 I got one thumbs up, two thumbs up. Oh, okay, I got a lot of thumbs up. Okay, great, so many thumbs. Hi, y'all, thanks for coming. I know it's the last session of the day, so it's really close to happy hour slash dinner slash other obligations. So thank you all for being here. Oh, here we are, this is what we're doing. My name is Nikki. I started the Drupal Diversity and Inclusion Group two years ago after DrupalCon New Orleans, and we, oh, that's okay. And we have been doing this conversation every year. We're gonna do it a little bit differently this year. I'm just gonna give a very, very fast overview of what we do, and then other members of the leadership team are gonna take over, and I'm gonna sit in the corner and shut up. So the Drupal Diversity and Inclusion Group was started because we wanted to make Drupal a safer space for women, people of color, minorities, people who are differently abled, people who are not neurotypical, all of the people who we don't see a lot of at DrupalCons. That's specifically why we made it, and we've been working since then to make Drupal safer. And yeah, okay, just did that. And here's all of the things that we're against. Here's a big long list that's not exhaustive of things that we are not racist, we're not homophobic, we're not sexist, we're not Islamophobic, and we think it's really important, and I'm gonna stop speaking for the group in a second as soon as I sit down, we think it's really important to be explicit about these things. To not just say we wanna treat people nicely, but to say we are against racism. We are specifically anti-racist, we are specifically anti-sexist, we are specifically anti-Islamophobic. And so that's some of the messaging that we're putting out and that we're trying to create in the Drupal community. Okay, great, this is where I go sit down and let the rest of the leadership team talk about all the great stuff that they've done this year, this is the first day that we have a leadership team. We realize that more people are better, and so we got a lot of smart people on the leadership team to do a lot of smart things this year, and we'll let them go from here. I'm sure you're over, I'll go sit down. I'm Tara, I'm Sparkling Robots. Hi, Mark Drummond, M. Drummond. I'm Alana Burke with an equally unique username, it's aburk66. And we also have Greg, who is GDD, Nat, who is Catch and Ruby, Ruby G. Where to find us online? Drupaldiversity.com, or on Twitter, Drupal Diversity, or on Slack in the Diversity and Inclusion channel. Oh, it does, oops, we have a new website. And we're also on Drupal.org, our project's called Diversity, which I think is really cool, because when you work in our issue queue and we give you commit credit, it comes up as diversity on your profile, and that's just the best feeling ever. Just putting that out there, you should come to our meetings, because for every meeting you attend, you post an issue in the meeting agenda, and we give you credit for it, so it shows up on your profile. And we have meetings every Thursday in Slack at noon EST and 8 a.m. PST. 9 a.m. PST. I'd never get the time, so I'm sorry. 9 a.m. PST. Don't think this has a slide, so how to help, come join our meetings, talk to us, check out our issue queue, if that's not really your thing, just come to the meetings, tweet, check out our Twitter, follow us on Twitter, and yeah, Contrib Team. Yeah, we have a branch called DDI Contrib Team that was founded this year, maybe nine months ago. I don't know if there's a slide, so I'm gonna go with it. We were started when Jerry's released his sort of state of the Drupal, I think something like that post that was looking a lot at where contributions came from, and the focus of the post was not diversity. It was like corporate versus non-volunteer contributions, and there was one sentence, I think, that said there were 2% non-male contributors, and Holger had a lot of discussion about this, and we have since formed a little branch of people who are working to increase code-based, and as we go, all kinds of contributions to the project from people in underrepresented groups. So if you're wanting to mentor people or wanting to learn how to make your first commit, or anything like that, get in the channel and help that way. It's a DDI Contrib Team on Slack. I think so. It's not my turn yet. We have lots of good stuff happening here in Nashville. I'm sorry that it's Wednesday, so some of this stuff already happened, but we're gonna wanna take credit for it anyway. Monday night, right? We had a game night, Tara ran it, lots of people came, they played games, it was like a safe space, and more or less an alcohol-free space. Completely alcohol-free, which is really hard to find in conferences. Earlier yesterday, I gave a talk about ethics, so we're still increasing the conversation about how to be ethical in technology. Earlier today, there was an LGBTQIA plus BOF. Last night, there was a People of Color and Allies BOF. There's another one today. There's an LGBTQIA social happy hour tonight at six. There's a religious minorities BOF, when is that? Okay, I thought you might know when it was. But there is a religious minorities BOF. And almost all of these are new in the last couple of years, that they're officially on the schedule. So this is one of the things that DDI has worked to help the DA and Amanda and the program team do. They used to be organized organically by people, and we decided that it's good to have a set and designated space for them. So now, the leadership team's gonna talk about the stuff they've done this year. Right after DrupalCon last year, inspired actually by Nikki's talk on 100 Ways to Be an Ally, which gave, I don't know, a lot of book recommendations. We formed a book club in Drupal Diversity. We read the New Jim Crow. We read a bunch of articles, the Combahee River Collective Statement, and Peggy McIntosh's work on White Privilege, and unpacking the Invisible Napsack, and other things. Oh, Twitter and Tear Gas, by last year's keynote speaker. We were having kind of a formal book club for four months that has kind of shifted into people giving book recommendations in the channel. We have a Goodreads group, if you're a Goodreads person, where people's recommendations mostly end up. So you can check us out on Goodreads if you wanna see the kinds of things we're thinking and talking about. I think that we wanted to start it, again, to just sort of elevate the level of discussion and self-education around topics of diversity and social justice. So I'm super excited about