 All right. Hello wonderful people. Thanks for attending our panel discussion which is titled how to make big things happen in Drupal and the reason we are here is that each of us made one or not one each of us made several big things happen in Drupal before so we have some stories about success and failure and we would like to share it with you. So the first question to the panel is to introduce yourselves and to tell us why are you here and I will start because I have the mic. So I'm Gabar Hoichi I work for Acquia and I'm here because I enjoy connecting the dots in the community and figuring out where people need help and to enable them to be their best and that's why we organize this one and that's why I'm also involved with organizing the initiative leads keynote for Wednesday which you should attend even though it's in the morning and you will probably have a lot of partying done that by that time. Be there. Next one. Good morning everybody. My name is Mike Herschel I work for Agilina. We are hiring just so you know. I did I put a lot of work into the Olivero theme I was not of course the only one but I put a heck of a lot of work into the Olivero theme and then more recently I also put a lot of work into single directory components which is coming out in Drupal 10.1 and I'm very excited about that and I'm here because I want to empower other people to to do really cool things. Hi I'm Tiffany Ferris I'm the CEO of Palantir and you know through the years I've made a couple of different contributions. Drupal got in Chicago I was in Sierra and been on the board for a million years but from the code perspective you know Palantir was the driving force behind workbench and then more recently in the Drupal Rector initiative and then we have another one we're working on we'll be talking about that probably next year. Hi I'm Kristen and I've been working with Drupal for almost 20 years and in contribution space maybe since around 2010 and more recently so I've had a lot of contribution experience especially with Gabor on various initiatives but in the last about May of last year I started a contribution events initiative with the goal of trying to increase the number of contribution events whether they be promote or in person stand alone or part of a camp or you know that type of thing and so yeah it helps spearhead some porting days that happened last year remote porting days back July before the Drupal 10 release and more recently have been doing this project adoption where we're trying to get people who know how to do maintainership to adopt modules that need a Drupal 10 version and we're still looking for people so I'll talk to you after this. All right so since you have the mic anyway so what drives you to do this what motivates you to be involved with these big things? I mean I've always like doing Drupal to contribution just cuz it's fun and I love all the people and all that but specifically for the things that I've been focusing on more recently would be that I like enabling other people to be able to contribute so I'm helped with the you know mentoring and things like that and I think by creating more contribution events then then we can get more people contributing and more people helping out so a little thing can actually become a big thing by you know getting more and more people involved and it just takes that first person to kind of start and go from there. So I think for you know for us for Palantir we've been in the community now for over 17 years and we like to think about these kind of gnarly gnarly problem spaces and part of that is my my core love of you know duck tails right I want to work smarter not harder all the time and so when we find those opportunities we kind of go after them and say yeah this is a space where we can we can carve out and we can really make a difference because I think part of being in open source is that kind of recognition that sometimes you're standing on the shoulders of others and sometimes you need to let them stand on your shoulders. So I get really excited when I see websites running my code right so like to me it's kind of almost ridiculously awesome that there are hundreds of thousands of websites on the internet that have you know code that I wrote installed and I would also like to apologize to all those websites but but I literally get a kick out of that and I also like making things easier for people like I primarily work in in Drupal's front end and Drupal's front end hasn't had a lot of momentum but but recently it does and and I feel really excited about that and once you have momentum it's a lot easier to keep on going and I love building that up and I love that feeling of waking up in the morning and looking on Drupal.org and seeing that something I had been working is now a part of Drupal and that's that's a really big deal. Yeah one thing that I would add is I recently reread the subtle art of not giving a and and author makes a great point that you can't avoid problems in life so the so the key to happiness in life is to pick the problems where you enjoy solving them and then try to not give up about the rest of them so if we pick the right problems and then then we keep solving them that kind of leads to happiness but maybe it also helps if you get paid so the question is are you doing this in your pay time are you doing this as a volunteer combination or how does this work for you? So you know Palantir what we do is we look at a triple win I'm looking for things that are wins for our clients I'm looking for things that are in problem spaces where the Palantir team would be challenged and engaged by it and I'm looking for spaces that have a huge impact in Drupal so when I do that I then find those opportunities whether it's Palantir funding it or a combination of Palantir and one or more clients and then so I bake it into our process so that's and I want