 We are the hangover members of the Drupal South Steering Committee who have been on the committee for a while now and are staying on. And we have a little overview of what has happened recently. I think it's the achievement this year that we've organised a conference. My favourite. And I'm Jenna, hello, welcome. And Jenna also is on the front. A little overview of slides. Oh, you want me to do it? Yeah. As you can tell, we've been organising a conference and haven't spent a huge amount of time on our own presentation. But we wanted to keep it casual. Feel free to sit close so you can get involved in the discussion. This is more of a round table session update than us just sitting here talking to you. And we will just tag team. We haven't worked out who's doing which section, but we'll work it out as we go. So just a quick overview of what we do as the committee and the various roles within that. We do want to talk about our committee members and the election that we just finalised on Friday. And new committee members might be sitting in this room. We want to talk about what we've actually been doing since the last time that we were all in person in Hobart in 2019. A bunch of recent events that we've done, challenges and some lockdown things. And then what we're thinking about doing into the future. As the chair of the committee, I'm going to pass to Dave Sparks to talk about the committee role and goals. Yeah, so Drupal South has always been set up as a subcommittee of Linux Australia. We do have almost complete independence. But what Linux Australia provides for us is just the level of logistics and infrastructure, finance and cash flow so that we can get events off the ground. And they provide the insurance, a whole bunch of vehicle stuff that we need to run events. We have a catch up with them once a month and report on our activities and find out what they're up to. They're a good bunch and they're very supportive of the Drupal South community and very appreciative of our events and the general level of success that we provide through those. Our main role has historically been to select, I guess, the event locations, tank bids. We use with people to organize the events. Local committees usually. Last couple of years during the COVID era, we have organized the events, mainly in-house within the committee last year. And this is also going through our Drupal Cup. We have a pool of central resources, templates, guides, docs, some social channels and some promotional activity to support those events. And really, we're here to provide some sort of strategic oversight and continuity and consistency from event to event and make sure it's all successful. I might just add to that final point. So if you've attended Drupal South for the past decade or so, we did have a system in the past where the event would end and then everyone would look at each other and go, who's organizing the next event? And so the key reason that we put this committee in place was so that we could have continuity of events and that the ball wasn't just kind of passed to some unsuspecting victim, as I like to call them, because obviously organizing events an incredible amount of effort and thanks to all the volunteers that we have that help us with that. And like Dave alluded to, the last event that was solely managed by a volunteer organization was SOS who ran Drupal Gulf online in 2020. Very successfully online ad, but a couple of nervous breakdowns narrowly avoided in the process. Committee members, do you want to talk about this, Jenna? So we have an all-star team for the last couple of years, including Dave Sparks over from New Zealand. So how our Treasurer and me from Brisbane and Owen and Kristie who wasn't able to come over, so she's taken over from Nicole who had a little Drupal South baby. Yeah, so if you'll see her little babies, Nicole too near. So this is our team. Yeah, we should fix our cartoons. They always have fix our babies. When they make a cartoon, they have how many babies were born, so Drupal South can have them too. Just to keep it a bit personal and family oriented. Do you want to talk about the terms? So in terms of continuity, what we've done with the structure of the committee is that we have rolling terms, one that starts in November, another one that starts in May. So we've got something three seats changing, or we've actually got three seats changing in November, and then two in May, update those slides. And that's just staggered so that we don't have like five new people all coming into it. And we've got at least a gap there to be able to hand over. And very importantly, in our charter, we've established that we need both location diversity, so that New Zealand always has two seats that they're represented on the committee, and also two women. And then we have a fifth member that can be whoever's got the most votes, which is the approach that we took with the election. Oh, I didn't update this slide either. Do you want to talk about this, Dave? Or should I give it to him? All right. So in previous years, we've had not many candidates. This year we had lots of candidates, which is fantastic. It shows people are actually interested in what we do. And I'm sure that you recognize maybe the names on that list