it, and that's another place you could help. I think a Drupal team, which I already talked about, Nashville Planning, who wants that one? So a handful of us from Drupal Diversity were involved in some of the governance conversations that happened this year. We had a panel a couple of hours ago right here in this room where we talked about a lot of that. And I think a lot came out of that, although not as much as we would have liked. There's still a lot of discussion to be had, especially around getting diversity and inclusion into that conversation and into those values and principles, but it's something that we are very much aware of and very much involved in and very much working on because it's incredibly important and we are not going to give up and we're not going to let there be language that we don't think is strong enough as Nikki had read earlier. Like these are the things that we do not tolerate and we think that that kind of language is what needs to be in Drupal's values. It needs to be explicitly stated for reasons that I don't even think need to be explained. So that is something that we are just gonna stay very much focused on and not let go. I can't see what the next one is. Did someone want to talk about, I don't. So throughout the year, we had a different camp organizers come to our meeting and say, hey, we want to support diversity and inclusion. Should we have a buff? What should it be in it? What should we talk about? Or should we have sessions? Where should we tap into speakers for those sessions? So that was really great because we felt like in the meetings we had people come in and ask for help and then all of our members kind of contribute to that. And then for DrupalCon specifically, we had like DDI session help where we had people drop into this channel and say like, hey, I'm working on a talk. This is where I'm at, like maybe I'm brainstorming or maybe I already have my slides and people jump in and sort of help and mentor that person wherever they needed it in that process. So we, like I think earlier, towards the end of last year, we decided we're gonna move to Drupal.org. We had a lot of feedback that people were having trouble contributing to our GitHub issue queue. And sometimes maybe we were training them to do that and eventually we decided if we move to Drupal.org then people who are gonna contribute to our issue queue will be getting the practice of contributing to other issues on Drupal.org. And so maybe that's what we should be doing as sort of like a platform for people to not like a stepping stone for people to get started. That was a really big process and a lot of people pitched into that. And I remember in our meetings, we would have agendas and we'd be like, here's a list of things that needs to be done before we can flip the switch. And people would be like, oh, and moving issues over, copy pasting the summaries and linking back to GitHub. And so that was really exciting. And another part of that that was really exciting was now we can give credit for people attending our meetings, people helping moving our issues forward or helping with things at Nashville. We had a bunch of issues for the game night or for the booth duty. And I hope that we'll go back and we'll give people credit for that. And it's really exciting to see that credit appear on the profile. Oh, and then the Slack channel to help people plan Drupal con session was the session help met slash mentoring that we did. I have big news. So one of the things that we have done consciously in DDI is the things that we wish the Drupal Association and the Drupal community did. So we make all of our decisions transparently. We give contribution credit for coming to meetings and doing emotional labor or non-technical labor. We make mistakes publicly and then apologize for them. We tweet things honestly, sometimes with regret, but then we fix it. Basically we just try to live publicly and transparently. One of the other things that we wish the Drupal Association and the Drupal community did was have a formal process for transitioning leadership. People should not be in positions of power for too long. I think it makes things stale and it makes things seem as though that person is the most important thing when it's not. So DDI is not my project. DDI is a community project. And I don't want it to ever seem like that DDI wouldn't exist without me. So starting effective now, Fatima is the new leader of the Drupal Diversity and Inclusion Group. And so I'm just gonna say just real quick that I think Fatima is one of the smartest, kindest, most engaged people that I've ever met in any community. And that not only Drupal, but DDI is super, I'm gonna try really hard to make her cry. That Drupal is really, really lucky to have her. And I'm gonna be transitioning out over the next year. It's not gonna be abrupt. I'm gonna support her. And I'm so excited to see how DDI as a community evolves under her leadership, which I know is gonna be stellar. Well, we wanna stay involved in the governance process. We wanna really push for that. And we can't be the only one saying things. So we really want the people who come to our meetings to push for those things and post in that governance issue queue. I think session help is a really great idea. And we can kind of expand on that and help people submit sessions and increase speaker diversity. I know Ruby's working a lot to improve the resources on our website. And for people to be able to go there and look into that. And we have the contrib team doing this like accelerator program mentoring to get people comfortable contributing to core. So a lot of things, a lot of contributions. I don't know. There's something I wanted to say when, oh, a lot of work in progress and improvements. And there's always room for improvements. Something I wanted to say earlier when Nikki was talking was that when I first came to this community, I think I was just like, I don't know what Drupal is. I don't know what's going on. Everyone was really welcoming. And I kind of didn't come for the code because I didn't know what the code looked like. I just came to the con to figure out why work was switching to Drupal and what I had to do to learn how to keep my job. And then I came and everyone was amazing. And I felt so welcomed. And so I felt this community vibe. And I was like, I haven't had that anywhere else. And so I stayed. And I remember being in a diversity inclusion boss at New Orleans and everyone was talking about why they were there. And I started talking about like, I'm so used