 Excellent. Well, thanks again, everyone, for being here for our second Meet the Candidate session in 2015. Again, I'm Holly Ross, and I am really thrilled to talk to so many amazing candidates today. We've had such a wonderful turnout from all over the world, which has been really fascinating and wonderful. So, today, again, we are going to be, we are going to be going through a few questions from myself, as well as integrating questions in from our attendees who are listening in. And we will get to those in just a minute, but one of the first things that I want to do is go ahead and talk a little bit about who's on the call with us today. So, joining us today, and I think these are in semi-alphabetical order, if not actual alphabetical order. Kelly Albrecht is our first candidate with the a-name. So, Kelly's been working in Drupal for over 10 years and has founded a couple different businesses in the Drupal world, which is really interesting and fun. And I need to know where Kelly's picture was taken. Burgatory chasm in central Massachusetts. Ah, okay. I was going to say, that looks like the very definition of between a rock and a hard place. Excellent. So, Kelly is here with us. We also have Jean. Jean, I like to say your name with a French accent. Can I call you Bernier? Is that how you say it yourself? You bet. Okay, thanks. You bet, yeah. Jean is the co-founder of Cheeky Monkey Media, a Drupal shop up in Canada. I always have to stop myself from saying Canadian. And Jean has been working in Drupal since 4.6, so we have another Drupal entrepreneur here on our hands. Ani Gupta is joining us from India, and Ani, it works with Accelerant, but he has also been in the Drupal business since version four and has also helped start up a couple of Drupal companies over the last few years in the growing market in India. Alex Matthews is joining us all the way from Wellington, New Zealand. So, I don't know about you guys, but he's hands down my winner for best accent today. Thank you. All right, good. I'm glad you chuckled when I said that. And John, sorry, Alex also has a web development firm that he started up and has been working in Drupal for the last, I think it's about five years now. And we have Carl Zospina, who is Colombian by birth and living in Texas now, has helped, found a couple of Drupal businesses as well and was really integral in helping us launch a Drupal Con Latin America in Bogota just a couple of weeks ago. And it looks like Frenchie was able to join. So, let me just give me one more second here. And let's see, I opened up your microphone. Are you there? Hi, Holly. That's awesome. Yeah, so sorry, guys, I'm late. No, I'm just glad you were able to make it work. I know sometimes the software is a little bit, a little bit goofy. All right. So, now out of, out of order. Good. So, Frenchie is here also from representing India. And has also been a very, sorry, has also been very busy in the Drupal business space in India as well, been working in Drupal for a number of years too. So, I think your start, if I remember your story, you really got started in 2011 when Dries first visited India. Yep. All right. So, that's who's on the line with us. When you guys answer questions today, just a reminder to please say your first name when you get started so that people who don't know your voice can follow along. And I will do my best to get your smiling faces up on the screen as we go along as well. Sometimes it takes me a couple of clicks to get there. So, don't be surprised if you look like someone else for a moment. Okay. You guys ready to go? Right here. Go for it. Yeah. Okay. So, I'm going to pitch a couple questions your way. Feel free to just jump in and give your answer. I'm going to try my best to keep track and make sure that everyone has a chance to address the question as well. And we are going to ask you to keep your responses down to about 90 seconds or so so that everyone has a chance to get at these questions. So, some of these will be familiar to you. My set of questions is standard across all of these, but my first question for you is, what is the most critical issue facing the project today? And how can the association contribute to addressing it? I'm happy to feel the first answer in that regard, Holly, if that's okay. You betcha. I've been thinking about this a lot, especially since listening to yesterday's session, and I realized... Sorry, name, name, name. Sorry, it's Alex Matthews here. Pardon me. Yes, hi, Alex. Sorry. I thought my accent would give us away, but no, I'll make it clearer. So, I consult a lot of large organizations that deal with Drupal Strategy and Web Strategy and Software Strategy in general. And the emergence of each Drupal version and moving into Drupal 8, I feel as though there could be a lot more sort of clarity because there's a disconnect between when is the next version coming out? Should we invest huge amounts of money and moving to it? And I feel as though this is true both on the really large enterprise and government scale, as it is also for the young hobbyists who are just getting into it. And I believe that there should be a really thorough effort towards advocating and communicating Drupal Strategy from the association and from the developers and from the community back to the end users and the clients who end up funding us. So, I feel as though there needs to be more emphasis on communicating what the strategy is to all the stakeholders. If I may get in there, I think what Alex said is fantastic, but you know what, from business side of things, there is a massive amount of education that needs to still happen for a lot of people that want to adopt Drupal. Now, Gartner has a lot of information out and a lot of businesses depend on that, but people still don't know Drupal is a fantastic enterprise level solution. How do we tackle that? As a Drupal Association member, shouldn't we try and focus on that also? Drupal Association focuses a lot on DrupalCon and Drupal.org, but perhaps business side of things are something that I would like to see also. Well, this is Kelly. I'll jump in and I agree with what everybody said. I would add that one of the issues that I'm seeing is it's getting increasingly harder to get more talent into the Drupal aspect of this industry. I think there are a number of reasons for that and I've been very involved over the last couple of few years trying to get outreach in the community, maybe not even just Drupal for younger kids, but more computer science and getting a more diverse crowd interested in programming and in web development and finding ways to get them in here and then counting on Drupal to be that awesome option that I know it is so that they choose, they're interested and they want to choose it and work in it. And then I won't have such a hard time hiring people to do all the Drupal work that is out there as the world has pretty much standardized on Drupal. And so one of the things I think the Association could do to help is to focus more on the groups and people that are doing that outreach into the community and trying to find ways to let those next Drupal rock stars know that they have a home here in Drupal doing Drupal work. Being here is, well, I have to agree with Kelly and everybody, Alex and Annie ahead of us as well too. I think another part really... Hey Jeanine, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Can you speak a little? You're very fake again. Oh, how's that? Better. Alright, so I was just saying that I think another part of that is how do