 wide room, isn't it? It's a very wide audience to work to. Hi, I'm Rachel Larson. I work with the Drupal Association. I'm the only European employee from a global association for the Drupal project. I try to get around. Most of the time I come down to camps. I usually go down to Drupal camps across the Europe on the motorbike, but no one wants to come into London on the motorbike. No way. It's not worth it. So I wanted to talk to you today about contribution making sense for your business. I'm going to write this out the first time and send in the talk synopsis for today. I realised afterwards I wanted to be a bit stronger than that because contribution doesn't just make sense for your business. Contribution is both essential for the Drupal project because there would be no Drupal project without your contributions. And it's also beneficial for your business. It's for both. So what do I mean by contribution? How do people contribute to Drupal or in fact any open source project? Well, there's different ways. You may use your undeniable talent. Many of you work in the Drupal environment and contribute your talent. Some of you will be developers or may have a history of development. I used to be a developer before I did this job. I can kind of remember how to do it. Here's Angie committing some code into Drupal Co. I think that was in Vienna actually. And so does your team build with Drupal on a regular basis? The work that you're doing, can it be reused? If you're building something, if you're building something to deliver for a client, can you even take that further in terms of its quality by releasing it as a module for Drupal? So many modules happen that way. Someone's building something for a client and they actually go, yeah, but I want more people to have their eyes on this. I want to reuse this piece of work and they release it as a module. It means you've got other people's eyes on your work, which, yeah, is kind of scary. But actually it helps you learn by what other people have got to say, your peers. But it also means that you can get back all of their knowledge into your business. So you, as a developer or your development team, improve not just because they're sharing their peer review with other people in your business, but with other people all around the world, yeah? So contributing your talent helps your business. But also contributing time. So by time, I mean contributing effort. There's John sat there contributing his effort, not in the thing that he does every day for work, his primary skill, but contributing his effort into something else. This is actually judging the talent show at DrupalCon. Yeah, it's his time. He's giving it for free. But he's actually works out really well because, and I know John does an amazing thing of coordinating all of the volunteers at DrupalCon Europe. And I know he's going to be doing it again this year. Where is he? Yeah, which is a really amazing contribution of time. It's not his primary talent. But I think John would agree with me that he learns a lot by doing that. He grows as a person by working with all those volunteers at DrupalCon and coordinating them. If nothing else, it increases his profile. Yeah, as a developer, as somebody who manages people, etc. Yeah, so contributing time outside of your primary talent is another way of contributing to the Drupal project. And it has benefit. Yeah. And finally, treasure. And by treasure, I mean money. It's great having bits of code and it's great having people's time at events and in other ways. But there are some things that we just need to pay for. And things like the servers that run the millions of test runs, the continuous integration test runs that happen every time someone submits a patch. It's a Drupal.org. It runs a test run. And there's what, how many Drupal core tests right now? Is it about 34,000? Something like that in DrupalCon. And that when we get how many patches submitted a week, thousands? Think about it. It's a huge thing that takes place. We usually see at the Drupal Association when somebody is coming up to DrupalCon or coming up to a major release or even a minor release. This has gone quiet, hasn't it? Is that one one out of battery? Is that one? Oh, yeah, that one works. That one was working until just now. Okay. Coming up to DrupalCon or a major or minor release of Drupal, we see an uptake of test runs that run. And the Drupal Association that pays for the test servers, they see the costs of those because they're on Amazon go up. And it could be extra thousands of dollars a month. Yeah. Treasure matters. Paying for that matters. Yeah. Now to make sure that people can do that is we have a number of programs. We have an individual program so people can contribute to the Drupal Association around membership. And I highly recommend that you go take a look at that. But for organizations, those of you that have organizations here or have influence within your organization, we have some partnership schemes, supporting partners, premium supporting partner, supporting partner, hosting supporting partner, lots of different ones depending on what fits for your business. Yeah. And you can help pay