 So let's get going with Holly and the update. Excellent. OK, I just want to make sure. Good. I think I have things set. Great. So operational updates for the last month. Obviously, we had a big month last month. It was the month of DrupalCon. And lots of great things happened in Austin. And even though that was just last month, I'm pretty sure everyone here could tell you that it feels like it was maybe 18 months, two years ago that Austin happened. But it was a really good show for the association and for the community in a number of ways. Lots of great attendance, obviously. But I think, in particular, we were really excited about some of the ways that we were able to leverage DrupalCon and folks being together to drive forward some continued momentum on Drupal.org in particular. So having Whitney Hess there to kick off the user research project, to meet with the working groups, to have actual face-to-face interviews with folks was really great. We've continued to carry that forward past Austin. Just getting the working groups together to start to think about a short-term vision for Drupal.org was really empowering. So those were really great. And then we're also really excited about the sprints that happened, although we were not able to remove all the Drupal project beta blockers, and in fact, maybe increase them that day of the Friday Sprints, we were able to get over 30 community contributions to Drupal.org that we've been able to commit in the week since DrupalCon Austin. So lots of great stuff for Drupal.org that happened out of Austin on top of all the wonderful community building and learning that goes on there as well. So we've really been focused on the cleanup from DrupalCon and getting our invoices paid so we can close the finances, going through the issues that were addressed in the sprints, et cetera. So just closing down DrupalCon has really been the focus in June so that we can clear up and get ready for Amsterdam. And I think just one other note about the numbers overall that I just want to talk about as we look at some of those numbers is that we have a ton of numbers that are tied to the idea that we would have a Drupal 8 release in 2014. And since that's been pushed out, those numbers are just not going to hit goal. So I just want to say that out loud so we're clear about that. But we still think they're the right numbers to be looking at and they're good to track and we're really glad that we have the numbers on a monthly basis going forward. There's a number of goals we're not going to hit and we'll talk about some of those. We go through them. And then I just think the last thing I really want to highlight again is that we've had a ton of momentum on the Drupal.org project overall and I think particularly around infrastructure. So Rudy, his new team member, Archie, the infrastructure working group and the infrastructure team have done a ton of great work. We now have a CDN up and deployed in front of all of Drupal.org, which is really fantastic. It lessens the burden on our resources at OSU OSL. And it will hopefully increase the page load time, particularly outside of the US where things get really pokey. So we are excited to have that up and are obviously tracking the numbers related to that so we can see what kind of performance improvement it has had. So lots of good stuff coming out of Drupal.org in June, which is really great. So one other caveat about the numbers is we look at some of them is just that we, to prepare for a July 9th board meeting, we were unable. We had to produce materials about a week ahead of time for the board, which meant we could not close the financials in time to have the financial numbers updated in the dashboard. Just wasn't gonna happen by July 2nd or 3rd. So anywhere we look in the KPIs right now and we see dollar amounts, those are just, those are last month's numbers. So we're just not gonna comment on them for this month. That's where they sat last month and we didn't update them for this month. Any questions about that? Any question over here? Okay, great. And looks like Donna and Denise have joined. All right, so we can't really look at some of the financials right now, but in terms of our overall KPIs, again, things are looking really well for us in a number of areas, particularly around program work. Lots of program participants, obviously with Austin and we've had some great webcast numbers lately, people joining webcasts. So I think our last one had over 100 people on it. We've been hitting those numbers pretty regularly now, which is great. Membership is also doing really well. Liz and Joe have been creating some really cool promotions and experiments to see what excites people to join and renew. So talk a little bit more about that, but those numbers look really great with the exception of our slider experiment, which we implemented last year sometime, we got that slider going up in the fall and it continues to be drugged down instead of being drugged up overall. So we may want to consider a different way of presenting the pricing for memberships in the future. Although it's not affecting the budget negatively because the numbers overall have been fine. It is, we're having people join at less than the suggested amount overall. So I mean, go ahead. Oh, sorry, this is Jeff. Can we have Josh work on a mechanism where if somebody brings a slider down, it changes their head shot to a Scrooge McDuck? I'll get right on that, Jeff. Never change. It's a really