 Oh, to make sure that we're all in the right place, this is how women built open source adoption inside government. So we're gonna start with a couple of questions. One, before I even start like why we did what we did and how we did it, just wanna find out how many of your government employees? I know at least two. Jeez. Two of you? You don't want people to know James. Okay, good to know. Another thing we wanna know is how many of you have organized a community event or like a webinar or things like that? Okay, good. That helps. Before we also get started, I have one really big thank you to say, they will probably never hear this. The whole reason I started Drupal for Gov came out of a discussion I had with Adam Mordecai and Aaron Welch from Atmomatic. So everything that sprang from that discussion is what we now call Drupal for Gov. And I don't think they even know that. And for the two people who really got me into Drupal in the first place, another shout out and a thank you to both Sean Robertson and who works at Blue State Digital and to Zach Rosen from Pantheon. It's their fault. Next I also wanna say that we've built this community since 2009 and in doing so, we've had lots of different takes on who we are. A lot of us are women and in doing this for moms, we work in regular public sector jobs, non-public sector. We take kids to basketball games, serve in the military. We've had children. We've sent children off to China. So we've done a lot of really amazing things since we started the group in 2009. And what we're gonna do today is a lot of storytelling about who we are and where we came from and some basic answering of questions about those steps that we took. So we're gonna start with our first slide. We decided this year we're gonna add some images to it. And I'm thinking, can you even see what these are? So that is the 20, there we go. This is a slide that kinda shows an evolution. So one of the first things that we did when we started back in 2009 was we started hosting sort of brown bag series. I started with Gov 2.0 first and I had folks hack an old site that I had because they were all like, oh, Drupal's so scary. And I was like, what are you talking about? So we started with that and we moved into hosting other things. It kinda, I knew Drupal was going to be a thing in government when I went to the web manager's university event, which is no longer held, thank you GSA. When we went to that event, we did sort of a mini bar camp and I was, and people were like, okay, well I'll do a session on this and I'll do a session on that. And I turned to my friend Sarah Cope, who was a WordPress person, and I said, Sarah, do you think anyone come to fight, did a session on Drupal? And she's like, maybe, you should do it anyway. So I did. And I walked into a room of standing room only. Had to have been 50, 60 people in the room. I don't know if I met James there or not yet. But at that session, I went through the slides I did at the original Gov 2.0 and came away from that experience with enough people to actually found Drupal for Gov and really get stuff started. And that's kind of where we start with how we kind of blossomed. The second image you'll see here is from 2012. And that 2012 thing is our first Drupal Gov days at the Department of Commerce, at which time now I'm going to sit down and we're going to start storytelling. So you've already heard what the first things I did were. We're going to talk about what the first things were that these three amazing women also did. And they're going to introduce themselves first and answer one really specific question. Are you a Drupal expert? So good evening. My name is Jessica Deary. I'm a federal employee and I work at the Environmental Protection Agency where I manage a Drupal intranet site. And I first got started with Drupal for Gov because when I got the job at the EPA seven years ago they had already decided they were going to use Drupal. And so I realized I needed to learn what this Drupal stuff was. So I went to a Hello Drupal event that was being hosted by Drupal for Gov to kind of familiarize myself. But, and that's kind of where I first met Kirsten. But about six months later, after we launched our site, I was coerced into submitting a session for, not by her, but by the person who had been, I had been working on the project with, to submit a session and tell our story of how, of what we had done. And so my first real foray into being involved was the first act of just submitting a session for the event that was held at commerce. And then, and that was kind of the end. It was a spiral in. I just kind of got sucked into everything else and all the wonderful things that we've done that we'll talk about a little bit today. But so that's how I get started. And do I consider myself a Drupal expert? The answer is still no. I will move on to Nika. Yes, hi, my name is Nika Hector. I'm a director of web development at DS Federal, which is a consulting firm. How did I first get involved? So initially I was working for a company, another consulting firm, and I did a presentation on delivering your local development environment and having it spun up easily in the AWS instance. So that was my first experience just presenting. And then I had started training and I got involved in assisting with training on selenium testing and contributing to the web experience toolkit from Canada. Yes, absolutely. Do I consider myself a Drupal expert? It depends on who I'm talking to and their level of expertise. And Virginia. Well, hi, I'm Virginia and no, you don't take photos. Oh my gosh. Okay, Virginia, I'm going. I am a federal contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton. I've been working with Drupal since D6, which I guess I started about eight years now. And my first involvement was through Kirsten. She had engaged me and helped me during one of the furloughs. I found a freelance client through that time and which became a long-term client. That's another story. But throughout the year she's pulled me in deeper and deeper into Drupal for Gov. I've assisted, I've tried to help on the web team, never got my local development set up correctly. But then I've also helped volunteer on the Drupal conference days, the Drupal for Gov conference days. And now I've been leading a few trainings. So, yes. She now speaks on issues related to the front end. Right. And strangely enough, one of our founding members actually just walked into the room and he thought he was going to sneak in and I wasn't going to notice anything. Mike, would you like to stand up and just wave? I won't make you talk, I know how you are. We originally were founded as Drupal for Gov with 11 people and two of us are still in government. Mike Jennings works at OSTI still. And the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Right? In the Oak Ridge area. So he was one of the founding members and it has been really influential and answering a lot of questions on our Slack, not our Slack channel, but our listserv. And he also does a lot of administration work. So that brings us to the next question that Virginia didn't answer about being a Drupal expert. The thing is that we discovered that all of us are thought of as Drupal experts within our communities. And none of us, because we all have a little bit of imposter syndrome, would think of ourselves as Drupal experts because I don't contribute to core. I don't think of myself as a Drupal expert. But when it comes to organizing government employees and getting them to contribute, I feel much more so. Like, you want to tell the story of how we contributed to the 3000th contribution? I do remember that. So one of the things that we have been able to do at our annual GovCon is we have a sprint room. And so there was the year when, while at GovCon, we were able to have, was it the 3000th commit to... The last three. The last three during our event, which was really, really exciting and to be able to tell everybody that that was done and to provide a space where people... One of the things about government is the idea of contributing and doing all of this as a community is very, very foreign. That there's a whole idea that there's people there that help you and you can ask questions and they won't try to sell you anything. But that people here are genuinely, because we are so invested in the product, we are invested in the community, we are invested in the people. So that is, I think, the biggest piece for government, but by having a space, by working with GovIs that we've been able to do is kind of help people realize, no, no, really, you can ask and people will answer and it's okay. And one of the things that we also try to do is we put experts in front of our government employees and remind folks that you can ask questions of the experts, but there were several companies that were really, really helpful at the very beginning. When Jess first came in that particular day, if phase two hadn't offered to send three developers to teach a bunch of classes, we couldn't have done it. They taught people how to do mapping with Drupal and they showed open each of them and had people actually set it up on their local systems, all of this at the US courts on a half day. So we were able to divide into two places and at the same time, we did a documentation sprint and we contributed to Drupal.org at the time. So there were lots of on ramps for government employees to contribute and the companies are more of our partners in this, which is one of the reasons you see that there are actually two contractors here. We work together to make it possible for government employees to contribute back to the project and we do it in lots of different kinds of ways. One of the biggest and brightest ways that we do it is through training and you'll notice I've now got a new timeline up there with 2014 which is where I'm also gonna turn this back over to Nika to talk about some of the training that she's given and some of the responses she's gotten. Yeah, so one of the first trainings that I gave was basically assisting users and setting up Drupal. Can you hear her? Okay, just checking. Yeah, so we send out prerequisites regarding like what they need to have on their laptops and basically it's probably a room full of 20 or more people, varying levels and we just get them up and running on Drupal and kind of show them the ins and outs. I've also done training at USDA for behavior-driven testing, BEHAT and that was an interesting training where I'm at the end, I provided a Vagrant box and gave them everything initially that they needed and get and so four hours later after we've gone through setting up Drupal and getting BEHAT running at the end, the guy was like, you know, you don't look like a developer. So I didn't know that was that. This is what a developer looks like. We come in all flavors. It's true. And so one of the other things I wanted to do is as Virginia pointed out, I like to suck you in and never let you go. So part of that was that Virginia seems to have a little anxiety about speaking in front of audiences because she doesn't think she's an expert. So I do it anyway and I push her out there to do that. And recently she did that at her company in front of not only, who was it? We had almost 300 people out