 And we should be good. All right, well, thanks, everyone, and welcome to our first Meet the Candidate session for the 2016 at-large board of directors seat. I'm Holly Ross. I'm joining you from my craft room at home, but I'm the Executive Director of the Drupal Association and I want to start with just a few notes about how today is going to work. So a couple of notes. Everyone who's a viewer today is on mute to keep the background noise to minimum. And panelists, again, just a reminder, if you can keep yourself on mute as well, that's great. But we do want to hear from you. So make sure that you use a couple of tools that are at your disposal. The first is the Q&A window. You should have access to that. The bottom of your screen, you'll see a little Q&A button. That window is where you can ask candidates of the questions. So questions of the candidates. So feel free to use that. I'll be keeping an eye on those and passing them on to the candidates. And you can use that to target a specific person. So if you want to know something from Danny specifically or Shyamala specifically, for example, you can go ahead and ask that of the candidate or you can let us know if it's a question for everyone or anyone. You also have in there a chat icon. And use that today if you have something you need to let me know, like something technically not working, for example. Myself and Brendan Blaine from the Association are online to help you with any technical difficulties. So use your chat for that. So here's how today's session is going to work. First, we're going to have two-minute statements from the candidates. And so as a reminder, candidates, I'm going to give you a one-minute warning and a 10-second warning. So try to keep an eye out for me. I don't want to rudely cut you off. And then we're going to go into the Q&A. So candidates, since I can see you this time or at least hear from you, if you could give me some sort of signal that you want to answer a question, that would be great. I'm going to call on you guys to try to keep the cross-talking at a minimum. It's a little challenging because we have 23 candidates in this election, which means every call we have between 8 and 13 candidates on a call. So we'll do our best to keep the cross-talk down to a minimum. So raise your hand. And I'll be taking notes to try and call on people if there's a question you particularly want to tackle. Also, we're recording today's session. So if you do miss anything or you want to share it with colleagues, you'll be able to do that. We'll update the elections part of the site with that recording information as soon as we have it. And let's see. Oh, yes, just a reminder that you don't have to just listen here and ask questions here. Every candidate has a profile on the site. There's a Q&A section where you can ask questions of particular candidates there and get them answered. So candidates, just a reminder, check your profile pages for questions. I don't think that we have the, right, can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we have the little email feature for when you do get a question there. So you want to check those out. Last but not least, just a reminder that voting starts on March 7. So please vote and encourage your fellow community members to do the same thing. And I think those are all my announcements, but did I miss anything? Anyone have any questions? No? Okay, ready to go? I need vigorous head nods. Okay, excellent. All right, let's go ahead and meet the candidates. So I'm gonna go in alphabetical order by first name. So we'll start with Alexandru. If you wanna go ahead and kick us off and tell us a little bit about yourself. Hello everyone, can you hear me first? Yep, you're good. Okay, awesome. So my name is Alexandru Badiu. I come from Romania. I've started using Drupal 12 years ago. I'm probably, if not the oldest one of the oldest Drupal users in Romania. I've worked with Drupal since then. I've started the Drupal Romania Association in 2009. I've been involved in organizing the Romanian Drupal camps since then. I've also taken a keen interest in education. I used to teach at the University of Bucharest. And I started about two or three years ago hosting the Global Training Days events here in Romania together with some friends. And starting in two days, I'm going to start teaching a full semester course on Drupal 8 at the University of Bucharest, which is very, very exciting and a bit scary at the same time. And yeah, I have a special interest in education first of all and looking at how to make people interested in Drupal and how to make the initial barrier of understanding Drupal and contributing to Drupal much easier and also in communities, especially because the Romanian community hasn't been doing very well. And this one is a special interest of mine hoping to learn from other communities and improving the Romanian one as well as a result and trying to help other communities at the same time. And yeah, that's about it. I currently work at Corbis, Corbis Images. Before that, I was a long time developer on probably the largest citizen journalism website, which was incidentally built with Drupal called Demotics. It's not on anymore. It was sold to the Chinese and yeah, that's I'm out of time. So that's me. Thank you. Well played. Why it's on time. Excellent, thank you. And Danny, how about you next? You're muted. I am muted and I'm no longer muted. My name's Danny Norton. I am the director of user experience of Pyga Systems where I manage a small but scrappy team of user experience designers that work on our global web properties. And I also prior to that did a lot of work in the Drupal community, both as a UX contributor and as someone who did most of her thesis research on the experience of contributors, basically trying to ramp up and become productive as Drupal contributors. I said a lot of contributors there. So basically I'm running for the board for a couple of reasons. One, because I did all of this research and donated it to the community, but then took a job for a while where I wasn't working in Drupal and fell out of the community for a while. So now I wanna get involved again now that I'm working in a Drupal team. But also because I feel like it would be really interesting to continue not only that research, but actually help drive some of the improvements that we could make after learning all of that stuff. So I think that's it. My daughter's adorable. You should see pictures of her. I just had to throw that in there and now I'll let someone else talk. I like it. Well played. Good. Thank you guys. It was a great start. It was a great start. We're just keeping it right on time. All right, if we continue to go alphabetically, I'm gonna go with a username here because I really only call this person by his username. So Enzo, why don't we take you next? Hi everybody, good night. Okay, as Fali said, my legal name is Eduardo Garcia. Nobody knows that, but everybody knows me as Enzo in open source communities. And I am co-founder of a Drupal workshop located in Costa Rica, but I am Colombian, so it's complicated. And right now I am taking this call from Singapore because I am running a Drupal tour for two weeks ago around Asia. And my call is to try to follow some ideas I bring in the last election about how to try to help to Drupal communities in emerging markets. So I have a resolution this year and I said I will do what I promised I would try to do last year, and I am doing this year. So why I am running for Drupal Association this year? I want to try to bring to Drupal Association new business or new projects related with, try to get help from community to get a more multilingual Drupal Association in terms of documentation, not really, it's just like to try to help people to get into Drupal A or Drupal in general to remove that barrier. Not multilingual in terms of surname, it's just like for newcomers, new developers, we have a lack of that. And also to try to get on hand for the community to try to lead in trainings, provided by leaders of community in different languages. So that is my idea, stay in contact with people, try to do more multilingual and encourage them to try to contribute more in terms of community and also to lead some initiatives like Drupal Council. I am commentator of the project that helps people to try to get in as quickly as possible in Drupal A. So try to use Drupal Council please. That's it. Thanks. That's great. All right, so Dianni Enzo and now I think Jason. Okay, thank you. I'm Jason Pompantel from just outside Providence, Rhode Island and I am a little bit of everything. I've done both design and development work on the web for the past 20 years. I've worked with Drupal, rather than years, I think I'm supposed to go with version numbers. So I guess technically it was well 4.7 was out, 5.0 was in beta. So I think that's okay. But one of the things that over the years I've become to really love is that this particular part of the web community has always really been kind of home. I have the good fortune to speak at a lot of different conferences about web design and typography and that sort of thing. But it's always when I come back to Drupal Con that it feels like I know everyone there. And so every time I get more involved in the community it is really warming. And it's something that I think is pretty unique. So I'd really like to be able to help more people like me that have more of a design background become a bigger part of that community. Because efforts like Danny's to increase UX and its presence and its impact on the community are hugely important. And I don't remember if she mentioned this but she's been a huge part of the design for Drupal event in Boston for a number of years and I've been fortunate enough to work with her a little bit on that. So just in terms of how we can help more people become a part of this process I think that's really my big motivation for wanting to be a part of this. I started off with the rationale that if they let Morton do it then why not? But I didn't think that was necessarily the best slogan to go with. But I think getting more designers in the process every time I've gotten involved with things like talking Drupal or being at DrupalCon or helping with Nedcamp or D4D every time we get designers in there it just gets better so I'm hoping I can help improve that. Thanks Jason. Excellent and John I think you come next. Thanks, hi. Way to start. So I probably I started working with Drupal about 10 years ago. In that