to keeping my head down and not speaking up and just letting people say racist or Islamophobic things to me and then just letting it go because accepting that maybe that's just a part of my life and I have to deal with that. And that's how I got emotional. And I think, Nikki, you said something that prompted me to keep talking. And then I just kept talking for like five minutes. And then I felt so empowered at the end of that. And I was like, I just said all the things I should have said years ago, but maybe I wasn't ready to say. And after that, I just felt like I started getting platforms to talk and people started listening. And for me, that means so much because there's so many people who don't have the opportunities that I had and didn't meet the people that I needed that I met and weren't able to get those doors open for them. So if I can be at a point where I have this power and I can do things and I'm gonna need people to help me along the way and I'm gonna make mistakes and that's all part of it. I just wanna say that like, this is all new to me too but I'm really excited about having a voice and I'm really excited to be able to say the things that maybe people who don't have a voice can't say. And that's sort of gonna be my focus, I guess, for the year. How we can support those people that maybe don't know that we can support them because maybe they're so used to not being supported. Thank you. And if anyone else has plans for the next year. I have plans for Friday. We're gonna be, yeah, so Contrib Team is having a sprint on Friday in the mentored core sprint room. It's a little bit unconventional but so far they haven't kicked me out. And one of the things that I was always frustrated with was there's this like, we have tasks for people who don't know how to code thing. We actually do, like you don't need a local environment. If you can read and write in English to some, you know, to whatever level. We have tasks for you. We also have tasks for project managers. We just adopted the gender field module. That's exciting news, which we need to port to Drupal 8 and I would like to work with the Open Demographics Project to use some of their stuff that they've been working on and kind of use the gender field module as best practices sort of for user data collection around diversity issues. So that being said, I would love to have anyone there. Also, we need coders. It's not like we don't need those people too, but it's gonna be an exciting day on Friday. So one of the things that came out of our contrib team is that there was an effort to have a new website for Drupal Diversity Inclusion workgroup and Ruby who's not here worked a ton on resources, making that a great source for resources and I know a lot of other people worked on it. But one of the great things that came out of it is Colleen Clarkson who's here, as well as Alex who's not here, made a huge effort to help create a new website and I'd love Colleen to come up here and if you're up for it to talk a little bit about that. Bonjour. That's my French attempt. Yeah, so yeah, it was really exciting. I just kind of was hopping around in Slack. I just love the fact that we use Slack by the way now because I had no idea what IRC was, I just couldn't figure it out. So yeah, I was just hopping in Slack and somebody was like, hey, we gotta build a new site and I also run Drupal Camp Atlanta so I have some experience with theming and as a sole person, so I didn't even really think of being on the DDI team as really anything really, as far as just, hey, I'll help and I personally have never worked with a project manager. I work at the university so I'm like a lone wolf. Never just worked by myself so I don't have anyone to work with and Alex, this dude, Alex is a machine. Like this guy's unbelievable. So I wish he was here and he couldn't make it but he started making all these issues in the issue queue and issue queue is kind of intimidating for all people really and he was making all these issues and then all of a sudden he was like, hey, do you wanna do this? I was like, yeah, and I got a chance to work with a project manager for the first time. Like wow, somebody lists all the things that you need to do and they just assign you to these things. This is really cool and he had all the color codes on there so not in a weird way but basically the reason why he came up with this concept is to gain knowledge and gain experience for people who may not have that opportunity and my opportunity was just, the reason I don't have that opportunity is just because I'm a lone wolf in a shop and at a university and so I got a lot of experience working with him on how to work with a project manager and it was really neat so basically I got mentored and I didn't join it to be mentored. I was like, I just want help and end up being a really cool, cool experience. So we're looking for people to help. Another Alex has volunteered, I'm really excited so we gotta work on the mobile side of it right now. It's kind of ugly when you're responsive. We know that so please just don't make comments over and over like we get it. So yeah, yeah, the sites, it's really basic but it's been a fun project so far so hopefully I'll get more involved just from this and we could use more help so that's it. So one of the things that I have focused on mostly is I helped create and solidify our moderation and participation guidelines and I run sort of our moderation team. I'm like our lead moderator and I also became a Slack admin so that I could really handle that in the event that we need to handle things. But one of the things that I really wanted to get off the ground that we haven't really was having a really solid moderation team so that we could, there are times when our Slack gets really busy and there are people on 24 seven and in those events I would really like to make sure that we have someone who's sort of on deck 24 seven in the different time zones and that's something that we haven't been able to do especially in non-North American time zones so I'd really like to have enough people who are interested to make sure that at those times when our Slack is really busy, I hate waking up in the morning and finding out that there was some 3 a.m. drama on Slack and now that's the first thing I have to deal with and I haven't even had any coffee and there are like 94 pings and they're like, oh my God, how long did you see this and I'm getting pings from all sorts of people so I really enjoy moderating and I enjoy making sure that it's a safe space and I think it's so