there. We filled Booz Allen Hamilton, I mean it was full and they hosted our last half day, which was a global training day. And maybe you can talk about what you got to do there. I was part of the front end, I guess, the front end Drupal 8 migration training. So we outlined how to prepare for migration to Drupal 8 from Drupal 7 or Drupal 6, exploring the template files and your fields and how to start the auditing process of your content. And it was a bit nerve-wracking because these are my peers at work. And these are the people who may have a way in on your performance review. So that was a hurdle that I believe I overcame. I believe I overcame, got an achievement award out of it. I don't think I mentioned that. But I don't like to talk about myself in that way, but this is a good platform to talk about it. And I guess just giving back, I guess, to the community in some way, if it's not code or documentation, but helping in training has helped me become more active in that aspect, reducing the anxiety. It's not just about me, but there's other people who feel that they're not experts either. It's true. One of the other pictures that you'll notice on the screen right now, right over top of 2014, was when we decided that we were gonna get together as women as well. I think just about everyone there was either a contractor currently working in the government. And I was on a detail to the White House, so I had everyone over for lunch. And we had one amazing time there. It was kind of cool to be able to see that we all were having the same struggles, but we're moving the needle forward. What was kind of impressive about how we did this was that none of us had authority to do this. No one said to me, hey, we're going with Drupal. Instead, I said, hey, if I had this space on a server, shh, I bet I could get this up and running. And so someone gave me some server space. So then I pushed out an open atrium site for all of the CIOs within the Department of Veterans Affairs. And they used it. They had no idea what they were using, but then I got them all using it. And they were no longer afraid of the topic of open source. It took me 53 weeks, but I was able to get it approved for the enterprise in VA. It's not, I'm not kidding, 53 weeks. Did we not celebrate? I believe I celebrated with everyone. Because it takes so long to get something approved like Drupal, that was back in 2013. But now they're approving modules without worrying about it. In fact, there's someone here this week who works at the Department of Veterans Affairs who is representing ODS. And I think he's gonna have a bof tomorrow. He works for VA. He does Drupal-A things, which is kind of cool to be able to say, I was on that original team. I no longer work at VA. That original team that made it possible for this to happen. But when we all have similar stories about not having authority and still being able to make people comfortable, which is what they're gonna talk about. I feel like I've taken some of the lessons I've learned by being involved with Drupal for Gov. As we have sort of grown our community by just pulling, literally pulling people in and voluntarily telling them to do things and helping to make, a lot of it really has been helped forcing people to be more comfortable, to encourage them and say, and this is a low risk situation. It's not your job. No one's gonna make fun of you. We're asking you to provide some, to support this community that is gonna help you grow and do that. So I've been able to kind of do that a little bit internally within my agency. We have, everybody kind of does whatever they want on the intranet. Everybody, we've got like, probably 15 different platforms. I was the one who ever once saw that. It was like, 15, probably 15 different little platforms. And there's a couple of offices that use Drupal. And I was like, this is crazy that we're all doing this differently in your calling your news article, and we're calling it news article, and your fields are different than mine. Like this is stupid, why are we doing it like this? And, but I don't work on the office that manages any of that. But I decided like, this is still just too ridiculous to not do something about it. So we started, all of our intranet stuff is called like at work. So I work for ORD. So our intranet is ORD at work. So we started a Drupal at work community group where those of us that use Drupal, we've done, like we talk about trainings, we talk about how we implemented stuff on our site. But then we've also turned it into, as this many community, what we wanna do for all the people that want to do Drupal, but don't really know how yet, is to just build kind of a standard EPA intranet distribution in Drupal 8 that people can use. So those of us who are, it's an opportunity for those of us to get experience with Drupal 8 and kind of play around with it. We'll standardize on something. And then if the agency ever does decide to pick something, we can say, well, this is over here and look at the work we've already done. So you can build communities without authority. Honestly, oftentimes more easily than you can with authority, I think. And so we were talking about this earlier today with Nika, who, do you really need to see the slide? So we were talking earlier today and Nika was like, oh, I've never done that. And then I reminded her that both of them have done that. When you actually try to get people comfortable with the concept. So she would enter a meeting and okay, well, we're having, we're gonna use Drupal. And then people would look at her like, oh, I mean, Drupal. What? And she had to work with them to get them to