we improve onboarding people into the systems and getting kind of... It can be a little squirrely at times trying to figure out what are the best ways to go about things and a lot of people that are new to it can be just kind of thrown into the walls. Well, how do we help better bring those people on so that helps with bringing new talent up but as well that onboarding can represent how do we bring more business into Drupal because, well, at the end of the day, all the shop owners are using this to make money, to push things forward. How can we help them better educate and put people through the process of saying, hey, this is a great platform. This is why it's better than WordPress or Joomla or any of the other things that our clients are going to be coming to us with because a lot of the times nowadays people are coming to the shops asking for Drupal. So, you know, that part is a little bit solved but still how do we bring good talent on? How do we share what are the good ideas? One of the things I think would be critical to adding on is how do we start to kind of rank modules and things like that again. There used to be a great site out there that does that but you see WordPress and other open source projects doing that kind of stuff and those are things that can help get people moving forward faster, I think, too. If I may jump in here. Honestly, I really don't think that ranking modules is going to help Drupal. I think Drupal itself, especially with Drupal 8 where we are heading in terms of establishing a core structure and basically becoming a platform, Drupal is no longer in the same category as WordPress or Joomla to me. Honestly, I mean the way I sell Drupal is a platform. Sorry, this is Annie, by the way. It's Annie. So, what I'm trying to say is that, yes, for businesses, it's important to understand the distinction now between Drupal 8 and what is a CMS. Drupal, to me, is no longer a CMS only. It is, to me, a platform. And for that, I can, you know, I mean as a business, yes, I can sell that. I can build a platform around it. Gartner is a ranking aquire and the top quadrant today, so I can use that also. But, yes, for me, how does Drupal Association play role there? I'm not very clear about that, but I'm not sure that Drupal Association should get into the business life. Well, I am glad to have some counterpoint on the call, but I want to make sure also that we have a chance to hear from a couple other folks. So, Carlos and Ritchie, if you're there, I want to respond to that question. Hey, everybody. Yeah, thanks. Hello, everybody. This is Racha. I believe the most critical, you know, of issues that Drupal Project are right now is facing is, you know, the awareness. I've been leading Drupal a community in India and city called Mumbai for the last six years and the biggest challenge that I've been facing is to get people on boarded on Drupal to know more about, you know, what exactly is Drupal Association, what are the initiatives, you know, how do they benefit by participating in court screens and a lot of other things later too. And I believe this is the same story with other parts of India and maybe, you know, other parts of the country as well. So, awareness and reaching out to people is, I think, you know, the prime concern and as well as the participation. Awesome. And Carlos, do you want to also address this? Yes. You are also a little bit faint, Carlos. Okay, I'll try to get closer. Okay, can you hear me better now? Yes. Okay, this is Carlos of Pina. So, we've been talking about all the problems that we have with Drupal right now. You know, we have the promotion, the awareness. I will add the diversity of the communities getting more diverse. If I can say that, the short dash on developers, the learning curve, that balance between the businesses and the community which is so important and so interesting about the Drupal community and the Drupal ecosystem. But I think the most pressing concern right now is Drupal 8 because we cannot move forward correctly with any of this until we have Drupal 8 that is changing pretty much everything in Drupal. We have finally a correct way to develop. We have finally a much better side-building experience. We're finally embracing accessibility, embracing responsiveness and mobile. So I think we have a good start with the grants for Drupal core developers. But I think that's something that we can work more on getting more business involved and follow the ideas expressed by Drees on Drupal con Austin and find ways how the business can invest or let their people invest time on Drupal core development. So we can move Drupal 8 forward and then we can work on promotion, on the short dash of developers, on the learning curve, on a new system that is much better and for me much easier. Thank you. Can I add to what Carlos said? I think Carlos brought up a very important point. Drupal 8, yes. It's a massive rewrite and I'm selling Drupal 8. Sorry, I'm so sorry. I keep forgetting to do it myself. It's Ani. Come on, Ani. Oh, I know, right? Just get caught up in things. What Carlos is saying is fantastic. I mean this is a very important thing. Drupal 8, I mean hey, where are you going to be ready when it's going to be there and all that? Look, from what I see a lot of companies are already using Drupal 8 and launching projects in it. Drupal 8 is a massively different version of Drupal. It's mobile friendly and everything I think. As Drupal Association, yes. I think Drupal Association is already doing a lot of work around understanding or letting people know what Drupal 8 is. What I just said, a lot of people don't know what even Drupal is. Forget Drupal 8 or 7 or 6 or 4. We have to find a way to make sure that a lot of people know about Drupal. That's my thing. I think if you could follow up on that and just talk a little bit about and then I'd like to give the other folks a chance to respond as well. Talk a little bit about what you might think is important for the Association to contribute to when it comes to Drupal 8. What more should the Association be doing to help support not just Drupal 8 but the release cycle in general? Well, this is Raja. I know for the fact that there are organizations who started using Drupal 8 but this is done in silos and the promotions of who is using, how are they using and how they consuming Drupal 8 is still not out. So maybe Drupal Association can help by publishing a success story or a case study of Drupal 8 adoption policy, migration policy and maybe some resources and training material around that if somebody wants to migrate, they can probably go about it. That's my point. This is Ani. Can we let some other folks get a word in? Okay, I'm going to chip in. Ani, you and me, we're the same. I have to bite my tongue right here to not intervene on every other end. So this is what I think and this is what I'm saying. I'm not talking, we have to wait for Drupal 8. I think that although we have said it's important and the support, I mean Drupal 8 will come with a better release cycle better version in a way to do it that will solve the problem. When is the next version? Should I invest if they're going to get Drupal 9 sooner or not? We will know in a better way. It's easier to understand from the site building perspective, from the front end perspective and honestly in my experience even from the development perspective. It will open a wider variety of developers because now we're using the standard development. Now that spaghetti, we're hooking code that we have something better and it's