to be very clear I've never made a commit to Drupal code not that I can't but my contributions are different they're not just code it's about the vision and seeing you know where we can have that impact and organizing others around it at the Palantir. So your model is that you fund the teams that are working on these things? That's right I'm looking for opportunities where there's alignment between a need that we've seen and we know how to solve and what our client needs are and so I may take that and spread it across a couple different clients that's how workbench happened. Rector was something that Palantir funded directly with our PPP funds when we were you know when COVID first shut everything down I was like I now know what we're gonna work on we're gonna work on Rector and we're gonna make a run at it. Good job by the way. Yeah so funding yeah that's sponsorship is a big thing and not everybody has the privilege of getting funded to do contribution and that has always been a problem. In my early days I was definitely just volunteer and then when I was working at my last company although we did we did sponsor employees ourselves. I was working so many overtime hours it didn't really feel like it was volunteer right it was just part of the business and you know it was a thing so but you know COVID happened and life changed and I was like well some people get funded for this that some people are I know people that you know get funded for contribution why can't I do that so I went on GitHub sponsors actually got a couple sponsors for a little bit of money and and then I was doing some work with Salsa Digital for client work on some government projects and I'm like hey maybe they'll fund me and so I talked to the CEO and he's like what is this thing funding contribution and we talked through it and I convinced him that it was well worth their money to invest in in contribution so they sponsored they part-time did like 10-15 hours a week back about a year and a half ago but what was cool about it wasn't just that that which awesome you know I get to pay get paid for contribution but after a few months they're like well can you teach our team about contribution can you actually help us do better at contribution they had been doing contribution but kind of under the radar I'm like yeah so I kind of went over and instead of just me doing it I was actually helping the whole team do it so that was pretty cool so I would say like like my experience is I've worked for some amazing companies that that kind of partially make space for contribution you know I used to work for Lullaba I worked for Valtes and I'm with Adgerlina and each of those companies it's very important for me and for them to make space for contributions which means that they're not working you the entire time that being said to be honest like a good chunk of the contribution comes on my own time too you know mainly because I'm passionate about it and I recognize that that can lead to burnout so I'm always kind of doing myself check-ins to make sure like hey I don't have to do this you know this is volunteer but you know so yeah so so what do you do what what do you do about your burnout you want to talk about that well like so so there was one period and when I was creating Olivero and and I just I took a break you know I took a break for like three months or so and you know that was fine I also if I don't want to work I don't want to work there's nothing forcing me to do this you know like the companies that I work for it even though they make space for contributions the contributions are not mandatory so so there's nothing there's nothing forcing me to do this it's just that I I happen to enjoy it I'm lucky you know that's great so I think when we talked about this you too had stories about burnout and turn over as well and how you can replace yourself so even though you kind of figure out how to make this big thing then you can also figure out at the same time your successors or how to how to keep this alive so do you want to talk about that well I've there've been sessions on just on burnout so yeah it is a big big topic and I've definitely had a lot of ups and downs this is my first triple con in in person triple con in four years so that is a big thing and I think actually that helps re-energize at least for me and I think a lot of other people of like actually seeing people in person but yeah no I've definitely had plenty times where I just had to walk away and take that time to myself and try to decide if I wanted to invest you know my especially my if it was my free time do I want to invest in it and it's it's hard and I think the best thing really what I found was reaching out or sometimes people will reach out to me and just you know check in on Slack or however you can and just see how people are doing if people have disappeared there's probably a reason so I think you also you also built a system that the when when your initiative is well that community enough that other people can take it yeah yeah okay yeah so good reminder so so last year we did these porting events and so I did the very first one in July and I had a lot of help with documentation and kind of setting up a checklist and all that and was really awesome and what was really cool was I was like okay well around the July one and I was like well kind of tired I don't know when I want to run the next one because you know it's still some effort and then fortunately a company some people from a company they're like hey we don't do enough contribution can we run one of these you know porting events I'm like yes that's exactly why I was trying to do this was so that you know enable other people and so what I said yeah totally I will mentor you to run the event so they ran it and I just mentored them I you know I have to have some sessions with them and zoom calls and kind of say here are