 back to present. Okay so let me just go ahead and dive in. Of course before we do I want to thank all of our supporting partners for stepping up and giving back to the community by becoming a supporting partner. All of your funds are going towards Drupal.org and making sure our engineers are updating our tools and the infrastructure is funded. All the great things that we do on the site is because of you and I want to thank our signature partners. This is the top level that's been growing over the last year since we introduced it and we're just very thankful for everyone's support and we're also glad that we've been able to update the program so that each level gets more business value while we know that everyone is contributing back to make sure Drupal.org stays on and evolves. We know that you could be doing many things with your money and we want to make sure we provide as much business value as we can so we've been featuring a lot of great case studies off of the front page and providing other kinds of value like that and our supporter base just continues to grow with so many committed companies around the world and it's not just the Drupal shops or digital agencies but we also have many ISVs technology companies that integrate with Drupal as well as hosting companies that are working with us. They recognize that they are part of our ecosystem and generating income for their company by working with Drupal and so they want to give back as well. So we really thank you for all of your support and now let's go into some Drupal association news. On December 12th there's going to be a public board meeting followed by an executive session and it's a rather important one. It's the time of year when we get new board members. Every year in November board seats expire and so we are using this opportunity to make a few changes I just want to call out. So Tiffany Ferris, Jeff Walpole and Vesa Palmu are rolling off of the board after many years of great dedicated service to the community which we are incredibly thankful for and it's now time to replace those seats so we'll be voting on the new slate of nominees and we are also going to be making some other changes. So for example Jacob Redding will be the new treasurer as Tiffany rolls off. Mike Lamb will remain as the secretary but we are going to make a change with the chair. So Drisby Tarch has been the chair of the Drupal Association since the beginning. He wants to still stay very involved with the Drupal Association but he's decided that the chair officer position can be taken over by an independent like neutral party something that the community had asked for and he was happy to do that and so we are going to be voting on bringing in Adam Goodman into the chair position. This is a great change he has been advising the board on and off for eight years helping us evolve from a volunteer board where the board actually used to put on DrupalCon and has helped them move to a strategic board and we can now evolve even more with him as the chair. It's an interim type of chair position. He really wants to just orient the board to be used to having a nominated chair on the board versus the founder of the project and we also can continue to evolve on the strategy side too with his help. So that's going to be a really great change. To bring him on board we do need to update our bylaws. He is a paid consultant and we currently have bylaws that say no one can get paid so we are doing a change to the bylaws and a vote to the bylaws to allow us to pay him for this interim role and while we're voting on the bylaws we just looked at all of it and just wanted to update it. So there's some other changes that we're going to be voting on. Some real basic things there's a list of committees that we don't use anymore so we're just cleaning that up and some other things like us as we can only use basically telephones for our you know virtual meetings but obviously we have things like zoom now so just really simple changes like that but you'll see that in the public board meeting that we'll be voting on that as well. Some other things to note about our board is that we have 12 seats all together 10 of them are nominated and two are elected by the community so we are going to vote to look at how to get more everyone's from the community on the board but how can we get more of the community elected directors on the board get some more diversity in terms of regional representation as well as different kinds of personas and so there's two things that we're voting on that you should know about one is more operational which is basically board members that are nominated they expire and their seat expires in November but if you are community elected that cycle is different and expires in January and that's just really hard to manage so we're going to vote to extend Shamala and Ryan's Rama's seat to expire in the November of the year that their term is over rather than January and that way we can just onboard and exit everyone together but the other one is the way the bylaws are written we can actually have four community at large positions rather than two and we will look to have four community at large board members join us in November and so that is a change that we're going to discuss and make sure that's something that we can support operationally but all of these changes mean one thing that I think is important for you to know which is we're going to change when we do community elections and we've been doing that I'm kind of starting now through March somewhere in that time frame is when we normally do the community elections that we can get someone on board to come to their first in-person retreat in the Drupal con in North America but because we