for the services that actually probably you're using every day. If your developers are working on stuff, they using the services that we need to pay for every day, probably all day. Okay. Okay. So is it really essential for your business? Is it really essential for Drupal that you're contributing? Well, yeah, there's no better way for your business to build expertise, to build better teams than to actually be not just work, download a software stack like Drupal and use it, but to actually be part of that software stack. Be part of what makes that happen. Be part of the direction it takes. And you only do that by contributing. Yeah, that's how you get to say by actually providing the code, the time or the treasure, you get a say, that's how you get in and you say, actually, we should be going in this direction or that direction. Yeah. Okay. Increasingly, there's other reasons as well. So large organizations we're seeing on a regular basis now. We're seeing large organizations that are end users that are looking for agencies. They are beginning to look to see how involved in the open source project in terms of supporting it, supporting the development of it, and so on. They look to see how they contribute. FISA is a really good example of this. So FISA won't employ agencies directly who don't contribute in some way to the Drupal project as a decision that they made. They look and that's how they make some of their decisions, which is good for us all, which of course means it has a benefit to you and your organization. You're developing those skills. You're getting access to those large end user organizations that require this type of thing. And also your organization's increased visibility. So you've all seen things like the marketplace. Yeah. The marketplace on Drupal.org is driven directly from your organization's contributions to Drupal. So it's driven directly from whether you're committing code, whether you're committing treasure, you know, whether you're a supporting partner, absolutely does move you up the marketplace. Yeah. Okay. And now that we're beginning to build things like the event listing, and we'll be able to show on their people's sponsoring events and so on like that, even when they're not Drupal.com, you know, sponsoring local events, it might be that in the future we'll be able to take that time that you're spending on events if you're a volunteer or you're a speaker and you're an organization. We can use that to move you up the marketplace as well. Yeah. Okay. All possible things. Yeah. Also, if you're known within the Drupal community, it's going to make you more attractive to the best talent. How do you go about recruitment? Now, do you want to simply spend money on agencies, on recruitment agencies, or do you want people to be knocking on your door? Because knocking on your door tends to be a bit cheaper than going through a recruitment agency from what I remember. If developers and other marketers and all these different people think, if I go work for company X, I'll get to spend time on Drupal.com, I'll get to spend time on marketing of Drupal. I'll get to do all these things as part of my time there. They've got a really good reputation for working with the project. Yeah, they're going to be knocking your door down. And we see that already. Some of the really big organizations we know, they don't need to try hard to find the best talent. Yeah. So I've got a couple of examples here. One X Internet in Germany. They're a top contributor. They have a lot of code contributions to Drupal projects. They are a supporting partner. The visibility that they get from that means that they're recognized as experts in a lot of places, a lot of decoupled stuff that they do. And they're doing some work down in Southern Spain. I know around training of new people into Drupal, which is really interesting, being watching what's going on down there. I think that one X Internet are going to host a week of training and contribution down in Canile, in Southern Spain, right after Drupal called Europe. I don't know if I'm supposed to tell you this. So they're planning to do that. And the company's sorting that out. And it would be really great. So they're spending a lot of time making that happen. They're contributing to the project. And their name gets out there as people that find that a good thing to do. And it means that one X Internet can wave at people to knock on the door and say, I really, really want to work for you. I'm saying in a very similar position as well. Their whole business model is to get the best possible value out of their clients' investment and they do that by a contribution. So they contribute absolutely as much as they can back to Drupal when they're developing things. If it can be reused elsewhere, it gives them a lot of transparency. And when decision makers are deciding whether to go with Amazon, they can see everything that they've done. They can see that they're a thought leader within the software, which means that they're an easy choice to make. I'll do another couple. Drop solid. They really manage to attract and retain highly skilled employees because they give them the opportunity