 So I'm Megan Sanakie, the COO at the Drupal Association, and I am so excited to be here and to have a DrupalCon this week. So are you all having a great time? Yeah! Did you all go out last night? So you're all feeling really awake, right? Excellent. Great. Well, I want to talk to you about Latin America and how you're so strategic to the project and how you've contributed to that and what we can start doing together, which is really exciting to me. So I wanted to start with the Drupal Association's vision. I think Holly talked about this yesterday. And our vision is for Drupal to be a leading platform around the world. And why is this important? It's because Drupal has the power to change lives. It creates all kinds of opportunities, new jobs, lots of learning, opportunities to be leaders. You can even get a global perspective by working with people around the world. And most importantly, you get these meaningful friendships that's really special to Drupal. And we're really excited to establish this kind of vision by working with the community and delivering programs, such as ImprovingDrupal.org, MarketingDrupal, DrupalCons, all kinds of community programs, grants and scholarships. And I know that together we have already achieved a lot and I want to talk about that today. And I want to give credit to the community leaders that saw early on that Drupal has this power to change lives and they wanted to bring these opportunities to Latin America. And so I'm going to be telling some of their stories as I talk about how Drupal is leading today, how Latin America is strategic to the project, and then how you became strategic, how did you grow like this? Those are really special stories that I'd like to share. So just to let you know, you are a very good company. Drupal is one of the largest open source projects in the world. We have over 33,000 developers. And as we work on Drupal 8 together, we have over 2,300 people collaborating, which is really significant. Raise your hand if you're working on Drupal 8. That's fantastic. And together we've built over a million websites and we are powering 12% of the top 100,000 sites. And there's so much more room to grow in many ways that we can lead, in many ways that we can grow. For example, maybe we want to be 50% of the top 100,000 sites. These are goals that we have. We have big visions. We're going to do it together and we're going to need Latin America to help us. Dries wrote a blog post that you might have read that talked about some of the ways that Latin America is strategic. And I'd like to talk about that, but I'd like to go a little deeper and explain how the community has become strategic in the different areas. And they include helping us globally, regionally, and also with the code. Picture means nothing to me right now. Anyhow, let's talk about the global situation. There is great demand for Drupal on a global scale, which is fantastic. One of our barriers is talent. We just don't have enough talent. And I think that's happening everywhere, right? But in the U.S., if I just look at where I come from in the United States, we have thousands of jobs that we can't fill, mostly developers and themer jobs. And so it's really hard to meet the demand. We even did a survey that confirmed this and that there's hiring managers out there that are just spending so much time and money looking for talent. And I really think that Latin America has done a great job growing the community, you have a great talent base. Talking to businesses, it seems that there's good capacity too to bridge the gaps around talent and work together. And there's already some really strong examples of this happening. And Nexus IT was telling me some of their stories. And also, Rootstock is also another great example because they're in Panama that still has strong U.S. business relationships. And so this is happening all over with different businesses. I really encourage people to look at these models to see how they can help bridge the gap around talent and also to work together. And one of my favorite stories as I was interviewing people was from Carlos O'Pinus. I think I just said that right. Yeah, there he goes. He's waving his hand. Thank you. So he told me so many things that he's doing to grow the community. He's a Colombian who lives in the United States. And while he's there learning Drupal, he is taking the time to go to camps, help grow them. He's received scholarships from the Drupal Association to go to Drupal Cons. And he's out there looking for companies who need talent. And he has all these connections here in Latin America. And so he's doing a lot of matchmaking because he really wants to make sure this happens and that people have these opportunities with Drupal. In addition to that, he's also making sure that there's really competitive rates for Latin Americans who get jobs through him. I think that's really amazing because it's not that he just wants people to have jobs, but he wants to make sure that everyone has a better life because of Drupal. And I just think that's a really amazing contribution. So thank you. And so there's a lot more we can do there. And we're looking forward to see how we can help with the Drupal Association too. So Latin America cannot just be supporting people globally. For Drupal to lead means leading everywhere. And it's important that we grow Drupal adoption here in Latin America. And that's already happening in a big way. Just talking to a lot of the different businesses, there's excellent case studies already. And you can see them from e-commerce to banking, publishing, universities. It's happening everywhere. And I know that there's room for a lot more. And we're also going to need talent so that you can serve globally and regionally, right? So these camps, your global training days, all the things you do to bring people into the community is going to be even more important. And I just want to talk about how it became that Drupal was starting to be adopted in a big way in Latin America. And from what I see, one is that you have freelancers who are very brave that started a business. It's not easy to do a start-up and to put all that together. And so that's a really