want this person to roll in in November then we're going to change our community elections to the summer so just note that change let your staff know and we will be promoting this communicating it out and running those elections this summer and just a few things to note about Adam Goodman I mentioned how he's moving into the chair position he's very excited to get to know the community better I mean he's worked with the community on and off as he's been advising the board he brings to the table just loads of experience he is a professor at Northwestern University in Chicago in the US and he is an advisor on leadership and advises nonprofits and companies all over the world so he's just been a really great partner and I'm excited to work with him but more importantly I'm excited for him to meet you and to understand your business's needs because the board needs to focus on that and so I'll be setting up interviews between Adam and our supporting partners so you might be getting an email from me in the next couple weeks where we can set something up because he would really like to hear what the needs and opportunities are that the Drupal Association should be focusing on and in other news kind of shifting from the board that does strategy over to the staff that does the operations we are growing as a team so our we recently hired Rachel Lawson who lives in the UK she has been the community for 11 years has deep knowledge in how our community works has played many important volunteer roles from community working group to sprint mentor she has a technical background and we have asked Rachel to be the community liaison between the Drupal Association and the community so we can have more of this bi-directional multi-directional conversation and really to foster understanding understanding of what the DA is doing understanding the needs of the community making sure that we're really as agile as possible in terms of meeting the needs of the community and then on the other hand many of you have worked with Rachel Friesen who has been our events director overseeing DrupalCon and she is leading the organization mid-January to go explore the world and take on this whole new exciting adventure so we're certainly really sad to see her go but we are excited for Brooke Candelaria to join us as the conference director she has deep knowledge and experience in tech events working with all kinds of tech events including open source ones like Linux world and she's worked in open source communities so it's great that Brooke can bring to us this whole tech event experience and marry it with Amanda Ganzer who handles our programming she has a great understanding of the Drupal community so we can really elevate DrupalCon so it is a premier tech event but without losing what is so great about our community and our culture so I'm really excited for Brooke to come and and start evolving DrupalCon she's also going to be working with me on the licensing program as some of you may know we are looking to license DrupalCon to a European entity she is going to be helping me with that process um and there's just so much more that we can do we talk about how do we do customer roundtables and how do we do events in a box that can be shared around the world so lots of lots of different ideas already coming within just a few weeks of her working here so very excited about both of these new hires speaking of DrupalCon the next one is in Nashville Tennessee April 9th to 13th and really interested in having this event be a step forward in an evolution for DrupalCon in the past it's very much been focused on the people who build a website or an application whatever you're building something amazing with Drupal and that is good it's obviously also focused on the contribution side of of the project and really accelerating the project by bringing people forward by bringing people together excuse me and that is really good because that persona the builders the the front end the back end the dev ops the project manager like all all these people that make up teams that build something amazing with Drupal plays such a critical role especially since they also you know there's a certain percentage of them that are also contributing to the software so I'm very proud of the base that we have we do want to expand the way I see it is that for a visitor to a website or a user of an app is getting a digital experience that's not just based on the builders expertise there's a whole supply chain a whole team of people made up with different personas you've got the decision maker you've got the builders of course you've got someone leading the builders and then of course once it's built and you need the people on the marketing side who are going to really bring that side alive alive with content and marketing campaigns and they're focused on being able to have agile messaging and conversions and strong SEO and we need to bring those people into the fold because as I like to say no chain is stronger than its weakest link and if we want Drupal to be adopted and have a strong foothold in any account we need to be talking to all of these touchpoints along the supply chain of creating a digital experience for a visitor we would like to bring them all under the same tent and provide really unique experiences for all of them but then also create experiences where they can interact and kind of break down the walls between the personas and so you're going to start seeing some changes at Drupal Con this year and then we'll be able to keep evolving over time this is going to be probably the first Drupal Con with so many personas served so these are the different tracks and what you're going to see are many familiar ones that are very technical