 Director of the Drupal Association And I'm one of many many people involved in the association We'll get to our structure and everything in just a minute What I just handed out was our annual report that we just put out earlier this year at Drupal Con, Chicago So we just put it out in March and it details the financials for last year 2010 and also 2009 It gives you a little brief description of what the heck the Drupal Association is To start things off, how many people here just by a show of hands know what the Drupal Association I've heard of it before today. Oh awesome Up from like two years ago when we ran this session and there were five people in the room and Four of them were board members. That's pretty good All right, does anybody want to take a stab at what describing what is it that the Drupal Association does other than obvious people? Somebody that maybe just heard about the Drupal Association. Yeah, what is the Drupal Association to you? So it pulls the community together aggregates them and provides a central forum from to communicate and meet each other as well As organized as DrupalCon to get yeah So other other things that you mentioned hardware the redesign of Drupal.org part the migration from CVS over to get Does anybody else want to as anybody has have something different that they think the Drupal Association is or the impression? Thank you for the scholarship And here's one of our scholarship winners anybody else Julian does it govern the the ongoings of Drupal? Okay, so the kind of it was more of a question of Governing the Drupal project itself, but we're also maintaining a separation. I'm actually gonna get into that in just a minute Anybody else have an impression or they were left with an impression or a question of what is the association? the administrative Organization to make sure that all the Drupal stuff can happen Can I call it the boring back-end bits? Okay, that's pretty good. All right, so let's just dig straight into it So the Drupal Association And we're gonna start with the boring back-end bits We do have a mission statement and our mission statement is the Drupal Association Fosters and supports the Drupal software project the community and its growth That's pretty vague Means we could do a whole lot of of stuff But what this means to us is it's really about community So the Drupal Association was created to foster this sense of community and so here are just Pictures of what we see as community This is Drupal Camp L.A. This is Drupalcon Copenhagen It's Drupalcon Copenhagen some more This is Belgium Dev Days This is a camp in India It's a camp in Milan Believe this is a camp in Athens this camps in Spain Texas Peru But also community our individuals doesn't have to be large groups of people So I always have Checks here with this really quirky keyboard. This is a great Drupal developer in Jordan. I just love this guy I happen to see him everywhere little icons everywhere Amy and I believe this is also an L.A. right Kerry so This is the the community to us. It's people gathering. It's people meeting It's individuals in their in their home or their office or their core working space It's people at a conference at a meetup at a bar at a camp or at a sprint It's it's wherever people are meeting and getting together to work on Drupal to collaborate on Drupal to write Documentation about Drupal to teach other people about Drupal or really if you touch Drupal, that's what it means to us But at the core of what the association is its community Now we have defined so what is it that we actually do we took that big mission statement and we did boil it down to Six big bullet points here and you can see these on association dot Drupal dot org So we maintain the hardware and software infrastructure. We empower the Drupal community to participate We protect the source code. We protect the Drupal project through legal work and advocacy. We organize And promote worldwide events and we also communicate the benefits of the Drupal software This is what we are striving to do some of these things we do now and some of these things. We were planning to do So let me go over Kind of items of what we're doing now and I'm gonna leave plenty of time at the end For us to for you to ask questions This is Drupal dot org It's a physical server it's in Corvallis, Oregon hosted at the Oregon State University open source labs, they're a really great sponsor of our of our project giving us free Power and bandwidth and just really great people and these are the servers that are hosted in their data center This is the team that this is part of the team. We have a really large infrastructure team But this is part of the team that helps to manage Drupal dot org Drupal dot org is Like one rack over it's partially in this rack and one rack over these two people Lance and Jeff aren't in the Drupal community. They work at OSU OSL at the open source labs And they're a great community members, but they're actually not Drupal developers But they're part of our community in the sense that they help support us. These two are in our community this is Narayan Newton and Rudy forgot his last name temporarily Rudy We love Rudy we just But so we have Narayan and Rudy and they're part of our infrastructure team along with Gerhardt and a lot of other great people So this is one of the things that we do so you can see at the top maintaining the hardware and software infrastructure of Drupal dot Oregon and other community sites One of the things we did earlier this year that isn't fully done yet, but it's in transition is These servers right here. Anybody know what these servers are? Okay, they're old. There's somebody over here Old dusty dirty Slow They're not bad. Actually. They're not bad old dusty dirty are HP any idea what they do They load balance that was pretty good. Who said that first awesome Any idea what they