 All right, so we're going to get started. Thank you everyone for joining me here today. Again, for those of you who just came in, I'm Michelle Jackson. I work at Palantir as a web strategist. And I'm here with my colleague, Allison Manley, who is also a... Something. You do everything. So it's hard to have a title that encapsulates all that you do. Technically, it's sales and marketing manager. But Allison wears so many hats. So welcome and thank you for joining us on essentially what is a journey and what has been a journey for us to engage folks from both Chicago and Baltimore in the Drupal community and give them a set of skills that will allow them to not just explore Drupal, but also expand upon their existing skills, technical skills. So making inclusion happen through mentoring. Today, we're going to talk about the history of our initiative. We're going to talk a little bit about what we did last year at the 2017 DrupalCon in Baltimore. We're going to talk a little bit about what we did this year in terms of our mentorship and training program. We're going to talk about what we did and what went well and then what went not so well. And we're also going to talk a little bit about how we can measure success when we're doing this type of initiative and then what's next and how you can get involved as well. And so if you're wondering, well, what is this initiative? What is this mentoring? Essentially, last, I think it was March? Yeah, it was mid-camp. At mid-camp 2017, Chris Rooney gave a presentation about essentially diversity within the Drupal community. And we had a lot of contentious conversations at that time happening in the community. And Allison and I wanted to focus on what we think is important, which is a little bit more action-oriented and not as discourse-based. So we decided we wanted to actually take a more proactive approach with getting folks who perhaps don't even know what Drupal is, are not connected to the community, involved, and give them an opportunity to really get a taste of what this might be like. So we started brainstorming after we heard Chris Rooney who's walking in here just speak about diversity in the community. This was his presentation. Say hi, everyone. Hi, everyone. So we did have quite of a whirlwind right after mid-camp. Luckily, I was available to actually work on this. So Allison and I collaborated really closely to get students from Baltimore who were already involved with N-Power, which is a nonprofit that distributed throughout the country, has multiple chapters. And we wanted to get students involved in DrupalCon. Essentially, we wanted to give them the opportunity to not only understand what Drupal was, but also meet other people in the community as well. So essentially, what you're seeing here is a day of Drupal. We have a photo here of the cohort of students that we actually worked to get into DrupalCon for a day. And we gave them a really brief overview of what Drupal is, essentially, how you might apply some of these basic Drupal concepts to their understanding of what they can do with their own tech career. So these students actually already had a technical background. A lot of them had existing developer certifications, but didn't necessarily have access to or know about Drupal. And so Ryan actually also led that training that day. And we also gave students an opportunity to network with folks on the security team. And you're probably like, well, how did you manage to get all this done in three weeks? Well, my background is actually in youth education. So we used to wrangle students for the State Department and basically send them overseas. So I'm quite familiar with the wrangling of students. So that's why we were able to do it. But essentially, what we identified during this process is that partnerships are key. You have to know who has access to certain groups of students or certain groups of professionals and really be able to leverage those connections. That was really what has made this process and the project so successful, has been to leverage these existing not only relationships, but nonprofits that are already well-established. Did you want to add anything to that? Yeah, I would just like to give major kudos to Michelle because we did conceive of this after Chris Rooney's talk last March of 2017. He sort of threw down the gauntlet and challenged everybody in the room and said, what can you do to increase diversity in Drupal? How can we make this an actionable thing? And I went up to him afterwards and I said, here's a simple thought. What if we actually just sponsored some students in Baltimore to come to DrupalCon Baltimore? How hard could it be? How hard can it be? And we conveniently have Michelle who is based in Baltimore on our team and who also at the time was not resourced to any project. So she did have the time, I had the time, and we were able to find an organization local in Baltimore in N-Power that had students that were very excited to come and learn about Drupal for a day. It was literally just one day that was all we could do. We wrangled with some help from some wonderful people in the Drupal community at the last minute to get free tickets for all of them to come. We managed to arrange for other people in the community to come sit down with us and have lunch after they had sort of this half day of an intro to Drupal and for them to be able to attend some sessions. But it was just a really light taste, right? Just one day of DrupalCon. You've never heard of Drupal before and then you're thrown into this huge convention center in downtown Baltimore. And so when we went through this exercise of lunch and talking with them, we took a step back after it was all over and said, okay, well, that was great. How do we expand this and make this something bigger and better? So then we started meeting internally and talking about, okay, well, what would it look like if we did try to make something larger out of this? And that brings us to what we're working on this year. So essentially we wanted to understand is this something that's scalable beyond not just one day but is this something that's scalable from a program perspective? If we want to scale it, who? Are we hoping to get another N-Power chapter involved or are we gonna be looking also more regional nonprofits that may not be tied to N-Power? So essentially we had a lot of questions as you were going through this process. Capacity, what happens when I'm not available? What happens when Allison's unavailable? So we'll talk a little bit through that process shortly but I'll just provide an overview of what the goals of the program were coming out of last year's DrupalCon. So we wanted to provide students, we're young professionals from underserved or underrepresented communities with