 Hi everyone. I hope you all had a good hallway chat. And this is the Drupal South Steering Committee community update. So I'm not sure how many people are online just yet. Kind of taking a minute to let people in. So I'll just give you a rundown of what the purpose of this session is. It's basically to give you an update on what we've been doing for the past year. So the last time we did this was at Drupal Gov, which was also online this time last year. And despite everything that's happened with COVID, we have actually had a very busy year this year. We've had three events that we've run all online. And Dave is going to give us a rundown of that later in this session. Personally, I hope this is our last online event that we need to run for a while. And we are planning to move back to in-person format as quickly as possible. And again, we'll be talking about that through the session. Essentially, we're just going to give you a rundown of everything that has been going on. And of course, this being a community organization, we try and be as open with our communication as possible around what we are working on. If you ever do want to find out what we're up to, just visit the Drupal South.org website. And we've always got a record of the minutes of the meetings that we have there. And that just covers all the things that we're talking about and issues that we've got in play. So just by way of introductions, I'm Owen Lansbury. I've chaired the committee for the past couple of years. I'm transitioning that role to Dave, which we'll talk about through the session. And then we'll also be introducing Nicole. She's going to talk a little bit more about what the committee itself does. From there, Sahal is going to be talking about the finances of the committee and how we can use those funds. Jana is going to talk about the new website design. If you haven't seen that already, it went live yesterday. Like I said, Dave is going to be talking about all the events that we've run and planning to run. And then I'll come back at the end just with a wrap up of other issues. If you do have questions or comments through the session, please just use the live Q&A button. And if you want to open it up to an in-person discussion, we can actually bring you onto the stage. Otherwise, we can just read out your questions and answer them in that way. And if you ever do need to get in touch with us, again, just go to the website, use the contact form, and you can contact us that way. So with that, I'm going to hand over to Nicole. Hi, so yeah, I'm Nicole Ritchie. I've been on the committee for a couple of years. Since we've sort of formed it, I will be rolling off early next year because I'm having a baby. And I'm just going to tell you a little bit about what the committee actually is and how they're structured. We were still a subcommittee of Linux Australia, and it was formed primarily to just provide a bit more consistency across our yearly conferences and mentor local organizing teams, as well as most conferences have always got, or in most cases, we've got a bit of budget left over. And having the Drupal South committee, we can actually start investing that money into different initiatives. Or also we can support regional marketing activities or support regional meetup groups. We'll talk about that a bit later. And we've also started, there's a couple of working groups. There was a government one. I don't think there was much movement last year because everyone seemed to be very busy. But there's certainly the career pathways working group that's actually making really good progress and working on different ways to get more young people into Drupal and offer career pathways into Drupal. The committee already introduced everyone. We normally have a staggered two-year rollover term to ensure that not everyone rolls off at the same time. I think it's roughly about six months gaps. And they're obviously all volunteers. And also if anyone is keen to join or contribute, we normally meet once a month and you're always most welcome to join. Otherwise, the minutes are usually posted online on the website. And if you would like to get involved, let us know. We're always open. There's obviously always people rolling over. You can also self-nominate yourself if you'd like to be on the committee. And yeah, I think that was sort of just a rough overview of what we're doing. It hasn't obviously in the last couple of years we've chipped away on bits and pieces, but due to COVID, unfortunately, we haven't quite been able to do as much as we would have liked to. And I'm just going to hand over to Sohail to talk a little bit and tell you a bit more about those community initiatives that we've been working on. Thanks, Nicole. Hi, everyone. I'm Sohail Khatmani. I joined the committee earlier this year. I'm the treasurer for the committee and I help with managing how the finances work and what we do with it. Technically, like Nicole explained, any profit from any of these Drupal South events are held with Linux Australia. And being held within this Australia, we can use that too for other initiatives, obviously like for other events or to fund for additional activities such as meetups or camps or training. Is anything to really build that community involvement and get more people involved? So like we said, we're all volunteers. Nicole said getting involved and being part of that community is really something we want to drive through