important and I think we've made it so much safer and we've even extended that out to some of the other channels in Slack, like through the Slack admin team, which is great but I think having a larger team to work on that and also to keep evolving our moderation and participation guidelines as needed is important. Did you wanna say something? Oh, just say you're a badass. Oh, thank you. And we need more people. Yes, and we just need more volunteers in general, I think when it comes time to work on our booth and things like that, it's really helpful to just have more people who wanna actively work on things with us. Just one thing I wanted to add to that was, I know I and probably a lot of other people got involved about a year ago when there was something going on. There was a lot of difficult discussions and there's a lot of people who raised their voices and there was a lot of emotional labor that went into the Slack channel became a place where people would go to vent and to argue and there was a lot that went into it and there's a lot of people here who raised your voices. I think that's awesome. And there's a lot of people who put a lot of time and effort into responding to some things that were really difficult and supported each other and I just wanna thank everybody else for everybody who worked on that, because that was great. So it's Thursday, so this isn't as relevant, but we did have an off. It's Wednesday. It's Wednesday, wow. Cool, it's Wednesday. If you haven't checked us out at the booth, we have our photo booth where we showcase what the different faces in the Drupal community look like. We have stickers, we have pronoun stickers, which are just awesome and everyone should wear one, even if you're cisgender like me, because that supports other people who may not feel as comfortable about revealing their genders. We have information in the form of postcards, which I generously passed out earlier. We did this thing at the back where it's like, here are some ways to just be an ally at the conference. And the ways to be an ally? Oh, sorry. Oh, so the card I'm talking about for the recording, it says be an ally at Drupal events, make eye contact, invite someone to join your conversation, consider a new perspective and call out exclusionary behavior, which is my favorite. And then we also have a sign up for dinner. We're doing a dinner Wednesday night and Thursday night. We wanted to do this program to create a safe space for dinner for people that may not want to go to a really loud bar to have dinner. And we kind of tried to vet places that were dietary friendly, accessible, maybe not too expensive. And so there was a lot of work that went into that, a lot of crowdsourcing from the community, giving us locations, calling places to find out if we had to make reservations, et cetera. And if you come to the booth, you get good conversation and friendly faces. So stop by. We hope to see you this year. And contribution sprints are on Friday. There's the mentored core sprint, the first time sprinter workshop and the general sprint. Should I explain them? Uh-oh. Well, our slides are not correct, so if you're interested in sprints, check the website. Apparently the slide template is copied from Vienna, so check the website for when the sprints are. These were the templates provided to us. Uh-oh. As a track chair, I personally apologize for this. Right, we did that too. Make sure if you're speaking, I don't mind. This year for Drupalcon, there were more participants in the track chair who were identified as women than ever, many of whom came from DDNITE themselves. And many of them were first-time track chairs, so first-time track chairs, all speakers of some degree. And I mean, Drupalcon's not over yet, so I don't wanna, like, you know, the jinx us or anything, but I think there was a concerted effort, at least from Amanda Gonzer's side, I'll put the program manager for Drupalcon to change the tenor and theme of a lot of Drupalcon programming. And this year was probably the first step towards that, the first big decisive step towards that, with more changes to come in Drupalcon yet to be announced next year. But I'm, yeah, I'm really proud of a lot of people who came to the, who joined the track team this year. They, we, yeah, I don't know. I didn't have any perfect comments. I'm just really proud that this happened. And I think it was a force for positive change in the way that Drupalcon has always been. Well, so from, in this room, Heather, Fatima, Alana, and, oh, and yeah. And Sally. Kathy and Sally, yeah, served on the program team this year to help select sessions, which, it's a big deal. I guess it's more than just, more than just select sessions to govern the themes of their tracks, to invite speakers, to make sure that they were well supported, especially all the first time speakers that we had this year, which were quite a few, and sort of infusing the culture within the team so that it carries forward. Yeah, and I think having all of us on the track chair team really made a big difference. For example, we pushed for having a no all-male panels pledge, which I think worked out pretty well. And it also brought out some, you know, some really good conversation on the track team where there were a couple of people who pushed back and we pushed back on that and said, you know, this is really important. This is something we should really work for. We had to sort of explain the difference between, you know, adding a token woman to a panel versus looking around and saying, you know, why would you put three men on a panel and why can't you find a woman to put on this panel? And if this was a project of all men, is this something that you want to put on a panel? And is this worthwhile? So I think that that wound up being a really important conversation that was had both on the track team and on Twitter and on Slack. So I just kind of want to, as a conference organizer, kind of, I don't know, comment on finding diverse speakers. Okay. This is where the conversation part. Are we ready? Yeah. Good, good, good. So last year at Duple Camp Atlanta, I had an all-white male panel, right? And my panel was called the Contrib panel. And it was impossible, it was very difficult to find a maintainer of a Contrib module that was from an underrepresented group. So one of the things that I would like to see out of this group, and I think what you've done so far is awesome. And I think we can always do better. But as a camp organizer, we need resources. You know, we're doing this on a volunteer