Drupal training, networking and then an opportunity to attend conferences. And so essentially when we say training we mean not a one day training but a more robust training so that they're actually equipped with skills to actually be able to build tools in Drupal. We wanted to have more students involved and that goes back to that question about scaling. We wanted to create a model that other companies could either replicate or perhaps improve upon. And then also we wanted to expand our own support as a company to provide these underserved or underrepresented community members with access and inclusion within the community. And one thing that came up as we were finding these tickets for the students of previous years I was actually a global track chair previously. So I had access to a lot of speakers, track chairs who had extra tickets or whose companies had extra tickets. And so through my own access to not only those resources but also those community members that we were able to essentially connect with the DEA and leverage that partnership to get the free tickets that we did get. So as we're going through the process we understand kind of our own privilege as being relatively embedded in the community and really hoping to use that to give opportunity and access to others who don't have those relationships, don't know who Amanda is who just came and gave me a hug, perhaps are not connected with folks who have extra tickets. So looking forward at 2018 we decided to actually focus on Chicago. So our company is based in Chicago. And so as you were having this conversation about capacity, Baltimore was great because I'm there and we have Meg Plunkett, my colleague who's in Philly and we have some other folks on the East Coast now too. But Chicago is essentially our hub. We have a lot of folks in Chicago who live there and work for Palantir. And so just from a capacity standpoint it made sense to identify a partner in that region just because we have so many colleagues who live there. And then also that is our home base. So that was the strategic decision that we made after talking about where was this program going to go and in what region. But to add to that when we were talking with our contact at N Power in Baltimore and we asked her when we were looking for a good Chicago partner to partner up with, she said, well, wait a minute, our Baltimore students who went last year want to keep going. Is there any way you can keep us in the fold and can we continue this? And so we decided actually to split it. So we'd have half the students coming out of Baltimore, half the students coming out of Chicago because we did have a big enough East Coast presence that we could support that. And then we just accounted for that in our budget. Well, we've got to now fly people from Baltimore to mid-camp and Baltimore to Nashville. So that was just something we accounted for early on. Something else that we were considering. So for N Power I think we were just lucky that when I was trying to figure out what partners to connect with and actually N Power was referred to me by another potential nonprofit partner in Baltimore that could not work with us. I think it was Code in the Schools and so they actually told us about N Power. But I think we lucked out because N Power has several chapters throughout the US and then also our newest partner, Genesis Works, has several locations throughout the US. So when we were thinking about scale we wanted a nonprofit that was distributed just like the Drupal community because our goal essentially was to essentially identify other partners and agencies and mentors to actually connect them with students that are in their own region as well. And so you'll see here on the left N Power has international presence as well in Toronto and then we have other, we have West Coast, we have Texas, we have East Coast as well and then we have Chicago, Texas again, we have Minnesota. So we wanted to have a broad reach and a lot of potential in terms of reaching other students who are outside of the chapters with whom we're currently working. So now we're gonna talk about how we did this and how we structured the program. So going back to 2017 we did consider actually identifying high school students that was going to be very difficult because of the way schools run and when students are in school and parents and permission and absences. So essentially that was something we learned really quickly was not going to work for an April conference. So essentially we wanted to identify folks who were not in high school but perhaps early 20s, late teens who are looking to expand their professional opportunities. We wanted to essentially identify students who were already within an existing program that another nonprofit was running. So we wanted to focus on a pre-vetted pool of students not necessarily fill out the Palantir application but students who are already committed to another organization's program who are already working on developing their skills, doing some type of training of some sort just because it makes it easier to get them engaged versus perhaps doing a more grassroots approach of recruiting applicants on our own. We had a lot of questions about how do we get the students from Baltimore to speak to the students in Chicago and when are we going to have trainings. Ultimately we adopted a remote distributed training program where essentially we had Slack as our medium for communication and then also did virtual training once a week with two labs. So we had one opportunity for in-person training which was a kickoff and essentially after that everything was done remotely. In terms of our format we were looking at mid-camp as a program checkpoint and mid-point so that we could essentially connect with the students again and bring everybody to Chicago and then of course the students would convene in Nashville for DrupalCon as well. And so this was our idea and the concept that we ultimately went with in terms of what expansion would look like, what 2018 would look like. We were really concerned about ensuring continued student participation which is something that is a pain point that we'll talk about shortly but when we're dealing with students who are not in high school or are not doing a summer program for instance where they have unlimited time to dedicate to our program it's always about balancing conflicting priorities. So a lot of the students who we have are working in multiple jobs or internships are potentially doing other training and educational programs, maybe doing other activities related to the nonprofit or the program that they're associated with our partner. So it's a lot to juggle to ask them to actually do our program on top of everything else. So they are not full-time students, they're