that money that comes back from running all of these initiatives. So I share the thoughts. I think despite COVID, we've had a busy year. We've had a few events that have run online. So any of that sort of has been reinvested back to running for the events and doing other things, other initiatives. So in terms of sort of if, as people being part of this community yourself, if you ever want to reach out about something like a training camp or meetups or something which you think that can contribute and add to help build that community, feel free to get in touch with us. Just contact the committee via the website and we can discuss and go from there as well. So I'll give you an example of how sort of the funds have been used. So this year, for example, any of the events that were run, the funding was used to design the Drupal South website. If some of you might have noticed it, if you visited recently, I think the team, everyone did a great job to get that up there. The older website was very outdated, didn't have as much information that you'd like there. So obviously we ran a formal process for RFQ and then we selected the designer and developers and they were also obviously involved in the community or part of the community. And it was a really great model in terms of how we use those funds to actually push funding back through the community and build that sort of involvement and get that. We also used it to appoint a professional event organizer for the 2021 events, Stirling Marketing, so you can see that obviously that we were trying to run this, we're trying to bring a lot more sort of new people to the community and obviously keep in touch with all the existing community that we have as well and make sure that they know of all the initiatives that we're running and have an opportunity to be part of it as well. So those fees were obviously covered by the event budget as well. So like I said, if you have any ideas or you want to just talk about any of the other sort of meetups, camps or trainings, feel free to get in touch with us via the website, you can fill in the contact form and we look forward to hearing and discussing any ideas with you. Thanks. What I'll do is I will now hand over to Jenna. She's going to talk about the website redesign. Hi, everyone. My name is Jenna Malakava. I'm based in Brisbane and I've been a part of Drupal South Committee for a year or so. So last year or the beginning of this year, it's already almost end of the year so it's really hard to judge the time. The committee decided to have a little quick redesign of the website just to have a little facelift and arrange the data and make it a bit more user-friendly, design-friendly and just promote Drupal in our region. We engaged a designer, Sahal, just explained and there was a little budget for development of the website and now it's live. It's still work in progress. We're updating content and updating all the previous events just to make sure that all the data and content is appropriate and all the time sensitive information probably can be removed. So now you can visit that and just let us know what you think about the design and send in more recommendations. So we're trying to keep a list of all the events that were ran under Drupal South. We'll try to put more information, especially on those events from the past that websites for those events don't exist anymore but thanks to Wayback Machine you can actually see those websites and information about them from the past. So it would be nice just to have a little information about them. It's more mobile-friendly as well and it's more accessibility-friendly as well. So I'll probably won't show any of the designs or website layouts because it's right there. Browse. That's pretty much it I guess on the website update. Back to you. Thanks for that. My name's Dave Sparks. I joined the committee just around a year ago and took up the portfolio for looking after the events and we've had a busy 12 months with events going on. If we go back to Drupal Gov 2020 that obviously had to move to an online event and that was our first virtual event that we ran on this event there platform that we're using today and that was a good trial run to test that out. We had around 300 attendees which is 30 speakers in a virtual sprint day. We achieved the typical Drupal Gov strong crossover with the government sector and after that event we ran an attendee survey and we got a lot of really good feedback there on the format and how to run things. Salsa Digital was the organizing sponsor and the event team there. They worked really hard and had put in a huge amount of legwork to make that happen and that in part, that workload was one of the things that led us to reinvest some of the profits back into hiring a professional event organizer to make things go a bit more smoothly and take that workload off volunteers who are all super busy in their day jobs. We did have a Drupal South Wellington here in New Zealand scheduled for 2021 but when the rolling COVID lockdown started and the travel bubble didn't really turn into a thing it got pushed back to a different date and now it's been pushed back again due to us having another event and a little bit of uncertainty around what's going to happen in the medium term. We need at least six months lead time to put together an in-person event but it is something that we're still really focused on and something we would like to make