some tools that you can use you know use them if they make sense they don't have to and then they were able to tweak it so that it worked for them and then we incorporated some of that back into the process so Palantir we have you know we've been around in the Drupal space for a long time and we've certainly had so many amazing colleagues and now Palantir alums who contributed a lot in their personal time and that model has never really been sustainable particularly now as is those of us who may have not had kids now have kids and things like that so when when Palantir wants to support doing something big we do it as part of our work so it's either part of the client work or it's a project where there's an entire team one of the things that pieces of feedback that we've heard over the years is that it can feel isolated or feel really lonely and so our teams are used to working together to solve something and that's that's how we think about it that's how we think about that model for them and I think that that then becomes about what Palantir's contribution is rather than the individuals on the team it does create some some challenges because that's not a very familiar model in the Drupal community so sometimes it gets confusing for people who are like oh I want to talk to this person who this thing is well actually they were allocated to that and they did a great job but it's really Palantir you want to talk to if we need to to advance it or do something else yeah yeah we talked about this when we were discussing what to cover here is that the the open source in Drupal especially there's a lot of value in karma in building karma and there is this disconnect between is this a karma of the person or a karma of the company and how you can transfer that karma from from how you can make people understand that now you maybe have a different person that's funded to work on this yes yeah I mean because we were more involved than just funding like we really identify what those strategic priorities are and and move them forward and we'll rotate team members as they move on to different projects and things so it's really the company that's taking responsibility for it it's a little bit different all right just spark something so the rotation so actually that's something at least that's also that has been super helpful because although you know the quite a few people it can do contribution usually will allocate you know a chunk of hours for you know one or two people and after a while you know they may be like you know I'm good for a while I I would like to just you know focus on client work and that's totally fair right people you know they get tired of whatever it is and so then we rotate people in and that's been really great actually so don't you know discount that especially if you're a company owner organization owner and you have you know team members that might want to do some contribution but maybe they don't want to do it every single week maybe they want to do it for a couple months and then you know swap out and then keep great so when we were preparing for this we talked about a lot of different challenges that people could face when they start a big thing in Drupal so you have like a favorite or one that you want to highlight yeah yeah so one of the issues when you're trying to get you know attention on on a project is is knowing people you know and and I've I've been lucky enough and privileged enough to like have some personally really relationships with core committers and excellent developers and things like that not everybody not everybody can do that and another thing that like really helps out is being in person and we're all we're all privileged and lucky enough to be here in person but not everybody can do that when when you want to get something committed to core or build something or or get feedback it makes it's a lot easier to do so if you have a personal relationship with a person that is the final decision-maker you know if I can reach out to someone and say hey Laurie what do you think of this and then he will say like Mike that's a horrible idea or or say like you know you could do this if you do that but if I did not know him it would be like it would be very intimidating for me to reach out and we recognize that this is a problem this is hard to scale and and there's there's been a lot of discussion one of the discussions that I'm really interested in as I was talking with a fellow Drupal Association board member Nick Wienhoff who works for GitLab and they have a they have a program where they have employed merge request coaches and so if you're a person who like wants to you want to contribute code to GitLab and you want to get this into GitLab core but you don't maybe have those personal relationships to make this happen you can hit a button and then at some point the coach will show up in your issue queue talk with you and say hey number one this needs tests number two this is a never but number three the whole idea is okay and that can be like the first line of getting your code in shape for core and at that point when that is ready that person will then go to the committer and say hey so and so you need to take a look at this because it's pretty cool and I've been working a lot with this person it something like that in Drupal I think would be very valuable but at the same time we're still a little ways away from that because GitLab of course has paid positions and you know the Drupal Association to funding is is not as much as it needs to be I think for the challenges that we've faced you know we're an agile company and we like to work in that way so one of the things we're always trying to do is to increase our predictability and what I do know with absolute certainty is that this community is not predictable so you never know when the work that you're doing is going to be really well adopted