load balance? All of Drupal.org These machines Were up until later this year. They're in transition the old dirty dusty cobweb That's what those are our load balancers. That's it So we went and bought new load balancers And they're being put in now, but this is part of what we do behind the scenes, you know We identified a problem and we try to fix it I'm sorry. What was your name? Ricardo so you also brought up some of the great things other things that we've done in the past year for Maintaining the hardware. We did the Drupal.org redesign that was started quite some time ago But finished earlier this year and it's still ongoing We migrated over to get Finally got off of CVS over to get and that happened just around Drupal con Chicago earlier this year in March We also invested in cod the conference organizing distribution Which is the distribution of Drupal that we use for Drupal con? So when we build software for our needs to run this conference We also give it back to the community So you guys could run whatever you'd like whether it's a campsite or use it for a client project So but it's back into GPL code Okay We love it So Yeah, well, I mean that's the great thing about Drupal you can use a distribution you can pull it straight You can to go with core and add your own modules or or however we found it more beneficial for us to Sort of create a distribution around our conference to make it easier to come up Make it easier for our conferences to be organized as well as give something back to the community Since we're using the funds from the community to fund that project which then in turn went back into the community So that's number one maintaining the hardware and software. So let's move on a bullet point to Empowering the Drupal community to participate and contribute to the project So there's many different ways that we try to adhere to our mission here and Empowering, you know, it's a pretty broad term. There's a lot of different ways we can empower people one of the ways that we Started to that this year with something called the community cultivation grants How many people have heard of this grant program? Awesome, that's a that's a number of people, but it's not large. So there's a number of people that are learning it for the first time So the community cultivation grant program It's we set aside a set of funds To help grow and foster the to support and foster the growth of the Drupal community and this can happen in a number of Different ways it could be through a training program. It could be through a sprint. It could be through maybe a camp Maybe it's a particular website that you you you need some help on but it's going to help your community But it's some way that we're helping you get the funds that you need To build your local community and in this case, we're really looking at local communities Now the one thing that we don't ever fund with these grants is software development So we don't fund module development and we don't fund the Drupal project itself But we will fund say an educational sprint to help people write better docs so that other people can learn from that or A sprint that is teaching other people to write better code So we would fund things like that to help grow the community So I want to just sit on that topic for one second because do you really have any idea why we don't fund any development Nope We are busy and that and what Sam said is is is true So he said it's a conflict of interest if we fund software development we In turn can have the ability to guide the project And that's the one thing that we don't do nor do we want to do the project is your project It's a community project You everybody in this room and everybody at this conference has the ability to direct and lead and guide that project If you want DA to include, you know new functionality, you can take that on and you can make that happen We we can't help that If you want, you know D7 to have a new security release That's what the community does if you want to add 10 or 20 or 40 new modules or reduce the number of modules and Merge those models. That's you guys. It's the community and we don't want to be in that position where we're guiding the project because really the core and the nature of open source is its community built and If we start guiding the project, we're getting away from the community And so we're staying with the community by creating programs like the cultivation grant Community cultivation grant program because we want to help support you guys help support the community So you can make those decisions so you can guide the project and you can lead it But we're just there to be your support base So that launched Earlier this year and they're going to be announcing their first round of grants tomorrow Which I think is really exciting We're funding I think nine projects in about seven different countries Which is pretty awesome But I'm not gonna steal their thunder so you gotta wait till tomorrow The other program that we launched this year was something called biz connect. How many people have heard of this program? Okay a few For those of you heard of it. You want to take a stab at what it is What is biz connect? Yeah, facilitating so facilitating business connections. Anybody else want to take a stab at that? yeah, so Connecting maybe with enterprise companies and letting them know about resources honestly So the reason we created this program I mean there were several reasons, but one of the big ones actually goes back to community Right, we use the word biz because it is focused on businesses But what we were finding in the past year and a half is that a lot of new businesses were coming into our community? And they didn't know how to get started They were switching over to Drupal from whatever it is they were doing before maybe a proprietary CMS Maybe one of the big vendors that