more professional. I mean it's easier to offer Drupal 8 to bigger companies and to the small companies at the same time. So what I think the association can do is make sure we get to a point where we can start building this new era or this new needs on top of Drupal 8 and not on our little brother that is Drupal 7 really compared to Drupal 8 and that's what I meant before. I think that the grants that have been going around helping companies is good. I think that the ideas that are around I forgot the word about the special marketing options for companies using Drupal that will let them get more money and therefore give time to their developers to help with the software as such. I think all those are the things that we should be working on so we can start building over the new era again era that is Drupal 8 and when we work from there and grow the business and the community at the same time because again I insist we need to keep that balance, that beautiful balance that exists between business and community in the Drupal ecosystem that makes it so interesting and so different to any other open source project out there. Thank you. Thanks Carlos. Others want to talk about what specifically the association can or should be doing? I'll jump in. This is Kelly. Last call media is one of those shops that has a Drupal 8 website. The reason why we did that was an extension of an adoption of the Give Drupal philosophy where we were doing monthly sprint days to contribute to Drupal and to work as a team together and building Drupal 8 website grew out of that and we were able to contribute a lot of fixes back to Drupal 8 and get familiar with contributing to Drupal 8 and it was easier for our developers to want to jump in on sprint days at Drupal 8 and it was really a great bonding experience and it was a great business move to get a Drupal 8 website up and also a great training to get ahead of the curve on what's coming out and that really worked for us and I think it really worked for giving back to the community. I've struggled with an answer to this question because I know the Drupal Association is already doing so much. I feel like I may suggest something that you're already doing but just a way to help other shops to feel like this is something that they would like to do as a shop. A lot of times I know a lot of other web development shop owners and I think to myself they should redo their site in Drupal 8. That'd be great if we just had a whole bunch of Drupal 8 websites and just to really show and then you can write blog postings you can explain just to create that marketing buzz and I think the Drupal Association could assist in adding some structure to that. And I guess unrelated, the second idea that I've been thinking about, I don't know how viable it is but it would be cool because we can consult with a lot of big companies that want to know when these people are coming and as it gets closer it gets harder and harder for them to start a new project in Drupal 7 because they think well are we going to start this in 7 and then it's going to be ready soon. I've been wondering if there'd be a way to create a pool where they could donate money because all large companies donate to some non-profit or whatever to make a donation to further fund some of the grants that the Drupal Association is putting together. We can all sprint on this together. Awesome. I'd be quite keen to follow on from what Kelly said there. Please do, Alex. Okay, I'll try to make this brief. Basically, I re-support the idea that we should be engaging the stakeholder community far beyond JustDrupal.org and that there's a lot of people who are using Drupal, people in government, people in large businesses, the cafe down the road. There's a great deal of people who are not necessarily technical, who are not necessarily a part of the community and yet it does impact them and they've got a big interest and a big stake in this technology. As a consultant when trying to sell Drupal solutions, I often encounter that sort of barrier and I feel as though even the resources on Drupal.org at the moment about Drupal 8, while they're good, I still feel as though they're angled more towards a developer and less towards a technology strategist or less towards someone who might be making an investment. The two main areas that I would like to see the Drupal Association grow in would be advocacy and market share of CMSs and web technologies in general. But I'd also like to see it being able to engage more young people and that whole education quotient and bringing in hobbyists and new site developers. So I feel as though the Association to specifically answer the question around what the Association could be doing I feel as though while the developers have a really good community already that we should be expanding our focus to advocate towards a larger pool of stakeholders and therefore achieve a larger market share of the CMS and hopefully bring in some talented fresh bloods into the pool as well. Awesome. Gene? I'd have to pretty much agree with Alex completely. That was extremely well said and I think what is really going to be important to push this forward. Yes, I wanted to discipline and say I think that the points are simple. The grants need to keep going we need some marketing that is not you know a company doing marketing for themselves not actually not pantheon but the Drupal Association helping to promote Drupal as such and as Alex said not towards developers that are already using Drupal but outside to get new people and companies knowing what they can get with Drupal and find a company and something that we can add there is some kind of organization on the release cycle that is happening but I believe the Drupal Association can play a part in helping control in a way that release cycle in that way we will not have. The big question that I hear today is when is Drupal A coming? If Drupal A is coming right now, when is Drupal 9? Is it going to happen in a year? In two years should I move from 7 to 8 or wait until 9 or something like that? If we have more organization there I think we can have a better path and finally promoting stuff like large skin of Drupal in America or creating media, documents, posts like that that will help a lot everybody to get more business and more developers. Excellent, well I want you guys all to know that Ani is so excited about your answers that my question queue is filled with plus one and I can't every more You guys all have a fervent admirer in Ani I want to switch gears a little bit and get to one of the questions that came in from one of the community members and we spent a lot of time talking about the software at this point and how the association can play a role in the promotion of the software and the release cycle of the software I would love to know what you guys are thinking about when it comes to local Drupal communities and what role should the association play in supporting those local user groups I'll jump in Oh, yeah Alright, I'm going to go on alphabetical order on this one and we're going to start with Kelly and we'll see if it goes well from there I don't know if this is my best answer but this is just what popped into my mind first On the last conference that I was organizing out here I really wanted to have a bigger, like a sprint day that was at a larger scale than some different times and I was looking for a streamlined way to get some help from the Drupal Association for help with that event and then also I think to extend that idea a little