you never know when someone's going to come in with a with a need that needs more immediate attention than you've predicted or allowed for so I think that's that's one of the things that's challenging and as we kind of touched on in the last question just the confusion it causes when it's not the person who's driving this thing but it's actually the company that's driving that I we don't really have a lot of mature processes around that we understand as a community or even if you're new to the community but familiar with open source you know to go to the maintainer you know to go to that but it's not always obvious if it's a Palantir initiative that really that person may no longer be working at it or may not even be a Palantir anymore and may have no interest in it whatsoever so I think that that kind of confusion kind of comes up so there's just there's that that unpredictability that unknowns that kind of come up and make it challenging as you're thinking about you know how you maintain it in after it's you know the big development release we know what that looks like but it's that that the long commitment that you have that one that's really where the challenge comes in so wait so do you think that there's a so the predictability problem I think part of it is when the owner when there's an ownership mismatch between things so when you are like make this big shiny contribution to the community and you gift them as a gift then the community does not have ownership over that gift they just get this like big blob of thing and they done they can't make anything out of it so so do you have like did you find good models for for working on this yeah I mean there's a there's a balance right part of what the value that we bring in the reason that we're able to accelerate the innovation in the way that we do when we when we make these contributions is because we do have teams that have established charters and they know how to create working agreements and they know how to work together in a really collaborative and deep way but you need to balance that and you know our control of our ways of working with working in the open so there is a a nuance to it you don't you don't get it all the way done for your own definition of done or all the allocation you intend to make to it you take it about 80 80% of the way so that others can understand the vision and start to imagine their own use cases in it so then that's when we start working in the open you know there have been cases in the past where companies are like staking out ground we're not ones to stake out ground we want people to scratch their own itch we get that but when we're working on something big we do get about 80% of the way there and then we start to create blogs and scaffolding so that others can join us in that in that space because it does belong to everybody so that working in the open piece before you have run out of whatever investment you're interested in making in it is a really key piece for I think organizational level development yeah well Angie Byron had this blog post that we always refer that has perfectionist Pat and sloppy Sam and perfectionist Pat is working on their own and on the side in the corner that makes everything perfect and then gifts it and then nobody cares and then sloppy Sam is there and is very sloppy and makes crappy things but then people join and then they are involved and it all becomes good at the end yeah we try and hit it somewhere in the middle yeah you know I think that they're you know this this may resonate with some in the room but when you work with a high functioning team you really want to keep doing that in that way and so that's why we try and balance that working in the open and inviting others into that process but also really leveraging the value that teams can deliver great so challenges yeah I think so I've been operating a lot in the sort of lead organization mentorship that sort of space rather than so much of the hands-on coding and you know I've done that and I still do a bit of that but I think you know I feel like I'm making more impact in this sort of organizational space I think one of the challenges really people don't like to organize seriously like they don't like to organize like who hears like a project manager or something nobody no hands are going up okay who begrudgingly has been a project manager for things a few hands wow okay much better yeah yeah yeah so that's what I'm talking about like so I've done all the things I've done the coding and the organizing the marketing and all the things right so when I'm I feel like that's a place that people people will step up to write a patch or write some tests or whatever I feel like we do that pretty well but yeah the organ organizing and the like rallying the troops and trying to like lead the you know horses to water and whatever her cats all that fun stuff right we don't have enough people to do it and actually it's not that hard it isn't it really isn't that hard and I'll tell you a little story so this contribution the project adoption thing that I kind of kicked off a few months ago it literally is a spreadsheet okay it is a spreadsheet so there was a so this is part of the Drupal 10 readiness initiative and it's kind of a sub-initiative that happened and it was at some you know we have the bi-weekly meetings and I'm like well we need to get more modules over to Drupal 10 you know and you know it's just kind of stalled and things aren't happening and I'm like you know you can go through this whole process which it sounds like that a lot of people in the room are more of a developer side right where abandoned module process that kind of thing but no one was just doing it so I said okay I'm just gonna make a spreadsheet so I said okay people you know chime in what what projects would you like to get moved over and you know people chime in made a