there. We ended up with 117 votes from members of the Australian and New Zealand community, which is the requirement to vote for people on the committee. And the next people that are coming on will be fulfilling those two year terms. And then we'll have another election in September, October 2024. And that will then choose the next five. Obviously with people like Dave, who were continuing anyway, that was fulfilling an NZ seat. There was no need to put that up for election. And then we only had one other candidate from NZ who automatically came into that mix. And the results, oh, I haven't put the names in there. It was a busy morning, but it adds to the suspense. So as I said, Dave's continuing as chair. And then if he chooses to step off sometime before 2024, there'll be a transition to it. A new chair, Chris Burgess also from NZ. He'll take over one of the seats from May onwards. So then again, we have this crossover for the NZ candidates. And then in terms of announcing our new members of the committee, we have Marjorie Tongwe who introduced us. If you want to put your hand up. Congratulations. So Marjorie's from the ACT, been working with Tribal a very long time. Running the ACT meetup alongside our other new committee member, Michael Richardson, who is not from the ACT, but goes there every month to help run it. And then Julia Topliss, who's sitting behind them from Morft. And so Michael's actually going to commence his term from November as well. And then Julia will come in in May, but you are more than welcome to join our meetings before then. Because we'll have a whole bunch of things to do. So congratulations, everyone. Great to see you joining up. Activity since 2019, Dave? So 2019 was Tribal South in Hobart, which was a good, fun suare. And coming out of that, we developed a strategic priority plan, which sounds very official and important, and it is. And that had a number of initiatives penciled in for it. And then, yeah, something happened, and all our lives got a little bit disrupted and put on hold. And the strategic priorities haven't gone away, but we didn't have as much opportunity to act on those as we would have liked. And so I'm not sure what your experience has been like under the last couple of years, but for most of us on the committee, it's still been a very busy time, our day-to-day work lives. And there's still been a need to support the Tribal South community and push things forward. We didn't want to just put everything on hold for two years. So we refocused our attention on things that we could do. The Tribal South website, which I hope you all have been to in the course of the conference, got a redesign and a bit of a g-g-up in the back end and a rebuild. And that's looking really great. And I think our biggest role is communication and giving people somewhere to go to learn and participate and the website really is a cornerstone for that. And we used our retained profits from our history of successful conferences to bring on board a professional event manager and marketer to keep continuity going month on month between events and also to ease the workload for event organisers and the lead-up to events. And that's been a very successful programme for us. It's enabled us to work on our outreach beyond our little Tribal South bubble of usual suspects we've never on here and start promoting Tribal more widely within the open source community and also within the professional industry as well. So it's been very successful for us. It's been very nice, the website, I'm sure. So we ran an RFQ process for this to call for submissions. We got three in, I think. And went through a bit of a branding-like exercise with Marin for the design and just tidied up our assets and our presentation and modernisation and some nice colours for that. And then the team at Tomato Alpha Studio did a really good job of running that through a very efficient build process. And this site, I'm not sure if you've ever heard this before about a Tribal site that had evolved over a fairly, you know, a lengthy period of time. There were some changes. There were some leftover bits and some forgotten corners and that all got tidied up and upgraded as well. So platform messages for us. Yeah, and as I mentioned, there's a platform message and it's been great just hosting that for us all along and providing support for that. So yeah, it's there and it's prepped to serve as a platform over the future as well for ongoing kind of marketing engagement and collaboration stuff. Yeah, the RFQ for the Vista Marketing was won by Stirling Marketing. Again, we ran an RFQ process and had a call for submissions. And we got three or four for that. And Nicole Stirling was successful in that bid, has a good close ties with the community, knows the people in the landscape and has brought kind of a level of professionalism to our sponsor relations and dealing with those. And I think for this conference, the sponsor support has been fantastic and has taken away a lot of problems that generally have existed in the previous event-to-event approach. And having that continuity has been pretty good. Yeah, so like I mentioned, Salsa Digital organized Drupal Gov'n 2020. It was actually incredibly successful, 340 attendees. It was before people got