time I've had my own Drupal shop. I've moved countries to open a branch of commerce guys in the UK and then I joined Acquia headed up the solutions architecture team in Europe and now I'm a product manager for a distribution lightning which is Drupal distribution focused on the enterprise authoring and I also run the modular acceleration program at Acquia we're funding a number of contributors to get modules done. So I have a lot of involvement in kind of module development in Drupal at the moment and that's been fascinating. I think I've also been pretty involved in the community over the time. I've helped run Drupal Cam London for the past three years before I've moved to Boston just last year and I've talked to plenty of camps and kind of my roles in those companies have really meant that I've met a lot of people around the world in Drupal my current mission and the reason that I want to join the board is that I've spoken to a lot of customers and clients about where they see that deficiencies and opportunities in evolution of Drupal and I think I've got lots of interesting feedback but I want to broaden that effort and I want to reach out into the community and I think being on the board will help me do that to find out kind of what Drupal can become and what people want it to become Drupalists doers and they want, the evolution is ongoing. I really want to work out how I can help drive that forward. I've also been a member of another tech community related board, the Systems Administrative Guild of Australia. I sat on that board a number of years ago and I've been involved with other non-profits. So there's 10 seconds and that's about it. Yeah. Kids are amazing. I'm still a horrible timekeeper by the way. If I stop looking at the, if I'm looking down the entire time it's because if I look up, I forget about the stopwatch. Excellent. Thank you for that, John and Justin. Thank you for your next. There you are. That's me. Hello everyone. I will say that in preparation for this meeting I did watch the Republican convention, our Republican debate from New Hampshire and I did not pick up any pointers. I did not learn anything. So I think we're good there. I hope we don't learn anything from that. So I'm Justin. I'm from Asheville, North Carolina. Currently working as the US operations manager for commerce guys and now folding into a Canadian company called Acro Media. I started out in Drupal as a project manager with Matthew Conerton of aspiring web and my first Drupal event was Drupal Camp South Carolina where I met Ryan's Rama and Ken Ricard and I think Ryan actually helped me install Drupal for the first time. So to see that kind of level of involvement in the community was incredible. So I saw a special interest piece on a man who cuts hair for free for people that are going in to get job interviews and these could be homeless, jobless people. And I thought to myself, it would be pretty silly if I tried to cut people's hair for charity. But the way that I really love to give back and can contribute back to the Drupal community is by organizing and facilitating passionately talented people to do incredible things. So lately I've been working with Drupal Camp Asheville to organize the Drupal camp for the last three years. I've also worked with Asheville Drupal users group and this year I'm lucky enough to help organize the first ever project management track at a Drupal con in New Orleans. And Shannon's actually helped me with that. It's a great opportunity to give back to the community. So this is really something that I'm passionate about giving back to the Drupal open source community. And I've never really been excited about an open source community like I have been with Drupal. Excellent. And Shannon, I did say the first ever North American project management track. North American correction. It is the first North American one. Well, unless you count like Portland where we hijacked it, but I don't think that counts. No, road tracks don't count. Yeah. All right. Good. Thank you for that, Justin. And Ken, I think that makes you next. All right. My name is Ken. I am a 5'10 cancer. I enjoy long walks on the beach. Wait a minute. Oh, I'm sorry. Wrong chat. Wrong chat. I'm sorry. OK, guys. My name is Ken Dillard. I am the director of a web hosting company. I'm in charge of the support team. So I get an opportunity and the privilege of dealing with customers from all over the world. We have a global presence. We have customers that are in the UK, the AU, Netherlands, the Middle East, and of course, here in the United States. Drupal is something that I'm not even going to pretend that I was on board with on website number one. That would not be the case. But I've grown super fond of it. It's like a brand new romance for me. And it is hot and heavy going right now. And so what I hope to bring to the entire Drupal community is a voice to help promote Drupal, not only to bring more donor dollars and attention to it, but just to be the voice, the personality, to be able to be that person that will be able to say, hey, Drupal's awesome. Here's why. And if you don't have it, you're not part of the cool kids. So that's what I hope to bring to the community. Excellent. Thanks for that, Ken. And I think, well, I know you mostly are Schnitzel, but I also really know that your name is Michael. So Michael, you can come next. OK. Hello, everybody. Yes, so my name is Michael. Or as Holly just said, people call me Schnitzel. I didn't even know that the NTIB was called Jose. So yeah, well, I'm Schnitzel. So I want to show you three reasons why I think I'm one of the best candidates here to run for the Drupalization Board. First of all, I'm active in the Drupal community in a various forum since more than six years. I'm a core contributor myself. And I not only contribute to contrib, but also to core. So I was lucky to work with Gabor on the Drupal 8 core multilingual initiatives and work there to make Drupal 8 better. I'm a speaker myself at events. I'm an event organizer and I'm a sponsor. And not only I stop there, but I also try to teach other companies about Drupal and what the community does. Second, I actually have multiple cultural entities. So I have a team in three different continents. And I can tell you, it's not only just paying different currencies, it's a lot more. I understand the different needs of people in different cultures. I understand the different ways of communication and understand the struggles they face as a local community. And third, I have my own experience as a board member. I'm a board member of my own company, Amacy Labs. And I'm a board member of the Frontend Conference Zurich, which is an event in Zurich that we organize once a year. And I would like to highlight two initiatives that I would really like to implement when I get the large board member. First of all, I want to establish a direct communication channel to that large board members. And second, I want to bring a new initiative that is called an ambassador initiative that allows anyone who is passionate in the community to take part in bringing ideas and knowledge into the board members. So like making sessions or buffs at camps where interesting ideas and other things can be brought up. Because at the end, there are only two community representatives in the board. And we need much more. So and with having that, I think that will help a lot. So I would love you to consider for Schnitzel, where you can also call me Michael. And thanks very much. Thanks. I have to say, you guys are so good. I remember this was a lot of trouble last year. But I just want to hug you all so good with the time. Good. I think that brings us then to Shannon. We have two to go. Shannon? Hi. Can you guys hear me OK? Yep. OK. First of all, I need to apologize for any children noises in the background. We had a death in the family. And so I have my two little ones with me. So I'm trying to make lemon out of lemonade. Sorry, lemonade out of lemons. So I will try to be quick here. I've been involved in Drupal for about six years now. I started out at a small startup. And I will not go into too much detail because it's all in my profile. So you can read what I've been interested in doing. I'd like to talk to you about what I'd like to do on the board. So my main experience and where I think I'll bring the most to this community is through what I've done with Drupal 8. I've gotten a really good look behind the curtain as it were. I can see a lot of difficulties and a lot of areas that can be improved. And I've got a lot of experience working with the people who influence that the most and who are able to make those kinds of changes. Notably people like Dries and Angie and Jess and Gabor. And I think that those people, for me, along with a lot of other people in the community, are where we're going to make things happen. These are our decision makers. And they are people who can influence and who have a lot of experience, too. And I think that we are also all really, really open and people who attract community members for getting those ideas. So I think all of us together have an experience cooperating together and working on these things. And I'd like to continue doing that on the board. So I think that's one way that I can really bring a lot to this position. I also really hope to tackle several big ideas that I have, especially around education and funding. I saw how difficult it was to do Drupal 8. And I'd really like to see us improve that release process. So I think the only way to do that is by improving our education system with the community and getting more people involved, and by finding new and improved funding methods to make that happen. So those are two of the things that I'd really like to do as a board member, try and solve those problems, or at least advance them, as well as being a sounding board for the community and the things that really matter to them. So that's what I really hope to do. Let me see how much time I've got here. I think that's too much. Yep. Thanks, Shannon. Also, I love hearing baby sounds, so that was nice. Yeah, he is obsessed with the bus song, so I better go put that on. OK, good. And that brings us to our last but certainly not our least candidate, Shamala. It's nice to see you on a screen, even though it was nice to see you in person last week. Yeah. Hey, hi everybody. I'm Shamala, and I'm from the south of India, a place called Chennai. I'm a director of a company, Unity Solutions. I started my career as a civil