you've heard of well, whatever they were doing They were switching and they're like Drupal's it Drupal's great Drupal's awesome But before they weren't a Drupal shop and they were like what we do like how do we get involved in this community and They still had a sort of a business mentality. They were waiting for Somebody to tell them what to do so a lot of businesses if they work with proprietary software You know think of any big company name that comes to your head those companies come to you and say This is you do you take software you use it and you get it done But in Drupal we just say join the community and That's great, and I think everybody in this room understands that but some people need a little guidance So we created biz connect as one way to give them a newsletter that just keeps them in the know You know business managers actually do read email newsletters I know you guys have moved on from that We have RSS and Twitter and all these other things But they still do read these newsletters, which is great. So we compile information for them quarterly Sometimes monthly if it's happening and let them know about upcoming events whether it's a camp whether it's a meet-up in their local area Whether it's a new initiative that we're taking on whether it's a new conference. It's coming these things We also within our newsletter and within like this brochure and you can take a look at it This is one of the first brochures from that program is We open it up the very first page of the very first bullet point is your new business And it was how to get involved in the Drupal project first bullet point contribute code Documentation themes and modules back you'd be surprised at how many businesses don't know how to do that And so we're trying to be that condo to say yes, you can sponsor a conference. Yes Money helps, but you know it helps more code documentation and your involvement. So let's help you do both And with that project, I think a lot of people I'm always surprised at this You know, we currently now maintain a database of a little over 700 business names that are active in Drupal that Haven't sponsored a camp or a meet-up or come to our conference But we go out there and actively find them and try to bring them in and a lot of times they come to us And they're like, what do we do? You know, I remember a really good example as I was in New York City, which is where I live Just earlier this year and I got contacted by two companies One had 50 employees One had 10 employees Neither of them were involved in the Drupal project at all, but all their employees were 100% dedicated to Drupal The amazing part was one of these companies was four blocks from my house and I didn't know they existed It was kind of like one of those whoa, whoa We need to you know help these people learn how to get involved in our community They hadn't come to the to the meet-up in New York City that has 400 people that meet at a camp You know a group that has thousands of people and so we were looking for ways of getting them involved So that's that's how we help to empower the Drupal community. We have a new program that we started up later It's already started now, but we're sort of formalizing it was one that we call like the home improvement program and it's These things for continuous redesign in Drupal.org continue to improve it The migration to get came through sort of this program Plus one subscribes, which we were looking to kill So we can actually have a subscription service these sorts of things Ways that you can come to the association as a community and say hey as a community We would like this on Drupal.org This would help us Get our jobs on easier better faster So that's also helping to empower the Drupal community to work on its own And I'm sorry Shun the young okay, so just like Shun the young said scholarships I Have a slide at the end of this deck. I think you'd be surprised at What we've been able to do over the years with scholarships, but that's part of empowering the community letting people get in To our conferences or to other things with our grants programs here so they can be involved in the project All right moving on to these these slides here number three and four Which are both around legal legal work and advocacy some people don't Maybe see it up front because it's a lot of times behind the scenes But we are tasked with protecting the GPL source code So when you write code and you contribute to the project We want to make sure that it's your code first and foremost It's always yours, but that you've given it to the benefit of the community and that everybody around the world respects that Sometimes you know people do take GPL software Affusticated encrypt it or whatever they want to do and try to sell it as their own or remove credits and It unfortunately happens. So when it happens we go out there and say No, can't do that So we do that for the source code as well as the project and its community The FSF the free software foundation also works on some of this and so this guy Everybody knows this is It's it's the little triple icon So this this is this is Larry Garfield or Krell C. R. E. L. L on triple org Big-time contributor to the project been around for quite some time He also helps to do a lot of our legal work and he does it with the help of the software freedom law center Which works with our project to provide lawyers Lawyers and legal advice so we can figure out how do we you know go after People that take our triple icon and try to use it in a for-profit sense and not Contribute back or take the source code and you know try to create a fork of it But not give credit to you guys for doing all the work Which has happened a few times So the fifth one which I think is how everybody knows us is organizing and promoting worldwide events So I think you've seen these ones. We have Copenhagen DC