happen. So for 2021, coming out of that successful Drupal Gov last year we thought, yes, let's pivot back and let's do some online events and keep the community going through 2021. We had a lot of feedback from you and we wanted events and people were really hungry for that connection to find out what other people were doing. So to run those, we've had three Drupal Shorts online events this year and with that decision to get a professional organizer and to help us all we ran an RFQ for that. We had four respondents, really high quality responses back but we ran with Sterling Marketing. They had a really good history with the Drupal Community complementary marketing services and with that digital marketing background we were able to kind of give us a bit more outreach and reach new audiences as well. We started off with a bit of a pilot, a smaller group for an executive summit in early June. We advertised on LinkedIn for that to get Drupal back in front of key decision makers in the business community. We had the keynote by Jitma Binaragama that went really well. He was awesome for that, great feedback from the attendees there and really good interaction. So that was a very successful event and then we had some roundtable discussions with that facilitated by the sponsors. So I think getting in, changing the format a bit for online, having more interaction, having more discussions has really, we've learned as we go how to exploit this medium to make it not the same as an in-person conference but to play on those strengths and make them as worthwhile as possible and we've had a lot of good feedback from that. We wanted to run another couple of sessions so you're in the second leg of a two short format community event. In November now, we had the first one in August which many of you have been at. With August, we were able to kick off with the keynote with Drees. We had 230 registered attendees for that. That session went well and had a good level of uptake from the audience and we had some good feedback from that as well. We had a good response from the community in terms of talks coming forward and I think that we will continue hopefully getting that good feedback and as people in our community get more used to what we can do with an online presentation before we go back to traditional kind of in-person events. We consistently have had people asking us when we're going to do those in-person events again. I think everyone spent an awful lot of time on the webcam over the last 18 months. But that being said, I think that people are getting better at this sort of format as well. It's an interesting space and we're really looking forward to progressing over 2022, having more events, having more engagement with the community. We've pushed back our Wellington booking for the venue again and we just keep an eye on things before we can return to the city. Possibly looking at in-person opportunities in the latter half of 2022, timing in somewhere between Drupal Con North America and before Drupal Con Europe. I think all of us here on the committee are quite keen to go somewhere warm for that. We'll get back to all of you out there with another survey. Get your responses and get your thoughts. Using a professional event organizer has been awesome. Our events have always been really good quality events, but they've taken a big workload to toll on those volunteers. Having a pro on board does make that easier and makes it easier for us to do things that we wouldn't normally do around the professional marketing space as well. Early 2022, we'll be looking to recruit a new event team to look at that big event for 2022 and to work alongside sterling marketing to manage conference content, get speakers and put the show on. Possibly looking around 2023 for Wellington. Better late than ever, I guess. We just really want to make sure that we time it in with a calendar that works for everyone. Ideally earlier in the year. That's always been our long-term goal, to have these conferences pushed to the pre-Christmas period. It's a busy time for everyone. We're just keeping an eye on when we can do it, when's the best time to do it and what the community wants. Overall, very successful year for events. Looking forward to the next couple of years. I'll hand back to you, Owen, for a wrap-up. Just a reminder, if you do have questions for us, throw those in the discussion forum or the live Q&A tab. We are keeping an eye on that. If we don't have questions, we'll probably wrap up early. I do just want to thank Dave personally for the work that he's put into these events this year. I also want to thank him for taking on the role of the committee chair going forward. We've always had a plan to transition between roles and term links so that there's IP retained within the committee at any point in time. So having Dave being able to transition into that chair role is a really great thing to maintain that continuity. And then my role, I'll still be involved in the committee for the remainder of my term that goes to beginning of 2023. So I'll still be able to be playing a hands-on role with any future events that we are putting on. I think even though it has been frustrating with COVID for the past couple of years now, we have actually made some really good progress in terms of how the committee's structured and the tools that we have at our disposals. So actually a big thanks goes to Chris Skeen for originally setting up a lot