engineer. I'm a civil engineer from a very prominent institute in India called IIT, and I took a break to spend time with my kids and got back into IIT after that, most part of which was in Drupal. I've been an active member of the Drupal community for the last nine years, and I'm pretty excited I'm contesting for the director at Large Post and the Association Board. So it was an exciting Drupal con for us in Asia, and just being with the Asian community, the Indian community, has really inspired me that I should represent them and be one of the Drupal Association Board members, bring in a national representative and contribute towards different community building strategies. And in my Drupal tenor, I've been working in multiple initiatives in Drupal projects, which has given me a large insight in understanding the goals and how the Drupal Association works. I think this is going to be a big advantage for me. And the other value adds that I have acquired to some of my experiences in the last years is a very good understanding of the local communities here in India. I also have connects with some of the Singapore community, and I've mentored a large number of local Drupal developers and Drupal businesses here in Asia. I've been an active participant of the Drupal Mobile Initiative and the Drupal.org redesign. All this, along with some of my team building and strategic decision making capabilities as part of my organization, and my activities and fundraising for Drupal, as well as for my alma mater, I think would be a big asset to the Drupal Association. And with this, I would like to just put forward that my key goals are to implement innovative community-building strategies and bring in more ambassadors to Drupal. Awesome. Thanks, Shamala. Appreciate that. All right, everyone, good job. We got through all the intros. It was great to hear about where everyone's coming from. And I think it's a real testament to the exciting world of Drupal community that we have several different continents represented here. And I'm just really excited that we have another set of really diverse candidates. So what we want to hear more about now is what your stand is on several of the different key issues that are facing the community, how you want to help inform some of those, learn a little bit more about what you want to accomplish as a board member. So just a reminder to our viewers for the webinar that this is a good time to go ahead and use the Q&A button that is available in your Zoom screen. You can go ahead and ask a question there. You can pose it for a particular person or to all of the candidates. But I definitely have a few to kick off with. And those of you that don't feel like you have to tackle every question, but definitely raise your hand. Let me know you do want to answer a question. And if you do have a response, I'll try to give everyone a chance to do it. Here, I'm going to time and try to keep our answers to around a minute so that we have time to get through multiple questions. Because if we did a minute on every single question, we'd be out of time after three or four questions. Sorry, more than a minute for every question. We'd be out of time after three or four questions. So that's the format here. Any questions, candidates? We need vigorous head shaking. OK, that's good. Danny says, no, I'm with it then. So we're going to go ahead and move into questions. And I'll start with this one. So the term for the community board seat is two years. And we did that on purpose. It used to be a year. But it takes a while to get to know the group of people and start to figure out how to contribute as a board member. So we extended it to two years so that folks could really feel like they could work on something that really mattered to them and would have time to accomplish that. So at the end of your two-year term, what is it that you would want to be able to say, I got that done? This was really important to me. And I got that done for the community. Any takers there? OK, we'll start with Jason. I think that what I'd really love to see happen is to be able to go to an event like D4D. And when you ask a room full of designers if they've been able to feel like they could contribute, whether it's in ideas or code or designs or things like what Danny worked on for the profile pages, to have more than just like one or two people raise their hand. So finding out how do we make that onboarding process more accessible and a little bit less intimidating for non-technical, non-developers to feel like they can stand up and have their voice heard and help make the project better and make the community stronger, that would be really satisfying. Great. Excellent. Who else? Let's go, Schnitzel. Hello. Yes. I think for me, and actually I was multiple times in that own situation, that there are sometimes things that I hear from people from the community saying about the DA that they don't understand or they say it would be really good if the DA does that and that. And there is no real way for the community people to just send that out, except maybe on Twitter and hoping maybe somebody off the board or somebody sees it. And what I would like to have is not a super crazy formal process, but just a way where people can bring in ideas that then are discussed and also like brought back. And actually Drupal is really good in that. Like we have websites build on Drupal, like change.org and stuff that help these things. So why shouldn't we have our own tool that allows people that to know if I have an idea, I can bring it on. I know the board will discuss about it and I will get an information back. So if there's such a system exists, that will be awesome after my two year terms. Love it. Tani? So it's interesting because being someone who is involved in the design of the profile pages, which I think took, I mean, like three months. Like it wasn't a hugely long project. But also one of the things I was able to do was catalyze the front end consensus banana, which Jason was involved in. As a matter of fact, I distinctly remember grabbing him from the hallway and saying, you, you need to be involved. That's the kind of stuff I love doing. I love finding opportunities for people to work together and figuring out who are the players that need to be in the room to make something happen. So I would definitely see myself doing a lot of that as a member of the board. I mean, a couple of other things that I really would love to see are more focused and organized design in UX sprints at DrupalCon and Drupal Events. And another thing, and this is something that impacted me personally at LA, trying to make the code of conduct at events more clear and to make it more instantly clear what should happen if an incident should occur. I had an unfortunate incident with a stalker at last year's DrupalCon. And it was only because I happened to know the board members that I was able to actually even report it. And so finding ways to make that more obvious is really important to me. That's a good point. All right, John. Thanks. I think it relates back to what I said initially. It's similar to what Michael said as well. I think we have a great process on Drupal.org of issues where we can have really deep discussions about technical issues. But sometimes those architectural decisions are made at the bottom of an incredibly long issue. And that doesn't really give access to all of the stakeholders of Drupal about what's happening or how Drupal is evolving. So I think at the end of my term, I'd hope that I had created a process where those kinds of issues can be brought up and add to a wider community. And we can give that context and allow people to engage with those issues in a semi-formal way so that the whole community can feel engaged around the direction of Drupal. Great. Good. Shyamala, I know you wanted to take this one too. What would be really exciting for me to see at the end of it is that I work with some of the communities where the participation in contribution or in community activities are not in part with what's in some others. Specifically with Asia and India, where we do have a large number of people using it, but still not leading in terms of quality and quantity of contributions. So I'd like to just build more ambassadors, bring my experience in having worked in these issues and understanding the cultural values that exist in some of these countries to bring in more contributions from there. Great. All right, I think, yes, Ken. Well, at the end of my term, my hope is that I can look back and be able to say I added to the numbers as far as the community is concerned. I think there are a tremendously large number of very, very smart people inside the Drupal community. But we need to work to bring other people that's outside that may be on the fringes of Drupal to bring them in and have that conversation. So to be able to create an atmosphere where everyday people are having everyday conversations about a very non-scary CMS platform. So my goal would be to, at the end of my term, be able to say, yeah, I actually helped bring dollars in and I helped generate a very un-cumbersome, a very non-scary conversation about Drupal and increase those numbers of people worldwide that are able to come in. Awesome. All right, Alexandra, there you go, you found it. Yes, yes. Big screen. So what I would like to accomplish at the end of my term would be growing up communities, especially the one in Romania, and learning more about them and helping them, and also trying to set up a way of helping people get into Drupal, either as a standalone person likes more resources like the Drupal ladder, but also for people trying to teach others about Drupal, such as the Global Training Days event, because I started doing global training events because I already had teaching experience, but I found it very difficult to actually figure out how to present Drupal to people who have no idea what Drupal is and make them understand. A very simple example is until I started making an analogy that fields, entities, and bundles are like relational databases. Nobody actually got fields, entities, and bundles. And I think that there's also a barrier because a lot of us are very good programmers, but if we go and start doing teaching about technical stuff, basically what I want to say, have some sort of online repository where people can look and see how they should present what works, what other people say that works. Nice, that's good. I'm going to stop. Thanks, that's great. And so... So, how