sort of a mini summit version and we can have additional participation. Just noticing a quick question in the chat. Yes, this presentation will be available as a recording after the event. So you need to share this with any of your coworkers or other folks in your networks. You will be able to do so. So we'll promote that on social as soon as we get the recording processed. So finally, I do want to mention two more elements. The first being the birds and a feather sessions. If you're not familiar with these, these are sort of unconference style self-organized conversations. So you can go onto the DrupalCon website and you can actually snag your own slot to create a bof of birds and a feather session. And these are not presentations. These are actually opportunities to have a discussion. So as you can see here, we have one session submitted that's for a discussion with the Drupal initiative leads. So this would be a great chance to go in and talk about what does it mean that the Olivero theme is coming together as a new default theme for Drupal and different things like that. It's a great way to engage there. Let's see. Finally, there is an on-demand content library available. So the on-demand content library has video content from our speakers that's being uploaded so that it can be watched at any time. You don't have to wait for the specific time slot. Again, this is in deference to the fact that it's a global event and it's gonna be tricky to follow a complete 12-hour schedule every day. So we're gonna have a variety of this content available and then recordings included in it as well. And then at the end of August, all of this becomes part of the public DrupalCon archive. So that will be available as well. And we don't want to forget social events. So there will still be trivia at DrupalCon global. We'll be doing it digitally. And you can certainly submit your own social events. So if you wanna do that virtual dance party or board games online or whatever else it might be, you can kind of submit those items and participate in some of the fun social side of DrupalCon, which is always important. For me, it's not just the scheduled content. It's that social and interactive element that makes DrupalCon such a special event. So now I'll talk a little bit about details of managing your schedule and how you work through that. And again, bear with me, if you're a DrupalCon veteran, we will get to the virtual platform part soon. So this is just a little animation of how this works. If you go to the program menu on the DrupalCon global website and click on schedule, you'll be able to filter the schedule by the event type, by what track the content is in. And you can certainly then add individual sessions to your personal schedule. Note also that if you're viewing the site just as an anonymous user, or if you haven't set time zone on your Drupal.org profile, all these times are in UTC. But if you do set a time zone on your Drupal.org profile, it'll be converted for you into your local time. So that might make it easier for you to manage your personal schedule. Similarly, the personal schedule itself, once you've created your personal schedule, you can subscribe to that. You get an iCal file, you can subscribe on Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, whatever calendar program you use as a way to just sync the schedule that you have with your actual calendar, which can certainly be easier to manage to some folks. I'm gonna keep on rolling here. Okay, so this is now a basic overview of what the tool we're using itself will be the actual virtual conference tool. So this is an application, browser-based application called Hopin that is being used by a number of different conferences, including an upcoming UN General Congress and all sorts of things. So it's a cool platform that's been rapidly added in features, and we've been working with them pretty closely. Among other things, we've been working with them on some accessibility improvements to their tools and things like that. But this is the main area that you will join when you join the conference, the reception area. And the reception area has a few different components to it. So on the right-hand side of the screen, you can see a global event chat. So this chat stream will have any kind of conversation that might be going on among attendees. This is one element of the virtual hallway track, but I'll talk about that in more detail as we go. We'll also, as organizers, be posting any important announcements that you might need to know about. So maybe we'll be letting you know when the Dries note is starting or whatever else the case may be. We'll drop that in there, as well as reminders about the DrupalCon code of conduct and anything else that might be important. You also may see the speakers of the event popping in here to promote their sessions and invite you to join. And in addition, if we decide that we'd like to, we may promote some global polls to the audience and there is a link to the people who happen to be in the room. And I'll talk about that more in a minute. You'll also see that there's sort of a summary schedule that gets you some basic information about what's going on, probably using the actual DrupalCon website will get you a more detailed schedule just because there's so much content that scrolling through other schedule stuff might be a little tricky. But you can also just drop in based on the things that you see in here. And then over on the left-hand side, you'll see the kind of five main areas of the virtual conference center, as it were. So, one of these areas is the actual main stage for the event. So the main stage is where we'll be having the plenary sessions and the featured sessions. So this is where you'll go to see the Drees Note, to see Mitchell Baker from Mozilla Speak and any of the other featured sessions that I talked about before. This is essentially an in-browser video sharing experience. It does have its own dedicated chat stream, so you can talk with just the other people who are attending that particular main stage session. And we'll also have little pieces of intermission content so that in between programming, you can get some more information about other events happening later in the conference or just other things you can do like networking opportunities, chances to chat with people. So that is always gonna be under this main stage link here in the sidebar. The next area, there's gonna be a sessions view. This is just an alternate way to see all of the scheduled content. Again, generally speaking, I would probably suggest using your DrupalCon website schedule, but you can also browse through the sessions view and find all