comfortable. Yeah, because normally I come in after we won the bid. So most of our clients, they already know that they want Drupal, but it's my job to show them how to use it, how to best use it, how to implement like tools that assist you in using it, continuous integration. And then my involvement in Drupal for Gov kind of like solidifies all of that. And if I can, I try to pull them into that and involve them into our meetups and our trainings. And then at work, it also helps to kind of bring that community in. It's kind of hard sometimes to get buy in from leadership to get involved in Drupal and kind of understand the importance of community. And I think my involvement here has drastically helped my influence within my company and driving the importance of Drupal and community. And I have had a similar situation with Nika. You know, you're brought in once the contract has been won and the project is kicking off and, you know, but there are still some kind of hesitance on the management part on the client side where like, is this really a good option? Why can't we do something else with another technology or tech stack? And there is some hand holding and reassurance and that confidence that I had in kind of talking about Drupal and its, I guess, performance and the qualities that make it a great enterprise level application comes from working with these ladies and getting, I guess, learning more about it in the community. And I've kind of been growing a Drupal community within Booz Allen, hiring more developers. And I actually have a junior developer who has no background, no background in Drupal at all, to have her staffed on a project developing in Drupal and growing in it. So, and I feel a sense of, I guess, achievement in that aspect to kind of spread it out. Okay, so then I'm gonna ask, does anyone here think that we're not Drupal experts? Seriously? Really? I know that we don't think we are, but I think we've convinced you all, right? I think so. So this is the point at which we've done a little bit of storytelling about what we've all done and you can see some of the stuff that we've done. The picture in the middle is from the 2016 keynote with Webchik, so that's Angie on stage. Boy, did we have fanboys that year. So we have our event every year at NIH thanks to our host, James, who is phenomenal and it makes it possible for us to really provide intensive training and lots of really amazing sessions and we do this really on a very tight string budget because I think we count for every single penny but we wanna be able to provide experiences for government employees because we don't have a lot of training dollars now and in order for us to be able to improve our skillset we have to be able to do this. So we provide scholarships for state and local employees as well to come to GovCon. We've provided scholarships for folks from several different countries, lots of different counties and local governments and community leaders within those areas as well but this isn't all just about us. We wanted to make this more of an interactive session so that you can ask questions about some of the roles that we've had and where necessary I'll pull in the three government employees that I know are sitting in this room so feel free to ask us questions or we're gonna continue to talk. Oh, and I will also call on you. I'm not shy. Who in here in the room has been to a Drupal GovCon? Who here is, this is the first time I've even heard of Drupal GovCon? Are you guys local? Are you guys in the DC area or are you outside? Okay, so that probably is part of it too but I always like to say because Drupal GovCon is our big splashy thing because it's three days, it's huge. We've got keynotes and trainings and so that's what we're known for so people are always like, oh, you're the GovCon folks and I try to turn it around and say, well, no. I mean, yes, but that's not all we do and so when she talks about some of the stuff that how it got started out, right, these half days we are now at a point where we have kicked off we do webinars the third Thursday of every month. We've started that last year. I attended one of the buffs for the Global Training Days Initiative and we decided that that's something we need to do so all of last year we participated in every single Global Training Day and we have all other sort of communication mechanisms for people to connect and do things and so I think by providing a variety of ways for people to grow and learn has also is how we've helped Drupal grow and that community grow and making, especially on the government side making this whole idea of community far less foreign and actually something that is really, really cool. You know, a great way to do that, so size of GovCon. So Nika asked, how big is GovCon? Well, the year 2016 when we had a thousand people I think we had a little over a thousand, I said never again because our then only holds 1,100 and I said, I'm never doing this again, I'm going to quit and Jess said, no, that's not happening and we decided from then on, we were gonna cap it at 800. So last year we had almost 900 so we were sort of close to our cap. Our signups had actually about 1,700 people on our Mailchip account has 3,300? 