San Francisco But we're also branching out so we are the organization that runs triple con North America We run triple con Europe Here triple con South America is coming up and we also want to branch out to Asia Pacific So we are looking to do three triple cons per year Rotating around the world trying to grow these communities support these communities and Bring a conference of this this caliber of this quality to where the people are We also offer fiscal sponsorships and right now we only offer this in North American Belgium This is where we have a legal presence but for camps that are in North America they use our our legal body as a way of Running their camp so they can run their camp as a nonprofit and we can also offload some of that back-in-business stuff The Dono is referring to to get it off of them. We have the nonprofit status. We have bank accounts We have accountants all of these things they can run their camp Do their ticket sales if they have ticket sales or their sponsorship sales? We'll help pay their expenses So they're doing the they're doing the rubber and raising and we're helping them do the spending But just so there's a legal body so that all happens with insurance taxes, etc We've done that in North America and in Belgium questions on that Mm-hmm. Yeah, definitely. I think we should talk about that Yep setting up sort of worldwide entities. Yep There's similar situations, you know the back-in-business bits of actually running a camp or a conference or something of the side you know they vary from country to country and Yes, there there I can definitely verify there are problems all around the world And this is something where this is what we can do now And we're trying to figure out it's not gonna happen soon But definitely over the course of several years. We'll work on figuring out how we could best help and support that community So the question was is there is part of the interim solution to partner with other open-source organizations to help this kind of international expansion or so or Supporting these international organizations first. I want to say we have no intention of really setting up a legal entity in every country in the world There's no way we can really sustain that But we are looking at ways that we can Help and support Like people like Ricardo that have already set one up. How do we best work better? with with with Ricardo or point Ricardo to other resources that are in the area And be that but we're not gonna set up entities everywhere But we are looking at what is that way and we've been looking at other open-source Projects and how they do that. So just some stats From a triple con and we we pulled these together just this year. So the triple cons that we've had Have reached over 5,000 unique attendees This isn't the number of attendees The sum of all attendees across this is unique individuals because we have a high repeat rate Which I think is awesome So when people come to a conference they come back and they keep coming back Which is really great. So we reached a little over 5,000 unique people that have come to our conferences come to Drupal con In those 5,000 people 55 countries are represented and in terms of scholarships Shangri-La 115,000 US dollars has been given out a little over a hundred fifteen thousand dollars in scholarships to over 70 scholars This is over the course of Drupal con And scholars sometimes will get a flight a lot of times they get a flight hotel You know, they're put up for the time of the conference as well as their conference fees So we try to get people that you know Maybe couldn't afford to fly all the way to North America from whichever country they're in or fly to to Europe and get them into our conference they're valuable people in our community and a financial bear a financial should not be a barrier we can help with that We have to the tune of a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars Now one that we are working on is Communicating the benefits of the Drupal software You know, this would be I actually came up today in the keynote. There was a question over marketing What role does the association play in marketing of the Drupal project? The what I can say now is that it's been talked about it's been discussed It's on the roadmap. We don't have a particular plan or what we're going to do yet But it's there. We're trying to figure out how to do it best without stretching ourselves too thin You know part of this is the conference When we run a conference like say here in London where we sold it out We sold out this conference. We thought we would have maybe 1500 people tops that would be the tops really we thought 1300 We blew through that But the great thing about when we do that is that people take notice and people look and they go whoa Drupal what's going on there? And we do try to use that as a hook and we go out and we tell people like yeah, right about it Tell everybody about it. We did And it's pretty great. So we're we are Getting there with the marketing although we don't have a formal plan around it today. Oh We got a mention in the Wall Street Journal Let me pretend. Yeah, that was a great article. I didn't I didn't know that that's awesome. I like mentions Wow Yeah, that's pretty awesome Okay, I want to kind of get through the next few slides here because I since we have a lot of questions here So just a quick kind of history of you know, who who is the Drupal Association? You know, it's this thing out there The Drupal Association Is really people it's passionate people that get involved their volunteers up until Late last year vast majority and we're volunteers that started this thing in 2006 It's around five years ago over five years ago Few people got together you can see this is one of the earlier meetings. So if Karen we have Gabor So we have Karen Gabor Angie Boris Gerhardt and a few other