from your back end development and front end development dev ops the ones we talked about but we also have some other ones you know like the the business owners that's always been served as well as project managers, site builders these are all ones that we've been talking to at every Drupal Con but we're starting to lean into a few other areas one is technical leadership we did some research and talk to directors of engineering at different end users that we really want to have them come to Drupal Con and they say well I've come once but really it's for my team and we want to make it so the technical leadership at the end user or even at the digital agency wants to come again and again and there's something for them and we ask what they would want they say well we want something that's going to like pick our heads up and help us blue sky some new ideas and thinking but also that comes in the form of case studies and talking to peers but that also comes in the form of how can I be a better manager how can I get the most out of my team there's a need for that so the technical leadership track is going to focus on that for the directors of engineers and then on the marketing side we are starting to move into that with UX and content editors content strategy content editors so here we go right here and I'm user experience sorry so we will be focusing on that with this Drupal Con in time I love to start seeing a track for marketing people to come in and really understand Drupal's value in terms of TCO and SEO and all those great acronyms so I'm just very excited about this evolution of Drupal Con because at the end of the day Drupal has many different types of people in its community and we need to serve all of them another thing I want to point out is that there are some themes that will be resonating through Drupal Con ambitious digital experience is one and the other one is headless we really have opportunities to grow in both areas and at Drupal Con Vienna the jury's note focused a lot on what is an ambitious digital experience and why headless is such a growth opportunity for us so you're going to see in all of the tracks case studies and that case studies will range from technical to business but you're also going to see a big focus on headless every track will also have some form of like javascript content and some will be very technical but in the when you look at horizons it's really about pushing boundaries with headless and what what are some amazing things that we could do or should be doing what are we doing with smart cities you know all these big topics that futurists are are covering now and Drupal can play a role in that and so lots of really big themes that will be kind of percolating through all of these tracks to look out for excuse me so I certainly encourage you to check out these tracks think about attending of course many of you are sponsoring and we greatly appreciate that support we have some new summits just so you know if you want to get in front of business leaders who are talking about it's basically peer to peer networking peer to peer learning around different industries so if you want to get a real focus I encourage you to check out the summits we have a new one called decoupled summit that's going to focus just on those kinds of headless experiences decoupled experiences so I definitely like to highlight that one because I feel that the sponsors are getting some really special value in those kinds of intimate meetings so be sure to submit your sessions share your knowledge the important date to keep in mind is January 17th that's when call for papers closes we also want to call out Drupal Europe events so we're taking the year off for Drupal con in Europe so that we can come up with a new operational model that's more sustainable and adds more value to that to that region in the meantime 20 in 2018 the community in Europe is building an event for the community it's called Drupal Europe 2018 and they're making really good progress they just told me yesterday that they look to announce the venue in the new year roughly January and so just keep an ear out for that we'll certainly be amplifying that information I'm sure many of you in Europe are eager to find out what to do and how you can support them with sponsorship which I highly encourage as well and we are working very hard on coming up with a structure for Drupal con licensing and that would be so that Drupal con can come back to Europe in 2019 they're working with this amazing committee of European event leaders and we are really close to putting something out to the community so they understand how and when to submit their proposals to be the licensee to be the event organizer for Drupal con 2019 so I just want to let you know if you're if you're interested or you know any entities out there that have expressed interest to keep their eye out for mid-December when I'll be sharing that information and I think that's it for Europe so Tim I'll hand it over to you awesome so yeah I'm going to go ahead and give an update on Drupal.org this is going to be a little bit different from some prior updates in that I'm going to be talking certainly about some of the features and things that we've been working on since our last kind of public conversation in September but I'm also going to talk about some Drupal project licensing policy issues that have recently been resolved some long-standing questions and give sort of the basic information about that and the clarifications that are in place and I'll get that in the second half of my my little conversation here and feel free to ask any questions at that point Megan go ahead next slide we'll start with the feature changes obviously as most of you