I see myself if I get the election for Drupal Association in two years, I think it would be great to change the image people have about Drupal Association because in emerging countries, I feel people think Drupal Association is like a distant uncle and rich uncle, and they always try to get a lot of money for them, but I think we can do some kind of mentoring to try to create leaders in community, to try to help them to encourage their own community to resolve their own problems. Maybe going together, but it's like to try to change that image and it's because maybe there is some distance between Drupal Association and new communities. It's just an effort. We can compromise together to try to improve that relationship. Great, thanks. All right, excellent, Justin. I figured I'd have to weigh in. I've heard Drupal has been called a duocracy, meaning that those that are actively doing rise to natural leadership roles. And I believe that after two years of me working with the Drupal Association, you'll find that the Drupal community is a more connected place where the strongest and also the most interested and passionate have the ability to connect with the people that aren't quite there yet, that want to contribute just as well. And I think that's something that every single person has spoken about, at least mentioned, that there's just a misconnection with some people that wanna contribute or with people outside of the community. And as a person coming from marketing, as well as sales and as well as project management with the organizational skills and the ability to appeal to a mass audience, I think that's what I hope to give to the Drupal community. Good, and then I know Shannon, I can't see you, but I think you have something you wanted to share as well. Right, so I think when I come out of this position, if I'm elected to the board, I think I'd really like to say I helped figure out how to figure things out. There's one thing I saw helping on Drupal 8, it was that there was a lot of problems around release process that could easily be solved if we had the right tools. And I think I saw specifically Gabor's rocket ship tool that solved a lot of those communication issues and kind of brought everything into a really focused group of workers. And I think that that's what we need as a community and as a group trying to pull out another version of Drupal and I don't know how many years, hopefully not as many as we took for Drupal 8, but it would be great to have the ability to put into place that solution for all of the major initiatives. And I really support Michael's idea of putting forward a way to consolidate a wish list if you were and develop a product backlog for core as a whole. I think that's a tough thing to do. And if we could do those two things, I think that we would have not only the ability to say this is what the community wants, but also this is how we can organize it and get it done. And that would enable us to do a whole lot more, a whole lot better. Awesome. Okay. Did everyone have a turn there? Is anyone who didn't go wanted to answer? All right. And I'm gonna go ahead and move on. We have a question from the community. I think this is a great question because although you're the community elected board member, service on the board is definitely different than a lot of the roles that you play in the community. One of the ways that it's different is that it's a more strategic role. So the board doesn't spend time actually necessarily literally going on to Drupal.org and making changes for the association, for example, but they try to set a longer term direction for what we should be working towards as opposed to executing on what we can do that day. Hopefully that made some sense. So there's definitely some differences there. And I'd love to see from folks, how do you see being a DA board member different than you see as your current role as an active community member? So it's a question from one of our community members there. Anyone wanna tackle that? Okay, Alexander. I answered it by a text, but I can do it live as well. I think there's a tremendous opportunity to actually learn a lot of stuff by being the DA board member rather than just be even not normal but known standalone community member. And I also think that as Nito said, you can influence and you can listen and then take over to the association the problems of the community while being a normal community member, you don't really have that chance and you might have good ideas but they then end up buried in 100 plus replies, threads and things like that. Thank you. Thanks. Shyamala. Hi. I very strongly feel that the community must be represented from different cultural backgrounds and many of the strategic positions that are getting done would be benefited from having me from representing a different cultural background. And you're right in saying that many of the things that we could do, we could otherwise drive independently in achieving some of these goals but some of these need to be at a strategic level more at the DA. And that's where I think the value would be. Great. Jason. So I think that one of the things that has always been a focus in my work has actually been more at the strategy level than at design and implementation. And that's actually where I would really want to be a bit of a lightning rod. When you're working on a localized scale, organizing a local meetup, that's one way of building the community but by being a person who is sort of in that wider web design world but also part of the Drupal community and coming from more of a design background rather than a technical one, it helps be a focusing element on bringing in some of these ideas that could really benefit the community. And I think that it's really important for us to get those perspectives there, not to do things on the tactical level but to really help get things moving conceptually. Great. Danny. At least forget I'm on mute. Yep. I mean, the biggest thing for me about being a board member versus being just a community member is it sort of cements my involvement in a way. And one of the decisions that I made early on when I was contributing was that it was more important for me to contribute to Drupal.org than it was to contribute to the Drupal project itself. And part of that is just my skill set. I do information architecture and user experience strategy for large content heavy work websites and I'm obsessed with helping people get their work done and find the information they need. So that to me felt like a better fit for my skill set. And I feel like I'd be able to do a lot more of that on the board than just being a normal or not normal but like just basically showing up at contribution sprints at events which is what I've been able to do to date. Makes sense. John, I think you wanted to tackle this too. Yeah, thanks. You might think on a day-to-day basis I already do. I'd already tried to engage with community in this way. You know that I co-authored blog posts around concepts that I think are controversial and need to be in the community and I engage with lots of community members but I think the association has a mandate to engage the community as a whole. And as I think Jason was saying as a lightning rod for these issues, I think I would be able to take up that mandate and actually become and be able to more easily engage with the community as a whole rather than just the people I'm working with directly or rather than just through blogging or other public posting and then put some systems around that as well. Sasha, this will hand up. Yes. So I think being part of the community is actually about implementing and doing stuff. For me myself, it is specifically getting to relate more multilingual but being on the board, my job I would more describe it as making the environment for all the people that are in the community as smooth as possible, as easy as possible to allow them to do the tasks without hurdles, without issues and stuff like that. Nice to see that myself, I used to be executive team on my own company and now I'm more and more only on the strategy level and it's definitely a hard task because you have to plan ahead really, really long to make sure that everything is correct and you also have to try to get every idea that people have to get them somehow in but I feel I'm really, really interested in working on the board in making the pavement as smooth as possible for the community to continue to do great stuff. Awesome and so I think I saw you also. So I think everybody's doing a community effort in many levels and this job is basically about to do a crisis. So you do the best part, what you think is better for your local community but a big part of the Drupalization Board, I think it's everything about negotiation. Like you need to do a concess about with the rest of the board about what is the best solution and what is the best way to implement so your job or what I think is more to try to read about the community and to try to send these messages to the board through your voice and try to find a balance. So maybe I am sure it's pretty different than my current role because bureaucracy is not what is necessary in Drupalization Board from my point of view. Great. Justin, I saw you as well. Thank you. So I do see the position as being different and similar but to address the differences, I think the main difference in a position separate from just a member of the community is being able to tap into the larger scale resources that the Drupal Association has at its disposal not only including devices to institute change amongst the community but also providing board members kind of a funnel for community feedback allowing the association to gather more insight to properly serve the community. Conversely, I see the similarity as being this position being a place where highly motivated people kind of push the Drupal community farther and faster than it currently is going or than it currently could go with just community members behind the wheel. As you say, this is a strategic position. So working in the background of larger companies and seeing these large institutions move, that experience I think lends itself to the Drupal Association. Awesome. All right. I think, Shannon, you might be the only person we haven't quite heard from yet. That's because everybody said probably what I was going to say. I think the association has a unique position in that it can receive information from the community that's its purpose. It also has a