people in the couch ones trees and that was one of the original association meetings You know, this was 2006. It's people saying like we're passionate. We want to make this happen Now over time we've had a lot of people get involved So here's just kind of the roll call of who's heavily involved in the project or in the association so of Angie and Dries Addison Laura Scott these are going really slow Kieran law Gerhardt Kerry Gordon Earl Miles Neil drum Steven Whitton's Khalid they get that right Robert Douglas Tiffany Varys Larry Garfield Ronan Bader Greg Madison There's a lot of people it's Fernando with good company. All right, Richard Stallman Jeff Eaton Michael Myers Boris man Rudy Narayan Jeff and Lance OSU OSL and Drupal. It's a lot of people involved in this. There's Steven Peck Bevin and I had to pick this one Neil drum. Sorry There's Zach Rosen Nedra Rogers Jeff Robbins Isabel Scholls Chris of Anton Yeah, it's it's all about the socks in these pictures We got the the oh No Oh This is not good Can I skip? All right, there's a lot of people involved. We're just gonna flip through these here That that will go through so there's been a lot of people involved about 35 people have been involved in the creation of the Drupal Association over the years and In the next slide as I'll just keep going as these These cycle through is that last year in the fall We made a big transition. All of these people I've been showing you today were volunteers The dedicated hours and hours of their time and they're from all parts of the world in November of last year. We made a big switch. We began hiring for the first time and Two of the people we hired In November of last year, we're Neil Kent and Megan Sannakey. We hired an events manager and a sales Manager, so this is how we're helping to grow the conference by hiring professional Professional people with years of experience to help build our conference to grow it This is how we're expanding to three conferences per year So the Association is now in this transition period of we were a lot of volunteers heavily dedicated To now we're our fully staffed And we have full-time staff that are dedicated to these projects We're gonna get there Because I gotta give my next slide. There we go. All right, so we have Moshe George DeMett Bill Fitzgerald and Peter Olinon. So there's a lot of people So now the question is where are we going? So last year we hired two of our first people Neil Kent and Megan Sannakey who you'll see around the The floor both of them come to the Association from outside of the Drupal community But have years of experience in their area Neil ran Mac world and a ton of other concerts and Everything around in fact the photographer today that took our picture. He knew Neil from a black IP's tour that they did together This is what they do. They set up big events for people Megan sales we then hired a bunch of other people to help us achieve our mission So we hired right over here. We hired Neil drum To help with the technology back in to get our our software infrastructure in place We hired Paul up here to help with memberships because we do want to create a strong membership organization So we put somebody in place for that Daniel Finnerty who's our accountant Liz Trudeau helps us get these data so that we know how much Where everybody's coming from Annie stone who's a office admin who's just helping to keep everything together and Isabel Scholls You'll see around who's now a full-time event coordinator. She's just there to help run our conferences So what are we up to? Here's kind of a quick list As I mentioned before we're building a strong membership program We want to be that organization that is from for the community and by the community So we're increasing our communication out with our members We started a program years ago, but never sent a newsletter Until recently we're trying to help communicate with the members how you can get involved with the project We launched membership benefits discounts to commonly use software or events that you might want to go to And those came from the community. We're trying to use our size to help you And then put in things like recurring memberships Expanding our conferences. We're gonna do three a year That all started in 2012 Building out our community helping with that. We started our grants program fiscal sponsorship program our home improvement program Which we're doing now and we're looking to do more upgrades in 2012 and planning for that now So hardware infrastructure upgrades d.do updates Our business community working with them we launched biz connect to help connect these communities businesses together We also started to create CXO events at our conferences where Freelancers that are growing or small businesses that are one to three or five person shops If you're looking to network and get business advice from others around you We have an event just for you to help you grow your business so you can help support the job of community It is on Friday So see me after I'll give you information and then where are we going as I mentioned before things that are on our our roadmap, but not quite there yet promotion of the Drupal project right now We promote Drupal con like crazy Anything we can to promote this conference and get people here We do it promotion of the project itself. It's planned Other things that we're currently doing in planning GPL protection. We do that now The Drupal con trademark we protect that so people know when it's an official event And also the Drupal trademark is planned that has its own process right now Dries is managing that but we are working with Dries to make sure that we can start moving it over So it's in the trust of the community But once we have a strong organization for that very similar to Linux foundation Linux mark and other projects WordPress foundation WordPress