basis. You're doing all these things on a volunteer basis. And it's difficult to find these speakers. Sometimes in certain situations, it's almost nearly impossible. So I would love to see this group start looking at, like, so for example, I don't know specifically like what are the goals of the group specifically? And I like measurable, attainable goals. Like I'm kind of a stickler. So I would love to, we talked about this in the channel, maybe potentially coming up with a speaker's bureau. I know that there could be some problems with that. But like, if we're trying to improve our speaker representation, how can we find these people? And the other thing is like, I love the makeup of this room, but I'm also curious, I've seen a lot of different people here at DrupalCon and I'm actually curious as to why maybe some people aren't not in this room. So I just want to, you know, just make that comment of I would love to see some resources. I'd love to see some goals. Like how was the leadership team put together? Was there a voting process? Is there terms? I mean like, so just some basic things from like a nonprofit organization process that I would love to see. So that's it. Officially taking notes again. Thank you. So Tara's taking notes. And just real quick to answer your question about the leadership team. When we formed it, there just weren't that many of us. And we picked the people who were most involved kind of just right off the top. I think one of the things that should happen this year is official terms and transparent selection process. What was your name again? Last person who spoke? Kaleen. Kaleen, I love that you asked about speaker diversity because this is my passion. I'm giving a talk tomorrow at noon about this and I'm from WordPress and this is something that we're actively working on right now and any cities who run the guidelines and the workshop that we've created have had huge diversity in the word camps and I would love to help Drupal not have to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel but launch from the things that we've done and help you with that. I just want to comment real quick on speaker diversity. As a tractor, I pushed really hard to invite as many diverse speakers as I could. And one of the problems that I ran into that the program team is very well aware of is asking especially underrepresented groups to come and do free labor. Oh, sorry, Sally. It's hard. We don't pay our speakers here and that's a really huge hurdle and it was very hard. I had a lot of people who said, hey, I would come except I'm not going to come do free work for you. And so that is just sort of one major problem that we need to fix here. Sorry, I didn't want to jump. Yeah. I'm sorry. I just want to say. One thing I want to try to do is stop talking about all of us underrepresented groups of poor because that's not the case. Well, it's not. Like what I'm saying is I get the point but there's a lot of us that can afford to go and regardless of economic class, I just would like to, does anyone know what I'm trying to say without being offensive? Like I just want to be careful of like we're very, it's a difficult topic for diversity is not easy first off but it's like there's a lot of people that are very, very capable or financially sound and underrepresented groups. So like just like with code, like, oh, underrepresented groups, we need to do beginner stuff so that they can get involved. Well, I mean, everyone needs beginner not just underrepresented groups, right? So I just want to be careful of just saying underrepresented groups, financial and entry level. I just want to just be careful. I totally understand. It's just, it's not about finances so much as it is about unpaid labor. Like it's a totally sort of a different concept of asking people to work for free versus because they can't afford it. Does that make sense? Like it's a sort of a different, no. Can someone explain this better than I can? Okay. Everybody else has to work for free too, right? Right, I think, yeah. And I think my take on it maybe is as a woman making less money than my peers and also frequently being asked to perform emotional labor that's unpaid. I think there are many women who, not everyone who are personally committing to not doing free work, which is different from getting paid or getting cost reimbursed to come to DrupalCon and I think that's what Alana was trying to say, but certainly I totally agree that class is not tied to other demographics. Relating to this. Okay, good. Then you can go in front of me because I want to steer off in a different direction, sort of. I was just going to comment one thing. There is a blog post that changed the way I see the world. Astridon wrote several years ago, the title of which is something like the Ethics of Unpaid Labor and Open Source Software. I really recommend reading it because it speaks a lot to this topic about the intersection between underrepresented groups and the open source community and the expectations we put on speakers, on developers, contributors of all kinds in open source and how it's disproportionately difficult for underrepresented groups to do those kinds of free work and how it becomes a barrier, which is exactly the opposite of what we want to do. Yes, that's an awesome blog post and everyone should read it. One thing before, I know you've been waiting so patiently, but one thing I will say is I think to Kaleem's point, we're all doing free work. And one thing that we could take a look at is just the ethics of doing free work in general and to think critically about whether or not that's something that we want to do, making sure that we're entering into it mindfully because all of us are here doing a lot of free work, both technically and emotionally. We good? Okay, so one opportunity that I found that we have available to us is, so people have been asking me from the employer side, how do I get more diverse candidates? And rather than saying here's a bunch of resources, which isn't a thing we can do, I was like, oh, we could also say, stop by our office hours and let's talk about things that you can do that either attracts a diverse pool of candidates or things that you're doing unconsciously that's excluding a diverse pool of candidates. Because I had just talked about things that I thought were really common knowledge, like if you make a whole bunch of stuff in your hiring description required that a woman is more likely to opt out than a man, I thought this was common knowledge, but apparently it's not. So I realized that, oh