3,300. Our list serve, which is the Google group where we all coordinate answers and questions, we have just over 500 people on that. So there's a lot of ways to connect and we also have GovDrupal Slack which has about 250 people I think. That's completely open so if you're a contractor or a govv you can be on that. If you're interested in the Google group you have to be a government employee or sponsored in by a government entity. So that means like if you were working at NIH James would need to make sure that you're abiding by the rules because it's really important to us that you're not selling anything. It's not like Microsoft's hard sell. I don't know if you've ever been through one of those. They are brilliant. I mean I feel like I could do Microsoft like nobody's business and then I get it and I'm really disappointed usually. Sorry Microsoft. But yeah we try to make sure that it's more of a we put the expert in front of people and say these are the people who are helping us and we make sure it's if you're from a company that you get credit for doing that as well. Like Booz Allen Hamilton hosted us and USDA hosted us for a DevOps day that sold out and we had ZivTech presenting on Probo which is a really amazing product. If you've never seen it you should go look at it. And we had Minecraft and it was oh USDA. Yeah the CIO's office because they play with rancher and salt. I'd never heard of those before. I learned a lot. Come on ask questions. Were there any big milestones for Drupal that were like big inflection points for growing Drupal in the government? When the White House went to Drupal. Which unfortunately is not now. But that was huge. And so because you know especially federal government I know it's at local levels as well but federal government security is a very, very big deal. And so while there were initiatives for open source and moving in that direction the comfort level isn't there and the government takes a lot longer to get there. So when the White House went to Drupal a lot of us were like look if the White House can do it why can't we, this is silly. So that's the one that sticks out in my mind. So it wasn't just something that happened in the Drupal community. It was the adoption of it by such a significant part of the government that mattered. Yeah, that's how I would say, you know. Yes. Yes, you may. All right, so you're not here. Should we cover all the mics just to make sure? Oh, sorry. I'm having a mic. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. And there may not have been, I'm not going to say this, but we're really talking about this in a government government with the same level of weight. How many other people, we kind of, I'm finishing up with people, weight of a magic wand and suddenly having to, to a magical community of people experts, well, it wasn't the White House that wouldn't take a game there, right? It doesn't really matter what White House, you can get experts, right? You can get experts to show up, but you might work with the mother agency and you can't weight that magic wand and you've got federal procurement rules and hiring rules and maybe a team will call fusion experts or folks who like working on a W product or whatever and maybe a control stack or you're on the left somewhere and you're not going to recall that as soon as they're still left with you. So, while I'm, and you've got, I know the people that are working, but don't take this. I don't want to be negative with people in front of you. While they know, acknowledge their well expertise, contributions and generosity and the awesomeness that it is to keep you uptight, there is this other thing, it's just when the White House said, let's go build this thing in Rupal, suddenly there was a team of political appointees independently all saying, hey, what's going on in Rupal? All across the government. And so it's what you're doing beyond Rupal. So, it's a very strong approach. Without these ladies, it wouldn't be what it is right now. Thank you, Matthew, about the administration. It wouldn't be exactly where it's at. They've been saying, we're all going to do word press. We're going to do, we're all going to do word, you know, we're going to do a harder fight. It's on word press now. Well, yes. It's a wrap. This administration has not hired a single director in the digital strategy. So, all the deputy directors were not really inclined to be switching to a web sector or anything. Because we don't have this great cash to use that money. Correct. You know, if someone did, if someone shows up and says, here's the money, let's all go to word press, odds are we're going to do that. Because they're actually using their words. I mean, these are going to be wonderful. We really are. When someone says, go do acts, we're going to do acts. But there's nobody there saying, go do acts. So, we're all going to do it. There, we've made it over. I've got a forthcoming going on right now. You ask anybody who does serious government contracts and you point to them and say, do you say, hand for approval right now? Oh, yes, yes, you can't tell. Yeah. That's all I can say, but if I talk to you. There you go. Thank you. Thank you. And we're with you. So, I'm all to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And then, yes. But we have to use the mic for a minute. That's right. So, one of the other things that I'm going to disagree with the speaker who will not be named is that I actually built sites in Drupal before the White House went. In fact, one of those sites is still in use today with just about every single government agency. It did not make you all change. Well, everybody loves that site and it's nothing like what I originally built which is even funnier because that was built on Drupal 6. But what's kind of cool now is that I can point to that site and say, well, yeah, I did that back in 2009. The stuff I do now is way better. I am so much better now. And I do so much more complex things than this cute little site that still goes. But on the other hand, it's still out there and it still