We're building that so we can be that organization that represents the community. All right, so we have quite a lot of time left Actually, but it's more of a Q&A questions. I know it's probably a number of them. So It's open. Yeah I'm not very Regarding the Drupal trademark we already made some work in Portugal because we asked Dries note giving us authorization to use Drupal and to Register Drupal dot PT that that can only be done if you are an entity Inside of the country. So at this moment, we already arranged that and we would like to make that site to create a good site with Drupal dot PT of course Associated with the Drupal Association All right. Anybody else have any other questions? This is open So plans to expand it to Southeast Asia and Oh That's a new term Australasia Kerry. Do you want to I know this is something you're passionate about Well for the last couple of years we've been trying to organize a Third floating Drupal con the first one of those right on the speaker here the first one of those will first one of those Is likely be in South America Then from there will probably be moving East I guess it's east from here. I can't say where it's gonna be but but Certainly Australasia Okay, yeah Yeah, we know there was a humongous that we're in Brisbane There was a humongous Drupal camp and I think you know, I can't say we're going there, but There's possibility. We're certainly reaching out to other areas South Asia and Looking even further east It's hard to say I mean I don't really have anything to tell you as far as what we're going to do but We will be having three Drupal cons a year So So, um, I think it is short answers. It's on a roadmap. Yes 2012 will We will go to three in 2012 And then we'll branch out from there So right behind? Yeah, so membership That's a really good question Let me just Australia Australasia Awesome, they I like that. Yeah, I mean we're we're We work with a lot of people and we're trying our best to we when we run because when we talk about a Drupal con There is a particular expectation that a Drupal con has you're gonna meet core developers You're gonna meet a large community. You're gonna have code sprints. It's happens over multiple days There's a particular expectation and so we want to be the body that runs that sort of Conference at that that hits that expectation As well as helps to support other other events like camps and meet-ups where you may need support Which is like the cultivation grants which again a lot of them are going to and you'll see wait till tomorrow You'll see we're hitting that area I'm not gonna say where Try not to steal their thunder I'm sorry. What was your name? Leslie, okay, so let the other question on what are our memberships? We have two types of memberships individual memberships and organizational memberships individual memberships are 30 us dollars or 22 euros and they help to support the project and The benefits are listed you can go to the association. This is not on that screen How about that? That's a little better So here are some of the benefits We did arrange for some discounts at various places again this bubbled up from the community So we use our leverage It helps to promote Membership badge and other things that are coming up. Basically, we try to keep you in loop help support us And we'll try to help support you We also have an organizational membership Which is roughly the same thing. It's just designed for a company to help support us and it's a hundred US dollars or 77 euros a year 73 I can't do my math at a question in the back Okay, so the question was you know, it would be great if there was a central at your so what was your name? Dermond Dermond from Glasgow and Scotland and you're So you're you're helping to set up the Scottish Drupal Association and so currently as an association We don't have a whole lot to offer be blunt and honest It's it's on a roadmap. There's a lot of information out there And we're trying to figure out how best to pull that together So we've started on it, but we are looking for a lot of help on figuring out how can we best help that? Without setting up legal entities everywhere, but really how do we get that knowledge out there? I think one of the best ones was we're here Today we're here this week. We should just set up a boff. I'll come into the boff I'll tell you what I know. I'll try to pull other people into the boff and Let's have one of those and and talk about it and see what we can do but it's There's a lot of info out there Other questions, how are we on time? Yeah Drupal in definitely the Middle East it's Right at this moment It is not on our roadmap in terms of where we're headed because we are when we run a conference as an association It takes a lot of resources takes a lot of staff time takes a lot of financial resources It takes a lot of calling and emailing sponsors and saying help support us This is where one working with other national organizations and see what we can do to help support that But on that same it's definitely noted, you know last year I spent a lot of time in the Middle East in Jordan Which is where there you are Where I met Issa there Who's done a ton of work with open source in Jordan in that region? I just came back from Ozcon where we were talking, you know, where's the best place to be Turkey? Egypt, you know where whereabouts is the best place centrally located for people to get to because we do recognize things like How do people get visas and cross these borders? What's feasible in terms of you know people coming what can they afford to pay in Lodging and travel costs etc. Etc. I think working and better working with our national organizations is going to help support that more than just waiting on us to do something there because We only we have so many resources in there. They're not unlimited wish they were Somebody got the pot of gold that