 Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the Q4 2019 supporting partner update. I can't believe it's almost the end of the year. We're I'm Carrie Lucina. I'm the fund development director at the Drupal Association. I always emphasize the D so people don't think I'm saying fun development, although what we do is fun. I'm joined by Tim Lennon, our CTO, as well as Heather Rocker, our executive director at the Drupal Association. Before we start, we just have some quick housekeeping. There are ways to stay informed all year long. If you aren't getting our monthly supporter email updates, please let us know. It's a good way to hear about all the latest and greatest work that Tim and our engineering team are doing on Drupal at Oregon Beyond. You can follow us on Twitter at Drupal Associates. You can join the DA supporter Slack channel. You need an invite to do so, so please let us know if you're not already joined. You can also contact your account manager, Delana Lang, or Kelly Delaney. Today we're going to talk about Drupal Association, DrupalCon, and Drupal.org news, but first we just want to take a moment to thank all of our supporting partners, our signature partners, our premium partners, as well as our classic partners, without whom all this work would not be possible. We also like to do a shout out to our new supporters and our new premium supporter, Microserve. They've been a classic supporter for a long time now and recently upgraded to premium. So thank you so much for doing that. If you feel like your organization has the capacity to give more, or if you're interested in learning a little bit more about some of the benefits that you get as a premium or signature supporter, please let us know. And now I'd like to hand it over to Heather for some Drupal Association news. Great. So I think we'll start with an update on Giving Tuesday. So this was an initiative that the Drupal Association was involved in for the first time here in 2019. What started as a US-centric event has now gone global and it's really about engaging communities to give back. And thanks to Liz Trudeau, who's on our team, she took the idea of us participating and she took it to the next level. So she came up with our Drupal Association quiz trivia that people took part in. So we had a trivia contest, a giving contest, and a referral contest. So thank you to everybody who participated. It really was all about engaging our community, encouraging giving to support what we do at the Association, which really supports the Drupal community and the project. We hope that it increased a bit of your DA knowledge for those of you that took the trivia quiz. And if you didn't, we may be able to talk Liz into putting that somewhere that you could take just for fun. And really another piece of it was about creating buzz about Drupal on social media. As you know, I like to think of ways for us to talk to our communities that aren't already involved in Drupal. So this provided a neat way on social media for people to know what we do and how we do it and to get more involved in our community. So thanks again to everybody who participated and wish Liz luck making it even bigger and better next year. But I know she'll do a great job. The next piece we want to talk about is the contribution recognition program. So those of you that were with us at DrupalCon in Amsterdam or have read some of the news on Drupal.org. This is an initiative that kicked off. It really is in response to a lot of conversation in the community. So Dries talked about it in Dries note in Amsterdam and we we followed up on this as well. So Mike Lamb is the chair of this committee and he shared a video with the folks in attendance at Drupal com Amsterdam about what we want to achieve from a DA perspective so it's not a new program. We're already doing contribution recognition today and compared to other communities actually doing it quite well. But there's always room for improvement. So what we want to do is make sure that we're enhancing our current program that we're rewarding and recognizing the best way possible. And we're going to put additional focus on non code contribution as well because we want to make sure that every piece of our community that makes it as vibrant as it is today gets recognized. So those of you that are community organizers and help in non code ways. We want to make sure that you're recognized and rewarded as well. So we've got a program that's put into place. There's a committee of a mix of self nominated and appointed. They represent end users service providers individual contributors and community organizers and there's the first meeting of this committee meets on December 18. And there will be a blog to follow so that we can share all of the next steps and news with you along the way. And then we hope to launch At least a major portion of this program so we can share with the community at Drupal con in Minneapolis. So speaking toward wanted to give you a few highlights of what we're looking at in 2020. So I wanted to share a bit of our roadmap with you as well. So this is not all inclusive by any means I tell the team if we put this on slides it would be about 100 slides given everything that we try to do within the year to support the community. But I wanted to highlight a few things I thought would not only be relevant to those of you on the call but are things that we're looking at to enhance or do differently in 2020. And so as I just spoke about the contribution recognition committee. We're going to be putting a lot of time and energy into supporting that group and making sure that this gets launched in the best way possible. Part of what will come out of that that is that's a conversation that stemmed out of this concept. We met with supporting partners in Amsterdam. And