mavericks, they're juggling a lot of different types of things. And then a lot of them have things going on in their personal life as well. A lot of them have personal responsibility. So that's something that we wanna open the conversation up to you about later is just ensuring continued engagement and participation. We have a mentorship program in place for these students but are always curious to talk about how we can best support students throughout the process. Do you have anything else to add? No, you're doing great. So as Allison had mentioned, we wanted to continue the MPOWER partnership because our point of contact at MPOWER Cathy still wanted to have students engage as students we're still interested in participating beyond 2017. We created new strategic partnerships with Genesis Works, Figleaf, Drupalize Me, and then others. And so one of the key milestones in our planning was actually deciding whether or not Palantir would run the training or whether we would outsource the training to a Drupal training expert. And we went with the latter because from a capacity standpoint it was easier for us to find someone who does this professionally as a service from a company standpoint because it was easier for them to actually just implement a training and provide access to that training for the students versus having us develop our own training independently. So that made that process relatively smooth because we didn't have to create all the materials ourselves and we could use what they currently use to train developers and other folks running Drupal. Mentorship by professionals throughout the community. So previously might have heard me mention kind of the need to have two strategic partners that have chapters all over the US. So similarly, we wanted to have mentors who were also distributed. So we have folks who are mentoring the students virtually from all over the US currently. We have, I'm in Baltimore, but there are other mentors who are, I think we have one in Massachusetts all over. So essentially that was really key as well. And then we had talked about the need for having a mentor in person or not in person. And we decided that as long as there's frequent touch points so we actually didn't need to have a mentor that was in person on the ground. I do think there's value in having that but we found that it was not necessary in terms of the coaching that would compliment the training that we were running. So some of the questions that we were tackling while we were coming up with the implementation plan were, who was gonna do the training? We decided that Figleaf would be doing that where is it's gonna live? Where is it's going to be hosted? Where are students going to have their projects? Where is it's going to live? We wanted to address both technology and hosting needs because we weren't sure if the students would have Mac laptops. And so we wanted to, or access to the internet regularly. I know Baltimore specifically doesn't have significant density in terms of internet access all across the city. So we didn't wanna make assumptions about access to Starbucks because if students are in certain communities where they don't have those resources they might have to take an hour bus to get there. So these were things that we were thinking about. We didn't end up providing internet but we did provide laptops that were refurbished just so that they had that. And then they might have to worry about a mobility issue of getting to a point A to get the internet but they don't have to worry about, oh, I don't have a laptop. Also, where are they going to be training? What types of hosting environments do they need for what they're going to be building? That was something that we had to wrangle a little bit. Had some hiccups at mid-camp. Do you wanna talk about that? Sure. So right a couple days before mid-camp there the hosting that they were on expired. And so what was lovely was that at mid-camp of course there was a large team of Pantheon employees who were very happy to come in and they spent a couple hours just making sure everyone was put up on a Pantheon environment and spun up and it was all said and done in a few hours. But that was one of those things we hadn't anticipated. Now that we've done this pilot program once there are a few things I do differently moving forward. We did a lot of things right. I'd say about 80, 85% of the things we did right. There's definitely some things we wanna smooth out moving forward. That was one of them. I would say the other was yesterday when my plane got delayed by a freak snowstorm in Chicago and I had students trying to check in to the holiday in and they needed a credit card to put down. And I was not there to provide a credit card. So thankfully one of my other colleagues, I'm on the tarmac saying please help me get a credit card over to them. So that was one of those things you can't anticipate but I'll file it away for future reference. Another question we had was getting them to Chicago and Nashville. When do we book those flights? How do we fund paying for those flights? Is that something that Palantir incurs? Is that something that we'll get outside support for? We ended up incurring the cost for those as part of Allison's marketing budget. Where are they going to stay? Are they gonna stay in a hotel? Are they gonna stay in a hotel by the conference? Are they gonna stay in a hostel? Another question is just who do we need to notify? Emergency contact was something we were thinking of too just because technically everybody is of age, I think 18 or older. But again, who do we call if somebody sprains an ankle? Again, like I said, who will pay for kind of the cost of coming to Nashville? How do we get mentors and then what are the expectations? Do we just say we want you to talk to them about something twice a week or once a month? And then what do we tell them to talk about? Is it really focused on their long-term professional goals or is it focused on the training? We didn't really nail that down. We just wanted mentors to be available to answer questions in terms of the training, but that was a question that we had when we were identifying mentors and coming up with the idea of having that tertiary support. So we have our lab, our class. There's an instructor, Ryan attended all of the classes and labs with the exception of maybe like, I don't know, one or two. So he was always present, but we understood that having everybody go to Ryan also was a lot to ask. So wanting to distribute some of that support was key. The other question was, who is gonna review student work? So my background is primarily in research and UX. So essentially I'm happy to sit in, but what I'm able to support the students in it is a little bit limited. So not just having people