spreadsheet lots of metadata you know all these different things like when was the last commit you know how what's the status of the module blah blah blah and then the magic of the spreadsheet like people actually started volunteering because I had a column like okay I can take that one I can take that one Lucas heading from Nicaragua it took like you know 20 of them or something whatever it was just like really awesome you know it's just like a spreadsheet right like it can be really simple to organize something but for some reason I think people feel kind of intimidated I think I think it always helps when you kind of can scope the problem space so the there's these several thousand modules that are not ported as a unthinkable problem space but when you have this spreadsheet and okay I can take 20 like okay 20 is not bad this is much less than a thousand so I think it helps when you scope the problem space so that's also why I think initiatives some of the initiatives work really well because they're a Drupal community is this big huge community and it could be very scary for people and and you need to know people to make stuff happen because that's that because there's just a lot of things happening and people prioritize by by that and the initiatives help with having a smaller part of the community that you can belong and that has a tighter scope so you can feel more of the belonging and also have the tighter scope of what it what you are delivering and then can celebrate the success without this whatever decade-long effort of everything that you want to do in this area kind of thing nice so when we talked about this several of you said that there were unexpected wins of going to do big things that you did not expect so do you want to talk about that maybe Mike I I guess I became like I became a way better developer you know and in it I guess I guess first of all it took longer than I expected like you know when I when I started Olivero I think I was even like starting in like when a Drupal 8.9 was out and I was like you know what maybe I can get this in by nine and it took a lot longer it's it was more involved I feel like I could I could do a lot quicker now since I've been through the process but because of that actually I became a lot like a much better developer I've learned a whole bunch about accessibility especially from Andrew McPherson who's one of our accessibility maintainers and I learned I learned a whole I ended up like doing a bunch of really cool things and I can tell you like if future me went back to pass me and said do this I'd be like hell no I'm not gonna do that that's way too difficult but you know if you do things incrementally it happens you know and and I think yeah I think just keeping momentum and having having a good core group of people matters you know it's like an adventure almost so yeah you also got Drupal into cool front and news sites which was like whoa articles about Drupal cool front and stuff it's a new experience and also like your celebrate celebratory posts that are like building up the momentum in the front and space area I think really powerful yeah yeah I think I touched upon a couple of them so you know building some sort of framework for running events and then having someone just unexpectedly say yeah sure we'll take that and run with it I mean that was the goal but I guess I didn't really think it was necessarily gonna happen but yeah it was that was at least so quickly so that was a pleasant surprise and then I was surprised at how I mean just a spreadsheet could just make so much you know happen really I mean it's it seems so you know silly but it isn't because it was just like an easy tool like if you could just make something really easy for someone they're happy to jump in for an hour or two or whatever right you just kind of you just give it that you know you just say hey you know just pick something and run with it and and I was very pleasantly surprised at how well that went and it all comes together in a much bigger thing at the end yeah exactly yeah I think the thing that always is a pleasant surprise to me is how quickly the community will adopt something right so workbench was you know this entire suite of features and you know we intended it for so I don't I don't think at the time that I really expected it would end up in core I thought it would kind of always be a bit separate rector is a little bit different the I had a big vision for rector I was like I see this potential I this is gonna be really cool and it's gonna change the level of effort it's gonna shorten how long it takes to get you know our contrived modules up to the latest version of Drupal and it's gonna focus how we use our effort as a community right so you know it just it just depends on on that but even even still even though I had this big vision I still think rector was really really cool yeah yeah yeah and it's built a whole ecosystem of the update button a bunch of other tools and it's way beyond us right and now that's the vision right the you know go ahead and see it through and then it we don't own it but you know we just kind of plant that seed and it grows into a garden it's well beyond any of us at this point yeah that's the goal of all of the big things so I have a couple questions for the audience so raise your hands who are currently contributing to Drupal either the code or community events wherever you do okay it's more than half of the audience thank you put your hands down so who are you paid for doing that contribution alright it's like one third of the people that had their hands down before maybe a quarter all right some wiggly hands as well some you're somewhat paid alright so now that we know that about half of our audience do not currently contribute to Drupal core half of our audience contributes to Drupal core and a third of that gets somewhat paid to contribute