to get involved in the project and do the things that they want to do. It really helps. Their sponsorship of events. They're sponsoring DrupalCon and things like this big, serious and serious contributions in terms of both time and treasure. And as I mentioned earlier, FISA, they literally look back when they're looking for an agency to work with and they work with lots of agencies. They literally do go back through an agency's contributions and think, is these people we want to work with? And FISA have a lot of work. They had a period, was it last year or the year before? They launched a site, a new site every day in the year. It's kind of every working day, sorry. On average, because some days they did more than one, obviously. Trying to imagine that now. So they've got a lot of work. They work with a lot of agencies, but they're choosing those based upon how they're contributing to Drupal. So I work for the Drupal Association. They're very good to me. One of our jobs is to make it easier and more attractive for you to contribute to the project, make it possible. So basically what we do is we give you the tools. Now I must admit, when I originally wrote this talk, we make the plumbing, but my American colleagues couldn't really get the head around the idea of plumbing. What's that got to do with this? So we went with tools. So we provide that. We provide lots of things. We support the development of Drupal 9. Drupal.org exists and is managed by and is built by the engineering team at the Drupal Association. It's not magic. It's not just some magic thing that just weirdly exists like GitHub. Somebody's got to build here. I imagine someone's probably got to build GitHub as well, but there you go. Now Drupal.org is pretty amazing in the way that it allows our community to work in some really special ways that it wouldn't be able to work otherwise. And it means that we can do things that we wouldn't be able to do otherwise. So when we're looking at Drupal 9, we're building a whole bunch of things that make it easier. So we found that when Drupal 8 went to a composer-based workflow, we built some stuff to make that possible. So there's a composer endpoint so that you can download your modules, etc. But people wanted that to change the way that that works. So our engineering team have been working with the Drupal core people and providing that tooling that makes working with Composer and whatever comes to make Composer easier soon. Possible. It means that we can provide tooling that allows you to understand how your project will work with Drupal 9. It's going to make that job easier. So there's a whole bunch of very specialist parts of Drupal.org that make Drupal 9 the 8-9 process so much easier. And there's a lot of work gone into that this year. Hours and hours and hours. And literally this piece of code here is something I pulled out of our own GitLab instance on Drupal.org that is related to checking how we make Composer work differently, ever so slightly differently for you. We showed Drupal at its best. We want Drupal to be seen by your end-user customers in the very best way. So we spend a lot of time working up by features and benefits that are going past strangely. We spend time building things like Drupal.org marketing materials. We work on case study formats and evaluate content all on Drupal.org. We do direct marketing. We send things out to PR web etc on a regular basis. We work with end-user organizations by sending things through to them, hosting roundtables and summits to engage and grow Drupal customers and all that type of stuff. And we support the creation of marketing resources. And it was a Drupal Europe that I held a roundtable there with some leaders across Europe looking at marketing. And from that came Paul Johnson who can't be with us today. He was planning to be here. And Ricardo Amaro and Suzanne Degacheva they got together and they created the Drupal pitch deck which is now getting translated into lots of different languages. The Drupal pitch deck, the Drupal video. Who's using those in those pictures in their pictures? Brilliant. It's reusing stuff. So we're enabling that to happen at the Drupal association. We also bring the community together. So obviously we're doing that on Drupal, literally at Drupal.com. But also we do things like Drupalcon Europe in the future is we needed to find a different way to do that. So the Drupal association found a first in open source method of packaging up Drupalcon Europe in a way that Kiwony who won the contract for it were able to go with that. And they gave us Drupalcon Europe in, where do we get a lesson? Oh, Amsterdam. And Barcelona this year. Were you too high to remember? I'm not sure I'd like to comment. That's been too long. Yeah. I just worked really hard. I had just no idea where I am. I was running round tables and stuff there. But all of the legwork for Drupalcon Europe, the cost was done by Kiwony, which meant that there was no risk to the Drupal association and therefore no risk to the Drupal project by Drupalcon Europe that was previously losing money. So we put a lot of effort into finding a way of doing that so that it didn't