the sessions there. And if you just happen to want to hop into something, you can do that. No pun intended, that is the platform name. And then finally, there's some interesting tools that are for just meeting new people. So there's this networking tool, which is totally optional and requires the opt-in of both parties, but basically it matches you randomly with another attendee who's opted in to do this for just a five minute chat. So it's just a way to say, hey, I wanna meet some new folks. And you can just have a quick conversation if you want to, you can exchange contact details. And it's a nice way to meet some new people at DrupalCon. In addition to that, there may be some other folks from the Drupal community who pop in there. People like myself or other DA staff, maybe some of the initiative leads, maybe some speakers. So it might be a fun way to meet different folks in the community. What that looks like when you actually join, by the way, is just a one-on-one video chat effectively with the option to then do contact exchange. Finally, the last button on the sidebar here is for the exhibit hall. So the virtual exhibit hall is actually reasonably cool at this event. And there are a number of different choices and options that you have for how you engage with our sponsors. So you can visit the sponsors in the exhibit hall anytime Tuesday through Thursday. And then there's also a dedicated live exhibit hall hour each day. So when you go into the sponsor booths, you'll get an on-demand experience with some prerecorded videos or you'll get a live experience with live video from the sponsor in the booth. And as you know from DrupalCon in the past, if you've gone before, there's often some great demos from some of the same people who are speakers at the event and some really good content. So it can be really great to visit that. So when you join the live booth, you'll see them on camera and don't worry, it's not gonna turn your camera on automatically, but you can chat. Or if you want, you can request an individual video chat and things like that as well. We're also gonna be running a sort of exhibitor passport game. It's kind of a bingo game where you can visit the booths and get entered to win some prizes. So there'll be an Apple Watch, a Prograds, some gift cards, $200 Amazon or Lego gift cards or the choice to make a $200 donation to a charitable organization of your choice. So please help us thank our sponsors. This transition from an in-person event to a virtual event happened unexpectedly and on a very short timeline. And these sponsors made it possible for us to continue to do this and make this event happen. So we'd really appreciate it if you come in and take a look at the wonderful things that they have to offer. So let me talk about the hallway track itself. So again, for our new attendees who may not be familiar with this term, the hallway track is just what we call that kind of undefinable part of Drupalcom that is sitting next to someone new in a session and then striking up a conversation in the hallway as you're walking to lunch or walking to your next session or meeting someone in the contribution areas and then striking up a friendship. And this is a way that a lot of both personal and professional relationships in the Drupal community have been established. I think it's a really important part of the event and it's just a great way to meet people. It's the difference between just watching sessions and actually interacting and engaging with the community. So again, there's several tools that we can use to do this. So one of the tools that I already talked about is the one-to-one networking tool. And there is a comment from, yeah, there's a comment from Ruby here about how can I screen people if I don't want to participate in just speaking with any random person. So you do have a few choices on that front Ruby. So you can, among other things, you can use the people tab that I showed earlier. I think I have an example here as well. Yeah, so if you see this people tab in the sidebar of the site, shows a list of people who happen to be in either the session you're in or the main attendee room. And you can actually mute any other attendee in there if you'd like. So you can mute certain people if you have any concerns about that. And also if you wanna forego the random matching, you have the option to identify someone in a session who may be made a comment that you thought was particularly insightful or someone in the general chat who was talking about something you're interested in or maybe someone in a boss who was having a conversation and you wanna just keep following up. For any of the people in the attendee list, you can send a chat message if you'd like to do that or you can invite to a one-on-one video call. And in fact, I believe you can even invite more than one attendee. So you have multiple options for just having these impromptu conversations with people you meet in the course of viewing a session at a social event, chatting on the main stage, things like that. And again, you can choose to mute anyone that you don't want to interact with. You have to opt in before any video or audio sharing happens or any of that kind of stuff. So you can help control your experience in that way. Let's see. So that's kind of the basics of how that sort of general hallway track idea works in a virtual context. And I really encourage you to give it a shot to pay attention to the other people in a session chat room who are talking about things and do the same thing you might do in person. Ask them a question about that insightful comment they made and strike up a conversation that may lead to a great new relationship in the Drupal community. So of course, you can also continue that conversation in more formal ways. The birds of the feather sessions that we talked about before, if there's some sidebar happening as part of a main session that you just want to have a big discussion about, you'll be able to request another BOF session even after the event has started. You'll just need to provide the request form asks for two hours notice before it winds up on the schedule, but then you can organize a larger conversation. And certainly you can also continue the conversation in external channels. You can tweet about it. You can go onto the Drupal Slack itself and start a conversation there or on the rocket chat and do all those sorts of things. So also as an attendee, particularly for new folks, there's always some session evaluation options. So you'll get surveys sent to you and things like that. So please try and respond to those. It's really helpful for both the program selection team and for the speakers themselves