one of the ideas that came out of that group that we thought was fantastic was the idea of a certification program. And so that's a way for us to be even better partners with our supporting partners in that we can have a mechanism created that is related to your contributions both financial and otherwise to the Drupal community and help highlight you as business partner and really position you well in the business community for people that are evaluating and implementing Drupal. So we'll have some great information to share on that as well when we gather in Drupal con Minneapolis. We hope that you'll attend that session because we'll give you an update on what we're doing from a pilot perspective but we really want to be able to get your input as part of this program so make sure you join us there. We're also working hard to update our organizational membership program and it really is enhancing what we do today for you as partners. And one of the things that also came out of the supporting partner roundtable was the idea of an ambassador program. And so what we want to create in tandem with you is the ability for us to get the word out about Drupal at a larger scale. So that our team internally can attend a few events a year and do a really good job talking about Drupal but we can't be everywhere and neither can you. And so knowing that we want to get the word out that we want Drupal to be more relevant and relevant in the world. We're developing a program where you can partner with us to be our ambassadors about Drupal and we can be in the right spaces and places to get that done. Another thing on our list that we're working on and this is going to be a common theme is another thing but we're working hard for our community in 2020 as always is looking at our individual membership program and seeing how we can build that out. When we think about being an association. There really is a lot we can do from that individual membership perspective and we also want to have more of an emphasis on a traditional giving program. All of the things that we talked about will tie in to the contribution recognitions as well so you'll see a common theme in all of the ways that you give an engage and how we will accurately recognize and reward those in the best way possible. We are looking to continue the success of the executive summit that was held in Drupal con in Seattle. So we've got some exciting enhancements we're going to make to that program this year in Minneapolis but one thing that Carrie and I are really focused on is how we bring the executive summit experience to places that are not Drupal con specific. So we are currently working with a few strategic partners supporting partners that are interested in helping us co host executive summit events. And if that is something that you're interested in please reach out to Carrie and we can talk about how we'll put that together. But it really is a focus again on how do we and how do we spread the message but how do we do it in a more scalable global way. So we're excited about looking at those options as well. And the last piece I wanted to emphasize was we're really working with our local Drupal events and association communities. So what we want to do is make sure that we're really enforcing what happens with Drupal at that local level because it's so important and we're working with the event organizers working group which I'm sure you've heard of by now. That's officially chartered and and doing things and working with us here at the DA and also the local associations that continue to grow and be established across the globe and we want to make sure we have a nice. A nice way of not only supporting their growth and their activity but ways to help them be even more efficient and effective with what they do. So fun news. I know Kelly did a quick note in the chat to introduce ourselves to introduce herself, but wanted you to meet Kelly and Kelly's role here at the Drupal Association is really focused on building relationships with you are supporting partners. So she has a great background in customer success and customer service but also really building relationships that are win-win. And so that's a big focus for us at the DA is how do we build relationships that benefit both Drupal and your organizations and so she's going to be a huge part of helping us build out that practice. And I know, Carrie, if you want to say anything else about Kelly but I know we're thrilled to have her step into this role and she's already doing a great job. Yeah, Kelly's been at the Association for a while you've probably worked with her to fulfill your Drupal con benefits. We really wanted to be able to take advantage of all of her background and skills so we're really happy to have her come on as an account manager for our supporting partners as well as our Drupal con sponsors. If she hasn't already reached out to directly introduce yourself. She will do so shortly. So thanks Kelly. Absolutely. And hopefully what you'll see is we're really trying to build out a team and a structure with a focus on relationship building and so we welcome your input on how we can continue to do that even better in the coming year but thank you in advance for your support and for working with us and I hope that we're able to accomplish some great things. So the next thing we'll look at is where we've been out and about and this first one is no surprise so Drupal con Amsterdam. This was the first year where we licensed with Quoney partners for them to be the event production company and to really run this event and so this was the way that we could make it work for Drupal con Europe and be able to scale those events. And I think it went really well. We got really positive feedback. People seem to enjoy the event. I think it I think it was a