cost us anything to run. Now, Linux Foundation, Mozilla, others are looking at the model that we've built as possible things for them to do as well because he's been successful. So the Drupal association has done that to protect the Drupal project and to bring people together because we know that Drupalcon Europe is important and we've found a way of making that sustainable. I mentioned earlier on one of the things that's coming up soon is building a better events listing. So it's been a bit of a B in my bonnet over the last few months actually finding out how we could do that in a way that's not just a listing but something that's actually going to help the project. So it's going to be something that's a really big deal. Not until we get some data but once we've had a couple of years of data then it's going to be a really big deal. So we bring people together and we enable that. We also put effort into enabling the growth of the Drupal community. So this year, I spent a lot of time with the local Drupal associations across a lot of Europe and into Africa and Asia and a little bit in the US, not much. There are what are called Drupal local associations where people get together and they work on marketing materials, developer get-togethers, running events, all these types of things. These matter, they help communities grow. Now we get them together on a regular basis usually at Drupal cons and we sit there looking at how we can get better at that over time. This picture here is some of the heads of local associations. We got together in Amsterdam. It wasn't blue, I recoloured it and we did really well. Now there's a story that's going to happen after this. When we had this meeting, this is the meeting that Greg was at and I'll speak about that later. Okay, so we also put effort into recognising and celebrating contribution because I'm saying to you, I want you to contribute with your time, talent and treasure but we should never ask for something without giving something in return and the thing that we give is recognition, thanks, yeah, sorry celebration, thanks, yeah and recognition actually what can we do for you for all of your work and the thing we can do for you is boosting you up. So that's all about making sure people know about you and by you that could be you personally if it's an individual contribution or your organisation. If your organisation is contributing either through giving people time to work on stuff or through money, yeah, okay. So we put effort into that. Now we don't just celebrate work, we're not just here to just celebrate time, talent and treasure but we're also here to celebrate how we do it. So there are things that we and the Drupal Association of Finance, things like the Aaron Wynbarn award that's given away every year which I'm sure Alex at some point will be mentioning they're still looking for nominations, is that correct? Or have you closed now? Okay, I think you're still open. Okay, so the Aaron Wynbarn award is the award that's given every year in the spring usually handed over at Drupal Comp in the US and here's Leslie who won last year, okay, because not just because of the work that she does but the way that she does it, how she works. March 30th. So on drupal.org slash community slash CWG you will be able to read about the Aaron Wynbarn award and if you think there are people in the community that work in a particular way with people that you think is actually, you know, that's how we should work together, you need to be nominating them. It's just filling in a form and saying, hey, have you thought about this person X? Yeah, absolutely. So the Drupal Association very much kind of enables that by providing the funding and stuff for it to happen. We fly the person out from wherever they are in the world out to Minneapolis to present the award. Yeah, okay. We also put a lot of effort into protecting the community, which is a whole bunch of work. It's often, it's often the most understated work we do. A lot of the time I'm doing things that you're never going to hear about, and quite rightly. Yeah, in December the CWG and we provide a backup to the CWG as well. Yeah, even the small things that we do, even the small things we do, like the never-ending battle with spam. My goodness. Yeah, it's a never-ending battle with spam on Drupal.org. Yeah, we provide a final recourse for things like the community working group and other groups. Yeah, so if for some reason they need to hand it off elsewhere, then the Drupal Association Board of the final recourse for them, which is interesting, and we can pay for external people to be involved in that process. And we also provide a legal service, so we pay for the lawyers. Yeah, okay. And we secure the project. Yeah, we actually provide the security. We provide the functionality and the backup for doing communicating advisories, managing that process in conjunction with the security working group. We manage being able to provide releases and all of it's done in collaboration with lots of different people. Yeah. Well, there is one extra thing that's happening right now. I talked about recognizing and celebrating contribution. Well, we want to