 Everybody, it is board meeting. We're still only missing Angie, so hopefully she'll find her way soon, but it's still near. Denise will not be in attendance and Mike Lam will not be in attendance. So normally they're also, they're on the boards obviously, but we have forums so we can proceed. This is, this is an open board meeting, so we encourage all of you to ask questions or to, you know, if you have anything to say, feel free to raise your hand and we'll look you in. The agenda for today is pretty simple. We're going to do an operational update that will come from Holly. We will have very quick discussion or updates from the different board committees. That will only take five minutes and then we're going to talk about the board election process. And then last but not least, there is an update on Groupal 8 and how the Groupal Association is going to help with the marketing of Groupal 8 and the confidence strategy around it specifically. So with that, I'll do the floor to Holly. Great. So yeah, thanks everyone for showing up, staff included. And as Denise mentioned, it is an open board meeting and we get to do these twice a year and it's fun to have people in the room. So do feel free to ask questions as we go along. The operational update we're covering the month of August in this board meeting. And so some of the highlights for us as of the release of the board packet, we had the engineering team and knocked out all the release candidate blockers for Groupal 8. So everything on Groupal.org that was a release blocker for eight coming out is now taken care of, which is fantastic. There are a couple of housekeeping items for an actual Groupal 8 release as follow-ups, but those are on track as well. And we feel really good about that. And we also launched a new pilot program at the end of the summer called Camp Connect. And a few folks are familiar with the WordPress community. One of the things that they do for their camps is help support those local camps by doing fundraising, sponsorship fundraising for camps and then giving the money out to the camps so that they can, they don't have to worry about that part. So we're piloting a program for camps, some of the camps in the Q4 timeframe, the fourth quarter. They opted in to be part of the program. We are working with sponsors who want to pull their money through the DA and hand that out to camps. So we're piloting that in Q4 and we've gotten lots of positive response both from camps and from sponsors. And if that goes well, we'll start to offer that out to camps more broadly in the future. That was a fun one too. Some camps didn't want to participate. They've got their sponsorship stuff down. They're great. That's fantastic. But I think especially for newer camps, this will be a nice service and it'll help generate more community engagement all over the globe. So we're pretty excited about that. On the things to watch lists, progress to mid-year adjustment. So again, in the month of June, we did do a retrenchment for the association. Revenue was not coming in as planned, although it is up year over year. It wasn't what we wanted it to be. And so we have a new plan, a new financial plan for the rest of the year and we're watching that progress. Some things are doing fine and some things continue to be very slow and soft. So that's an area where we are putting a lot of attention and basically every couple of weeks we've got updates there and are making adjustments. So that is something that we're watching. An additional thing that we launched this year as a pilot program is a co-marketing campaign for Europe in particular. We purchased a booth space at two European marketing events, D-Mexico, which just happened in Cologne, Germany. And the Festival of Marketing in London, which makes me laugh. It's the Festival of Marketing. I don't know. There's something hilarious about that to me. But is there a Ferris wheel? I don't know. Exactly. I love it though. So we got booth space at both those events and have invited European shops to basically come in on that space with us so that we can represent Drupal and not just the shops at the event. So it's a way to get the Drupal brand name out there a little more strongly. And we had moderate participation from the shops. Some of them had already purchased their own space at D-Mexico, for example. Some people just weren't sure what they might get out of it. But we'll finish out that program this year and see what kind of benefits it does generate for the community. And then we'll look forward. But we're watching that right now. And then just a low light overall with sponsorship revenue for this Drupal Con, which was much lower than anticipated and also lower than we received for Amsterdam. And so that was definitely a tough one. A big part of that was that we did have one sponsor who had a very big presence here and just changed strategic direction. It didn't really make sense as a tool for them anymore. And we just didn't replace that revenue. That was a big part of it. And then we always see in the European cons, there's a lot of regionality. So if you don't do business in Spain, you're not as interested in being a sponsor. And just the business community in Spain was not as robust as we saw in Amsterdam. So that definitely affected sponsorship income. On the positive side for this Con, though, I will say we ended up meeting the registration goal that we thought we would get for this Con. So we've had about 2,050 to 2,100 people register for this Con. So we feel like it's a good community representation here. It's not as big as Amsterdam, which was 2,300, but it's much bigger than Prague, which is about 1850. And