available, but having people available who are capable of providing the support that students need. So we always had to have somebody attending the lab who could answer questions for the students that related to what they were being trained on. And then at mid-camp, I think we ended up corralling some Palantir to review student work. I know Lauren is here and Lauren spent some time with students reviewing their projects that we'll talk about shortly. So definitely it's very much an agile project. I would say it's probably one of the more agile projects I've done since I've been at Palantir. So that's something that I think I'm grateful for because we were able to modify our programmatic approach as needs change throughout the course of the program. So this is a timeline of what the program looked at from a bird's eye view from the kickoff in January 2018 where we gave the students their refurbished laptops and then began to pair them with mentors all the way to the beginning of classes, mid-camp that checkpoint or milestone, and then we have DrupalCon. And then we're hoping to talk to students about where they go from here. I know for me, one of the things I talked about is DrupalGovCon. So the Baltimore students, it's a free conference, it's relatively close to Baltimore, so seeing if the students can get engaged with that conference is something that's on my mind, but also thinking about this more broadly. Do we connect DrupalShops with Empower and Genesis Works chapters in other areas? Ideally, yes, that's what we wanna do just so that we can ensure that we're actually able to create a framework that can support students, not just the ones that we are training and mentoring currently, but other ones who have similar interests and needs as well. So this is a photo from the Genesis Works kickoff. So these are the Chicago-based students with Lauren, and then this is the Baltimore cohort as well on the same day. So it was really neat that we were able to have two in-person meetings and then connect virtually and then having the students all meet up in Chicago. I think we used Adobe, do we use Adobe Connect? Adobe Connect, yeah. So Dave from Figleaf who's there on the far, right. He was our partner at Figleaf who actually led the training every Friday evening, and that was the evening that the students via a survey said was the best night for them to have their formal class. We had lab hours one hour on Wednesday, and then there were two options on Thursdays. You didn't have to attend all of them, we just recommended you attend at least one so that you could check in and mentors would come to those lab hours as they could also come, whatever worked for their schedules between those three choices during the week, and then there was the formal class time, and that was all recorded as well because there were some students who Friday night just didn't work for them, it worked for the majority, but not for everybody. So there were some students who I don't think attended a live class ever, but always watched the recordings and were able to keep doing their work through the course of the program. Yeah, one student said that that was what was really helpful was actually having access to the recordings because again, like I mentioned before, a lot of students are doing a lot of things at the same time, they have the personal life, they have multiple professional lives, and then some of them are also doing additional training as well. So that flexibility I think was key. One student had said, I like that we have that flexibility that we have access to the video recordings, and that we are maybe not attending the same labs. It may not always be in class, but we're working towards the same goals. So there was still a sense of shared community across the cohort as well. And I'll let the students who are actually here share with you their project shortly. So in terms of what we covered, it wasn't just this is how you Drupal, we talked about goals of your site, why you would want to build a website in the first place. I think a key question was to help them see a problem in their community and then figure out how to address it with Drupal. So we have a lot of really neat community projects that students are working on that relate to music, churches, a mariachi band, and so students were able to create a nexus between an issue related to content or marketing in their community and then tie it back to Drupal, which has been really exciting. But they went over analytics, content modeling, content types and fields, information architecture, menu and blocks, forums and social media. So essentially this is a crash course in Drupal that covers a lot of other strategic pieces as well. So in terms of what we learned, we learned that scheduling is really hard. Really hard. Sustainability is also a big pain point because my initial involvement was very much based on my circumstances then and my availability where I didn't have a lot of project work. And then when I did, I couldn't play as active as a role as I had previously, which I knew coming out of the con last year, but in terms of how do we then make sure that Allison isn't resourced to this project 80 hours a week, since Allison does have other roles as well was something that constantly came up. Balancing from a student perspective, class, life, work, attrition, we did have some students essentially drop out of the program. So anticipating that was something that we did, but developing an action plan is something that I think we still need to do. So initially when we talked about expansion, one colleague I said, well, let's just have a few students. And I said, from what I know with youth education, we should definitely have more students because there will be attrition, but how do we mitigate that is a question I think that warrants further discussion. Managing expectations, how do we get funding and from whom? Delegation, especially when you have conflicting resourcing, communication, the logistics, not just around travel, but also having students connect with each other throughout the program and stay engaged and involved was something that came up time and time again, limited time money resources came up quite frequently as well. And then also how do we measure what success looks like was something that I think we're still grappling with and because it is in a pilot phase, but what is successes? I mean that they have a minimum viable product. Is it that the website is workable, usable, or is it something else? Is it that they get a job in a parallel field? Is it that they get a job at a Drupal shop? What does success look like? It's still something that we're contemplating. And you can join us at lunch with them all this week if you'd like to talk with them about possible