to Drupal core what would be the message that you think that people should leave this room with I think really the two key takeaways for me are that before you start to consider doing something big be really clear which model you're gonna pursue right there are four different ways of doing big things that are represented up here and each of those models has a consequence and impacts on you know how you're going to assemble your team right I don't have to worry about recruiting people to the team initially for that big lift because I'm gonna commit to it internally but if you are going to do it initiative like Olivero and you don't want to spend all of your free time doing it because you don't get the exact same dopamine hit that Mike does you know or you have a family you know he requires your time and his engines who you know then then you need to recruit other people and so as gobbler said I did a really fantastic job of of the kind of communication around it and that's one of the things you have to do Kristen's done an amazing job of the organization around it so be really clear on what kind of contribution model you have and then you can use that to tailor as as gobbler said before the the scope of what is achievable so when you kind of narrow that back in it helps you to be agile it helps you identify what is a realistic minimum valuable product that you can actually put out and so that you don't experience the burnout hopefully and you can really help triple innovate faster it's important that you can also celebrate success that you have the achievable goal yeah yeah I think Dries said it today was the power of one so definitely you know if you have a team awesome but you can do something amazing just by deciding to do it right so the contribution events initiative when I was kicking around the idea last May I'm like I wasn't going to in-person events I wanted more remote contribution events because I wanted them and I wanted it to happen and I wanted to see it and I was kind of scratching my own itch and I kind of ran it by Gabor I'm like can I should I do these like why not so I said okay why not then I'm gonna start doing this so you know there is a power in one and then you get more people right that one becomes to becomes 10 you know and and then we start you know impacting everybody so I think you know it's in it and maybe it won't work out and that's okay right maybe it won't work out you know so we've had you know it's like had some ups and downs and you know we have people that have come come and gone and in these initiatives and such but I think yeah just be okay with with just doing it trying it and you know if you need help rally the troops ping us ping other people in the community and people are really supportive so you know just go for it so I have so many things to say so like one of the most important parts at least for me is like assembling a team you know so it's like people have their different super powers and and I can tell you like when I was doing Olivero Matthew tipped who was in the room just a little bit ago he he did nothing but run the meetings and I would talk to him and I would say thank you for doing this he's like oh I'm not doing anything and and I would say like no you are taking like a lot off my plate I don't have to worry about this now because you just get it done you know if you can help out some with with that it's a big deal and then in addition to that I would have like other people help me do this and this and it was awesome along that lines I would also trade people issues I would say like if someone can review and maybe our TV see this issue I will totally do the same to yours you know I would also buy people with beers I want to talk a little bit about bike shedding bike shedding can be positive but let me define what bike shedding is bike shedding is when you go off on like random tangents so bike shedding can be positive but you need to time box it you need to say like all right we're gonna deal with this we're gonna talk about this for a certain amount of time but then you need someone with authority to put a stake in the ground and say like all right well this is it we discuss that anything else beyond this can be tackled but in a follow-up issue follow up issues are like a magical way to say like yeah we're gonna we got to get this done because perfect is the enemy of good if you're looking for perfection we are all very opinionated people and we're not gonna make everybody perfectly happy and we have to realize that as you said earlier like momentum and momentum matters you know hyping matters like I work with Matteo right here on single directory components Matteo did all the coding and and and I I can't one of the things that I would I would help out with is is writing blogs and posting and so I was talking about Matteo Matteo is like no this is not gonna make it for 10.1 I'm like it's gonna make it in 10.1 because I'm gonna blog about it get people really excited about it and that's gonna put pressure on the core committers and and I told them this I did work yeah and and and I did that like totally intentionally you know and and but like building momentum and hyping like like that matters you know and and celebrating success matters you know we need to say like we're doing some really cool innovative stuff here like let's talk about it let's let's write about let's celebrate it you know and and yeah yeah so all of us have been involved with a lot of different successful things through the years so you can find us after your session as well to talk but if you have any questions now we would be very happy to answer them or comments or like rotten tomatoes no yes I will repeat what was your first contribution yeah so like I had literally been using Drupal since like around 2008 my first ever like minorish contribution was at Drupal Convoca at a code sprint and I