runs. So, oh, and it's not been hacked. I do have to ask you to do a microphone though for the people at home. The design of our businesses, state and local governments. And so, I came today because I was really interested in what you're doing. I did work a lot in 2008 and 2012 too. So, I saw a lot of state and local governments moving to Drupal after that and it just made sense. I mean, we work in the city of Chicago, state of Illinois and a lot of local states. But can we get involved at all or is it really just on a federal level? Oh, no, yes, absolutely, absolutely. We have had people from all levels of government to include international. So, if you wanna help, and that is actually part of what we've talked about is, and what we hear from a lot of the state and county and local government is that, they're like, we're not in D.C. So, there's a lot of the stuff that we do that's harder for them to take advantage of. And we are really looking for ways, ideas and people that are willing to help us figure out how do we better serve that community that's not local. So, yeah. I'm saying because we'd like to learn about our process. So, part of that, what we were kind of sign talking here, I'm like, what are you talking about? So, we have this website, Drupalforgov.us. I shouldn't tell you not to go to it because it's there. It's a work in progress. You know, the government. Building it agilely. So, we're in the process of still trying to get it up in a way that is all that it can be. But that sort of being a repository for those types of things where we can invite people to maybe write some blog post or a place that we can share resources and point people towards things. Because right now, most of everything comes in the form of some type of event, right? You go to the GovCon and you watch a recorded session or you participate in a webinar and that's kind of where things are. But just having a repository that kind of catalogs some of those resources and points people is something that we're working towards that I would hopefully would be a good resource to in the future. One of the other things I do with camp organizers is I help them learn how to reach out to government employees. We're not different, although we're a little special. We tend to speak a little differently. And being able to bridge that gap for us to talk about, like for instance, one of the big issues that people used to have with taking Drupal was because it was free. Therefore, we couldn't use it. And so I had to go over all these ethics rules to say, well, the Department of Commerce is using it. So, or my favorite one was when I was told that if we put Drupal on the TeraMark server that it would bring down the entire GSA cloud. And I said, are you nuts? I mean, I honestly wanted to know if that person was crazy. But what I learned from those experiences is how to actually navigate those bureaucracies and the people who had power that I didn't have and how to make them more comfortable with it. Kind of like the way Nika had to do from her end with talking with people who, oh, I have to use Drupal now, what am I getting? And she'd have to ease into, well, here's what you're getting. Here's how we do these things. And we try to do that with state and locals as well because they have even worse budgets. They have much more significant issues than the federal government does. And so we work with them a lot. We bring them in on webinars. We try to make it possible for people who are on the West Coast to attend. Our webinars are later in the afternoon on the East Coast. It's the third Thursday at three, like the alliteration. I know, we're clever. So we try to do that. And one of the other things that we've also worked with is all the camp organizers around having a way to talk to and encourage government employees to attend events. So it's easier for government employees if you do it on a Friday and a Saturday, or I mean a Friday and a Thursday, or just a Friday, or just a Thursday. You do not have to do a full two-day camp. There are lots of great ways to do this. And a lot of government facilities are free, whether it's state, local, or federal buildings. We as employees can request a room and get it for free. Now, I could do that at my agency. Rehibit Wi-Fi, so. Like one of the great facilities I would like to be able to do is the House of Representatives. They're all on Drupal. I would love for them to host, but the capital building is prohibited. There's no Wi-Fi. It's prohibited. And that's the architect of the capital has nothing to do with either side of the house. Doesn't. So there are limitations, even though there are these great opportunities for spaces that are available and we can all utilize. You just need a government employee who can actually request it. And those government employees will request it. I am always surprised at all the people who are willing to host us, whether it's NIH for the conference. And I always feel bad for them because they look at the end of the week worse than I think I feel. Because we work so hard for that week when we have the event. And I think almost all of us take vacation afterwards. So I know how hard it is to host, but we can do it. DC government has wanted to host us before as well. It's another Wi-Fi issue. It's prohibited. So once I can get past some of those issues, Department of Interior has hosted us. In fact, when the Department of Interior hosted us, Nika taught a class on get essentials and command line. That's right, you did. And we're going to be teaching another class on get because we think it's really important for government employees and our contractors to