further would be cool to have a structure or a mechanism to reach out to the Drupal Association and maybe they could facilitate getting some top quality speaker in the area that I may not know about or one that would be willing to lie out and speak on something for a fee but to facilitate some of that bringing presenters into our groups You're all afraid to fill the void now, huh? I'll jump in I'm jumping in That is fantastic Seriously, we and Rachid will point to that also we've had problems trying to get a keynote for example for our camps but yes, Drupal Association does certainly help get us the names the big names help get the crowds and people get excited about that there are some heroes in the Drupal Space and I think that they should be maybe Drupal Association could actually have a page on them, the heroes of Drupal Space I don't know but in terms of local communities, yes, microgrants is something that I think would be really good for the Drupal Campus Ambassador Program, which is fantastic and I'll tell you, we had a fantastic 238 people code sprint and all of these guys were from tiny colleges in India nearby and we would love to have these grants available to us to empower those, so that's my thing from Indian Drupal Community Experience there's a recent talk going on about regional representation forming a national level representation in Drupal Association and the views of the person, I'll talk on behalf of all the leads, Drupal Community Leads from India so one of the major challenges that is to reach out to Drupal Association and make them understand what their challenges are what their needs are, so few of us are connected to Drupal Association now because of McGann's visit and we are more aware of what the things are but I believe local chapters representation at Drupal Association through some mechanism is important so that Drupal Association can understand that regional needs and can then facilitate their requirements and understand which community is doing what and how well we can serve them things like animals and we are working on something called Drupal Campus Ambassador Program and it's like getting Drupal to educational institutions in India and probably the next phase is we are going to get it to the educational institutions involved and there are a lot of other initiatives that other regional groups are working on but how to facilitate that, how to get kind of mentoring on that guidance on that, I think that's where we need help from Drupal Association That's my point Holly can I add my two cents? Yeah go for it. Alright well I may as well I would just like to start by acknowledging all the fantastic comments that you've all made which I thoroughly agree with and think that all of that is very very true. I would look at that to promise a bird's eye strategy view in this case because about two years ago I started organising the Wellington Drupal Meetups when I started they were very small and over the past two years we've grown them into quite a large community which is highly engaged and very productive. I mean by global standards it wouldn't be a very big community I mean we're about 180 members and about 25 to 30 people who turn up regularly. However in the past two years we've developed Drupal.org.nz together, we've had substantial involvement with organising Drupal conferences here in New Zealand and in Australia we've formed a huge amount of collaborations. For instance Greg Anderson from the one of the co-maintainers of Drush he came to Wellington not so long ago and our community had the benefit of being able to catch up with them and learn a lot. We've connected with the Auckland Meetup further north we've ended up working with the Australian Meetups in Sydney and Melbourne and even though we're a relatively small group of people we actually have been highly highly productive. We've done Drupal 8 contribution sprints to CORE. We've written documentation for Drupal 8. We've shared presentations between New Zealand and Australia and all of this has happened highly efficiently with a lot of productivity and so I'm really interested in sort of growing the number of a community but I'm also really interested in how to squeeze productivity out of said community and making sure that everyone feels supported and feels like it's more than just a community of practice but it's actually a social thing where they've got friends and they can feel a part of something that's bigger than them. I definitely see this in terms of how can we facilitate that and just to answer the question I would say Drupal.org could create a new role and call it local chapter organizer and this role gets given to anyone who can prove that they're organizing a meetup or a Drupal camp or something like that and that could be a very simple portal for communications and resources because I know that a lot of us travel often and that we can benefit from each other and I see a lot of the magic coming out of those networking events where the other communities get together so I feel as though the Drupal website itself could actually facilitate that. Alex, it's like you're reading our minds. We have totally had that discussion internally. More words later. Alex, are you going to be in Melbourne? I will be in Melbourne. I'll see you there. Yes, Ani really wants to have beers with all of you. We established that yesterday. Lots of beers. Gene or Ratchit? Carlos. I have a double experience on communities. I have experience with the Latin American community which is a community that has been working for years and getting together. There is so many leaders in every country and it's a weird community because it's more like a whole deal community, the whole region and also there's more communities. I'm also trying to start the Houston community. I think one thing that the Drupal Association can help with guidance and resources as you started doing it. We have Lauren for the community. She's awesome. For communities it would be important. I think that we can help whoever is starting that community to reach out to, as we said, with marketing, to business outside web development. People that are not using Drupal to develop but use it for their own apps and help develop that business part of the local market. It's hard to get a developer that is working on something, making money and tell them you can use this one but you will have a hard time right now finding somebody local that will hire you or something like that. I think we can help the local communities organizing events and organizing mid-apps and camps that are a little bit more oriented to business than just simple developers. We can help grow the other one by extension. In all communities and all local user groups they pretty much run by themselves. If you see San Francisco in the states, you see Chicago, etc. they pretty much are running by themselves. I think that the support is organizational and well, again, helping the people to reach out to other places where the local community cannot reach out but Drupal.org and the Drupal Association which is pretty much presently everywhere can. I don't even know if I make sense. No, I think you did, Carlos. Holly, can I ask you does Drupal Association maintain a lot of stats on participation? How do you get people beyond a group of funds? I would say the thing that we can count most easily is contribution that happens through Drupal.org. We actually just really started collecting, we've always collected the data. We've actually just started tracking the data in the last 15 months