important board observation I just had to get in right before Matthew spoke. Okay, Matthew, did you have a question? I don't really have a question, but I have perhaps a suggestion of how maybe we could tweak things and try them a little bit differently. As folks might know, we're going into Drupal Camp Colorado next month, the first of the month. And this year, we set things up so it was entirely free. However, people could decide what they wanted to pay for the camp and anything that we get above our budget goal is gonna go to a few different nonprofits. And what we did was we set the sort of default at the amount where you would get a T-shirt and just to see what would happen. And it's not a slider. It's just an open text box. And I would say that looking at the numbers at this point, by and large, the vast majority of people have chosen to put in more money than the default T-shirt amount. We've got a few people that have put in zero, but very, very few. Maybe it's the presentation. Maybe it's because people can slide things easily. And maybe if there were a default number there that they felt like, maybe it's just a presentation. Yeah. No, I think that's a good observation and that's probably right. We haven't really prioritized re-engineering that or putting resources into reconfiguring how that displays for folks because it hasn't had a budget impact yet. But I think, yeah, there are lots of ways that we can display the membership options and payment options for folks, price points. And we'll certainly do some testing with those. So, let's see. So, memberships. Also, Camp Fiscal Sponsorship, just to let you know, we had a goal of serving 20 camps this year. We're up to 27, which is great. The team here, both on the finance side, Chris and Leslie and the community managed position law and they've spent some time thinking about that program and how to better document and make that, market that program, essentially, including a possible renaming of it because fiscal sponsorship is both incredibly boring and confusing as a term. So, we're thinking about that, but that continues to be a really popular service. We're glad folks are taking advantage of that and the grants and scholarships, all that good stuff. And then here's where we definitely hit some numbers that are subpar because, again, we've got some, they're heavily reliant on the Drupal 8 release. So, we've got, under our banner of growing Drupal adoption, number of Drupal sites, contributors, D.Otto site traffic. Those are things that are definitely driven by a release cycle and they're not in the red, but they're not in the green either, right? So, some numbers there, but other things look good overall. So, on the whole, things look good for us. Drupal cons, again, we've got this red for dollars, but you have to ignore that for this month because it's not updated, but the numbers look really great for Drupal cons. We were able to finally get some audience information back because we said we wanted to get to more evaluators and site owners overall and on the whole, we're doing that. But most importantly, we're capturing sort of baseline numbers for who our audience is in a discreet, measurable way for the first time, which we're pretty excited about. So, those numbers were good for us. And one of the things that we calculated that we have now for Austin is the net promoter score, which is 23. It's tough to say if that's good or bad because it's something you measure against yourself and it's the first time we've measured for the cons. We asked that net promoter question, how likely are you to recommend Drupal cons to another community member, give them a scale of one to 10, 10 being, I would tell them to come this very second and one being never in a million years. Your nines and 10s are your promoters, sixes and belowes are your detractors. And now we know, we've got some numbers, but I think they look pretty solid to us. And I was happy to see the numbers where they were at. I believe it's actually designed such that you can actually compare it to others. So you can benchmark yourself. Yes, if you can find other people in the same doing, using the net promoter score for the same kind of work. Correct. Yeah, we can't benchmark ourselves against Pepsi the brand. Hey, Holly, I don't know anything about this thing. So 30 is like a perfect or like, what is 23? Like if we were measuring this on a hundred or a base 10 scale, would 30 be like an 80%? So 23 is like a 60% or like, how does it work? So if all of your respondents gave you nines or 10s, right, then you would have a score of 100. Because what you do is you take the number of people who gave you nines or 10s and you subtract the number of people who gave you six or below, right? And that gives you a score. And so it's possible to get a perfect score. That's never gonna happen, right? So I can send out a little bit more reading about this. Again, I think it's mostly gonna matter as we look at it from a trend line from Khan to Khan. Right, but that's a 23 out of a hundred is how we should read that. Yes, with the understanding that no one's gonna ever get a hundred. Right, like that's just. You can easily look up some more details on this. Yeah. It's a well-established method of measuring customer satisfaction. The internet has many words about it. Well, it's sort of the way every organization measures or not everyone, but most organizations measure their customer satisfaction that way. Yeah, and then we're