get better at it. We never stop. None of these things that we're talking about, do we stop trying to improve all the time? We're always working to keep it doing it better. So we've got together a committee who are working right now on expanding how we do contribution recognition. If you've got a fancy phone, you can point it here and then you'll be able to go to a link where you can fill in a form and tell us. Find out more about that now, this week, and make sure that your voice is heard on the work that they're doing. Because if you don't, you won't be heard. Yeah, it's really important that you're heard about how we do that, especially if you represent an organization. Now, we do all those things at the DA with a small but mighty team worldwide, bearing in mind the size of Drupal.org, bearing in mind all the things I've talked about. There are 17 of us. Yeah, 17. And in fact, actually employed the 16 of us because where is she? Tanisha works for, actually, works for Shridha in India, somewhere near Delhi. And she works with us doing design and bits and pieces like that. She's brilliant. And in fact, if you've got your program guide, which I don't think you've had to doubt the program guides you have, you're in the bags. Yeah. Okay, on the backing, she designed that. So on the back of the guide. So that's a really interesting contribution that Shridha did is they just went, here, you can have this employee. It's like, great. So she's fantastic. It really works for you well. So, yeah, it's a very small team. We're trying to make the best of the contributions you give us. Yeah, with all these things that we do, you know, over a million Drupal sites, ping Drupal.org for updates every week. Yeah, four and a half thousand people attend DrupalCon every year. 1.3 million users visit Drupal.org each month. I think that's gone up, actually, weirdly. Okay. Thousands of core tests and stuff that I mentioned earlier on before. It's all happening because of the Drupal Association. As I said, it's really small. It's a really small team. And we can only do it with your help. We can only do those things if you can contribute code, yeah, and contribute time, yeah, but also contribute treasure in many ways, especially at the moment, bearing in mind things like coronavirus and people not being as willing to travel to events around you. Yeah, things like supporting partner programs and putting money into things like the Drupal Association really, really matter, really matter because we need to make sure that we have a diverse portfolio of income streams into the project. Hint, hint, hint. Okay, really matters. So please do have a think about how you're, how you personally, how your organization that you work with contributes into the Drupal project. Think about what you can get out of making the most of that, contributing in, you get a lot more back out, yeah, take the time to spend some time thinking about it this weekend. If you want to talk about maybe getting involved in a supporting partner program, I am very, very happy to talk to you this week and very happy and we can make that happen, yeah. If you want to become a member, an individual member of the Drupal Association, and I highly suggest that you are, there's a link, yeah, literally Drupal.org such association will take you straight there to be honest, yeah. Do sign up, pay what you can, you can choose the level you want to pay, but do think about it, okay? I hope that was useful. Any questions? Oh, okay, if there's no questions on that particular topic, any questions for the Drupal Association in general? I must be mad, what did I just say that for? How's the Drupal Association helping with eight to nine module conversions? How are Drupal Association helping with Drupal eight to Drupal nine module conversions? Ah, well, good question. So literally at the moment, the engineering team have been working on some tooling so that we're changing how modules define what versions they're compatible with. So we have to do a whole load of work on Drupal.org so that you can say in your module, oh yeah, this will work with Drupal eight point seven, but actually we'll also work with Drupal nine, nine point one and nine point two, yeah, in the same module. So there's a whole bunch of work we need to do to make that possible and to not only expose that to the Drupal.org user interface, but also expose it to the composer interface, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, so there's a whole bunch of stuff going on there. I know that some people in the Drupal core have been working on a tool, I think it's called Rector or something like that. Now the way that that works is it will look at your Drupal project. It will look at the custom modules that you've created. And not only will it say if it's compatible with Drupal nine, it will, where there are incompatibilities, it will suggest the code that you've got to write like literally write this code to change any deprecated code ready for Drupal nine. And it's a work of genius. And I wish I could do stuff like that. Yeah, I'll stick to doing this. Okay, anything else? Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you.