so it's still pretty new for us. What we're working towards is a larger plan where we understand more about the different kinds of contribution that people might make, whether it's a community contribution like running a user group or organizing a camp or documentation contribution or a training contribution. You ran a training and trained 10 new Drupal developers. Those are the things that we're having internal conversations about and where to track and make that data available. This is Rachel. I'll take my turn here. Thanks, Annie. I was going to bring that point. How Drupal Association is collecting this data and providing these analytics to others. A few days back I was just trying to see which are the biggest Drupal camps, which are the most active communities so that we can interact with those community leaders and get some help doing or even something. I believe this is something I believe would help if we get those kind of information and interaction between these folks can really help taking smaller communities. They can get mentored by these bigger communities who are doing a lot of these events. Other pointers about a lot of initiatives that Drupal Association took, like community activation grants and other initiatives as well. If you can do more of webinars or spread more awareness about how to use it with the leaders I think that's going to also hit the movement. I believe such kind of seminars did happen but I think more of it can definitely hit the week. I'll go ahead and add in another one. This is Kelly. Before we do that Kelly can we I just want to make sure we haven't lost Gene. I don't want to lose him in this conversation. I'm here listening. I think everybody's really hit it off a lot of really great points. Plus I think the men having a place where newer groups or young groups are struggling to bring people up or bring their groups up in smaller centers, like for us we're pretty small city compared to like Toronto or Vancouver where they have very active groups. But really between Vancouver and Toronto there isn't a whole lot going on for like groups that are being able to sustain. So being able to reach out and connect with peers and other people that are doing it successfully, get help maybe even find ways to bring remote people in to do presentations. Those are all the things that would be great. Especially from a smaller or newer groups that are trying to start a perspective, those would be some really great places to be able to help and make those connections with the rock stars that are just slamming it out right now. Thanks, Jean. I think those are great points. I want to get to a couple of other questions that we have from the community so that we can get their questions answered. One of the issues that Grease brought up in his triple con Amsterdam keynote, if you thought, was the idea of how to incentivize contribution in the Drupal ecosystem particularly how do we get business owners to allow for contribution from their developer staff. So that might be something like giving their developers 10% time to work on Drupal or Drupal Contrib issues or having sprint days in their office, whatever it is, just making sure that we are making it easier and better for companies to get their workers to contribute to the project and not just the client work. One of the questions we have from the community is do you support that proposal and what kinds of incentives do you think are appropriate for the Drupal association to be advocating for or presenting to the community? I think as a business owner, one of the key things would be, especially the smaller shops to hear from the people that are doing it right now and what's the return on investment that they're getting because at the end of the day that's going to be important to the business owners is what kind of bang for the buck are they getting? Are they getting some marketing credit? Are they seeing a huge increase in talent getting ramped up quicker? Things like that, maybe lack of a better word, maybe some case studies or some mentoring tips again from the shops that are doing it and are seeing success from it. Because at the end of the day the shops need to make money and sometimes we need to get out of that mindset that every single hour has to be billable, maybe it's just what is that ratio and what are other people seeing that have been successful? Yeah, this is Kelly, I can agree with that and I could also respond to those great questions that I think we should be asking the people that are involved in this way. For me it's the whole way that we fill our pipeline at all just by being involved in the community and doing what we love to do. It's a really beautiful ecosystem that has really taken care of us and has really caused us to associate contribution with survival in this industry and collaboration with everybody in the community and to somehow reach out to those people and make a positive great example of that to encourage other teams to contribute. I agreed with a lot of what Dries said. I don't think it's so much that we need to bring more business to these companies. That's always great, I wouldn't say that I'm having an issue with that, but it's more about convincing of the points that were just brought up, such as training and onboarding and getting people more involved and how beneficial it is for team building to contribute and collaborate in something that is much bigger than the company itself which is Drupal, which we all are professionals in. I'd like to get it there. What I would like to say, what Dries said is definitely very important. Like at Accelerant, we actually have a role for a D8 contributor. Contributions are important. Now, contributions to me is not just code contributions. Rajat and I have been doing a lot of contributions in terms of making sure that Drupal is known around the community. That to me is very important and how Drupal Association comes into the picture in that particular aspect for me. Drupal Association provides a fantastic validation of what we try to do. I think that's what I have to say about that. I think we've been touched on the two points that are important. Holly, your question is what can do the Drupal Association and I think that is such a complicated subject that I don't think we're going to find a strategy right now. But I think that the two points that we have to keep in mind going forward is the education to the companies as Kelly said and I forgot the other name, sorry. And that giving back to the project is under benefit. That contributing in any way in documentation in translation in the community part helping Drupal is important and gives them back. And definitely I think that Drupal Association and Drupal.org should find a way to bring that recognition to numbers or to a way and I don't know, I know we've been talking about some kind of marketing based on contributions or marketing based on how much that company is giving back to the project that is not easy to do right now in this call but I think that's the way. If we have a company that's actively contributing and actively developing the open source part of Drupal they should get some kind of benefit from the exposure that Drupal Association and Drupal.org have and the more business come this way if it happens we'll make them see the benefits more and get more people helping to the project and we can move the project forward faster. Thank you. Hello, this is Richard. So my point here is in Drupal Mumbai community what we have been trying to do is we are initially