internships. I'll just throw that out there. I think the question that Ryan posed was mentoring. When does this begin and when does it end ever? I think Ryan had said mentoring is technically a lifetime commitment. So you're not necessarily, hi I'm gonna mentor you for five weeks and then I'm gonna drop off the face of the earth. Ideally you wanna be able to create a relationship that essentially outlasts the program. So how do we do that? That goes back to managing expectations with mentors. I think we had three lab hours, but there were only about half the students who were incredibly active. So I think within the lab. And so are our expectations reasonable? Is it asking too much? I mean these are things we're constantly reevaluating. Initially we thought we could do a two hour class once a week. But that scheduling just made this very difficult. I think right now we don't have a strong model to assess success. We don't have grades and midterms. So that's definitely something that we're still thinking about and we did take attendance for a few weeks. But you have some students who are attending and some students who are not but are watching the video recordings. We don't really have Google analytics for our program. So to make an assumption about engagement is also not fair because some students might be juggling the million things that they juggle but then also watching the recordings. And so that's something we're thinking about too. Do we have learning assessments? Is it really just gonna be about their project and do they hit this particular milestone? I think a question one person asked was if we had this in person would that make things easier? If we had the students in Chicago attend a weekly training in person and then the Baltimore students do the same thing? I don't know. I think that engagement and participation is not necessarily always constrained by whether something is remote or not. I think that if we had had in person, I'd argue that we might see similar patterns of people not showing up for class. That's just been my experience with youth education. So I don't know that in person would always, at least training would necessarily create kind of more engagement. I do think in person checkpoints with mentors might help because it increases accountability and then you have a better rapport potentially. And to add to that, we did actually, the Genesis Works folks. Julia is here from Genesis Works who is their alumni coordinator. Sheet and Chris Rooney actually did, I believe, twice get together at digital bridges offices so that everyone could work together and talk about how things were going and just especially when it came like what to focus on for mid-camp, what to focus on for Drupalcon. So there were some touch points physically where the students got together in Chicago. That was not something we did in Baltimore. In retrospect, that probably would have been a great idea. But again, it was just a matter of resources and lessons learned that we, I think we would like to implement moving forward. So again, I think measuring success is definitely something that we're still working on. I think the way I think about it is formulating a series of questions, the way I deal with projects and thinking about it in this context. So this is kind of where we are. We're still in the inquisitive phase about how we would go about doing this. But here are some ideas that we have and then after our session concludes we open, we'll open the floor to get your ideas as well. So what do students know at the start of the program? What do we want them to learn? Why? And then how do we measure that? The other one is does attendance matter? Is it bodies and rooms? People just showing up to mid-camp? Is that success? Or is it actually having a website that your community can actually use? Is it having content that makes sense within the website that you've built? Are students merely gonna meet curriculum milestones? Or again, is it about the usability of essentially the function of the website? Is it launching the website? Is it a percentage? Is it how often students check in with mentors? Is it also something that we can change mid-program? Because that's not really how, we usually, with Google Analytics, as a parallel example, you're not supposed to change kind of how you measure things in the middle of something because you'll lose that data, right? So then if we are making modifications, does that then have implications for how we're measuring what success looks like? Something else is, what happens after the program? I mentioned Drupal, GovCon, but again, mentorship is a lifetime commitment. So what does that post-program engagement look like? So these are all things that we're thinking about. We've thought about using surveys and one-on-ones to gauge, but again, this is a little bit more nebulous than a cut-and-dry program that you might see with nonprofits that are well-established in this area. So here's an example at mid-camp. We did have a Palantirie help students review their work-to-date and then that way they were able to gauge kind of pain points in areas where they needed help. Here they are last night. Everyone to get that. I think that's everyone, but one who, again, talk about work commitments. She couldn't miss work yesterday, so she had to fly in very late. She did not make it to her hotel last night until 1.15 in the morning, but she is here. But yeah. And so at this point, like I mentioned before, students who are coming in now are doing a lot of these personal projects that have a community focus. So I'd mentioned before there's a mariachi band. I love that you're coming in here while I'm talking about you. Yeah. A church, a music act, a recycling blog, a tech help blog, and then some others as well. And so we wanted to, like I mentioned before, give them a well-rounded training that encompassed both UX and strategy, and not just Drupal, because we don't want them to just build, build, build. We want them to think about why they're building and then what model in your life makes the most sense or problem in your life makes the most sense in terms of using that as a platform for a Drupal project. I think we have about 60% Drupal or 70% Drupal and then 30% non-Drupal, but we're hoping that they can take some of the lessons that we taught about identifying audience needs and planning your menu structure and actually can carry some of those skills and knowledge into their next job even if that's not within a Drupal context. I think we're thinking about resume workshops as well just to make sure that the way that they're communicating their skills makes sense for the job that they're looking for. And then also hoping to do some coaching around interviewing and then also, I was thinking about Drupal GovCon