lot of means that the average contributor doesn't have, notably budget and the ability to decide what to do with that budget and different people who have influencing roles and can decide where that should go and what should happen. So I think everyone also said that. So I will just keep it short and sweet and say that I agree with that. And I think that being a part of that association board is a way to do more with the means and facilitate communication in a way that you can't as a basic community member. Nice. Okay, did I miss anyone? Oh, so sorry, Ken. That's okay. Shannon kind of stole my answer. So I'm going to go with answer B. For me, it would be getting an opportunity to talk to customers every day. So I get an opportunity to not necessarily pull a username off of a message board, but I'm actually hearing from corporations. I'm hearing from end users about Drupal itself. So this would give me the opportunity to funnel that information directly to the board members. I consider myself a exceptional communicator. And so to be able to get that information to the board, to be able to get it out to the community and to be able to engage on this and customers and corporations to be able to ask them the right questions, to be able to get the full user experience for the purposes of making Drupal better. It took five years to get to Drupal 8. I don't know what 8.5 is going to look like, but we can't do it in five more years. We want to close that window. And the only way we can do that is everyone contributing what they have, adding a piece to it and moving the whole Drupal movement forward. That's what I plan to do. Awesome. Great. So another question, this topic comes up a lot, is another question from the community. And the question as it was phrased was, do you think that the DA should be less Americanized? And I think everyone will just nod yes. Even me, even me, I swear. Yes, I get that. So, but I want to maybe ask this in a more challenging way, which is what is it that the association can do to be less Americanized? How do we help embrace more of the, you know, cultures that are represented in the Drupal community? So, Daniel, let's go. My hand is up too. Shannon, all right, that's good. Shannon, I'll go with you first. I'm sorry? I'm sorry? Go ahead and go first, Annie. Okay, so one of the things that I noticed when I was doing research on the experiences of French contributors is that the French actually have their own version of Drupal.org. And there's a very good reason for that. It's because legally you cannot make content available in English that is not as understandable in French as it is in English. This is a law. And this is one of the reasons why the French are actually the most active Drupal contributors when it comes to localization. So, to me, one of the easiest ways to accomplish this goal is to actually make Drupal.org multilingual. And to make sure that there are people who are actively working in all of these different countries, all of these different languages, who are working on translating our content, who are working on really making Drupal.org a global website. Awesome, thanks for that. Shannon, let's ask what have you next? Okay, so, sorry, can I go next? My son needs to... I don't worry, sorry. Shannon, I'm on break. Ken, go ahead. I think the key is going to be, and I think Danny hit it right on the head because this is not only a Drupal problem, it's a CMS problem globally where you just have different fashions of different people, different organizations, different, excuse me, different people, different cultures, different CMSs. And then we have one version here in America, one version overseas, it's just a complete mess. So the task is to try to make it more international. But I would also like to, for the entire group to consider, before we can even go international, we have to make certain that we are making Drupal here a more cultural experience because honestly, there have been times where I would walk into these sessions, I'd be the only black guy in the room. And that's not uncommon. And so we need more minorities, period, before we can, we need to be able to establish that here. And then we can also do the multilingual thing, but we don't want to do one without the other. They both have to work hand in hand. That's a great point, excellent. Jason, and so I see you there too. As a middle-aged white American, it's guy, it's hard for me to necessarily take a big stance on this other than the fact that I agree. So without completely discounting myself, I will claim minority status as a designer. But I think that that's the way all of the communities work. There's issues with background, there's issues with the way people communicate, and that's language, and that's cultural bias, it's all sorts of national laws that come into play. But I think that's what's been so wonderful about the Drupal community is that any time I've gone to an event from here to Sydney to Munich, that community is incredibly welcoming. We just need to make sure that all of the different kinds of voices can be heard. And so while I can't exactly do quite as much with this appearance, at least with other backgrounds that can help those voices be heard. Awesome. And so why don't you go next, and Alexandra, I see you too. Okay, as a Latin American person who live in a... Sorry? Sorry to put you off, Shannon, I just wanted to say I could go at any time and back. All right, Shannon, we'll take you after that though. Okay, so as a Latin American person who live in a developing country, like in this Costa Rica, I could say right now it's not the Drupal Association fall because we don't have more non-American representatives because we don't have enough impact in this election in our countries. If you see, we have a lot of people in India and Latin America, in Asia, and we don't have a person elected last time from those countries. So the Drupal Association already have the elements. Just because we don't have enough power in our communities to try to empower people. So I don't think we don't need a change in Drupal Association. We need a change in our communities to try to get involved more people, to get involved for people they are represented for these kind of communities. Thanks, Anzo. All right, Shannon, let's hop over to you. Alexandra, I still see you. Just so you know. Okay, I'm gonna be really quick again with this. I think it's a great idea to put into place the tools that we need, but I think it's also really, really important to develop the networks. When you're dealing with communities, the most important thing is to find the spearheads in those different networks. And if one of our goals is to create a more, well, a less-Americanized, a more internationalized group of people that are represented as the community, then we should try and find the leaders in those communities and create the networks for change locally. That's how I think that is gonna come about. If we can find people or inspire people to try to step forward into leadership roles locally, we can get other people to say, oh, hey, there's that person that's in my area or at least my region and I can talk to them. And I think setting up the network is the way that we're gonna make that happen. Great point. Tooling and networks, yep. All right, Alexandra. So while I think that setting up multilingual Drupal.org or individual chapters in different countries of the Drupal Association is a very good idea, I think that it's something that we should look at as a very long-term plan. Because someone like the French who have already a ton of content and a place to go will not easily migrate to a Drupal.org and move all their content and all their forms and all their users. Similar is with setting up individual chapters. It's going to be very hard and in some countries with small communities is just not going to be possible. But I think what we can do very easily and which wouldn't require a lot of time and preparation is basically just maybe elect, maybe choose people from different countries or different cultures and listen to them from time to time. Set up meetings with them, make them some sort of as the point person to go to for that particular country, for example. Thank you. Excellent. Shamala. I think Drupal Association has a very good already a system of recognition which they follow in terms of contributions that happen in different areas. This needs to get more localized and we should start recognizing participation in different areas and also agree with Shannon and others to say that we must have identified user champions and ambassadors in these countries. I mean, just having a localized version of the website is not sufficient, it's more to drive and see that we understand the cultural differences and we're working with different people in these groups to drive this participation and the community to a greater levels. Great. Okay. Who did I miss? Anyone else wanna tag? Oh, Schnitzel, sorry about that. No problem. I fully agree that we should have a multilingual Drupal Association or Drupal.org, we should have possibilities for locals to bring it in. But to be honest, and maybe that's a bit of a crazy way, but there's a saying in German, there's the fish stinked from kopf her up or in English, the fish rot from the head down. I really think the Drupal Association should be as diverse, the Drupal Association board should be as diverse as possible. If we are talking about bringing locals in and there is mostly US people on the board, that's sending a really bad or not a good point. So I think we should try to get the Drupal Association board as diverse as possible to also make sure that everybody that just goes on the board and sees that there are people from all over the world that they feel represented by them in the board. Because if they see that, they would ultimately feel more appointed to it. And so maybe we could even go further and having local Drupalizations in the different continents. I know that's really expensive to have local, but that's maybe a longer term goal, but I think we should really have from diverse people from different countries, different genders in the board that really represents the community. Thanks, Michael. I'm gonna know that you didn't mean to call me a rotting fish. Well, I'm a board member at other points, so sometimes even myself, I know how to heal the story. That's okay. Justin, yep, you. Yeah, I'll make this quick because I know we're a little over time, but I do think that Drupal