to understand what people liked about their content. And that's a way to be an attendee who kind of gives back to the speakers who are giving their wonderful content to you. And then I'll talk a little bit about the contribution space and then I'll get into more of these questions because I wanna make sure that we have a good amount of time for that. So the contribution site is live. It is a separate sort of sub-site and with the support of the open social team, a Drupal distribution, it's been built to provide contribution space like virtual contribution tables just like you might be used to in the contribution rooms at a normal Drupal con. So here's a quick preview of what that looks like. On the main contribution website, you have a demonstration of just what the contribution space is about and then there's this table of contents here that has some helpful information to get you oriented. I'll walk through some of these ideas. If you go to explore the event, you can actually see a stream of the different kinds of activity that's going on in the contribution spaces. So you can see here, my cursor started posting some resources in the Olivero contribution table. Jennifer Hodgden started a contribution area for the new contributor guide on Drupal.org and there's a number of different groups that are already organizing on this site to begin contributions. And this contribution space is available throughout the event. So when you have downtime in your schedule or you just want to go contribute for a little while rather than doing session content, you can go join these. But in particular on the Friday, following the primary content, that's our dedicated contribution day where we really encourage everyone to join and there'll be mentorship opportunities for new folks to be there. So here are some of the kinds of groups that you might see there. So again, different initiatives in Drupal might organize a contribution group. There might be documentation contribution. There might be a promotional material for Drupal as a contribution area. And of course, there will be code contribution opportunities as well. And when you click on one of these groups, you'll see something like this. So this is the Olivero contribution table and it includes some resources like a demo URL to get caught up, a link to the issue queue for the project and a Slack channel where people are collaborating on that particular initiative. Similarly, here's the Drupal Mind contributed project reporting group. So this is the effort to help get more modules ready for Drupal Mind. There's already quite a bit there, but there's even more to go. And this just explains how this group is organizing and contributing on this effort during the event. So you could also help us get the word out. And I want to reiterate something here that was posted in the chat earlier. So if you are one of the repeat DrupalCon attendees, someone who's gone to a couple of events and it's all old hat for you, it would be lovely if you would sign up for the scholarship program to be a mentor or ambassador for the new people being brought in using the scholarships or others to just help them get oriented to their first event, particularly because it will be a virtual event. And it's great to have that one-on-one mentorship and buddy system to get people set up to enjoy their first part. So I hope you'll help participate in that way if you're able to. It's a really great way to do that. Let's see. So let's... You also can help us get the word out, of course, in smaller ways. You can just post on your social media channels or in your networks about content you're excited about. So you can signal boosts our scholarship program or you can talk about, find a tweet from one of the speakers about the session that they're doing and you can retweet that and just help get the word out to other friends in your network and bring in more attendees to the program. I think that would be great. So with that, we'll go into the question and answer portion. And I do see some in the chat and some in the Q&A. So I'm gonna skim through the chat space first just to make sure I've got those captured here. So again, I mentioned this earlier, but yes, the presentation is going to be available as a recording after the fact. So this can be shared around for anybody who missed it. And let's see. Yes, John shared in the chat, if you go to events.drupal.org slash global 2020 slash scholarships, there's information about signing up for that mentorship program that I referenced earlier. So I hope that folks will do that. And yes, Ruby, I totally agree. One of the best things about the hallway track idea is in fact, running into people that you haven't connected with in a while. Maybe the last time you saw them was a previous DrupalCon or maybe you know them online and would like to actually interact with them somewhere other than text, actually do some video chat stuff. And it's not like we can't do those things but it is one of those things that DrupalCon gives you that opportunity to make it a priority, which is great. Paul asks, this is cool, but it could be a little bit overwhelming. We put up a video or similar to help people make the most of it. Certainly we're going to be putting up this recording, Paul, and I'd love to hear other ideas. We've been thinking about slicing out some individual clips for different sections of this presentation and making those available just in smaller digestible chunks. Okay, so that's, I think, the questions from the chat. Moving over to the Q&A feature, John asks, can we hop between summits or are we limited to choosing one? From a technical point of view, you're totally able to hop between summits. So if that's something that you'd like to do, perhaps you work for a nonprofit that does something in the government space so you'd want to see content from both the nonprofit and the government summit. You do have that ability to hop. I will let you know they're not, you may find that there's some breakout sessions going on or that there's some kind of engaging activity going on that you might want to make sure you can fully participate in. But as long as you find an easy way to make that transition, there's nothing that's stopping you from doing that if that's important to you. Let's see. Oh, yes. So Jeff noted that this was already answered, but Jeff had asked, it's worth reiterating, is it possible to use networking to set up a chat with a specific person rather than with a random person? And again, yes. You can absolutely use the people tab to see who was maybe someone who, again, you met in a session because they had an insightful comment or something else. You can go to that people