made like the most minor CSS change and Bartek and beyond that I really didn't even do any type of major contribution until I until I started doing Olivero so I I probably went like 10 years in Drupal without doing anything major for whatever reason yeah you're testing memory I would say probably the first contribution I would I mean I call speaking a contribution so I would say speaking at probably at like Drupal Con San Francisco maybe 2010 something like that but but after that I'd say I don't maybe it wasn't the first but a major one is we did the Drupal 8 multilingual initiative which was super awesome we did yeah that was that was that kind of got me hooked I mean I did stuff before that but that definitely kind of got me hooked but yeah I mean it's been a long ride so I if you look me up on Drupal.org you'll see I don't have any code commits but that doesn't mean I don't contribute and I think the first big thing that I took on was in 2008 I think I led the search for a Drupal.org rebrand and hired Mark Bolton to do that work and then I was elected to the board first in 2009 and I served for nine years and then I'm in the middle of my next go around on the board so I've been serving three more years so other than Dries they've been the longest serving board members those are probably the first two things that people would know me for and Drupal Con Chicago in 2011 yeah I wanted to mention that it was an amazing conference I still have the pajamas they were great so it was a field museum party yeah yes yeah so what Bjorn is saying for the recording so is that so what Mike said is that we need this personal connection but what most people don't realize is that the people that you try to approach to make that personal connection are really friendly people and I would add one more thing is that they need your help because they have these big visions of things that they want to achieve and they need more people to achieve those big visions so they need you to contact them they're not just friendly but they need you so one thing that I I will let you answer as well about our comments but one thing that I like about the redesign of this conference is that they put the initiative lead keynote on Wednesday morning so their people leading the initiatives will be on stage in person talk about their things Mateo will be there talk about single directory components and then after the keynote after they talked on stage about their initiatives they will lead contribution in person in the room in the contribution room so you can like listen first unlike what are they working on one of their goals what you can be involved with and then right after sit with them in person and be involved right there so I think that's really a good way to to channel people right away into making these connections so I know there's a lot of opportunities in town to like sightsee but hopefully you'll be here on Wednesday as well I would like to second everything Gebber said just one yeah follow-up with I think one thing that makes it much easier is getting involved in a particular initiative if you if you're just like I don't know what to do then that is the easiest way to get involved because it's already organized so you you have that kind of baked in and then you can just kind of see well what do you need what helped you need and you can find your you know your way around like oh I like this I don't like that and that is just definitely that's been my go-to I mean I've done contributed modules and stuff like that but my favorite thing is working on initiatives I think as you consider that that there are some resources which are scarce right the the amount of time core committers have they have to prioritize right and we use our karma system both the the you know explicit and an implicit one but you know Mike's talked about the richness of in person face-to-face communication that's obviously going to be your your fastest path to a relationship in establishing that you're you know aligned with someone or that this is what's going to move forward but not everybody can meet face-to-face so consider that you know when you're working on an initiative as Kristen said there can be video chats right that's also a rich version of communication you know what do you do in Slack what do you do in the issue queue be mindful of how you are showing up in the community spaces because that helps people who may not have met you to know that you know you are trustworthy person and make them more likely to put you at the top of the priority queue you know when it's your turn right because they trust that you're going to take that and turn it into something that's for the benefit of all so you know if you can meet people in person that's great but don't be discouraged if that's not available to you in that moment just think about what is the richest you know form of communication I can use to really support this and move it forward. I have one more thing to say that's like completely unrelated to that when I was when I was doing Olivero something that like a tactic that that we kind of fell into that that worked really well is I would set like I would set up meetings every two or three weeks with a core committer you know so I would I would be talking to Lowry and I would say hey when can you meet in two three weeks and you would say alright well let's meet on Tuesday you know 8 a.m. your time and so leading up to that it's almost like a deadline I would have a number of issues that needed to be discussed I would have a number of issues that were RTBC and I had him for two hours to like look through these issues and he would either commit them or set them back and send them back to me and that dramatically increased the pace of us getting in you know it was it was a big deal. I mean one of the things you're very good at Mike is being able to ask for help and and not