learn how to use get. We're not using, does not get hub. We're gonna teach them get. Probably use get hub because it's more accessible to a lot of the government employees to get to. But that's okay. I'm okay with that. As long as they know how to use get. I want people merging code. Who else has a question? Come on, don't be shy. Come on, Mike, what's the question? The label, you especially had a certain expertise that it took me some time to understand that it's important to come to fruition in my mind. I'm gonna take that as a compliment. You were working at VA and I don't get a job that allows you to spend time on technical things. But I kind of followed you around at the Drupal time and different events and you seem to know everybody. And you knew everybody and you knew what everybody was doing. And I couldn't quite figure out who you were. I thought you might have been some kind of operative planet in the Drupal community to investigate or something. But you know, and you've already covered all of the accomplishments that you've made at the moment. So to kind of wrap this up, there's this, and I think it's something that women are better at than men. I mean, that's what this is, I hope it's not a sexist. It's not. That's what we're supposed to be talking about here, right? But, you know, you have a way of getting things done. You have an angle at getting things done and bringing people together and making things happen that is a certain kind of an expertise, you know, that I don't think a lot of men who put together like I would watch you pull off a lot of these big events with thousands of people. That's just my comment, you know, when I first came in, you were speaking on the issue of not giving yourself credit as an expert. So just broaden, you know, broaden what the definition of expert is. You probably got a lot of things that I can't do. You know, just think about it at the bottom. That's just... Well, thank you. Speaking of really great government spaces that are available and have Wi-Fi, the Oak Ridge Lab has an amazing space. And you now know someone at Oak Ridge Lab who could host a triple event, just saying. All right, so thank you for those kind words. I wanted to kind of tag onto that a little bit when you talked about how that maybe there are certain traits that women have or the way that we do things that lend itself to some of this. We were talking about it earlier as like, you know, the four of us are up here are just a small representation of the larger team. But what I think is a little unique about us is that I feel like probably 80% of our team that's leading stuff are also women. And that's a little, that's not usually at least been my experience to see. So the person, you know, that is the, does most of the people that have been giving the training have been women? The people that manage the webinars are women. And our web team is, you know, the project manager and the scrum master are both women. I mean, and that's not to say like the, we still love all of our guys too. Like I'm not trying to say that at all because we have some absolutely everybody who participates in every way is wonderful. But I think, you know, with this being women, helping women, you know, helping to do this, it is, I think it is kind of a unique story that of the probably 40 or 50 people that are heavily involved on a regular basis, probably 80% of those are women. And we were talking a little bit about, well, I wonder why that is? And I think some of it is in some of the relationship building that we do. It's not just task-based, it's relationships. A lot of the people that we meet and do things are, we don't just work together, we form friendships and you know, that kind of stuff kind of grows from there. So I think that has been part of why we have seen the growth that we have is not just, is because we are establishing those relationships and then also encouraging people to take that step, take that plunge and go. And being maybe a little bit less task-based and more relationship-based and personal growth and yeah, I need someone to lead a webinar but you know what, you really need some practice presenting your topic too. So hey, it's a win-win and so it's a different sell, I think, sometimes in how we approach it. More questions? Oh, I guess, we have an on-mic one again. So what's the breakdown of staying out? Because to my eye, it's an average between 15 and 60%. What if we do? You just do a lunch, it looks like. I don't know. So, so we pull. So we pull registration and Amy went through and came up with about the numbers. Now, you can't always tell with everyone's name, it's just not possible. But from the numbers that she gave us off of registration, it's 45% female and 60, 30, 70, excuse me, 55% male, but that's not who shows up. Usually it's women who drop off, we sign up early and then we don't come to events. But our events are exactly the opposite. I see more men's names sign up early and don't show and I have a full bag of badges that can attest to this. Yeah, we definitely do have more women who will show up and it's not just women, white women, it's women of color, it's women with disabilities. We have a lot of people who come who, yeah, yeah, project managers. We had to add an entire track for project managers. So the real, it's also reflected in the leadership and management structures of the organizations that supply group lists. I have no idea. So I don't think so. The consulting firm that I worked for previously wasn't diverse, where now I work for a woman owned 8A business, minority, right? And she's my, yeah. So yeah, I don't see the same level of diversity.