excessive Zoom fatigue. So we did actually do really well with that event. And we're very open with our figures in terms of income and profit generated. I'll talk a little bit about that. And we went through a big process to choose the right online platform. So we chose events there, which I think is a Brisbane-based company, that did very well out of COVID. They probably had to scale back a bit since then. And then in 2021, we realized that people were getting quite tired of sitting on Zoom. So we took the approach of running three short-format online events. One was an executive summit where we invited people in leadership positions in different large organizations, mainly in end-user organizations, not from vendors themselves. And that format had a keynote by Jitma from 15C, Department of Primary and Capital in Victoria, and then a number of breakout sessions that were then moderated by sponsors. So it was a good way to have sponsors get in front of potential clients without being too overt about it. And then we ran two public events, one in August and one in November. And again, they were the half-day events, quite rapid fire formats and really engaging talks. 24010D's, 60K income profit, and that was the first event that we brought on our event manager to do, hence the lower profit. And I think it's important to point out that we have been very profitable as an event in the past because of volunteers doing the bulk of the work, and it was a very conscious decision on our part to say, okay, well, we're actually making decent profit here. That can take the load off volunteers to focus on more fun things like speaker coordination and that type of thing and the logistics of coordinating with venues and coordinating with sponsors and packing sponsor bags, although I think you've got a road to do that. Just a couple of things to add on that one. I think with the short format, it's a bit more bite-sized, but it was just as much effort involved in organizing each of those and corraling speakers and getting submissions. And so without having a paid professional working on that, some days every week they wouldn't have happened. And I think that for us to sustain and continue to grow what we do and improve the quality of what we do, that continuity has been really important. And the first exec summit was a bit of a tester for us, and that went really well. I think the thing that came out of that that refers back to our strategic initiatives is that we did paid promotion and advertising to get outside of our regular audiences and we used LinkedIn to connect with end users and decision makers in the general community, Drupal community in the digital community in Australia. And so one of the aims of Drupal South is to foster the development of Drupal and adoption and use of Drupal and so having that marketing to end users and decision makers kind of fit into that goal and was quite successful. And so for Drupal South as an organization we picked up some new connections and got more people talking about Drupal out there in the decision making world. And Brisbane. Drupal South. Brisbane. All right, welcome to Brisbane. I hope you enjoy now our weekend activity. At least we have aircon, so it's all good. And the flights from February will all clean up. Anyway, so, yeah, finally we can all travel again and we can see face-to-face each other and mingle and have coffees and enjoy the actual on in-purpose, in-person attendance. So today we have about 230 attendees, some of them late registrants, so it's good that finally it's like, oh, yeah, we're coming. And everyone came from all over the place and from New Zealand and Singapore and from Canberra. So it's great to see people even on a, like, yes, the conference where it was organized pretty quickly. And it's only because we didn't know when the borders were open, because the borders were open and then they're closed again and then open and close. So, yeah, finally in July, I think New Zealand opened their borders so it's like, oh, finally we can organize something and then they said they're not going to close them again. Yeah, so we have how many speakers? I think about 45 speakers today as well. So lots of sessions and lots of sponsors as well. So go check the sponsored booths out. There's some cool stuff, some games and some Internet of Things happening at the booths as well. And we have all our volunteers here as well just trying to get all our speakers into proper rooms and connect them to AV and give work in. So, yeah, that's today. I think you can tell that it's the first time that we've plugged our laptops into screens and things like that. Do you want to add anything? Yeah, I just want to have a shout out to the volunteers here organizing the content led by Planet Mirror. And again, one of our strategic priorities is to bring new people into the industry but also bring new people into the conference, bring new speakers in. And so we had a focus on getting some first-time speakers in, having a variety of rooms. We've got a big room and we've got some smaller rooms where people can be less intimidated talking. And I think that'll be one of our priorities going forward from events. For events from here is to give people the opportunity to speak and encourage them to