currently is diverse. Now, is it diverse enough? No, but at the same time, I can't imagine a world where we place sanctions or guidelines for specifically bringing in a specific population into the Drupal Association. That being said, I think the marketing to those populations is what really can take place to diversify the Drupal community. And I also understand that there's an organizational situation where the Drupal Association is mostly English speakers. So having somebody come into the board that doesn't speak English primarily or even tertiary, it makes things difficult. So there is a kind of organizational change that could happen with kind of breakout regional groups. And I think that's incredible, but as the community is growing, I think you're already starting to see that. Little pockets of leadership all around the world. And that kind of organic development and growth is really interesting to me. Good, I think that's actually a great segue into another question from the community around this building local communities and we see it happening already. And I know people ask me my opinion about this all the time and I'll be happy to supply it to you in another forum, but how do you guys feel about having different associations set up in different countries and continents, right? We, they exist in some places and not in others. Is that the right strategy for the association or what do you guys think that we should be doing? So I'm gonna take Enzo first and then I see your hand, Danny. I think for our experience in Costa Rica, we have a Drupal Association in Costa Rica. That helped us, especially with Drupal camps because that provide a strong background for companies, for sponsors to try to support the community. So that allow the community to grow out independently because in other way, they're the sponsor, they will say, wait a minute, so you are a group of kids than they want to I give $10,000 in a personal account. Oh, that sounds crazy. And without funds, sometimes at the beginning, it's really hard. So I think, I don't want to talk about the other things like about governability and everything, but at least for that organization, financial process, that helps a lot as a community to try to grow out. Great. Danny, and then I see you, John and Alexander. So personally, I have, well, I don't know if this opinion is controversial. I don't actually mind different regions having their own Drupal Association as long as they talk to each other and they come together in a shared mission. I feel like it's really difficult for a volunteer driven organization to be as global as we think we're going to be and maintain the ability to work together effectively. So for me, it's like, okay, well, there's a Planned Parenthood that has a global, it has a global office, but then there's all of these different sub-branches and they all talk together and they all work together towards the same mission. I kind of feel the same way about Drupal Associations personally. Awesome, thank you. Let's hear from John and then Alexander and Shannon. I see that your hand is up as well. Yeah, so I've actually been involved in this issue within Drupal and outside of Drupal as well. I was part of a nonprofit organization called ISEC that's a graduate exchange organization. And I think, something I learned there that is that local chapters are great logistically, as I was saying, I mean, how about sponsorship and other things like that? And within Drupal, I've been involved kind of in talking about the formation of an English association and the kind of trouble that there was getting consensus around that and what that would mean for the community there who are already very engaged in the global organization. I think we all are writing one piece of software. And so it's really important to have a single organization, not a sharded organization that has three independent bodies or independent bodies per country. I think that it's important to have everyone engage in the global organization. And I think we can do that a lot better than we're doing it right now, possibly, but just because it's evolving because the organization has grown. It was originally in Europe and it moved over to the US and the community has grown and there's lots of things we can do now that weren't relevant previously to have better engagement, but I think it's important to keep one organization with chapters. Thanks. Alexander, you wanna go next? Yes, unless Shannon needs to run, so I will let her if she wants. If you want me. Up to you, I don't care either way. I've got about two more minutes of cartoon attention span. Why don't you go ahead then, Shannon? Yeah. Okay, I'll be really quick so that you can go, Alexander. Thank you very much, that's kind of you. I think my perspective on this is basically that I've seen both in different work experiences, something that was very big and very centralized and something that was very big and decentralized. And my experience has been that when you have the decentralization and you have many groups that are regional, working together and reporting up to a bigger global group, two things happen. First of all, they're very focused on what they do and so they can get a lot more things done. But there is a disadvantage of that which is that you also see those people not really caring about the global structure and not really feeling like they're getting their input at times and also the global structure has a difficulty consolidating all of that. So my personal preference is to have the global organization with delegates and have regular meetings with those delegates and make sure that the collaboration happens in a organic fashion because if you decentralize it into multiple DAs, then I think that those DAs are going to become somewhat disconnected from the whole in some way and focus on what they do and what they want and feel somewhat separated from the whole. And I think that's not the goal. I think what we want to do is try and represent everyone and work together. So I would say keep one big organization with delegates. Thanks, Shannon. And thanks again, Alexander, that was really gracious. And that was really cool. And I've got a run, so thanks everybody. I'm so sorry, I can't stay with the whole thing, but at the next one, I won't be by myself. So I'm gonna be a lot better. Thanks, Shannon. Well played. Bye, guys. So we have an organization in Romania and it helped us tremendously when it came to organizing events because we were able to go to Microsoft, for example, and as someone else said, they weren't putting money in our personal accounts, but rather in our own association. And also, it helped us with the trademark usage and things like that. But at the same time, right now, I don't feel that we're actually getting anything out of this association apart from this. So we don't really have a voice up there. At the same time, I don't think that we need to enforce this because there's simply going to be situations where people will not want to make an association. So I think, and yes, just sharding into lots and lots and lots of small, small associations across the world is probably going to be a logistical nightmare. So I guess the solution is somehow this representatives of members. And if they want to do the association because it helps, or if we somehow set up a way that they are recognized so that they can go and organize local events without being weird to companies, that would really help. Thank you. Great. Who did I miss? Jason. I think that we've all been kind of coming around to something that I think is a really interesting model rather than separate chapters. I think the idea of a Congress of sorts that can have representatives from many countries and regions that come together at Drupal Cons or something like that to help make sure that all of these perspectives are considered, I think really has a lot of possibilities because you don't have lots of separate organizations and the additional overhead and management and that sort of thing, but you still get the benefit of something bigger than the board, a next circle out of people that can come in and make sure that those voices are heard on a very regular basis. And that would enforce the fact that you can't be overly weighted by one country or another. Great. Any other papers on that? All right, Justin. And then Shyamala, I'll get you. These ideas that people are talking about are so incredible. And this is why I love the Drupal community. There's so many dreamers. There's so many intelligent people. The kind of organizational nightmares that these things are, are doable, yes. But for a two-year term, those would be incredibly hard to accomplish. That being said, my favorite book in the world, the complete business process handbook. This is how you document workflow from one organization to another, one party to another in these massive organizational ways. And that's, that's an interesting thing to me. That's something that I spent my own time doing and being able to create these networks, being able to really infiltrate into small communities with the ability to hear their voices up to the top. That's, that's fascinating to me. And that's something that I was really frustrated with in jobs prior to coming to the Drupal world. And that's something I've, I've seen a great increase in the ability to do, but at the same time, something I'm also interested in, in potentially adding, adding capabilities to. Awesome, thank you. All right, Shamala. Okay, so, yeah, I totally agree that it's, there's a lot of effort that goes into building smaller organizations and associations at different levels. And the central Drupal Association is probably now more important for them to be more accessible to many of these communities. And that's, that's kind of what's been happening with them reaching for camps and funds and other community building initiatives. If the association itself becomes more reachable and available, the overhead of building small organizations wouldn't exist and it would be easier for the local communities to actually focus more on community building activities. And many of this, we're constrained by time just to even participate or be part of the community. This would really remove an overhead and make the Drupal Association a central body. Great. Okay, and Kent. Just real quick, I wanted to just add to everyone is just throwing out great ideas, but I also wanted to add that while it would be a logistical nightmare, I know that's kind of a strong