wasting and a second of the help that you get do you know what I mean like you're so intentional and you're so grateful and you show so much respect and gratitude for the people that you work with it really makes people want to continue work with you. Yeah we recently had a core committer on site in London and one of the things that came up several times was the lullabot nudge so I'm gonna say hi to all the lullabots here because there is now apparently like it's a it's a thing that the lullabot nudge is like this very gentle thing that like hey this is here it would be great to if you could review it so so it's important how you appear there and how you get involved but it's also important to keep in mind that all of us are approachable and we are here and we need you to approach us and to be involved because that's how we make great things happen so maybe we have time for one more question yes yeah let me repeat that for the recording so Matthew said that we talked about funding teams and funding teams within a company and working with volunteers and what about the size of projects where several companies would have funds but none of them have enough and they want to work together and how what would what would it take to coordinate these funds and these efforts I think we take the same thing that we need for a successful internal project team which is you need to be very clear about what investment you're willing to make and upfront about what that looks like in the working agreement between the two companies right because when a company goes to make an investment you probably have time boxed it you've identified what your budget is and and what you're what expected outcomes you have so in Palantir's case we're expected to deliver outcomes for our clients that's one of the ways that we fund a lot of this stuff and part of that introduces challenges when you're working with another company that may be working on a different you know different timescale or even the community who may not be working on that same timescale as in any kind of collaboration it's about that the strength of communication and expectation management and you know understanding what what happens there I am excited to see you know some of what we're starting here with Pittsburgh which is you know Palantir was one of the the folks who contributed I'm happy to contribute for other people like money so that other people can take something forward that we would benefit from we were happy to fund that and that's just the way that I think about you know what we can reasonably do and how we can have an impact sometimes it's going to be money sometimes it's going to be pushing a team forward sometimes it might be you know sponsoring an individual or submitting money through the Drupal Association so we have a we have a bunch of different tools in our toolkit and for things that we choose to take on and dedicate team member time to it's usually something that we can get 80% of the way there like on our own just because that it requires such an intense investment at that point and I don't want to I don't want to miss the deadlines essentially but I'm I'm curious for how Pittsburgh might evolve I'm I really am excited about this you know about this experiment and I'm I'm really wondering what we're going to learn from it because I do think that could be a model and we might start to see like as Dries talked about today there's a couple of those that got funded it probably need to work together so that's going to mean it's kind of the unexpected piece of that experiment that comes back yeah the project management goes back to that project manager you need a really strong project manager and if it's two separate teams yeah that that can be challenging I mean it's it's no different than two web agencies you know that actually maybe do a project together for a government project or something I mean this is not uncommon right and yeah the project management is key and also just role-crafting and the chartering for how it's set up who's going to be responsible how decisions are going to be made those are all really critical conversations to have up front yeah the one thing that I think will probably be a part of a topic of a future Dries note I think I think because I see that trend coming up but we'll see how that goes is that we are trying especially in the UX area we are trying to not focus on huge initiatives because we we failed with one of them and we are not really succeeding with another one so we are what we are trying now and what we've been very very successful with is to have smaller goals that we can achieve and so Christina is trying to a little about is now trying to work on coordinating multiple different things that people want to work on in the UX area and instead of like having this huge goal that will probably take five years to do is to assemble different people from different companies to work on these things and to try to figure out how it's going to happen and that could be and we've been struggling with not trying to name it because it's not like a big initiative but at the same time it's a lot of things that will altogether result in a big thing so that's an interesting new model that we are trying at various areas and I think that we'll see how that works out and everything old is new again yeah because that's that's one of the ways we did a lot of image management stuff in the Drupal 7 cycle you know Palantir worked with a couple other companies we broke it down and said we're gonna work we'll take this piece on you take this piece on you start with a coordination summit you know just like you would do at a Drupal con so you can do it but it you just have to have a lot of trust good communication yeah all right so I think that's it for our time we already two minutes over so we should let you go to the welcome reception thank you for coming