fantastic event. We had about 1500 attendees. Some great content great networking. I think everyone that participated in the exhibit hall had a wonderful experience and there was a lot of traffic and traction there. So from a business perspective I think that went really well. And one of my favorite things is so it was my first official Drupal con and it was my first time being a contribution day and I did not know what to expect. And it was fantastic to see more tables and more rooms open up and more chairs come in the building because they needed more room for more people so about 25% of the total attendees participated in contribution day, which was absolutely fantastic and we we challenge our North America friends in Minneapolis to not only meet it but beat it from a contribution perspective so we hope to see many of you there it was it was a great day and I just think a lot of positive energy was happening in the room and a lot of good things for Drupal. Drupal South which when I first heard about I thought was somewhere here near me in Atlanta and indeed is not. They mean really south as in Australia. So Drupal South happened recently just after the Thanksgiving holiday here for us and Neil Drum who serves on our team who you'll see in the corner in the dapper gray suit there in the picture. I'm still very dapper still very dapper attends a ton of Drupal community events but in this case he served as the keynote speaker so Neil got to talk about how Drupal.org is built. And all the tools and services that provides for the community and I believe that session was recorded and is available I don't know if it's up yet but if it is maybe we can post that in the supporting partner channel to share with people so it was great content. And last but not least Drupal Camp should I so Tanisha who also serves on our team on marketing and outreach attended this particular Drupal camp. And not only did she attend but she led a session and she talked about Drupal contributions with a particular focus on noncode contribution and how everybody in the community can be part of the contribution network so thank you to Tanisha and and for representing us at that event and I hear that it went absolutely fantastic. And was a great event as well. All right thanks Heather I'm going to take it back and talk a little bit about more Drupal event news. Starting with our flagship event Drupal Khan which is happening in North America and Minneapolis the week of May 18. The DA is continuing a lot of the work that began with Drupal Khan Seattle to create onboarding opportunities for an expanded programming for all types of Drupal users. So obviously in addition to sessions and trainings that are geared towards the builder and developer community. The Drupal excuse me the content digital marketing track is our newest track specifically for content editors marketing teams and site owners at Drupal sites. These are marketing professionals who are responsible for generating content and construction constructing user journeys. And this year in Minneapolis there's a slight change where you can access this track as part of your regular Drupal Khan ticket so you don't have to buy a separate content digital marketing track ticket. As Heather mentioned the executive summit is back at Drupal Khan for its second year. This is a one day intensive summit for the heads of digital marketing CIOs CTOs or folks in similar leadership roles at Drupal end user organizations. Please stay tuned for updates around programming but past programming has featured digital leaders from Comcast and Chief Martek, Pfizer Johnson and Johnson and Charles Schwab. We're also continuing to evolve programming for our agencies and agency leaders in the Drupal community. So in addition to sessions and trainings that are created with agencies in mind will be hosting the agency leader summit which is for formerly known as the business summit on Monday morning. And that summit caters to Drupal topics for those in senior leadership positions at Drupal agencies and consulting services. There are also a lot more ways to get involved at Drupal Khan. If you're already a sponsor. Thank you so much. We really appreciate your support and this event couldn't happen without our sponsors. But there are a lot more ways that you can get involved. We are seeking agency summit leads. So if you're an agency leader and you want to lend your time and expertise at this event, please let us know. We also need volunteers for our speaker team. This entails about six hours of work between now and January 1 volunteers. If you have staff that want to volunteer they will receive contribution credit. It's also a really good way for them to get to learn more by about speaking at Drupal Khan by watching others. So if you have staff members that you've been wanting to get involved in speaking opportunities but there's been any hesitation. This is a really great first step to get them more involved. We also need local brain trust. If you're in the Minneapolis area. There are a few things that we're trying to pilot. One of them is potentially having a Drupal career fair at Drupal Khan to help build and support the Drupal talent pipeline. So if you know any nonprofits or STEM organizations or coding groups in Minneapolis that we can that can help connect us with young people who are interested in coding but might not know about open source or Drupal. Please let us know. There are a lot of other ways to get involved on the communications team or as the contribution mentor or various onsite support. So please let us know if you want to volunteer or you can also visit the Drupal Khan Minneapolis site to learn more. And next up I'm going to hand it over to oh sorry a quick update or Drupal Khan Europe. I know this is a question that we've been getting