for the Baltimore based students just because it's so close. And some of the resume workshop work is actually happening tomorrow. Like a lot of the students did bring their resumes already, but our HR staff at Palantir is going to be sitting down with them tomorrow to look over their resumes and see if there's any polishing that we can help them with. And also, I'll mention this again, we're really curious about what you think we could do differently. And also, if you're interested in starting a similar program or joining the program in your own communities because we can always do things better. And as you mentioned, we're definitely learning as we're going along. I think interestingly, a lot of my background actually, we would have had a credit card authorization, we would have had a lot of these things. And so because I am not doing that full time anymore, it was difficult for me to say, hey, Allison, here is all the things that you need for our youth program because I'm coming in here and there. And again, it's a capacity question. Well, and there was a snowstorm. There was a snowstorm. I was supposed to be there to do that, though. Right, exactly. But, because I know we're running low on time. So some of the lessons that we did learn, definitely that identifying the strategic partnerships up front was key, finding the right students. I mean, I don't know how else we would have found students just on our own to do this, but having organizations that already had students that were interested in code was a great thing. And then also just being able to have the time, the retrospective that we were able to do last year after our one day at Drupalcon to sit down and sort of implement the plan to the degree that we did. Obviously we can fill in some more details now that we've done this for a year, but we'll be having a retrospective after this one as well, just to see how we can implement this moving forward. The one thing I would like to talk about is that this was not free. Speaking of privilege, I have the privilege of being in charge of my budget. So when I was outlining my budget for all of how we were going to, for all of my needs within Palantir for marketing and sales, sales trips, conferences that we have to attend, I wanted to put some aside some money to make this successful. So Palantir actually in hard costs donated $8,000 which really was allocated mostly to travel. That was hotel, that was plane tickets, Drupalcon tickets and mid-camp tickets were donated thanks to those organizations. Of course, the mentors gave their time. Palantir also donated 11 refurbished laptops. But Figleaf actually donated more. I mean, their donation of the classes was about $12,000 in cost because to take one of their basic Drupal classes is about $1,100 a person. So then of course Drupalize Me and Acquia did donate some subscription and hosting fees and then we did later on after this slide was made got some donations from JetBrains. Okay, thank you. And then of course, and then also at the last minute to help us offset some costs, Ashley Thevenay of Blue Spark when I was telling her that the hotel rooms in Nashville were actually coming out more expensive than I thought they were, she said, you know what, we have a whole extra Airbnb house, would you like to have it? So she very graciously donated one of her two houses that they had reserved so we were able to help split some costs that way. But this as far as hard costs was what it cost Palantir to do this. So if that is scary to your organization, if you're not able to support that type of lift. And also, you know, we can't expect Figleaf to be donating for everybody, right? You know, like that's a big ask. But you know, maybe don't start with 10 to 12 students start smaller, start with three, start with two, whatever you can do. But that is just something I wanna put out there is that even though there was a lot of time donated there were actually some hard costs as well. Another way to think about it too is, you know, when you have brown bags, right? You have colleagues share their expertise in a particular area. They talk about a case study. Think about, you know, if you aren't distributed or even if you are, you know, when you have a coworking space and you have a session, right? Think about who you're inviting. Think about who you're including. I just wrote a blog post that was actually about diversity and the idea of diversity itself. And one of the main goals here was to kind of strip that and talk about access. Strip that term away and say, like, who are you inviting? Who are you networking with? Who are you connecting with? Who comes to your parties? Who comes to your Drupal events? Who comes to your, you know, UX meetups? Who are you associating with? Because that is a root of the issue. Not so much, you know, this diversity term, you know, I am diverse, you are not. You know, that creates a dichotomy of basically you're an other and I am not. And I'm part of this and you're not. And so instead, you know, thinking about it in terms of like, when you look around and you think about, you know, not just who is in a room, but who are you going to get drinks with? Who are you going to like talk about this module with? Who are you planning to do, you know, to submit that issue on, you know, Drupal.org and create a program or create an improvement in a specific area? Thinking about like that type of inclusion is really where we're going with this versus kind of a, you know, there's a diversity problem. There's an access problem and there's a problem with, you know, habits and there's a problem with who, you know, we associate and network with and who makes us comfortable and who we're comfortable being around. So really tackling this from more of a, you know, community grassroots perspective where it's about, you know, taking someone's hand and saying, join us for this coffee meetup. You know, join us for this particular event. That is really what we think needs to happen. And so Allison says the budget might be a bit tight for some folks but definitely there's other ways that are affordable where you can include people and invite folks who are from, you know, either, you know, tech-oriented nonprofits and have them be a part of community events. Have them be a part of an open house and just get them, you know, in the door. Get them to meet folks and that's free for most people if you have an existing event or program. The other thing I wanted to point out is that we are, this is not an original idea by any means. We just had the ability to implement it but Rachel from the DA had hooked me up with Crispin down here on the bottom who is doing something very similar in England. He has the benefit of government money. So they are able to do this with a government