you can just give us Yep question Okay, so your question is democracy in the Drupal Association Okay in terms you have so many I can talk a lot about that but the Okay, so the question is I Talking about the democracy or the governance Can you use the word governance the governance of the Drupal Association in how it interacts with the community? And how we keep ourselves on track that would that summarize it? Okay, so that's a big one. I don't know how many people read the Association news feed Thanks Well if you've seen the news feed like in the past several months or so There is a number of posts about this The Association there is One here improving the Drupal Association There's some ones about Drupalcon And there's one just before this that I want to draw attention to Renewing the organizational structure of the Drupal Association. So this just came out July So not not too long ago and it speaks directly to governance So we used to have an organizational structure of a general assembly Which were permanent members and they were voting members and those permanent members would vote on the board and there were nine board members At that point there were nine Was that it's changed so if you're gonna take notes take notes in one minute So that that's how it had changed Now we took a good hard look at that because that worked great for a few years as The organization was primarily volunteers and really had no money And it was just people working together, but as we started to take on more responsibility run bigger conferences Revenue jumped no are these conferences are are not cheap anymore. They're about a million US dollars each To put on so it's it's a lot of money coming in and out and we need a lot of infrastructural support for that Customer service support and etc. Etc. We want to figure out the best way of how do we make sure that the We're on track. We're working with the community while also growing ourselves and having the support that we need as a company and as an organization to grow and Volunteers are very dedicated very passionate about certain initiatives that they have And with our permanent membership base, they were only given a governance role But not a role to volunteer or to take a lead So we inherently created a really unfortunate conflict of interest where people were trying to govern the money That was being spent but also be a lead to spend money So he was a really bad loop that we needed to fix And so we went around this huge structure and you can read this this entire thing here But if you want to take notes what we ended up coming up with was a new governance model that is nine board members That are selected by something called the nomination committee The nomination committee is made up of community members board members something called the advisory board It's ten people The executive director injuries. We're all kind of mixed in and we go out and find board members that help Create a skill set of the board that helps us support the organization's needs You know whether we need legal needs or a finance person or somebody that can help with fundraising Or somebody that can help us go to certain areas of the world if we're gonna go to the Middle East or Australasia and getting these strong board members But it this point we did sort of remove ourselves from the community because it became the board Working with and ten people that were selected to create a new board. It's almost like the board creating those selecting the board Which is a very common way that happens in nonprofits So what we also create it were two additional seats and a flexible board and those two additional seats are called at large Seats their board seats and they're chosen by the community at large So our board should always be reflective of our community to begin with You know if they're not they why would you be on the board of a community ran organization or an organization that? That supports the community But we wanted to make sure that we did have that check so the community puts on Two board seats And they vote for them. They're not selected. They're not sought out or such So a board the nine board have three year terms and so three will come off every year three off three on The at-large are single-year terms So there to get that those new ideas and that fresh blood in there To to make sure that we're always listening to the community and it's not somebody who's been there for a while because we need that we need that that Consistency year after year. We're learning with each other. We're not cycling and changing We also need that those fresh ideas that fresh blood and to make sure that we're on check So all that is outlined in here Questions does that answer your question? Okay, we have a few more minutes All right, five any other questions what we're doing we're going Yeah, okay So the question just to repeat it for the folks that we are recording is what about the fears of the association is taking Over that we're running the cons. We're gonna get the trademark. We're gonna run the camps We're gonna take over and and local community has no no input I want to answer the camps one first and then I'll come back to the cons and the trademark Can I pick on you? All right. Can you talk it on the mic? Can you come up here too? Hi, so my name is Jen Lampton. I've been running the Bay Area Drupal camps in 2007 I was also one of the lead organizers for Drupal con San Francisco and in terms of Drupal con Maybe I'll let you talk to this later. There's a lot of influence, but in terms of your local camp You don't have to listen to them at all We do So, yeah, I mean, I'm a perfect example We're this year where we have a zero involvement from Drupal association in running our camp So in spite of the fact that I've worked with them very closely in the path in the past in terms of Drupal con We still want to