word. I think that minus a voice for the people that are using Drupal outside of the United States would be a great travesty if we didn't create some vehicle in which they had a clear voice and we're able to hear them on a consistent basis. I think that the indirect message that we send if we don't create that vehicle, regardless of how it would happen, is that they're not important or what they have, their thought process doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. So I think if we're talking about community, we won't be afraid of growth and we will just grant and bear it and make it happen regardless of what it will take to make it happen. If it's a community, we're all in it together. I know that sounds corny and cliche-ish and all that, but we're all in this together. So regardless of what it would cost us, we have to be one of the pay the price if we're really considering growing this community. Great. All right, did I mess anyone who wanted to answer that question? All right, and I'm gonna move on to the next one. So there is for the association, there's a distinct difference, sort of delineated between what the association does and what the Drupal product teams do, right? So the association supports the community. Our mission is to help make sure that the community can produce the software and get it out to as many people as possible. But what we don't do is touch the code, right? That's up to Dries and the core maintainers to figure all that stuff out. However, this year in leading up to, well, it was actually last year, leading up to Drupal 8, we did take a step of helping to fund the project in a way we'd never done before with the Drupal 8 Accelerate program. We actually provided money that the core maintainers were able to use at their discretion to fund work to get the D8 release out the door as quickly as possible. So that was a little bit controversial in the community and for totally understandable reasons, but also we felt pretty darn effective at helping to move some of those bugs forward and get the release done. I think no one involved feels like Drupal 8 would have been out in November if we hadn't done that. So I'd love to hear from you guys, where did you feel about the Drupal 8 Accelerate program and do you feel like there's room for more or different kinds of programs in this kind of arena? So, Schnitzel, you seem ready to answer, so we'll go with you. Yes, to be honest, I was one of them that when we announced that was a bit worried that we are going into a field that we've never been before, but now I can say it was definitely the right decision, so good job, D.A., and whoever was involved in that. I think what we have to see that it was a special occasion because the people were already desperate, were already really wanting Drupal 8 and everybody that chipped in, if it's companies or personal people, they knew what they're chipping in. If we do something now, it's really hard to tell the people what their money will go to because making Drupal 8 better, like yes, there are the new ways of releases, so with the minor releases, we could do something again, but I don't feel that specific thing will work again, also because I've felt a lot of people said, like, no, I already gave money, now I would do it again, but that doesn't mean that the problem itself is not fixed and it's definitely something where we need to know a lot of information of a lot of people, of how they feel, and I don't think just 12 people can actually decide that it's a big topic and we have to tackle it. Now you mute it, Holly. Sorry, I forgot I muted myself to pour tea without making that tea pouring sound, but John, why don't we go with you next? Sure, I'll try and keep it brief, but I think D.A. Accelerator was great and Aqueer has funded module acceleration and that's the program, one of the programs that I'm running, but I wanna take that forward as well and have companies sponsor acceleration of particular modules and I think it is hard to sponsor minor releases, but it's not hard to say we really need this module and that can benefit everyone. And so I've written about this, so if you wanna know more about it, there's a blog post out there on Aqueer.com, but I think it's actually, the module ecosystem is such a huge part of what Drupal is. Drupal is Lego or is a puzzle and it's really addresses difficult use cases and edge cases by people being able to site build and put together modules and so it's actually really relevant to accelerate the module ecosystem as well. Excellent, good work. Jason and then Ken. I am in agreement with pretty much everybody else's said. I was really happy with that idea because it was, as Chisel pointed out, very focused and targeted and I think that was really the key to that success and then building on that what John brought up by being so focused that it's this module. We can't use Drupal 8 until Path Auto is really working. We can't do enterprise content management until images in responsive styles are baked into a text editor. Those are things that we can focus and rally around and say there's an end point and there's a specific goal and we can scope it much in the same way that responsive image community group funded and supported the development of responsive images in the HTML core itself. So I mean, I think there's ample precedent and I think it's easy to keep it tightly scoped so it doesn't become this sort of miscellaneous, we just want to dump money into something but I think it's really critically important to make sure that Drupal can quickly become usable in whatever its current release is. Awesome. Good, let's talk to Ken and then Justin and then Alexander. Overall, I didn't have a concern with it at all. I thought it was the right thing to do. If we look at the release history of Drupal and we look just from six to seven, there was a few issues there as far as modules working, moving into the seven arena. So I had customers coming back to me saying, well, can I upgrade my modules? Well, yes, a great module in six but it just doesn't work in seven. So as eight is about to be released and again, keep me honest guys, it took approximately five years to do that. It was imperative that we hit it out the park, that we released a quality product in eight and as we moved to nine that this product continues to get better. So my only concern if I had one was ensuring that when eight was released, it was going to be all of that. It was going to be exactly what the community needed and everything was going to work and modules, it was an upgrade path, modules were going to continue to be able to be implemented and that seemingly is the case. So I had no issues with it at all. Awesome. And Justin, Gemlai C2. So it's so interesting to me to see these incredible developers that have made their fortunes, literally fortunes off of Drupal that don't have the time to be able to contribute or to do core work. And I think that the best way that they could possibly contribute is by financial contributions and to use that to propagate the rest of the world, the rest of the non CEOs, CTOs, CFOs that have a long term history in Drupal to propagate their careers and to grow the community and the reach that Drupal has not only as a CMS but as a community, a loving family that has opened itself up to me and all of you here. I think that only makes sense being able to use financial backing from people that have made their livelihoods in Drupal to push the CMS further. Thank you. Alexandra. I didn't have a problem with the program and honestly we've been doing this kind of stuff with a very smaller scale since the early days of Drupal having companies sponsor a modular two or three. So I think we should continue this. I think it's on the other hand, we need to be very careful about it and how we do it and it should be on a case by case basis. But in case of Drupal 8, I was really happy that it happened and that it didn't prolong the release date any longer. But at the same time, there's always going to be people who are not going to like it. There's a lot of people who feel that Acquia is taking hold of Drupal talent so they might say, why don't you guys sponsor it? So we're not going to be able to make everyone happy but I think that in general, people will be happy if this happens again and especially since it produces such a good result. Thanks. All right, we can talk to Shyamala and then Danny, I see you. There's a good strategy move to bring in the fundraising at the right time for D8 and this probably not should be like rightly said on a case to case basis but it gives people who don't have time to contribute that right opportune moment in alternate path for them to actually sponsor or fund others who needed to make a global need to get Drupal 8 faster up for us as a Drupal community ahead of them. Awesome. All right, Danny? So I think a number of things happened with Drupal 8 that were revolutionary in the history of Drupal. We haven't had WYSIWYG in core, we haven't had views in core. There were a lot of really exceptional additional issues that we had to deal with in terms of getting out of the product with Drupal 8, things we hadn't thought about before. Most of those things that we're talking about, most big modules are sponsored by one development shop or another. This is something and we make a case periodically for hiring core contributors to just work on core. If we're gonna do that and make that choice as a community, I don't see why the Drupal Association wouldn't be part of that. Okay, do I miss anyone who wanted to weigh in there? Okay, I've got one last question. It's 8.30, we've been here about an hour and a half. I've got one last question for you guys, which is, here's the setup. Back in May, we released issue credits on Drupal.org. So it's a new system that allows us to track, it's issue and comment credits, sorry, back on Drupal.org. So it's a new system, tracks the data within Drupal.org itself, so now we can learn all kinds of interesting things. For example, we learned something that we long suspected that the in-in community on the whole was contributing to Drupal.org at rates that were pretty significant compared to the West, so US and Europe, and we hadn't really had that kind of visibility before. So that's been really exciting. At the same time, the issue credit system, there's lots of interesting stuff that can or could happen. There's some concerns that it might gamify contribution or that the comment credits in particular, encourage people