still bringing in numbers on the code sprint contributions just so you know, we were able to count a small subset of commits, but we're working with some of the folks who run the sprints to figure out how to better track that number. But that's our initial take as we've got 81 commits that happened the week of Drupal Khan. Obviously lots of folks wrote patches during the sprints that have yet to be committed. So we haven't counted those yet. So that's a good baseline look at Austin. Amsterdam is underway. The early bird deadline is this week. All the numbers are on track for Amsterdam so far. And obviously, is Friday this right? Am I saying Friday is the deadline, is that right? That's right. Yeah, okay. So Friday, Thursday and Friday, but Friday in particular are gonna be big days. And we'll watch those and know if we're gonna hit our goals there. But again, we had a ton of sessions submitted for Amsterdam 510 compared to 350 something for Prague. So we see a lot of interest in Amsterdam and expect that to do really well. We've just really been working on the numbers there with Amsterdam to make it worth both budget-wise and space-wise. But I think the team's put a really good plan in place. So Latin America also moving forward. So we should have a site up for that with more information in August. Mid-August. And I've been working with the team on all the planning there. Steph Torres just got back from Bogota. Must've been exciting to be there during World Cup season. And I think that the big thing there just to point out is that, we are working on both figuring out what the translation services or the language preference is gonna be for that event, whether we'll run it in English and offer translation into Spanish or vice versa. But we're working with the team to sort of figure that out, but we will have translation services available one way or the other so that you can get the content in either English or Spanish. On the budget side, we're shooting for a net neutral budget. So no profit or loss. And I've been working really hard to understand what the cost really will be for that event. So you'll see more of that finalized in the 2015 budget presentation later this year. Any con questions? Okay, so I said a ton of words about Drupal.org already. Lots of great stuff going on there. And I think lots of the metrics that are in red, those are metrics related to Drupal 8 release by and large. But do you guys have any other things you wanna cover on the Drupal.org side? Okay. I guess, I mean, the astronomically big jumps in those numbers would be related to Drupal 8, but I think, you know, given all the great work that's happening with Drupal.org, we should still see those numbers be increasing month over month. Yeah, that's right. As we improve the issue queues, for example, right, like we would expect that that would affect the contributors number, right? If it's easier to use the issue queues, contributors would go up, but they wouldn't go up by the amounts we had thought based on a Drupal 8 release in the same year. Correct. So given that we're not gonna have a Drupal 8 release this year barring an active deity, should we just readjust our targets for the rest of the year so that they're achievable? But, you know, we don't have to ignore the, because what I'm worried about is it's fine to ignore them because they're against astronomically unachievable targets right now, but there's still a chance that all of the work that we're doing on Drupal.org isn't actually impacting the way we need it to. And I don't want that to get lost against, well, we're never gonna hit 24,000. So let's not worry about it. You know what I mean? So, Right. That is a good thought. That is a good thought. Most of the time I'm like, I'm a don't, we set a measure, let's continue to measure against it and just understand what assumptions failed. But I hear what you're saying about not wanting to lose track of whether or not the small changes we're making now are having an impact. The problem I think Angie is that for any to understand that we would have to understand the data. We would have to have access to better data than we have for what's happened previously, right? So all we have for things like contributors, right? For example, is an aggregate number for an entire year, right? We aren't really able to break the numbers down more in a more granular way than that. For previous years, so it'd be hard to say if we're pushing it up or down. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, maybe I could get with Neil or Josh then because we can totally break those numbers down by monthly aggregates, right? I mean, it's all in the database. So we would be able to do that. I guess it's a question if I'm the only one who has that concern. I just want to get to the end of the year and then find out we just invested $300,000 or whatever it was in Drupal.org and our contribution numbers went up by 1%. Yeah, I mean, I think that's- Yeah, my understanding of the way the data is structured is that that number is only like once, if you haven't captured it in an ongoing monthly way, that number keeps getting rewritten in the database. Okay. So, but we can look at that if the board feels like it's worth reinvesting these goals or resetting them. And I might just be an oddball, so that's fine. By the way, Donna can't talk, so she asked if you could keep her up. Oh, sorry. I will go look at that, is Angie an oddball? I don't think that we necessarily need