keep our camp like what our community wants to do and not necessarily what the Drupal Association wants to do And sometimes those things are in line and sometimes you're like, you know what? We'll just let our people decide what they want to do and they'll vote and whatever they want will build for them So if you don't want to have any involvement at all, you can you can also choose any range in between So if the only help you want is like a fiscal harbor for your money You can do that if you want more help you can probably find other ways to get more help But if you want to keep it completely your own you're also completely welcome to do that So in terms of the trademark that is something we don't do right now that that's trees trees manages that and has a you know There's a whole trademark license and rules and things that everybody can read And there's there's things like automatic licenses So if you're doing it for the community benefit, you get an automatic license It's pretty much just to prevent people from abusing the trademark if we take that over As the association and really hold it in the care of the community Which would be the only reason we would take it over is just to hold it in the care of the community We wouldn't change any of those We have no intention. I don't see why we would it's it's really we're here to support the community So those are the ways we do it. We do offer fiscal sponsorship camps, but I don't get involved at all I live in New York City and New York City is using us as a fiscal sponsorship I don't show up to their meetings. I don't I Don't participate in the email threads. I but I lived there they could I helped the Portland community do it as well The only interaction I had with the Portland community is I showed up one day and handed them a credit card and it said go spend your money That's it and that's that's really about the level of interaction we want Yeah, I don't I don't see that in terms of the conferences we Continue to work with the local communities And and keep them involved in the conferences So we're running Drupalcon Denver right now that Denver community is heavily involved In terms of the site design in terms of the content that's happening there Really our involvement has come to take care of the back-end business boring bits Do you use authorized net or cyber source? Do you have 50 chairs in a room or 45 chairs in a room? Can we afford it when you're talking about risk calculations when you're talking? 3,000 people and food and coffee and things like that, but the the meat of the conference really still comes directly from the community I don't participate in those at all In fact ask them Chicago people I got torn down a few times for Having a suggestion like this is ours. I'm like, okay No, we just want to be here to support does that answer your question. Do you have a follow-up or? Okay. Yeah, let's do it Yeah All right, we have probably 30 seconds or a minute any other questions or no You got a whole minute you do a lot in that Yeah, so in terms of a marketing, right? It's a it's a really broad But it's a really broad topic of you know, what is it that we do for marketing? So let me tell you some of the things that we do do now Which are primarily around our conference our conferences do hire PR firms We hire PR firms to get the word about the conference out and I highlight when we do really awesome stuff like sell out the conference or release new version of Drupal or Have some really great sprints or code or bring over 55 countries together In you know under one roof so we do hire a PR company to do that. It's not a very large contract You know, we're not spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on this nowhere near that but we do hire somebody to get traditional print in there We do have paid staff that do work on things like to make sure that Facebook is updated Twitter is updated Etc that we're constantly out there communicating and telling people As well as sort of writing blog posts and aggregating other people's blogs blog posts But we do it primarily right now around the conference And we do promote camps in some cases through our newsletters with our own membership base And organizational members and things like that while also trying to coordinate the marketing PR efforts of other companies So other companies will come to us and say what should we talk about like we have a marketing budget But how do we help and we'll say well, this is how you can help Here's some bullet points. Here's some people to talk to you know Go talk to these people or get in connection with these people are those That's what we're doing right now in terms of what we want to do That's a big open-ended question because marketing is a big topic It's it requires a lot of money and right now we're focused on making sure we can run good conferences We can expand our conferences build our community and build a strong community first and then Go and spend that money elsewhere It's it's on our heads, but if there's no there's no definitive roadmap that I can tell you what we're going to do All right one last one and then we got to wrap up You have a question Donna? so We generally grab Neil drum in the middle of the night from his hotel room. We tie him up blindfold him Spin him around 20 times and point him towards a map whichever You know wherever his head hits first That's where it's at It's a big process so we this I'm so was your name from Germany Karsten, so this actually speak to you. I think it's a community ran process There's a number of people that that we we pulled together Jen. Do you want to actually talk about this? So this is every this is Jen Lampton from Bay Area dribble camp, but she just want to clarify She doesn't work for the Association. She's not a board member or general assembly member or a staff member. She's just just involved