that just, I think, speaks to location as a driver for Con attendance in particular. But we feel like there's a good strong community turnout here and we're really pleased with that. So it's a low light, but I ended with a highlight because that's what I do. That's the operational update. Any questions about that from anyone? Finance committee. Finance committee met as a committee of a whole during the board retreat. The exact committee, I'll speak to them. So we did meet with Molly to follow up on the two-day board retreat that we had earlier this week. And we got aligned on action items and next steps. And then the marketing committee. No meeting, as far as I know. Okay. They did not meet. Any questions on that? This is meant to be short. But if there's questions. The next item is the election process. Awesome. I'll talk again. All right. So let's talk about this here in particular. But the community elections will be coming up in 2016 fairly shortly. And so we're going to start talking about it now in the community and helping people who might be interested in running, you know, learn more about what that means and give them the information they need to run. So that's the point here as more information all then really, you know, way in. If you've got things to weigh in on, let me know. So here's the process we've got mapped out. We're going to talk about what the board does quickly. If you guys have color commentary around that, please do add to it. Deal with your snarky executive director. Only if it's colorful. No boring commentary. Yep. All right. That's great. Sure. It's a circus here. Is that what you're saying? Okay. We'll talk about how nominations, the elections process works, who can run and how they run, what you'll need to do. And then we'll look at the 2016 elections process, not 2015. So what does the board do? One of the things I just want to emphasize is that as a board of the association, you know, we represent on the board or you guys represent on the board a lot of different interests. So the community has like 33,000 really active developers on any given day. There's a million Drupal sites. We have 12% of the top 100,000 of those sites. Oh, it's now over 3,000 Drupal 8 contributors. My point being that it's a very large constituency that the association tries to help represent the interests of. So we have, it's not just a lot of people, but people with an incredible variety of experiences that they're bringing to the association. So, you know, you could be a front end developer, a back end developer, a femur, you know, you could be from Bulgaria, you could be from South America, right? So we have just all kinds of diversity that we're dealing with on any given day. And yet, at the end of the day with the association, the board try to do is represent the community, right? So it's a challenge. But to help try to address some of that diversity, the board composition does that a little bit. So we have three different kinds of directors of the association. There is the founding director, or Dries. He's the only one that can be the founding director. And the board has to reelect him every year for a one year term to serve as the founding director. That seat can be empty. Theoretically, you could be voted off Dries. Yeah. But, but we like them every year. Then we have class directors and class directors serve three years terms. And those are folks who are nominated by the nominating committee and then are approved by the rest of the board. And every year we have a new class of directors that are opened up to be either reconfirmed or new directors that are brought in. And then we have the large directors. And this is where the community representation can also come in. In the class directors, we often think about, you know, what's the mix of people who are on the board? What skills do they have, but also what communities do they represent? And when openings come up, it's a good chance to try to rethink, like, is there someone, is there another skill set or is there another community demographic that we want to represent on the board? With the out large directors, you guys in the community get to make that happen. So folks nominate themselves to run. We elect one person every two years. And the community gets to make that decision. So our two current out large directors are Addison and Matthew. And Matthew's term is about to expire. So that's why we're having another election. So this is our mission. The goal of the board is to support that mission. See that mission come to pass. So you got some duties as a board member to do that. And these are the, these are US laws around board, what board responsibilities are. And the reason we followed that US law is because the association is incorporated in the United States. So that's where we're bound to. But there are three legal duties, duty of care. So you actually have to participate, you know, look at the financials when they're sent to you and, you know, listen when Holly's talking. That kind of thing. True story. Good luck. Yep. There's a duty of loyalty. There's a duty of loyalty. And this one's interesting because we do have a lot of folks with varied, you know, professional interests on the board. But when you're, when you're putting your board hat on to do board work, right, you put the association above everyone else. Yeah. And then a duty of obedience. And that is not obedience to the organization or the executive director. As it turns out, that's a duty of obedience to the law, right, which in this case is, you know, US Oregon and local local laws for us. And what that means is that, you know, if a board member becomes aware that we're doing