to leave comments on issues that aren't adding value to the issue, right? So there's some stuff going on there with the issue credits. So I'm curious to hear from candidates, do you think the system we've put in place, and I should say the whole goal was to encourage more contribution by making contribution more visible. Do you think the system we've put in place is achieving that goal and how do you wanna change it to make it even more effective? So I know everyone has talked about wanting to bring more people into the community, keep the community really engaged, and this is one of the primary tools we've been using. So Enzo, and then we'll go to Jason. I think it was really effective. I think recognition is really important. I am really happy with that. The only chance I could introduce is maybe an enhanced and try to do the same with documentation and with translation, because right now, people who contribute in documentation and translation, they don't get any possibility, even if they spend hours or weeks doing that. Yeah, that's a great point. It's a big regret of mine right now, too, but that's also something that's solvable for the future, hopefully, so. And then Jason? Sure. Well, I guess my first reaction is not knowing enough about it, even though I've been participating in the SUQ a reasonable amount in recent months. So I guess it goes along with my experience as a designer. I think we actually could probably do a better job of just letting people know how it all works and then making sure that it's very clear. I think that unless we have some massive skew in things, I don't want us to assume there's a problem with gamification or people not adding value, because I think the data that we get out of this, this understanding of patterns is just hugely important and I think that I have faith in our community. Thanks, Jason. I'm gonna go to Danny next and then I see you, Schnitzel. So I think one of the things, one of the things that's important to think about when you're talking about gamification is generally people in the world tend to assume it's badges and they get very annoyed because they hate badges or they love badges, either one. I talk to executives every day about gamification and that's the thing that always comes up and I've seen comments on Drupal.org about gamification. It's about badges and people are annoyed. So just like the important thing here is to be able to from a macro level, say this is the ecosystem of who contributes to Drupal and it is much larger than code commits. And I think on that level, giving that issue credit is important. I also think it's important to note that a technological solution only is not going to solve that problem because Jason can probably agree with me, as designers, most of the stuff we do is not gonna be in the issue queue. It's gonna be at an event actually talking to somebody. People who are leading sprints, people who are mentoring at sprints, they're not on Drupal.org trying to give themselves credit. They're just getting in, digging in and doing the work. So you have to find a balance between the technological solution and the human solution. Great. Thanks, Danny. Schnitzel, and then I see you, Alexandra. Yes, I can actually talk from experience. I'm one of, like in Switzerland, I'm one of the ambassadors of Drupal for other companies that maybe start to do community stuff. And then they come to me at Drupal Cons and say like, hey, have you seen? I'm on page 11, and my company is on page 11. I have a core comment, and that's really great. So the gamification for me, it definitely works. But I fully agree with the others. We have to be careful to not only do commits and comments. Like people of my company spend a huge amount of time in organizing the cons. Like, it's a tremendous amount in looking through all the sessions. And I know there's so many other volunteering going on and stuff. So I think it was a really great test in knowing if the community will like it. And I feel, yes, it does. And now we have to continue. We have to make sure that any kind of contribution somehow gets validated. And I don't know the point system or whatever, but we have to make sure that somehow people will whatever do. And at the end, it doesn't really matter if it's really, if how much point it is or whatever, but just showing it that they did something helps a lot and gets people excited and like to show the Drupal.org pages. So I think, yes, we should continue doing that and even broadening it up to any kind of contribution that happens that is somehow trackable. That's great. Thank you. Schnitzel, let's go to Alexandra. And then I saw you Ken. I guess regarding the current situation with the issue credits, I think a good idea would be to cross the bridge when we get there. I don't know if it's a problem right now if people are doing bad things or trying to do that, but I feel that the current way of the maintainer actually marking something as helpful is pretty good. But I agree with everyone else. We should, first of all, find a way to mark contributions made in other areas that are in a way, let's say, technological, such as, for example, translation. We have had a very large number of people doing Romanian translations in the last couple of months, but they are not represented at once. Those contributions aren't really seen. Same goes for helping on forums and things like that. But at the same time, try to find a way of actually highlighting people who are doing these kinds of things outside the websites. Organizing conferences, doing training days, of helping people, organizing local events and things like that. It's going to be tricky. It is tricky. It's not a solution. It is tricky, but it's good work. Ken. I think that one of the things worth considering is analytical people like data. So it's important that the why of why it's being done is explained. So it might be just simply, it hasn't been communicated to the degree that people even understand the end game with it. Keep it in mind also that you're not going to be able to please everyone in the sandbox, but if the data supports a greater good and that can be explained and shown through data, people will say, oh, I get it. Keep it in mind that the community is a community of thinkers. So you can't just say, hey, we're going to do this. It has to be backed up with some level of numbers and graphs and data. So that's people's learning style. So they will get it if it was presented in that manner. So we may need to go back and see if the communication of why it's being done and then the end game being explained has been adequate. Really good point. Good. Shyamala, I saw you. Any other takers? All right, Justin, you'll be next. So I think it's very user points and getting them to motivate themselves, motivate more participation by bringing in points of credit is a good way to go. But I also chime in with the others to say that there must be ways to recognize non-code contributions far more than we have today. And these also probably go a long way in building the community and hence needs its due recognition. Also, we need to make sure that as we're getting more numbers, how do we ensure that we have quality contributions and how do we wait these contributions based on certain criteria? Because one big fear would be people who just doing these tiny contributions, which are important. They must be points for consistency. They must be ways to wait it for consistency, ways to wait it for quality of work. So I think this is something that should evolve over the next year or two to make sure that we bring in and factor all these criteria into the system that we are building today. Great. Good, Justin. I think that gamification of contributions has been a free or cheap way that Drupal has really grown. And in that, I also understand that the saturation had to be there and the interest had to be there in the idea in order to spread that gamification to other areas outside of Drupal Core. So that is, I think it's on the way. I think that the Drupal Association has that in mind well in advance before we started talking about it considering it and I hope to push that forward. Also, I'd like to kind of address this two year change that I've seen. I remember being around some old school Drupalers talking about their Drupal user numbers. And now, and also that was a conversation in interviews. And now I see people talking more about their contributions, how many credits they have on their Drupal user profile. And I think that that's just a testament to how interested the Drupal community is in not only ranking itself, but also showing its overwhelming involvement. And I think that's only gonna continue regardless if we figure out how to further incentivize. The Drupal community is gonna self-regulate as well in the comment sections too. In forums, self-moderation has been happening for years and years and years. And do we necessarily need to push that further? Maybe, but at the same time, I think the Drupal community is very ethical and it's very moral, the two being separate. And it does self-regulate commenters and trolls. And that's interesting to me. Great. All right, any other takers on that, the last question? Okay, well, my cat is standing at the door meowing at me. So I'm gonna call time and just say thank you guys so much for sharing more about yourselves and your opinions around some of the most important issues at the Association is working through today. And just as a reminder for everyone, including you guys, candidate profiles are live on the site and you can continue the conversation there by asking candidates specific questions. So candidates keep looking for those questions and encourage people to do so. We'll definitely be pushing people to do that as well so that we can have lots of fun conversations and a really informed electorate when voting opens on March 7th. So I think those are the final details and I just wanna say thank you guys again for taking so much time to share your opinions and your views and I will look forward to talking to most of you guys at least one more session. Tomorrow's session is starting at a time that I know it's noon Pacific. I don't know what that is UTC because certainly I can translate that. Three Eastern and 8 p.m. GMT, I think. Is that 8 UTC, Shenitzel? Yes, 8 UTC, 9 CET. Sure. 8 GMT. Great. It is gonna be at awesome time, D-R-U-P-A-L. So I will talk to one of you guys then and thanks a lot. Thanks everyone. Have a good one guys. Thanks everyone. Bye bye. Bye.