know composers become kind of an integral part of Drupal 8 workflows for most organizations but if you are not kind of deeply tied into the community that may not be as visible to you or hasn't been in the past anyway and it's been a little bit hard to wrap your head around those new workflows there are a number of initiatives underway to make this easier for people who are building projects on Drupal one of them a fairly simple one is that we're now including instructions for how you install projects using composer directly on the project pages as well as linking to in-context documentation about how that works that's a small step and in addition to that we're thinking about and planning tools for site builders that might be integrated directly into Drupal's admin interface that can help people manage composer-based sites in a little bit of a more site builder friendly way so that's an initiative that we're just beginning to work on with the core maintainers if you go to the next slide we've been an announcement that you probably saw in one of our previous updates is that we've just finally cleaned up some parts of Drupal.org that had been existing with bare slash node slash random string of number URLs for such a long time and have been hard to shout across the sprint table and hard to manage and contribution and hard to bucket and analyze in our own analytics when we're looking at the activity on Drupal.org so we've just pushed out some more friendly URLs for different content types so issues now have friendly URLs and will you know if an issue is moved from project to project those aliases are automatically updated case studies have friendly URLs as do forum topics and we've created a few search shortcuts so if you do know a node id and enter it directly in the search bar you'll be taken straight there and you can even use a very short Drupal.org slash i slash issue id if you want to jump directly to an issue without using these longer search friendly URLs in addition we've been spending some time I want to call out mix logic Ryan on our team for his great work with Drupal CI obviously this is one of the big services that we provide to the project is testing and test coverage and there's a number of different things that we've been doing from providing environment testing for PHP 7.2 to just updating and troubleshooting various aspects of the system trying to make it run faster but one of the most important things is because Drupal CI is funded entirely by the kind of sponsorship that you provide we want to make sure that your dollars go farther go as far as they can in support of the project and project testing so Amazon Web Services recently instituted per second billing option for AWS so we refactored our Drupal CI dispatcher to take advantage of that per second billing option and we rewrote the plugin that we use to search across multiple availability regions to find the the cheapest instances that we can and this means a few advantages among other things it means that we can we don't have to wait to reuse unused minutes on test spots so we can provision new ones right away which actually means tests are completing faster and it also means that we're not paying for spot instance time that we're not using which means that we're saving an estimated between 20 and 30 percent a month on what our CI costs were even just a month ago so that's going to help make the sponsorship dollars that you provide go farther and allow us to do more with them in different ways next slide Megan a few things that you may have seen as well obviously we work with our partners tag1 consulting for infrastructure maintenance and support for Drupal.org so you've probably seen some messaging on our Drupal Infra Twitter handle about different maintenance windows that have occurred over the past six weeks or so as we've done various updates these have been things like general updates, machine reboots, enhancements to our monitoring systems and configuration management various things like that we've been pleased that for the most part we've been able to do these without any significant downtime or really any downtime at all in those cases we're also working on PCI compliance updates and really just reducing the scope of what we manage for PCI when it comes to accepting membership transactions or Drupalcon ticket purchases and all of those sorts of things and so that's something that you'll hear us continue to talk about as we finish that process up now to switch over to the kind of new topic for for these calls something we haven't really talked about before and that's licensing policy for the Drupal project and Drupal.org and I mean license in terms of the GPL license so there were several major questions that you may or may not know have been hanging out for honestly a couple of years that the project has been trying to resolve and some of these are very straightforward but haven't been explicitly clarified it some of them were a little a little bit more open to interpretation and have just needed some firm answers so one of the more basic straightforward questions was of course explicitly affirming can code be licensed under GPL compatible licenses included in Drupal projects and the answer to that has always been but to explicitly say it is yes you can use any GPL compatible code in a Drupal.org project it's just that when it's redistributed from Drupal.org it's distributed GPL or later and that's just a basic clause of the GPL that we're finally clarifying a little bit more clearly in our project on the next slide the next question was can Drupal projects include GPL incompatible non-code assets and this is something that's been a point of confusion for a lot of people whether it's project