something illegal, they have to do something about it. Right. So you are, you're on the hook for that. So those are the legal duties, but practically what ends up happening is that the board spends, you know, a fair amount of time overseeing the financial performance. So when things are smooth sailing, there's a monthly review of the finances by the finance committee. And they make a recommendation quarterly to the full board for approval of the financials. Setting strategy with staff is something we also do. So the staff will come to the board and say, this is the direction that we think that we should head in and here's our evidence for why. And the board weighs in with thoughts like, please, please, please, please, please, please don't do that sometimes or that looks great. Right. So that's their jobs to advise on that. Setting and reviewing policies and this relates to that duty of obedience. So making sure that our financial and human resources policies are compliant with law, you know, labor laws, but also that they can, you know, that's what you guys actually have to approve. But, you know, you also help us make sure those are in line with our values. Fundraising is something that boards typically do as well. So raising money for organizations. And we haven't done a ton of that in the past, but you all did a tremendous job of helping us meet our date accelerate goals. Thank you for that. And then the board is my boss. So if you've never had 12 bosses before or had the chance to be one of 12 boxes for someone else, it's fun. All right. The work of this is to attend a minimum of 10 of a minimum of 10 of the 12 monthly board meetings. The board meets once a month. It's a two hour meeting. There's a one hour public session and a one hour executive session. We have three strategy and planning retreats. So we'll do one in January and then one around each of the North American and European cons. And you're expected to sit on at least one board committee and the committees do typically do more of the actual work, right? So you're going to spend probably five hours or more a month on the board. That sounds good. Familiar to you guys. Okay. So if we haven't scared you away yet and you're interested, how do nominations and elections work? Just to let you know, there is a whole history around this. The community themselves discussed the process that we were going to go through and defined what that was going to be like. In 2014, we revised the bylaws just to change the election process up to that staggered two year term for each of the directors. It had been a one year term for the community elected seats, but it really does take some time in any group to become part of the team and to figure out what's going on no matter how good your onboarding is. And so we wanted to give everyone more time to serve. And then if you care, it's the election module that we use. Someone cares here. All right. How do we do this? So if you're interested, when we open self nominations, there'll be a form to fill out. The key is you have to nominate yourself. You cannot nominate another person to run. We'll publish that time period a couple of weeks long to nominate yourself. And we do ask you to share some information about yourself, a bio, like why do you want to run? You have some relevant experience, et cetera, your photo. None of these very few fields are actually required. I think beyond your user name. So I know there are folks out there who are concerned about putting too much personal info out there, and that's fine. But that's the kind of stuff that we will ask for. And I feel like the more that you can share, the better position you're in. So once you nominate yourself, we have a period where folks can have conversations with you. And then we need to be election. The key thing is that we use instant runoff voting. So we don't do a majority vote. We use instant runoff process. And if you Google that, you'll get a great British YouTube video that involves many post-its. And they explain the process really, really well. And voting is open itself for about a week. And voting is open to anyone who's had a Drupal.org account in the past year. And you had to have registered your account prior to the nomination. That's the bit that gets cut off on this slide. If you have a D.do account before nominations open, then you can vote. All right. Who can run? Anyone can run, right? So anyone can definitely be part of it. And I think we do our best to onboard new board members and help them understand what's going to happen. But I think board service is much easier if you've had some other kinds of experience before. So if you've been on another kind of board, particularly if you're good at reading financial data, you're good at reading financial documents. That's something you do a lot of. If you've been on a community committee within Drupal, then you are accustomed to how committees work. And the board is essentially committee. Strategic planning is great because that's the kind of level that we try to have discussions at. Not down in the implementation details, but what's the direction we're heading. That's the kind of discussion we try to have at the board level. And then policy development because that comes up as well. And again, you just have to nominate yourself. And we'll publish that nomination form when the nomination period is over. As a candidate, just to give you a sample of what a nomination form looks like, what you'll have on that page is a Q&A section. So as a candidate, your job is to answer questions that are posed by the community. We will have a Meet the Candidates webcast. We'll have several of those that you can