a lot. The Drupal Association is again partnering with Coney Congress for Drupal Khan Europe 2020. I know everybody's dying to know we still don't have the contract finalized so we can't announce the location and dates yet. But that's happening very, very, very soon. So please stay tuned for more. And at that note I'll hand it over to Tim Lennon for a Drupal project update. Awesome. Thanks. So the first thing I'd love to talk about is just that as you've probably seen by now Drupal 8.8.0 has been released. It came out on December 4 is the latest minor release for Drupal 8 and it's going to be the second to last one ever for the Drupal 8 version so 8.8.0 includes a number of really significant improvements, the stable media library, the new administration theme called CLARO with a lot of great usability improvements and a number of other things. And the final minor release with 8.9.0 will come out simultaneously with Drupal 9 and that should be next June. So that's when we'll see the last set of features for this before all new feature releases begin happening in the Drupal 9 cycle. I'd like to celebrate one item in particular if you go to the next slide for me, Carrie. The composer initiative was a really significant initiative for Drupal 8.8.0. There was a number of community members involved in this. A lot of the core maintainer team was watching this very closely and Ryan Aslet from the Drupal Association team was actually an initiative lead on this project. This initiative is one of those areas where Drupal the software overlaps with Drupal.org and the infrastructure that we maintain is the association. And so, you know, we talked about this while it was in progress during our last update, but what this means is from now on, if you start with Drupal.8.8.0 or later, whether you started by downloading a zip file, a tar ball, however you start to use Drupal, if you start needing to use the composer-based workflows, your install will already be ready. There isn't this like complex and painful process to convert your site over from one method of managing your modules to the composer-based method. It's a really significant improvement. It also means that there's been some simplification to how you just start a project using Composer. So a lot of great things there that will help kind of ease the pain points and rough edges that have been there with the composer workflows kind of throughout the eight cycle up to this point. So we're really thrilled with that. Coming next, we're on the road to Drupal.9 as I alluded to earlier. So what we should be seeing coming from the core maintainer team is a plan for the sort of alpha, beta, and release candidate cycle leading up to a June release of 9.0.0. As a reminder, what that means is that the major dependencies of key components of Drupal like symphony, twig will be updated to more recent versions with the 9.0 release and a number of deprecations will be removed for just older versions of functions and things like that that have new replacements. So those will be taken out of the code base and then 9.0 will of course get all the future improvements of the whole eight release cycle and what comes out in 8.9 and a host of improvements of its own moving forward. And if we continue on, I'd like to talk more specifically about some Drupal.org work and some projects that the team has done. So as you may have heard, because it got some good Twitter buzz and was mentioned at DrupalCon Amsterdam, we've been doing some amazing work on automatic updates for Drupal. We, thanks to a number of volunteers and sponsors who I'll talk about on the next slide, we've been really plugging away at the first phase of this initiative, which provides automatic updates for Drupal in both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. A release candidate of this automatic updates module is out now. It's available today and the stable release should be this week or early next week. So we're super excited about that. This is going to help a lot of the small to medium sized site owners, the kinds of folks who want a more set and forget experience. It should help lower the total cost of ownership. It should help ease some of the decision making about, you know, choosing one solution over another. It's a feature that we've long wanted and I'm really happy about how we've architected it and put it together for this first phase of work. So on to the thank yous. In particular, I want to thank the European Commission. They funded all of this phase one work. It was not an easy undertaking. It was a significant amount of investment that they made in the Drupal project because they believe in the project and heavily used Drupal throughout the EU. And there were a number of other organizations like Tag1, MTAC, Pantheon, and Acquia who also had volunteer contributors throughout this process helping us make this work. So speaking of this process, you'll notice on that slide, I called it a phase one release, a stable release, but there is a phase two coming up and we will need some more help in order to make that work. So phase two is going to bring some additional features to the automatic updates system. So it will have automation for composer dependency resolution as part of updates. Phase two will include a front end controller so that you can see this is what the site will look like after the update and there's what it is before and make the rollback process easier. Phase two is also going to work on getting this moved from a contributed module right into Drupal Core. So we would be thrilled if you or one of your clients is really interested in this topic and this improvement to Drupal. If you're interested in helping us out, whether that's with development resources or financial resources, please contact me, my email address is there, tim