maintainers site builders agencies it's whether or not assets that are not derivatives of the work of the code that is GPL can be non-GPL and this is important because of course font licenses and icon copyright and licensing all that kind of stuff are just on a different spectrum from code licensing and are usually not designed to work in tandem with each other so there's an there's an explicit clause in the GPL which states that any works that aren't based on the GPL work can be packaged and distributed in aggregate with GPL code so we're just explicitly affirming that yes as long as the maintainer has the right to distribute whatever those known code assets are they may be packaged and distributed in aggregate with GPL code and this is just going to make it easier for theme developers and anybody who relies on fonts or icon sets or things like that to host their projects on Drupal. This question related to kind of the evolving understanding of what composer and dependency management means in kind of a modern PHP and Drupal world as you may know the GPL says that you can use any software you like with different licenses but if any of it is GPL and you package it or distribute it together it must be done under the GPL and therefore must be GPL compatible and that's brought up the question well if you have a third-party dependency or a library that's non-GPL and gets installed by composer when you run a composer command is that acceptable or is that distribution and after consultation with a licensed working group and Dries and looking at different legal opinions we are affirming that yes under our interpretation GPL does not restrict the use of code with other incompatibly licensed third-party libraries or dependencies just packaging or distribution so in short that means composer dependencies on libraries with other licenses are completely okay but Drupal.org can't host those in packages with the original code so that's an important clarification that we're happy to put out there. The final question is sort of more of a matter of explicitly affirming protections for agencies and freelancers and anybody who works with a client to build sites for them and this is this has been an implicitly understood assumption about the GPL in a variety of projects but the Drupal project hasn't really said it out loud so we're just going to go ahead and make sure that we do that and update that in our licensing documentation so the question is basically when an agency builds a site excuse me when an agency builds a site for a client are they distributing code per the distribution restrictions of the GPL or are they simply acting as the customer's agent to build that site for them and therefore falling under the use clause of the GPL so just to affirm our interpretation and interpretation widely across many projects agencies and freelancers and other service providers are acting as the customer's agent they are not distributing code just by building a client website they're assembling the code base acting as the client's agent so in more simple terms again service providers can go ahead and use GPL code together with maybe GPL incompatible code when they're building client site this allows you to do things like integrate with third-party APIs and use libraries and run composer to build the client website but you can't redistribute all that code with those incompatible licenses in aggregate to the public as a product or package because that's when the GPL's distribution clause would come into play so those are just the important license clarifications some of you may have been following some of these questions for a long time to some of you they may be totally new but we're really pleased to have the answers and to be updating that information and again if you have any questions feel free to use the chat or use the Q&A panel to post any questions there okay well I just see this slide that says questions but first Dan it was really great and good job with the licensing that's sometimes a hard concept to have to to share so that was really helpful and also great work to your team too thanks yeah just pretty excited about what you've done this year and then also some things that you're going to do next year it's going to really help especially making sure those people that kind of quote-unquote got left behind with some of the changes in Drupal 8 and bringing them back into the fold and supporting them I'm just really excited that we can work on that yeah I think there's a lot of great initiatives planned that we're going to require a collaboration between the Drupal Association Engineering team and core to do things like automatic updates and tools for site builders and things to make these kind of developer-centric composer workflows actually accessible to the sort of traditional site builder type roles so that those folks can continue to be first-class citizens of the community yeah absolutely great okay well I can't see the the chat or Q&A windows do we have any questions from the attendees looks like not at the moment all right well then why don't we go ahead and close this out keep your eye out for our monthly email updates that are coming from your account managers Delana or Mark and of course if you have any questions you can reach out directly to them or to Tim and I we're pretty accessible and really so grateful for your support and we're happy to give some time if you want to just hop on a call and also just follow us on at Drupal Assos because we're always putting news out there out there as well okay well thank you very much and have a great rest of your year and I wish you all the best in the new year we'll come back to you with some updates in Q1 thanks again thanks everybody