participate in. We'll have a chance to field questions from the community as well. And then we definitely encourage you to promote your candidacy through social channels. It's a really good way to spread the word about the elections in general as well, which we love to see happen. So the timeline for folks who are interested, nominations are going to open on February 1st. So it's a few months off. But if you're thinking about it, that's when your target date is. Then we'll have a couple of weeks of Meet the Candidate. So nominations will be published on the 19th or the 20th. And then we'll have Meet the Candidate sessions and that open Q&A period on your candidate pages. We'll vote March 7th through the 18th. And then we'll be able to communicate everything out on March 25th. So there will be a few days of lag between voting closing and us getting the announcement out. And that's only because we have to get the board together to ratify the results. You know, it's not technically challenging. It's just to convene people. So we'll get that out. So that's the timeline and that is it. So any questions or I know we have some folks in the room at Chris and Schnitzel. You guys have run before any advice for folks? No. Right a good bio. Oh, there's Chris. Gotcha. Any questions about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so just a block that says here's what the process is and here's where we are in the process. Okay, that's good feedback. And we're actually meeting in a couple of weeks to have our first to write some stories up for that process. So that's good. Other thoughts or questions or feedback? Yes. And for board members who don't know Phil, let me introduce Phil Boulevard, who's our communications manager. It might be the first time you've gotten to see him in person. And Phil, I'm going to operate those slides, but he's going to wink at me when I'm supposed to forward them. Not. Okay. That's more appropriate. Not. Okay. So first of all, I want to give out a quick shout out to Bradley's. So I said, sure, I'd love to. Sounds fun. That's terrifying. The reason I said it was such enthusiasm is because I knew that Bradley had already been working on this for our team. For over a month. So thank you Bradley for letting me use a lot of your work in this presentation. And I also want to say that this presentation is mostly focused on the upcoming release candidate. But it's easily extrapolated when we're closer to the first release candidate. It's almost here. And I think we want to do at the association is really celebrate the work that's been done so far and to get ready for the work that's starting up. And there's some big ideas that we want everyone to know about. And those big ideas are that it's here. It makes Drupal better than ever. It'll help you create better. People are doing great things with it right now. Even more people plan to get involved soon. And we want people to try it out and tell the people about it. Okay. So these are your base messages. Yes, exactly. Okay. The way the Drupal Association can share these ideas are through or that we plan to share these ideas is through four kinds of content. So going down the left column, the kinds of content are awareness, research and education, comparison and validation and choice. And if you go now horizontally, the purpose for awareness would be we want to make it clear that the release candidate is available. And the big idea that would tie to that is here. On research and education, it's we want people to learn about the features and how those features can be used. And the big ideas would be it makes Drupal better than ever. People are doing great things with it now and even more people plan to get involved soon. On the comparison and validation, we want people to be able to evaluate whether it's going to be a good fit for them. The big ideas are it makes Drupal better than ever and it will help you create better. Choice, we want people to choose and promote choosing Drupal 8. Big ideas are try it out and tell the people about it. Our plan is to use different initiatives for each kind of content. So same chart, just kind of adding another column on the right around the initiatives. And the reason awareness and choice are bolded here is because really that's where the Drupal Association has the ability and the resources to focus. We'll talk more about research and education and comparison and validation later. So awareness, jumping over to the far right column. The initiatives that we plan to use to support this would be news articles or a news article, excuse me, on Drupal.org. Updates on our social platforms. Email newsletters and specific email announcements to our email list on the choice. Download Drupal 8. Calls to action. All over the site. And so where we could really use some help from the community to push this out there is through all of these various types of content that are available to the community. So blog posts, tutorials, testimonials, case studies, lateral, etc. We have all kinds of different ways that the community can help us. Filly community. That won't be disarming at all. Where they could really help us out with research and education. Do you want to talk a little bit about why those are specifically well positioned for the community as opposed to the association? It's really about resources and also just the reach and the connection that they have through their clients and through the people where they really have the power around case studies. Case studies, video, it's just more resources, more volume of content. There are recent changes to the marketplace. Yeah, so as I was saying, let me see if there were any