of those platforms and tools that we are able to use and they can then be leveraged for any other community activities. So we've got our own Slack channel. We've got our own website. We've got our own Google Drive set up. We've got our own Zoom account, et cetera, et cetera. So anyone can kind of plug into that infrastructure now. And as Sahal also talked about, we've got funding there that's available with people have specific initiatives that they want to see fulfilled. I think one of the frustrations that we have had over the past couple of years is that we started talking about a lot of pretty ambitious things in 2019 at Tribal South Hobart when we were able to all get together. And of course, without being able to initiate some of those things, we've been able to just pull the focus back to purely events. But I think in the long run, we would like to kind of see Tribal South being able to play more of a broader role in terms of promotion of Tribal in the region to really kickstart some training activities and those types of things. So I think we are always going to be restrained by our volunteer capacity anyway. All of us have other jobs. They're usually quite busy. So yeah, that's always a constraint that we just have to live with. What was the other thing that I was going to talk about? So also as Nicole talked about, she'll be transitioning off the committee due to family reasons in early 2022. And we have invited Christy DeFries to fill her seat. So those of you who aren't familiar with Christy, she's been driving the career pathways working group over the past year. She was heavily involved in Drupal Gov as well. And we think she'll be a great addition to the committee. And I think just in terms of your understanding of how the committee is refreshed with new people, we did have a initial voting process to get people onto the committee. The second time that we tried to use that, we had quite low levels of engagement from the community in terms of people putting themselves forward for roles and then the ability to actually run a vote. So if we're in that situation again in the future, then we'd be maintaining this model of just inviting people to join the board as those roles come up. And again, that'll be a role for Dave to fulfill as chair to identify where we might need people who have a lot of skills we need to bring on. Obviously, if we do have a lot of people showing interest in being on the committee, then we can go back to a voting process for that. So then the only other thing that I'll just mention is that I've had a role on the Drupal Association Board at a global level for the past couple of years as well. And that's likely to continue into next year and beyond. And as Lee Rollins mentioned in his keynote, we have launched a Drupal certified partner program through the Drupal Association. And that's been the main focus that I've had for the past couple of years is to kind of get that program in place, defined and into the Drupal Association staff to roll that out. So while Drupal South doesn't have a formal connection to the Drupal Association, we have very close communication with them and we'll be able to assist with any questions around that certified partner program as it gets rolled out around the world. So if you do have questions or concerns about that, by all means get in touch with me directly and I can then connect you with people within the Drupal Association if you've got questions about that. I think just in terms of things that we are going to be focusing on going forward, the career pathways working group has had some success in terms of getting established. Again, COVID has hampered that because part of the big focus was to get an internship program happening and without offices for interns to go to. That's been challenging, but I think we can see that as being something that would be a high priority for us moving forward. And then we've also got a whole range of plans around other pathways that we can attract people into the Drupal community from a career perspective. So things like University Open Days and that type of thing. Again, as Lee talked about in his keynote, getting new people through into the community as developers is a really high priority for everyone and we can play an active role in that as the committee. So with that, it doesn't seem like we have any questions. Now is your last chance to ask any if you do have any. So if we don't have questions, I'll just wrap up by just extending a big thanks to everyone that's helped on this event. So all the sponsors and the speakers and the volunteers who've assisted, especially thanks to Nicole at Sterling Marketing. That was something that we'd identified as being a need a couple of years ago to reduce the effort that's required by volunteers for all the nuts and bolts of event organization. And Nicole has really proved the worth of professionalising that role and it's something that we'll be moving forward with into the future as well. And also to my fellow committee members, thank you for taking the time to turn up to our meetings each month and to keep things moving. It can be a bit of a thankless task at times and can be quite frustrating if we're not seeing we can get progress under the current circumstances, but I'm very confident that we've got a great structure and great people in place to move into 2022. So thanks for turning up and enjoy the rest of the event. Thank you, everybody.