big shift that happened. And then they started marketing locally. So just talking with seed, they do really strong SEO, really smart. They're doing local events, Drupal in a day. There's all kinds of different marketing activities happening from these businesses that are investing in Drupal marketing. But we also have individuals that are doing things to get the word out there about Drupal. And I want to acknowledge what Nick Vidal is doing in Brazil. He's a community leader there, and he's helping to grow the community in a big way on many fronts. One of the things that I was really impressed with is he's been going to major open-source events, LatinoWare, Faisal, a few others. And he's making sure Drupal has a good presence there and is getting the presence it deserves. And that's helping to get us traction. He also used a grant to write a Spanish magazine about Drupal and use that to spread the word of Drupal, which is just fantastic and really creative. I've seen other people that are making sure that we're getting into publications like CIO, Peru, just covered DrupalCon. I saw that Drupal Latino Summit has gotten into PC World. So there's just a lot of things that companies and individuals are doing to make a really big impact or grow Drupal here in Latin America, and I think that's something you should be really proud of. I'm also looking forward to see how the association can help you on that front, too. And then lastly, the other area that I see as a great way that Latin America is strategic to the project is in the code base, contributing code. So for Drupal to be a leader, we need to be innovative, have innovative software. And that innovation comes from diverse input from everyone around the world. We really need to capture Latin America's passion and creativity, all your intelligence in our code base. So raise your hand if you contributed, maybe not just anything, any kind of code, whether it's Drupal 7, Drupal 8. Can I see hands? Yeah, I got even more. That's great. That's really important. And for all of you that didn't raise your hand, I hope that you will. It's really important that you contribute to the project. It's something that is good for your resume, helps you with jobs. It also is your way of giving back. And we can talk some more about that. Because if you don't give back, we don't grow this project, you end up stunting your own opportunities. You should really look at it that way. They're very connected. And I also want to just call out that it's not just individuals contributing, that there is a budding contribution culture in companies here. And that's really important, that companies support employees to give back code. And that they encourage their clients to allow them to give back code. And one example is Tager. And I think I pronounced that right. I was working on that. And then also Seed is another one. I really enjoyed talking with Aldebiere about why. Why is it important for him and his company that he, make sure his company is giving back code. And one is it just shows their expertise, right? On your organizational profile, you get to show all of the contributions and that's powerful. But what I really liked was when he answered that it's really more emotional. It feels good to give back. So when he contributes a module, and he'll say it's a simple module, it's just a simple module. But then he gets an email that says, thank you so much, you just really solved something that I didn't know how to do or that made my life a lot easier and now I can just move on to the next thing for my project, I just thank you so much. It just feels good to know that you're helping others in your community. And I think that's a great culture to adopt within a company. So I certainly encourage that and I do encourage everyone to go to the sprints tomorrow so that they can learn how to contribute and be a part of this. We have some sprint mentors here. Can you raise your hand sprint mentors? There we go. Seek them out. They're really special. They want to help you get to that process and understand how to contribute. They're making it a lot easier. So there's a lot of ways that the Latin American community is strategic to the project. And it's really amazing how you've grown and you are able to get to this place. And that's because of really passionate people. Like I mentioned, people that early on had a vision. They saw that Drupal provides opportunities. They wanted to share those opportunities here in Latin America. And they put a lot of countless hours of activity in the community that you have today. And so you can see some of the pictures of people I've mentioned. There's so many people that I haven't been able to work into my talk. I only have a few minutes. But together, throughout Latin America, there are these community leaders that have really grown things in a big way. Just some statistics are, let's see, this year, this past year, there were 19 global training days. And this is companies or people welcoming all the newcomers and giving them some simple training free or near free. It's just a really good on-ramp into the community. And then we've had, in 2013, we had 10 camps throughout the region that brought together over 2,000 people. And these are really important to have these camps because you start taking the newcomers and also your existing community members and you start leveling up the skill. That's how you start growing the community and also getting more expertise. And then just in January, we had the Sprint weekend, which was really popular all around the world. So much participation. We had four countries participating here in Latin America, which was wonderful. We'd love to see more of that. And then we also have, in this region, something I think that's pretty special. Community members had gone to Drupalcon. They saw that magic that happens. They saw the kinds of learnings you have when you have people cross borders and share. And they created the Drupal Latino Summit. And this was a really special event that brought people together for the first time. And it's happened three times. And because of that, they were able to do Drupal Pichu in Peru. And that grew the community even