do so and increase the quality of our talks and our content for everyone to enjoy. So, I wanted to talk about some of the challenges that we've had. There's an obvious one there. I'm sick of talking about it. One of our other kind of paradoxical challenges is that our event profits are retained by Linux Australia. And over the course of a decade, that is a significant sum. That's upwards of $300,000 that's sitting in Linux Australia's bank accounts that we generated. And it's actually really hard not necessarily to get that money out. I mean, we do have to go through a process to request grant funding to access that funding but having the resources to actually deliver on things outside of the event. And I think we had some very ambitious plans in 2019 that was the basis of that strategic plan. And a couple of those initiatives just fizzled because, A, we couldn't do anything in person but, B, solely relying on volunteers to actually execute on things that can be very hard over the long course. So I think in terms of my own role in the committee and transitioning off the committee in May next year, I would like to see the committee put some emphasis on how we utilise those funds. They're our funds from our sponsors. We want to deliver value to both the community and those sponsors in the long term. We'll take questions at the end, thanks. And yeah, so there's a big opportunity there. The money's there. It's just a case of actually putting the initiatives in place and having the volunteers to coordinate that. And that might be things like training or doing booths at university open days to educate people about Drupal as a career opportunity, all of those types of things. I think also importantly, a lot of people ask, well, what about the Drupal Association? They're aware I'm also a board member of the Drupal Association globally. And the reality is that they're just not equipped in terms of their structure and internal staff to assist events like this in the regions. And this is a global issue. I'm not saying it's a problem because what's happened is organisations like our own have stepped up and filled that gap. Meanwhile, the Drupal Association just focuses on running DrupalCon and their initiatives, primarily North American and Europe. Like I mentioned, volunteer-run initiatives, they do struggle to maintain momentum. And again, there might be some things that we can do in this postcode world to make that easier. And then the final thing to note there is cross-tasman engagement, while it's a remit of our organisation is challenging. So I think the biggest issue we have with this event was who knew that flying from Auckland to Brisbane was going to cost $1,200 or... Yeah. So there's hurdles like that, that, A, we couldn't come from preconceived that they would become problems and I think we do want to ensure that we can maintain that connection across the Tasman long-term. Future initiatives. I think we've covered some of this anyway. Dave, do you want to talk about this? Yeah. So in the past, in the olden days, in the pre-COVID world, the events would happen five months, one year, once a year, and there wouldn't be much in between those. And so in our strategic approaches, we want to be having smaller events. The exact day was successful. The short format was successful. We want to have some touch points through the year to keep the community engaged and it serves as a little on-ramp as well for speakers and presenters to try something in a smaller format. And that gives us a few more tent poles to maintain the awareness and the marketing activity throughout the year to keep the profile of Drupal strong, both in Australia and in New Zealand. And then the conference calendar has come out of hibernation and is now very busy. And so it's hard to find slots in the year that make sense. And there's generally been a sense from the previous conferences that as we get closer towards the end of the year, November is a painful month to do a conference. October's not too bad, but our plan is to move Drupal South much earlier in the year, which suits people's business calendars and everything better. And that's our plan for 2023 is to have the conference earlier. Right. Do you have a question? Yeah. A clarification, we said that the profits are retained by the Australia. Why? I guess why. So for us to go off and create our own nonprofit association is just another layer of headache. And there was a decision made more or less a decade ago that Linux Australia had that structure. They support a number of other open source events. So they do WordCAN and Bicon and a bunch of other things. Where by far the best and the most profitable. And I think that has suited this over the years because all the legal liability ultimately rests with them in terms of event insurance and financials and they've got all of those systems in place. If we added that to our little committee then it's like that's all we'd be doing is compliance with being a nonprofit. So I think you'll retain it. You'll maintain it. I think at this point in time we will. Like I said, they do have this horde of retained profits that they're sitting on. And I'm meant to be fair to them. I know what their bank balance is and I don't think they know how to spend it