funded apprenticeship but they've been doing something similar for about five years, which is pretty exciting. So that's his website if you wanna check it out because it's pretty fascinating and he's got a little bit more structure to his program than we certainly have to ours. And I'm definitely going to add that, you know, this took a very large village of people. You'll see the list of names of all the people that helped us in some way or another. This, it was a long list. I mean, we had a bunch of mentors help us out. We had a lot of people organizing in a variety of ways and then we had additional support. Everyone from donating a house to donating subscriptions to things to stepping in at the last minute helping us with hosting when hosting blew up at mid-camp. So there was a lot of hands in this and we really appreciate everyone's help in just trying to bring in new faces into Drupal. You know, I mean, I think it's, I think and that's part of what we were trying to do was, you know, there are a lot of many, many people who have never heard of Drupal at all but are very talented, you know, how do we invite them in? So this was our way of taking their hand and bringing them in and say, hey, there's this amazing thing called Drupal. We'd like to introduce you to it. We'd like to train you in it a little bit and then if you decide, you know, it's up to you. If you want to decide that you want to keep going with it, we can help you and support you in that. And here's a seat at the table. Yeah. That's kind of the message we want to give. So before we jump into kind of, actually before we do that, I would like the students to actually introduce themselves and talk a little bit about the work you've done today. Would you be willing to step up to the mic and share a little bit about your experience? Come on, Joseph. Let's get a hand for the students. Hi Damien. Hello everyone. My name is Joseph Patterson and I'm with Genesis Works in Chicago. Yeah, basically I was introduced to Drupal through Genesis Works and given the opportunity to learn more about site building. I expressed interest in technology in high school. And for me, it was more about finding opportunities that align with how to make my interests come into action, if you will. So yeah, this is like a perfect segue into getting to learn more about site building and stuff. But yeah, for me, I have been going through the course and mentoring with Damien as my mentor. So we meet every week and yeah, we just go over things about Drupal and how to get more accustomed to it. But I basically just wanted to start off with something that was more personal to me and kind of getting myself more accustomed to what Drupal is. So I started off with like a personal site, a portfolio site, so getting myself out there. I wanted to, in the future, if I ever wanted to look for an internship and stuff like that, I wanted to build a site that had my resume, social media links and all that. So people could just go there, see what I'm able to do and then based off of that, it would just get to know more about me. But yeah, through this mentor and program, I've been able to accomplish that at a very reasonable rate. And yeah, the progression has been very exciting so far and I'm looking forward to more to come. So yeah. What are you doing on Friday? Thanks for listening. What's happening on Friday? Oh yeah. Yeah, no, I'm actually partaking in, I'm partaking in what's it called, the Coltrane. Yeah, there you go, that's what it's called. So yeah, I'm also looking forward to that because it'll be a first time for me and also I get into know more about the people who are in there and how to contribute as well. So looking forward to that. Thanks for listening. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. All right, so hi. Similar to Joseph, oh wait, I shouldn't introduce myself first. My name's Yasmin. Similar to Joseph, I was introduced to Drupal through Genesis Works. Because of Genesis Works, I became more interested in technology and computer science. I'm currently a computer science major in Chicago. And so one of the most important things for me, going into this, deciding like, oh I wanted a major in computer science is that I wanted to explore the different venues because I know the term itself computer science is so vague and there's so many different branches of it. So when this opportunity came up to learn about Drupal, which is like, web development and can do so much more than that, I jumped at it because it seemed like a good route to learn more. And that's something that I really wanted to take advantage of. I've heard from a lot of people that they wish that they've heard about Drupal when they were younger or like they were trained at an earlier age like they really want these kinds of experiences when they're younger because they really appreciate it now. And I'm very grateful to have been part of this along with the other students that I'm with. And what's your website, Yasmin? Oh, so my website is a passion project for mariachi. So I've been playing mariachi music since I was like nine years old. And so I'm currently a mentor at an organization in Chicago. And so I wanted to come up with an idea of something that they could showcase other talented students in the Chicago area. And she told us, she went to a mariachi conference and I'm dying to see what that looks like one day. Do any of the other students wanna share? Justin, whoo! Come on everyone, I'm Justin Lang from Empower and Baltimore. Pretty much my first experience was at Drupal on 2017 in Baltimore. Pretty much it was like, give them a feet wet. Honestly, like in terms of swimming, like you step in the water. It was like, not much, I learned about Drupal at 2017. You know, Drupal is just the first real experience of it. But so far through the initiative program, I've learned more about it. In terms like swimming, actually, you know, actually getting your first stroke in the water, swimming, I learned more about Drupal. For me, I wanna learn more about it. Don't understand more. Not as much as I can about it. Maybe, you know, brought my horizons forever in Drupal. For me, my own passion is like, you know, network technology, I have a degree in it from Community College at Bournemouth County, Essex. Actually, I learned more about it. Maybe like, helped my community out with it. With Tech Help, I think my first project for my website is a Tech Help website. For me, my family called me the IT support. The rest of it come to me for like tech problems. They're like something with like a virus or something. Helping out with it. Kinda get rid of it. So, that's pretty much my project. So, we only have a few minutes left to take questions, but we're happy to hang out in the lobby and take as many questions