chasing after developers and doing events and trying to get them in here and recently we figured out a way to just tag a person to an organization. We have introduced a concept called organizational spark and we just reach out to this guy in all the organization and we say that this company is participating and not this person is participating. The participants are of course credited but in all our messages that we are sending out in all the events and code screens we are also sending the message that these are the organizations that participate. These are the number of participants. This is the kind of commit stats coming from them or kind of participation coming from them. I think this has been very successful in terms of it has built a kind of competition also, new persons, new organizations are also trying to chip in and understand that why we are not there and they are trying to figure out a way how we can get into that. So I think at global level maybe if something like this Drupal association can also use to provide some kind of acts on how organizations are participating and could not be just in terms of code contribution like Annie said it should be other ways of recognition like how they are sponsoring, how they are even participating, organizing events and participating in different cons and different Drupal events in their regional and national communities. I think that kind of thing when we see that stats, I know it would be very difficult to validate that but that could raise a competition and people will definitely try to figure out and go up the rank and it could work. Holly, I feel as though I've got some really good answers in this regard from what I've heard from the others but unfortunately just when you were asking the questions someone knocked on my door and I was distracted. Could you please paraphrase for me what the question was? Yes, let's see if I can do that. We were just talking about Drew's keynote and how you feel like the association would be able to play a role in helping incentivize contribution from the business community. Right. I think there's a number of different ways that that can be done and from what I've remembered from what the others have said, I think there's already really good solutions and I think Ashit's made a good point about climbing the rank everyone who's in the business of Drupal wants to have as much integrity as possible. A lot of us on our websites have Drupal association member badges and meetup organizer badges and Drupal 8 contributor. These are all logos that a lot of us have in the footers of our websites and I feel as though that's one really basic way to incentivize contribution but further than that I feel as though again Drupal.org can facilitate a lot of us by having certain roles that people can be nominated to receive if they can prove that they have actually made a lot of contribution and you could run competitions for who would contribute the most. You could have a list of partners of Drupal.org on the websites companies that have contributed lots of time and individuals. I think there is that divide between the individual contributor and the corporate contributor and I think that that actually does need a bit more thought. By and large I feel as though there is already a lot of incentivization there because in a lot of cases companies have an implicit interest in making sure that the platform is stable and in Wellington anyway we organize a Drupal 8 code sprint. We try to organize one for every month and that just happens naturally and a lot of the programs that I know are motivated to contribute just because they like to contribute. I mean I don't know that we need to make too much of a commercial incentive but if we are going to make commercial incentives I can think of a number of different ways that that could happen. Awesome and Ani did we hear from you on this question? Well I don't know maybe but yes what Alice said is actually I think everybody said their point I think it's completely... Look at the end of the day businesses need to make money. Drupal contribution should become part of the part of the way that you do business. At Accelerant for example we make it part of what we do on a daily basis for example we were working on a project and we discovered a couple of problems with a couple of modules let's say and we actually figured out a solution and we open sourced that. Here we should be able to just put out the solutions in the community and yes where can Drupal association help? Yes definitely make sure that people that are joining Drupal association know businesses and otherwise that it's important to communicate. It's important to contribute and it's important to be part of the community. I mean community itself does not grow without contribution and that is something that perhaps Drupal association could actually do a little better a job at. Awesome good well I'm going to switch gears on you guys with another community contributed question here. I guess I have to say what a good question and you're all pretty too. Here is the question which I think is a really important one it's one that we talked about a lot that the issue has raised itself in the community several times. We're wondering from any of the candidates do you have any ideas on how to promote diversity in the community beyond what we do now which is saying we value diversity which we do. What are the things that the association can help do to really affect change so that we can see more women, people of color, more participants from around the world and really create the diversity that we say that we value but we don't really have in our community yet. Can I go? Is that Carlos? This is Kelly I don't know if this is a doable if this is on brand for the Drupal association but I'll tell you what I saw work recently we were doing a conference and I've been feeling kind of a little bit of Drupal burnout in my community the number of people coming to each meetup is kind of decline there aren't a lot of new presentations on Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 isn't out enough yet that Drupal 8 presentations are really that common and we really wanted to do something bigger and bring more people into the conference so we made it not just about Drupal and one of the things that that did was that lowered the barrier to entry where our previous Drupal camps have been a little intimidating so it's really hard to get someone who doesn't know if they're into Drupal or not to come and choose Drupal when it's a camp or conference where Drupal is already chosen so if you have events or if you focus on things that are about more than just Drupal and then Drupal is in there as my opinion the best choice among then people can come in just checking things out they don't have to they're not trying to fake it that they're a Drupal person and they can come in and they can actually choose Drupal and this worked really well at a conference that we put on we over doubled we only tracked gender equality at the conference and we had an awesome increase in numbers and of course since Drupal is extremely popular in this area it was very popular in terms of presentations so I'd like to believe that we got a few Drupal people checking out Drupal and actually evidence of this was on the spring day that we had we had a number of people that had not used Drupal before and they got convinced along the way to come and see how they could get involved and maybe start helping great example okay keep going I think that's a great