themselves. And again it comes back to this whole thing of are we solely relying on volunteers to execute on some of these initiatives or do we suddenly say alright we're organising a third day and we're engaging this professional organiser to pay them to get it up and running because putting that effort onto volunteers is often not the fairest way to get things done. Cool. Yeah, this also gives us opportunity maybe to sponsor someone to come over to Drupal South maybe in Wellington or in New Zealand that will be next year to bring more Well, it was postponed and then it was postponed and then it was postponed so Yeah, and if we have to run the organisation ourselves we'll have to have a proper accounting company or an accountant and we'll have to do all the documentation ourselves where here we just give it to a Linux sister ally to do that. So for us it's like either you write your own platform to sell tickets or you get some other platform and pay a small percentage to actually sell tickets and they have everything and refunds and transactions with credit cards and things like that, so it's the same here. Any other Just on the Linux Australia they're very well, they're very supportive and we've got a good relationship and they bring experience and expertise above and beyond what we have within our community that people have been doing there for a long time The cost to go alone and break it away would be five figures a year cash outlaying with liability insurance is brutal he was bought the insurance lately it's painful even maintaining bank accounts and all that kind of calaba we're just the eroding our money and spending it on Apple whereas they can keep it warm and just get it back and use it. I've got two questions I hope they're going to use them Is the 300,000 set aside as cruel south money or is it a bit ambiguous? So it's not in a separate account so we finish each event the account that we've used for the event gets dissolved the profits get pushed into a central Linux Australia account and then they spin up a new account for our next event however we have very detailed accounting records that I'll be happy to share with you and show exactly what profit we've had from every event back to 2010 I think it was there's never been any problem going back for grant money aside from having to go through the process it's just that they have an internal process so even when we spin up a new event each year I think even with this event they're like well you have to fill out this application for us to tick all the boxes I think I said to Dave that they know who we are and again in fairness to them their committee and council refreshes every couple of years anyway so we're always kind of dealing with the people on their end that don't need to know really what Truthful is let alone our history with them it'd be fair, it'd be super nice if we just had to give a card and just give the money as we wanted any time you can't call us on risk with the government I know there's guarantee quite clearly that because they're not for profit so you have specific requirements to fulfill no one will be just private jets that's too bad, I'm not sure the second question I had was I was just curious, I'm not going to bring the numbers wrong but Truthful got Canberra was 350 attendees 60,000 in revenue Truthful south Brisbane was 230 attendees 120,000 in revenue what was the major difference where are you sitting where are you sitting currently where am I sitting currently in a very expensive hotel I was thinking about why was there so much more revenue in terms of revenue so more sponsorships and more expensive sponsorships so with Truthful got it was purely outline sorry I was just making a joke I think the ticket price was like $100 I think our attitude with those events was we're still going to charge a ticket so that people actually turned up that was the only reason that we actually charged rather than making it completely free it's just how we structured the budget and again the attitude in the last couple of years is we've got so much cash in the bank let's not actually try to generate too much more profit so as you can see this year we've been around that kind of 10 to 20k in profit we still need to be profitable so that we're not losing money but there hasn't been a focus on let's make heaps of profit because we need to be able to work out how to speed to all of them the existing funds first but the new committee may choose to change that approach in the future I think we're close to time any final questions how well are we supporting the next host failure are we contributing to them or is it... so they take a 6% of our event budget as an administration fee so that just gets taken out nationally at the end of the whole event alright we'll wrap it up there thanks for your interest just keep an eye on www.drucksout.org and our community education channels there will be opportunities to assist and volunteer and help out in various ways and come and give with our fantastic new committee thank you and if there's any other questions or anything crops up in the future just click us an email or a grab us on Slack so we are responsible and keen to chat to the community and come to the local meet-up yes local meet-ups very important