as you want, but I do wanna say that we are continuing the conversation. We're having a buff at 2.15, inclusion and action. And then also, Julia from Genesis Works was very generously willing to host her own buff for the first time, even though she's never been to DrupalCon before, just talking about how you can partner with nonprofits to reach diverse audiences. So, thank you very much. Questions? I'm sure there are many. Hopefully, maybe. Yeah, cause they're recording. As well. Okay, so I wanna talk a little bit about your experiences with measurement. Just because I run a very similar internship program as you do, that it's ending its second cycle in May. And I want to implement more of the resource component for my students as well. But I require that all students apply for experiential course credit through local universities. And that really helps with the measurement component because there's fixed parameters in which they have to meet to get the university credit requirement, as well as an hour requirement. So even if it's not all in-person work, they have to document that and track it. So that's really helped for me in terms of the parameters to evaluate them on. And then in the end of the internship, they have to do a final presentation in person or virtual, their choice. But it's a presentation of a final brand package, including their website. So it's basically like a business pitch. And that is a great point that I can evaluate their full scope of work on. But speaking to those, I just didn't know if you had any more specific measurement points that you were looking to implement or that you did try and maybe didn't work out. So I'd say that we were considering using a survey to measure students' understanding and comprehension of core concepts in the middle of the program. But a question I have for you is that not all of our students are enrolled in a university. So what would you recommend in that context? So I feel like your presentation idea is spot on. And then also the hour requirement, I think that makes sense too. I think because we have some students who are watching recordings, it might be hard to measure that as well. And so that would be self-reporting. But I'm curious if our cohort is kind of a mixture of some folks who are in college and some folks aren't, what would you recommend for those folks who are not in college? I think you could implement the same kind of measurement system that career centers use at universities because they have those parameters pretty publicly available. So you could use the same tools and resources to track their experiences and measure them the same way. But if you are looking towards expanding and getting scholarships, these experiential credit hours at most universities usually aren't incredibly expensive, depending on if they're in state and have a local residence. So it's something you could maybe offer a scholarship for at some point too, where they could get academic credit for it. Okay, great, thank you. Thanks. Anyone else? Mark. Hi. Just wondering if you can talk a little bit more about Genesis works and end power, like what the organizations do and just a little bit more about that. Yeah, Julia from Genesis works can talk to them. I'll let Michelle talk to them though. I would say just to probably speak to you. Thanks for the applause, Joseph, that was nice. So my name is Julia Logan. I work at Genesis Works. We are a workforce development nonprofit. So we were founded in Houston 16 years ago. We've expanded to five other cities that Allison and Michelle had up there. So the core program, our students get training this summer before their senior year of high school. And in Chicago, they receive training in either IT or accounting. In Houston, they also have some engineering as well because of the clients they have based in Houston and the folks that they work with there. So it's 160 hours of really rigorous, robust training. They get half of that in their IT or accounting. And then the other half is in business professional skills. So how to do impromptu public speaking, how to write professional emails, how to engage with colleagues in the workplace. And then once they've successfully completed their summer training, they are placed in internships for their senior year of high school. This is true for across all sites. So they go to school in the morning of their senior year and then they work from one to five Monday through Friday. They are, Yasmin was worked at the IT help desk at Accenture, Joseph worked in IT help desk at Spencer Stewart. Malik, I forgot, were you interned? Malik interned at TransUnion. Natasha was at Kirkland and Ellis, which is a huge law firm, and she was the person who sent phishing emails and then would send you a don't get phished, when they got phished response email. So she worked with the securities team. And so they have really, why kind of giving those examples, they have really meaningful, robust internships. It's not making coffee and fetching coffee and making copies. And then my role is we continue to provide support for six years out of high school. So from 18 to 24, I work with our students on college and career success. So if they're starting in a two year school, helping them transfer to a four year school, getting your certificates and start working right away. Our organization's mission is that our students gain economic self-sufficiency. So that looks like a lot of different ways for our students. It's not necessarily a four year degree. So we kind of see a lot of different paths to economic success. And so that's kind of the overall synopsis of who we are at Genesis Works. And I'm just gonna invite Justin to really quickly, if you can come up and chat a little bit about N-Power, that would be great. And then we have to actually close, unfortunately, because there's another session that's coming in here. Okay, so pretty much N-Power is a nonprofit organization. Pretty much they help undevelop youths. Pretty much 18 to 24, give them technological skills. So eventually attain the Conte A-plus certification. For me personally, I had a sort of technical background, pretty much from high school and the college as well. So pretty much it was like a refresher course for me for N-Power. And it kind of helped me attain my Conte A-plus certification. Pretty much cost free. Yes, they do internship placements and eventually it helped me attain a job as well. So thank you everyone for your time. If you want to continue the conversation like Alison said, we'll be outside for the next five to 10 minutes or so, but then we'll also have the BOF in room 203B from 215 to 315. So if you're about to jet into another session, you can always catch us there as well. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Thank you.