tab, find a specific person and send them either a message in text or request a video conversation. So let's see. Another person asks, how do we actually submit buffs on the day of? Because those could come out of this hallway track. Absolutely. So if you want to submit those birds of a feather sessions on the actual day of the event, you'll do it in basically the same place that you do right now if you're submitting them in advance. So it's on the events.drupal.org slash global 2020 website under the program menu. You can find the buffs submission page and the buffs schedule. And you'll be on either that same page will just be swapped out to the form that holds it in moderation for two hours. So we have time to actually make sure it fits in the schedule or we'll do something else. But that'll definitely be the place where you do it when you want to set up those hallway track sessions. Jeff, Jeff Porton asks, I'm still a little skeptical about the hallway track. How about some sort of opt-in directory where we can post bios and info that makes it easy to find people who are interesting to talk to? Yeah, that's a good question. And there's a few tools for that. You have to understand partly we're limited by what's available in the hop-in platform. We have actually been able to ask them for certain customizations. But as you can see here, if I'm looking at Bethany's profile, first of all, if I look in the people tab over here, I do get at least their title and organization information as a first clue. And if I click through, I can get, whoops, pardon me. If I click through, I can see the custom description that they're able to enter. And then a link probably to their Drupal.org profile or a LinkedIn profile. It's not a super detailed directory, but you can post a bio into that space as a way to explain a little bit more about who you are and what you do within Drupal. So hopefully that will help a little bit and between that and seeing the conversations that happen. I'm hopeful that'll help. But certainly we can also encourage other folks within a chat session, whether it's the end of a session in progress or just in the main chat area to kind of introduce themselves. We'll be having deliberate moments during intermissions where we say, hey, now would be a great time to have some networking. Maybe introduce yourself in the chat and see if anybody wants to invite you to a call or set up a bot or something like that. So we'll be doing our best to encourage that from a moderation point of view in addition to these tools that are available. Thanks, Jeff. So we do have a little bit more time if there are some additional questions. So I'll give it a moment here. Okay, so here's a good question. So what can people searching for jobs do if they are here at Drupalcon to kind of network and look for possible employment opportunities? So I'll have to regroup with our sponsor management team, but I think part of the sponsor booths in particular in the virtual exhibit hall will have space where if those folks are hiring, they can certainly promote positions that they have available and things like that. And I think perhaps maybe we can, I'll note this for the team, but I think we could probably use some of our intermission time to create a deliberate sort of, hey, for the next 30 minutes, why don't you share opportunities that you have, things like that? And maybe do that a couple of times throughout the event. That's a great idea. In addition, of course, there's the standard resources like jobs.drupal.org, but I assume you're asking within the context of the event itself. So yeah, I'll just say a few more words in case a last question comes in and then we'll wrap up here. But again, just thank you for attending. Thank you for your faith in us in the quick turnaround from an in-person event to a completely first time virtual event on a new platform. There may be little bumps in the road, but truthfully I'm really excited about all the things that this has unlocked and made possible in terms of engaging with a more global audience and getting people here who we've never had here before. And indeed another question did come in. So are there bandwidth requirements? So there are, there's some bandwidth requirements, certainly. I mean, if your bandwidth is sufficient to participate in this webinar, it's probably gonna be sufficient for the event itself. It's, we've said for speakers that at a bare minimum if you can have at least a 10 megabit up kind of connection, we do have a page with some technical requirements on the site where I can get more details. The short answer is if you can, if you can stream from YouTube and even that the 480p kind of quality of 360, you'll probably be able to do okay. The video features do scale to people's bandwidth, but that, you know, you might experience some artifacting if you're on the lower side. I'll see if I can follow up later with more information from the website. Another question, will future Drupalcons be both virtual and in-person? We don't have all of the details of exactly what will happen next, but we're definitely thinking about this. It does seem fairly clear that there's been a shift in what it means to do technology conferences, both because of the pandemic, but also because of just what having to make that change once has made us realize about the way that maybe events should work. So certainly we're considering that as options as either having hybrid events that both they have virtual and in-person components or having separate virtual and in-person events at different times, all depending. It's definitely something we've talked about internally. I don't know that we have any final exact decisions about specific upcoming events, but yeah, it's something we're talking about. Next question, will contributions happen all week or only on Friday? They are available throughout the conference the whole time and in some ways, I think you could probably even get started a little early and continue going after the conference because that website is up and running already. So Friday is when that sort of dedicated day that we'll have some more mentorship opportunities and things like that available, but the contribution areas will be available the whole time. I think with that, we'll probably wrap it up. We kept it to a nice and tight 40 minutes. So I'd love to give all you busy Drupal people some time back, but thank you again for attending. It's really awesome to have you all here. I'm excited and looking forward to joining you all for the event in just a couple of weeks now and we'll certainly be in touch. This recording will be made available soon and we will see you then. Thanks a lot everyone.