really helpful tutorials, testimonials from clients about how she is going and working for them. And blog posts about the eight versus the seven so that. Most of the. So blog posts about solving common challenges, targeted emails to their client basis. Webinars around specific industries and verticals and launch parties. So talk about that more later. Is anyone going to host a large party. So, one of the things we'd like to do is figure out how we can unite all of these efforts. And obviously social is a great way. And so what we would like to do is start using through full eight RC one. Hashtag. Through all of our social channels and ask the community to do the same. And then also hashtag around made with group late for celebrating specific projects. And those are two ways that we can really kind of aggregate and be able to search for content more easily across all the very social channels. And then there's a group. As you don't know, our groups dot group dot org group late production sites. So if we could get people to share their stories about people implementations. In that particular group, then again, a great way to aggregate all of the content. And then also when people are on through the dot org creating content tagging that with triple eight RC one. And then also directing media to our upcoming news article. And then translation is. Good job. So everything that the Drupal Association will produce will be created comments so please take advantage of it and use it. And then also I spoke with Karen. Yesterday and he showed me the seven. Pages that were created and all the translations that were done there. So we'll be reaching out to that. To play. And then we said plan to have a large party. And we will help spread the word. So we created a landing page. Launch party association. It's a web forum where people can go give us some information. We'll collect that information as we get closer. We will start to promote that, promote those parties. And again, Karen gave me some great ideas as to how we can do that. And of course, test test test. After we get through the RC one, the faster we get to the version release. And that's it. That's the page where all the good stuff will go. Yeah. I know. Drupal hyphen 8.0. For nerds. Right. Yes, you do this. The magic, the marketing URL does open up to the nerd URL. It's true. Good redirect. Any questions about the marketing plan there or ideas that we should be considering. Yes. I was just a good point. Maybe we just go with RC. RC hex. Yeah. Okay. It wrote it down. We just basically come out of the conversation about the contribution and showing who did it. And I was wondering. And all that was shown was about what people. You didn't show anything about who actually did it. I was wondering if there's anything that. Emphasizes on. There's a link. I was part of that. Mm hmm. Let me take that idea. Yeah. Yeah, it's a great idea. I like that too. Maybe a little badge to wear. Something like that. To be good block on the eight landing page is just a rotating thing of contributors. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You work on that. That could be your community contribution. Yeah. Your idea. I guess you get to do it. You don't learn that yet. All right. And you had thought also. Look what I read in the paper. Go do it. Right. So let me explain. Which is. Yep. Yeah. Let me try that again. So what I mean is currently, we do have a small press list currently. So we'll definitely push out to these journalists that we've already interacted with in the past for. Various seat related announcements. But we don't have a big broad list. And we definitely know that that's a whole. And that usually gets filled by some of the bigger companies in the space. That said, I did just get a couple of contacts last week. For some PR agencies that have done some open source software work in the past. So it's possible you might get from low cost or free resources to help do some PR work for the release. But that'll be the big. We'll do that at the. Not the RC stage, but at the actual release. So. Yeah. So hopefully yes. But I, you know, I think through fool be fairly well represented. But it'd be nice to be able to push that out from from these decisions more strongly. For sure. Small detail. But I think in the hashtag, I think it would be useful to. Instead of the age. People see that on a speed out of conflict. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The other idea was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The landing page already has some of that, I think, but we can certainly expand on it and or maybe simplify it and create. Yeah. Anything else on that. Yep. Definitely on our radar. Yeah. Yeah, we've definitely had conversations with a couple of partners already, but we'll. I think that'll be. That's been a very successful program for us in terms of getting people to actually, you know, install Drupal on a trial environment. And so get, I think. We'll get lots of eyeballs on Drupal, Drupal eight that way. Yeah. Anything else. Any, any questions outside of the things we discussed. Billboards, buses. What did I say about billboards, Donna? I'm calling. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've always wanted one of those balloons. No, the sky balloons. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, getting the announcements in early getting it out to people to help translate and then making those available. I think it's going to be really great. Good. I think we have one official, unofficial order of business to take care of. We are talking about burnout. That's fine. That's okay. That's okay. Tiffany. Yeah. Speaking of burnout.