my gosh, there's so much more that we could do to educate people and to maybe break up some of the Drupal agencies and whatnot are just so monolithically white and male and maybe we can help them if they're willing to come to us and get that sort of mentoring. Someone from Pantheon, stop by the DDI, sorry, someone from a large agency. Anyway, this one time, I was talking with this person who worked at the shop and they were like, hey, we're really having trouble getting people to come in. And I had that conversation a couple of times this week about maybe just holding office hours and they seemed really interested. Awesome, glad that we're like seeing the same thing. I have mixed feelings about that. It's, there are people who consult for agencies for a living and we could keep a list of those and refer companies who want our free work to pay people who are actually trying to make a living and probably are much more skilled at it than we are and that might serve them better. So at least having that list available to people when they're like, please consult for free for us. We might need to explain to them why they might want to pay somebody for that work. Maybe that's like a bridge thing that we could actually serve. If we decided to help people with those questions that they're having, maybe also if we kind of explain that to them, maybe we could ask for something in exchange. Like they could give a ticket, they could donate a ticket to an event that they're going to to a pool and then we can help distribute that pool. Some kind of in kind something. It's really hard for me. I never know when to help the world and when to be like, fuck you, pay me because I don't know how to resolve that tango mess in my head, so we should help people carefully. Yeah, I think I would agree with all of that and I want to thank you for all the great work that you do. On that discussion, something that came to my mind is that not sure if it's office hours or something, but a way of allowing those who like for example like me that kind of are really interested in diversity inclusion, but that I don't consider myself being an expert to kind of have a low, lower barrier of entry, entrance where maybe I wouldn't ask for, hey, support me in the hiring for my company because that's something where I agree we should pay for, but support me in organizing a camp. Yeah, to kind of, so to me like the diversity of inclusion channel feels like a very expert channel that I appreciate that it exists for the experts, but as somebody that doesn't interact with it regularly, I kind of reduce my interaction to listen. I just wanted to say that we have had times in the last year where we have done office hours and one of the challenges is that, it may be things to be different now, but there was a lot of people who used that to stop by and like argue against diversity and it was a lot of emotional labor like when that happened. So like it's different if people are coming to like say, hey, I'm interested and I want help. So I think it's a good idea. It is hard to have the same conversations a lot of times, but thanks. On the subject of it being a channel of experts, we internally talk about this a lot and I talk about this when I run the meetings, like we have an anonymous feedback, like we want to lower that barrier of entry and we are not experts by any means, that everything that I say I've probably learned in the last year being in that channel. And so I'm always open to what it is, what are the things that are maybe intimidating and what are the things that are making it difficult for the average person to jump in and contribute. And so we're always open to that feedback and it may not seem like that, but I'm saying it now on the record. So please let me know how it would be easier for you to help us help the community. Thank you. So I have two thoughts in my head. One is about making it easier for people to get involved and the other one is about kind of going back to like finding speakers that aren't white guys. So finding speakers who aren't white guys is probably shorter. So I think when we go back to the all white male panel pledge and there were people who were like, but that's all I have. I think just having them, like I would hope what comes out of that interaction is that they reflect on why their resources are limited in that way. So if it's like, oh, but it was about a project and all our employees are like that. It's like, hmm, maybe you should think about that. So, or like we clearly have a contrived problem when the leaders of our contrived modules are really uniform and if we wanna have a panel and we can't like, why is that? So, you know, not like looking harder for the ones that are there, but trying to evaluate why structurally there aren't already more there. So like it's kind of like, I don't know, I would hope that like the reflection and the trying to figure out how to change the way things are is what we wanna actually happen. Not that we wanna have like better diverse panels. They're related. And Dasha, when you were saying you've been spending a lot of time in the channel listening, I think that's absolutely perfect. I think what happens with new technology or new ideas that we get exposed to is at first we don't know how to talk about them because we don't know what words people use or how they use them or what they mean or what they mean one day like this and one day they mean a different thing like that and we're having conversations maybe for the first time ourselves but we've never seen anybody talk about it before and so I think like somebody was saying, Heather maybe, you were like, oh, I thought everybody knew about the way different groups of people react to strict criteria and I think because I've been in circles where we talk about that all the time, you start feeling like everybody knows and if you're not listening to people talk about that, you don't know these things. So Dasha, you're already like ahead of the game because like the first part of growing in this is surrounding yourself with people who are talking about it and watching them talk. When working on mentoring people to contribute to core, we held core contribution hours in public and one of the things that we hoped was that people who were thinking about maybe doing it would watch us talk about it so they saw what was involved in it and then they could then join the conversation later and they would feel more confident in doing so because they would see how we treat people who try and contribute and it's like the same