idea Kelly I see several things I told this story to Holly in Drupal Pichu I went to Dallas and I saw a conference previous to the Drupal camp that was an old oriented web and that was around Drupal but it was more about using social media content strategies et cetera nowadays we can involve the PHP world much more than before because we're moving forward towards that getting out of that Iceland so all those things will help bring different people and that will help in the other hand something that we did with the Latin American community for DrupalCon is the Drupal Association and I thank them for that work with us a group of local volunteers and they really really let us have a voice on what was being done because they understood that the culture may be different and the way we see things may be different and I think that's something that we can do on the different groups, minorities whatever we want to call it. I think I'm a minority because I'm Hispanic so I don't see a problem there it's understanding that difference in culture and working with people that is already participating in the project and how to reach out to those persons that may be scared by Drupal because Drupal is a big monster and it's scary when you see it from the outside and find how to work together and reach out to different people that is not just developers but I mean we have a whole recycle of different roles that we can play in a web development project that they may not even be related to Drupal directly but can work together so in summary I think involve different business world, PHP world, other web development strategies, Node.js javascript framework whatever and also working with the different cultures and way of seeing things on the different groups to make sure we have some people that can guide the efforts so they come across correctly. I hope that makes sense Thank you. Hello this is Racha so maybe one way we can try to bring more diversity is to do more cross-pollinated events there are a lot of technologies that work around Drupals like Carlos mentioned so doing an event with them or involving them into the community or doing a community event with their event I think could bring a lot more diversity Thanks Racha. Other folks want to add some thoughts to that? Okay I'll jump in at this point. Sorry it's Alex here. I actually have a lot of experience with this because early last year I started working with Catalyst IT which is probably New Zealand's biggest Drupal shop around how to bring in more women because it's a problem in our industry in that I would say maybe 80 to 90% of all our developers are male and that's probably been generous there's been other communities in Wellington that have really effectively reached out to women for instance there's a collective agency here in Wellington which creates something called Ruby Girls which is Ruby on Rails training for women. It's completely free and I believe that they're producing something like 50 programmers per year and these are really high quality programmers as well. There's models that do exist that have proved this to be effective and I think it's different based upon which country, which culture, which city you're talking about but I do know that there are formulas that can be quite effective and what we're doing right now is trying to create outreach with high schools and universities whereby we can go and talk to the students and say which of you are thinking about careers in IT, which of you want to be web developers and really at that point early on sell them the idea that Drupal is what they should be learning and then of course we need to facilitate that by actually providing the resources and the training required to graduate them into someone who's competent with Drupal I mean a lot of us must have seen the Drupal learning curve diagram it's kind of the cliff face that everyone falls off when they try and learn how to do Drupal and this is something that I encounter a lot because in fact in the same room as me while I'm talking right now I've got two people who have been learning Drupal for the past month or two and we have three new interns starting next month that are all learning Drupal as well so at the moment our shop is sort of producing quite a few Drupal trainees and that's a very intentional and selfish strategy. We're not doing that to be nice, we're doing that because we desperately need them. I also think that email programmers often tend to be better or at the very least more disciplined, at least they turn up on time so yeah I mean by and large I feel as though there are strategies that can exist I think that some of it's a private responsibility for companies to go out there and actually advocate they do free training and offer internships but in terms of your question Holly, how can the association help? At the moment in terms of working with high schools and universities and advocating Drupal to them we have to create all those resources from scratch. I know that there's lots of different Drupal education materials out there but I think that having association approved resources for engaging tertiary and secondary education I feel as though that would be a really excellent starting point even if it was just a PDF with 10 pages that would start circulating and give people an entrance point to actually engage their local communities so I feel as though it needs to start with high schools and universities. Holly let me ask you Sonny so in Drupal association you are the director, Megan is the associate director come on, how have you been able to build that diversity within that organization? Give us some pointers Oh now I have to answer questions Yes It's totally fair I think the real problem for us and being able to tackle this in many ways is that we just don't have dedicated resources for it it takes more than intent it takes action and I think we certainly try to do a number of things which are necessary but not sufficient so we try to model the behavior we want to see in the community when it comes to diversity we try to use the right kind of language to be inclusive many times you all have pointed out contribution is not just code for example right that's something we really try to echo in the community when we're doing our work we have a newfound focus on trying to work the right way with local communities especially communities that are different than our own for example of Drupal Khan Latin America and I'm sure Ani you've had some experience with Megan now talking about bringing Drupal Khan to India in 2016 so I think that what we've tried to do is send the right signals, use the right language model some behavior but we haven't done and could be doing is developing actual active programs along some of the lines that you guys have mentioned here today so that's how I'd answer that nice I just want to recognize that it's a complete cop out right but we recognize we have a ton of work to do there let's see Jean did you have something you wanted to add to this question not overly I would have just everybody had some really good hands-on examples especially Alex and stuff that are talking what they've done in New Zealand so it's to kind of echo and ditto that it would be great I think we're going to need to be cross pollinating with other systems that share with us to grow and diversify more well listen guys we have listen folks we have speaking of diversity and language we have about 13 minutes left according to my clock for this session and I want to pose one final question I think