more and created this regional strength that you need to sustain a Drupalcon. And it's because of all this work that we're all here today. And so I just want to thank the community leaders for doing this work. And I'm glad that we're able to do this. One of the things I wanted to share too is that Drupalcon Amsterdam in 2005 had about 100 people. And then they all left and they all worked in their community and they grew and they grew their businesses. And we went back in 2014 and there were 2,300 people. So imagine what that means for this group and where you're going to be the next time we come back. That means you have some work to do to have that magic from Drupalcon and go back to your communities and really grow. And I want to point out that we're not just growing as a community. We're not just giving people, we're mindful about it. We're making sure we're diverse. And that's because we have people like Karen DeCruz who are making sure that women are coming to the table and feel comfortable. Later today at the closing session we're going to tell you how the percentage of women are here. It's pretty significant. It's because of people like Karen. She started Drupal and it was, you know, for her job and someone said, no, we have a whole community come to the meet-ups. That's really important. And she came and she's like, I don't see enough women. I don't feel so, you know. Maybe this isn't my place. And she was encouraged, no, no, you need to have make it your place. And she did. And in Peru she started women in technology and just got women coming together to talk about technology in general. And then at Drupalpechu she created a panel that Holly Ross, our executive director, sat on. It just really started something. Women could see other women up there on stage talking, talking about what it meant to be a woman in Drupal, how they participate and contribute back. And it really kind of created a spark for other women. So a woman by the name of Veronica who's from Bolivia, she went back home. She is not into public speaking. She is just not her thing. But she was passionate about making this happen in Bolivia. And so now Karen is supporting her and giving her the encouragement she needs to start making Bolivia become more diverse as well. And this is happening in all the other countries. And that's because of people like Karen, so thank you. And so I love telling stories. I could tell stories all day because you inspire me so much. And this is one that is just near and dear to my heart. And so Fernando and Nancy, I would like to tell your story. To be honest with you, everyone I interviewed my story if you don't tell Fernando and Nancy's. And I was like, okay, well tell me why. And they would tell me their stories. And really Fernando is behind many of the reasons people stepped up to help grow this community. And so a little bit of his story, it's a very long story. So I'm just doing it justice in two seconds. But he started Drupal in about 2007. And it was a tool and a job. And in 2009 he was awarded a scholarship to go to Drupalcon in Washington DC. And that's when he saw that there is this amazing community with all these opportunities that you can have if you just tap in. And so he really had more of a mission to come back to Latin America and share these opportunities with everyone and grow the community so they can really take advantage of the benefits. One of the things, too, is that he attended a session that was about Drupal around the world. He realized Latin America at that time, this was 2009, really wasn't on the map. And so he said, not only do I want to go to Latin America back home to share these benefits of Drupal, but I want to make us important. I want to make us important to this project because this is significant. And now today I can stand on stage and even tell you all the ways you're significant. I think that's amazing. He's been a driving force behind camps, the regional summits, he's encouraged so many people like Karen DeCruz to step up and get more women in this community. And it's just really significant what he's done. And I want to point out, too, that he has not done it alone. His wife Nancy has been by his side the whole time supporting him. And she's working independently of him as well. She's not a coder. And that's okay because everyone has a role in this community. And she's been contributing by supporting camps and other community programs and making sure people feel welcome, making sure the logistics work. She does a lot of knitting. She expresses her love for Drupal through knitting and I just love her hats. But even this week, I mean you could just see how Nancy just kind of took over volunteering and she just sat down and read and I can't speak Spanish so a lot of times I would just point to her and she just took care of everything. So they are just a wonderful couple. And they are partners in Drupal. And they share this common vision to touch all these lives and to share the benefits of Drupal with you. And I'm just so thankful for what they've done and what everyone has done to grow this community. It inspires me and makes me really proud to stand here today and to tell these stories just to let you know what you have accomplished. It's really important that you know that what you've done is significant. And so I want to thank the people that allowed me to tell their stories today. Even if I just mentioned your company name, please stand up. That's right, that's right. I told you to stand up first. Get this going. Good, please stand up. I'd like for everyone to clap for those that I mentioned. I also would like anyone who has helped grow this community. Maybe you volunteered at a camp. Maybe you've contributed. Maybe you've worked in the issue queues. Anyone that's just helped. Can you please just stand up? Go ahead, don't be shy. There's a lot of you. Everybody stood up. You can do it again. Sprint mentors, please stand up. Anyhow, for all the contributors. Thank you so much. It's been an honor. Again, we're here for you. We're so proud that we can support you with grants and scholarships and Drupalcon. I'm eager to hear what we can do next with you. Please reach out. Thank you.