thing. If they can stay in the channel and watch how we talk to each other and talk to new people they'll be more likely to be brave enough to participate because they see how other people get treated and then what I would hope is that those people would be like, oh, oh, oh, I've heard this conversation six times, I know what these people say in response to this and it's always like, well here's our resource page or we have our meetings on Thursdays at whatever o'clock and so people who are not experts yet but are hanging out in the channel are gonna learn what these responses are and then they're gonna start being the people who give the responses and I think there's a lot of parallels there so sometimes that means that some people who are really experienced and may always answer questions may need to answer them really slowly to give other people who are newer the opportunity to give those answers that they do feel confident about because they don't feel confident about all the things. I just wanted to respond to the first thing Cathy said. I think it is also not, I mean it is important to try and work to change the structural things that are the reasons that you don't have a diverse group of people speaking at your conference but it is also very, very important to actually have people up there on the stage who not all look the same, identify the same because the first thing is because it can give a little bit of courage to someone who's maybe afraid of speaking up because say there are women and they don't wanna be involved with a bunch of perceived angry dudes who are very judgmental or like I'm talking about myself here because it was a barrier for me for a long time and then just seeing women contribute actually it was like, ah, okay, maybe. And I think the second reason is that also it helps break down the assumptions that the audience has that all web developers are white men, for example, which is also something like the number of times that I got referred to is him, people could have just checked my gender and my profile in IRC back in the day and known that I preferred to identify as female but no, it was always XJM, HEXJM, HEXJM so it was like, you know, just like making people stop and think, oh, it's not the person I'm not talking to isn't necessarily white, isn't necessarily a man, isn't necessarily straight, isn't necessarily cisgender, just like it helps challenge people. So I actually do think it's actually important to make a proactive effort. One of the thoughts that I have about that tension between come be my token woman speaker come be my token black speaker, that kind of thing versus and the like sort of burden that puts on people, something that it might have been a lot of someone, someone recently, someone said, hey, I'm looking for speakers who aren't, you know, come from different underrepresented groups to speak at my event and so you just retreated it from the, so like that kind of thing so it's like, it's not, hey you, you know, come be my token person. It's like, are you interested in speaking an event? I'm interested in seeing your session proposal and so there's like a broader, like asking the world and again that little thing, that little nudge that might be like, oh, I can maybe do a session. Sure, that sounds cool, I'll talk to them. For me, for individual speakers, I know a challenge that I had and I think other people do is like, what's significant enough to talk about? And I think a couple things that help with that is like the shorter sessions at DrupalCon is it's a lot easier to say I can talk for 15 or 20 minutes about this topic and someone else can ask questions and I can probably talk for five minutes in a response so I think that was a help and I think that's a good way to prompt people to say, hey, you did this cool thing that I haven't seen before in Drupal or you did this addition to this module that is pretty unique and new and just thinking about what are some small things that people that you know have done that is really new and interesting that you haven't seen before and just having someone explain it would be helpful. So submitting those sorts of sessions to DrupalCon is a really good idea. And then the other thing that happened at my company as one of the people in the technical leadership went, hey, I think this is a really good topic. I haven't seen anyone else propose anything on this. I think you can figure this out in three months and actually specifically went to someone and said, I know you're smart, I know you can figure this out. This is something that we do as a company and there's people here who can help you figure these tools out, build a presentation around and submit that topic. And that got people at least in the mindset of thinking, hey, I can submit something, maybe it doesn't get accepted but that even breaks down the barrier to the next conference and the next event. They have something that they can submit to another summit or another camp or something as well as just being even more prepared to be like, oh, it's not that hard to write a proposal. I can just put something out there and try again next time. I just wanted to share a tremendous appreciation for all of the work everybody has been doing as part of the DDI and I group over the past couple of years and to its continuing onwards. Speaking as one of the people who was on Colleen's panel, I think the people in my position need to do more to mentor and encourage others to also feel comfortable to do that work and also to push employers to give staff time on the clock to do this so it's not falling back on them to spend their free time doing this open source work, free labor versus, I don't know, spending time with their families, having a life outside of work. So that's one thing I've been trying to push personally in that direction. Yeah, I'm gonna speak to that a bit. Yeah, exactly. Preach, like we need people to be paying, people to do that work. Something that I had never thought of until yesterday when Dario was at the leadership thing and he was saying, I need somebody to take over some of the work I do, right? And I said, well, I have all these people who wanna help, right? And part of what I think helped me get into Drupal is the people I know and the people that they know. And it can be very difficult to get into that chain of the community. And so I guess I'm just putting this on the recording into the room. I am very interested in finding ways for people in a DDI contrib team currently and future members to take on leadership roles of like contrib