we can get one more round of answers in for folks here and that question is this okay so listen carefully I'm going to tell you the mission of the Drupal Association the Drupal Association well sorry the Drupal powers the best of the web the Drupal Association unites a global resource community to build and promote Drupal so what I'd love to hear from you is what part of that mission is most meaningful to you and you want to be able to act on as a board member for me it's global global is important global Drupal adoption is important and for me contribution is important go ahead I feel it's like inclusion the way you can easily get in touch with the community I can easily go talk to trees, talk to Holly it's so easy to interact with everybody, get in touch with them people are so friendly to help each other I think that's the real beauty of this community I think that's what being driven very beautifully I think the building community part, this is Kelly is the most important part to me, I think in open source I tend to just see where the community is at and that's the technology that I'm most interested in being involved in and that's rewarded I've been rewarded by making that decision so I think building the community is by far the best I think Larry Garfield once said open source thrives to the extent at which it's shared and building community involves connecting more people to collaborate to allow open source to thrive I completely agree with Kelly I had the pleasure of talking with Larry Garfield and I often feel as though building the community is almost the easier part of it keeping people excited about the community and giving them reasons to return and making them part of something social which extends beyond just a career I feel as though facilitating that sense of being in a place where you're safe who understands your pain, who know why you were slamming your head on your desk for three hours because you couldn't address a narrow message that you didn't understand these are all the sorts of things that I think add up and make Drupal a very special community that is more than I've seen WordPress communities and I've attended other conferences for other web technologies and while they have a lot of similar things I feel as though at least here in Wellington and the places like in London when I went to the Drupal con in London the community there and the level of socialization is just very very high things like the Drupal beer pub crawl I actually think sometimes that those are more important than actual poor presentations because that's where real connections are made and where real friendships are created so yeah I would actually come at this from a social angle and while I'm the person who's all about the community I'm not just interested in the community of practice, I'm interested in how do we create relationships that are more than just professional and how does that look going forwards. Something I've often wondered is how many babies exist today that wouldn't of if it wasn't for Drupal cons Please don't make me ask that question If it's Carlos and I think I agree with everybody, I think we are all here because we want to help with the community and for me being part of two communities the Latin American community and the American community based in Houston that bridging and that growing of community is something that really really excited me and as Alex was saying it's not just the networking, the professional links that you can create on this community, it's also the friendships as everybody you know you were talking about Larry Larry and me we spent a bunch of time in Bogota after Drupal con and we were talking about all this and I agree, I mean this community is amazing, this community is a group of friends and a group of business people a group of professionals and we can very well be you know in Tejo in Bogota or we can be in a Drupal con just talking about business it's so much that whenever you start talking with people that is really involved in the community, you start hearing that like me I've been to two Drupal cons and I have yet to see more than five presentations because I'm always talking with people and you get on those relationships and those friendships, so I think that's the part that most get to me from the mission and that I want to help is to grow the community and reach out to more people different people and keep creating this this amazing world that is the Drupal ecosystem thank you I'm not sure what else to add on top of that, for me too was going to be the answer about the community and growing it and really kind of helping push to show that you don't just have to be a developer to be part of the community and that there's so much more to be involved in it, I think that's going to be another key and again that helps with the diversity question that we had earlier is just to really hammer home, you don't have to write code to be part of this yep, absolutely awesome, oh I forgot I'm at the picture switching this time you guys, I apologize I think I have a lot of devices with me right now I just want to say thank you so much to the candidates for being here and for sharing so many great ideas I have in the last two sessions written pages of notes and thoughts about things that we should be thinking about doing or doing better and I just think it's really indicative of exactly what you all said in your last answer, just the power of the community, you guys are so smart and I know that Drupal is an amazing project because we put that collective wisdom together right, so thanks for sharing with us and being so generous with us thanks also to the people who were hanging in and participating as attendees here today and for supplying such great and challenging questions, I love that we don't shy away from big problems here, that's really awesome and so what I want to do now is just wrap up and remind folks that we have a couple more ways to interact with the candidates, we have our final meet the candidate Q&A session tomorrow and that takes place at 12.30 pacific time slash some other time wherever you live and I recommend checking that out www.drupal.org slash nominations, we did try to list out the time zones there, hopefully we got them close to right and so you can listen in on that one and then of course as I mentioned every candidate as you can see has a Q&A section in their candidate profile so if you didn't get a question answered today and you want to know how someone in particular feels if you are logged in you've come to the www.drupal.org slash nominations and you can pose your question to candidates right there and that Q&A session will be available on those candidate pages throughout the voting process as well so keep interacting, keep asking tough questions and then on March 9th get ready to vote and spread the word we had two main goals for this election cycle one was to increase the diversity of candidates and I think that really happened and that's fantastic speaking of encouraging diversity I guess that was not a sham answer I can check a box I did one and I would like to so that was the first goal and the second goal was to really increase the participation from the community so we need you to vote and we need you to help other folks vote as well so that all happened I think that's the end of my public service announcement so just thanks again guys and have a great day slash night whatever will happen for you and thank you to everybody thank you so much everybody hopefully we'll catch you soon bye guys