at association.drupal.org. And we're really looking together to put together, looking to put together a sort of dream team to make this next phase possible and complete. That's of course not the only initiative we've been working on so you'll remember of course the major initiative to use GitLab for Drupal's code management and repositories. Everybody's been waiting on the next key feature of that, which is the merge request feature. So we've actually got some significant progress there and it should be coming quite soon. It'll certainly be there before Minneapolis. I won't say I won't try and be more specific than that. But if you happen to be in Hobart in Tasmania where Neil was you might have seen a little bit of a sneak preview of some of this stuff. So we're really excited for that and just keep an eye out for that soon. Going into next year. For us 2020 is going to be the year of Drupal.org updates. So the internal team is working on our own internal plan to upgrade our our collection of primarily Drupal seven sites to get them to eight or sort of really realistically to nine over the course of next year and beyond and get all of our sites fully up to date. But we're also architecting a way to do that that will still allow us to deliver features that improve the experience of Drupal.org and support a more rapid pace of development of the project so you'll probably be hearing about that in my future supporting partner updates as we go ahead and figure out our exact strategy for getting all of our sites up to the latest version ourselves. Looking forward as well. There's a number of future initiatives that we're considering. Some of these we're going to try and do as much as we can by ourselves others would require external resources additional additional financial support of partners. So again if you see items here that's that that speak to you as something you'd like to see as well. We'd love your help. But things like getting a project messaging channel in core so that the Drupal Association and the coordinator team can push key messages to people who might not be engaged with our community that do manage and use Drupal sites. Things like some project sponsorship tools so that maintainers of key modules can maintain those in a more sustainable way, especially those ones that are managed by individuals rather than organizations. Trying to see if we can add telemetry instrumentation to Drupal itself to generate more data about how it's used and make us enable us to make data driven decisions about project direction. And also a federated login service so that all the Drupal campsites out there and other services can let people log in using their Drupal.org identity. So there's a lot of other things on that list as well. But these are some of those big items that will give you kind of a taste for the things that we're considering doing over the course of the next year. And then I want to remind everyone that you should be saving some dates. So the Drupal seven and eight are end of life 18 months after the Drupal nine release. So if that release happens as scheduled on June 2020 that means seven and eight become end of life on 2021. There are certainly organizations that are setting up as long term support vendors to provide extended support beyond that timeframe, but these are, this is just some great motivation for you to help work with your clients to get them through their next set of upgrades. And I think that's just about everything that I have from the Drupal.org side I want to thank you for the support. All the funding for everything the engineering team does comes from our supporting partners. So we've, we've accomplished really an incredible amount of things this year. It's probably been our, our most successful year in terms of supporting the community and the Drupal project since my, the beginning of my tenure with the association and that's just been thanks to your support so thanks very much. All right, and I think now we can open it up to see if anybody had any questions. Tim are you able to see the Q&A section. I am seeing it. It looks like there's nothing in there right at the moment. Okay. So maybe as you wrap us up a little I'll keep an eye on it, but of course, you all can contact us after the fact as well if something occurs to you not at your time. Yeah. And again, just a reminder to stay informed throughout the year through these various touch points and connections with the Drupal Association and your co manager. We obviously introduced Kelly Delaney as our co manager but there's also Delano Lay who's been with us for so many years and we all know and love. So please don't hesitate to reach out. If you have questions after this event. And just thank you again for joining us. It's really great to be able to share all the hard work that our team has done in the quarter and talk about what's on the horizon at the Drupal Association Drupal project. It's so wonderful to be able to share this news as we kind of help you in the community make the best use of Drupal possible. If you are interested in learning more about these various volunteer and contrib opportunities that we talked about throughout this presentation, or if, you know, you want to learn about new ways to give back and support the Drupal project financially. We'll share those details in an email following up because I know there was a lot of, of kind of calls for support throughout this presentation. I'll just pause really quick and see if there are any other questions. I think we're all good. Okay, great. Well, on that note, happy holidays for those of you that are celebrating holidays in the next month or so. And please again, stay tuned for for more updates from us and we appreciate your time today. Thank you for partnering with us we appreciate it. Right.