roles that are maintaining modules that are initiative leads. Like the thing that is true is that there are already these people, they already know what they're doing, right? Like the DDI channel is not a bunch of people who are like, what's HTML, right? There's so many people like who are so skilled and for any number of reasons, haven't found that pathway. And I mean, we've been talking about succession planning in the community and I know that that's a pain point and a lot of core and contrib and everywhere, it's a lot of pain. But I don't feel comfortable saying, here's a group that's already struggling to fit in and now they're gonna be maintaining a module till they die, right? Like I already don't feel comfortable that that's already happening. So anyway, I guess I just wanna continue that conversation and put this out there because I don't quite know how to get there but I'm really excited about it. Hi, the work you're doing is amazing, keep it up. Especially that resources list, if you haven't checked out that resources list on the DDI website, it is pretty extravagantly wonderful and that would be a great thing to give to any company that was like, how do we approach DDI? You could read a lot of things because, I wanted to share something about speaker travel and financial support. It's an idea, we have not done this but it's something that we've kicked around and I just wanted to kind of share it with the group in case it was something that seemed like it would work in your ecosystem. Sorry, I'm Andrea Middleton, I'm here from the WordPress project so I should have been more specific, thank you. In our community programs, we do not pay speakers and we don't cover speaker travel, period. For programmatic reasons, if we ever were to do it, we would do it for diversity and inclusion reasons but there are multiple other reasons which I'm happy to talk about some other time, elaborately as to why we're not addressing it right now but currently one of the most interesting things to in this market or in this kind of area for the WordPress community is doing a matching program like finding speakers that need financial support to be able to participate in the community or as speakers and then finding companies that are interested in funding that effort and basically creating some kind of like connection point where they can find each other and work things out that way. Again, it's been something that WordPress people have been kind of kicking around, it's not something that we're doing in official channels but I'm just kind of thrown it at the wall if it sticks for anybody, it seems appealing, you know. You're the last one needed. Oh, thank you. Oh man, I'm gonna make this count. I've talked a couple times on DDI Slack about unspent personal capital is hoarded, capital and wasted capital in the community and I've always struggled with how much personal capital I should suggest like, let's just throw all the chips out and spend it on something. Say what you mean, I don't know. For what, if people think of you as an influencer in some way using your influence but not using your influence to better the lives of others you're kind of, you're being a dig. Yeah. Oh no, no, but I don't mean in the sense that like slaving for other people but if you have a job rec that's open if you're not trying to, if you as a participant in Drupal aren't doing your part to at least source underrepresented candidates, you're doing it, you are doing an act of bad in the community, that sort of thing and so much of the work that we talked about has been sort of like the speaking truth to power type, you know, like the prevailing against existing structures of oppression for URLs. I would love to see an angle where we take where we do things like we help people get a promotion or a raise who are, you know, we help people interview for that next better job and get them out of their shitty job that they hate or we help people who wanna get promoted to manager get promoted to manager and empower those who are in situations that they don't necessarily know how to navigate or improve get better because I don't think we're going to see really substantial change in the Drupal community until we have more minorities and positions of influence on a regular basis and those doors are very, very hard to open for many of them, be they women, be they people who don't speak amazing English, people who don't have a shit ton of contribution and code those doors are very, very hard to open and I feel very fortunate to be where I am now but I don't know if I could give a recipe to somebody else and say, hey, if you follow this, you know, your career will be successful and I'm trying to think of ways to pass the ladder back down and I, yeah, I would like to see us do more of that and I'm not saying that everybody here is in a great place and I'm sure everybody could do, you know, better career-wise or Drupal contribution-wise or whatever, really community-wise but for those of us who can't pass the ladder down, I'd love to see us pass the ladder down more frequently and to more people, I'm sorry. To you, to offer opportunities, to offer others the same opportunities that were given you to advance their careers. Let me give you a really concrete example of what David means. So in 2013, I had never spoken at a very large conference before and David was selecting sessions at Bad Camp and me and my best friend, Lauren, beer, what? Burrows of it, it's now, so anyway, sorry, she married. We got the opportunity to speak. That opportunity meant that more people got to know us that we didn't have access to before. Knowing those people got us better jobs, now we're in good jobs, like, you know, we can continue to rise up the ladder but had David not taken a chance on two women and been like, here you go, here's the opportunity, we wouldn't, our careers were able to snowball from that. Yeah, okay. We are out of time. We could lock ourselves in a room and do this forever. I don't recommend it, I think it would be really disheartening after a while. One thing, I wanna thank you all so much for coming. One thing I wanna point out every time that we have these conversations is look around you, these are the other people who care enough to be here. So sometimes it feels like you're the only person who cares, we have a room full of people who made time today in a packed, wonderful schedule to be here and have these conversations. So thank you so much for coming, and that's it. Make sure she, make sure let's get her to come with. Come down here.