to reset our original goals, but it would be really good for us to at least think about what we believe is achievable given the fact that we're not gonna have a Drupal 8 release this year. And just use that as a metric, as a lands rather to how the numbers are lining up. I'd like to know whether we're doing better. But I tend to agree that once goals are set, we should probably stick with those goals, even though we know that they're not achievable. Might be useful to, in one of the future board meetings to talk a little bit more about this problem and what we think the cost of the problem and how we prioritize things relative to overcoming that. So we have more insight in sort of the roadmap. I don't remember if that was presented as a retreat to be honest, but sort of how we're thinking about fixing this thing, like obviously improving the issues, but there's also other things. And getting a little bit more insight in the thinking there could be more meaningful to me than resetting the numbers. Hello? The metrics. Hey, Donna. Oh, I'm here. Hello. Thank you. Okay. Yeah, Dries, I think that to just to address your point, last year as we put together the leadership plan, it lacked any kind of detail about what would happen on Drupal.org to drive some of these changes because no CTO. But to your point, yes, our next leadership plan and budget presentation should have more detail about the work that the tech team and community all undertake together on Drupal.org and how those affect the KPIs that are outlined for Drupal.org. That would be helpful because it's definitely a concern. Yeah, for sure. Anything else on these? Can I go back to a couple of points that I couldn't raise because I was on mute. One about the slider, and I just wanted to state that one of the reasons we did that was to acknowledge that whilst our membership fee is trivial for those of us in rich Western nations, it's substantial for other parts of the world. It's one. And the other one was a question around DrupalCon North America was, are we any closer to be able to announce dates for Los Angeles? Okay, so on the slider, yes, that was one of the reasons we did that with the slider. Unfortunately, the result is that it is mostly North Americans who are, I mean, American Americans who are dragging that slider down. So I feel like it's something, I want to be sensitive to that, but I don't think it's really, it's not serving that purpose. I understand that. So I think that, I just think that that needs to, you know, I felt that it just needed to be stated. It wasn't just like, oh, it was some crazy experiment. Oh yeah, I know. I'm just abandoning that rather than, you know, actually there was a reason for this and the reason is this and I feel that that should be stated. Yeah, I think any way that we reconfigure it will still involve a way for people to pay less based on, you know what I mean, so that anyone can choose to give what's right for them. The slider mechanism just may not be the right way. And then the second question was, are we closer to, yes, so we should have a final contract in our hands very shortly. So we've been going back and forth with the LA folks, you know, finalizing things. And the reason we just haven't announced dates is because we don't want to do that till the ink is dry on the contract, right? Yeah. No, I understand the reason. I just wanted to get a bit of an ETA because I've had a few people going, when is that? And so. Yeah, I have to, actually. Yeah, I get that. And I, yes, I understand that. I would say, I think it's soon, as soon as the answer, soon. Yeah. That's what I've been saying. I want to say that at my last, the last meetup that I went to, I was sort of hijacked by about 15 people around that. Okay. Do we have a month? Yes, May. May, okay, great. Which I understand is fall and not just spring. What? For Donna. Oh. Got it. No, autumn, we call it. Oh, sorry, autumn. What's for it? It's much lovelier. Thanks, Holly. That's useful. Okay. All right. So then at Drupalcon, see that, oh, you know, I think the rest of the things to talk about in here, sorry to scroll so quickly through this if you're looking online. The job board, we now said Drupalcon, often we've all started showing some folks different pieces of it. I think we're working on getting the final features in place and getting that out the door in the next couple of weeks. And it's definitely later than we anticipated, but not, you know, not crazy off schedule. So we are looking forward to getting that out there and we'll see, you know, we'll see how that impacts revenue. I've got some adjusted numbers for you in the budget discussion later. So the job board, we're excited to get that online. And then I just want to one more word. I already said some words about membership, but just again, just congratulate Joe and Liz for getting us above 3000 for the first time this year and that certificate campaign that they ran during Drupalcon and afterwards did really well. They had a goal which they exceeded for the, for memberships and renewals, which was or purchases and renewals, which was 600. So that was really great. And again, I'm just really excited to see them experimenting and building numbers to track against, you know, for future campaigns. So those are my highlights with all the words. There are some other numbers in there. So if you have questions about other areas of the update, I'd be happy to field those as well. Did you mean that these are your highlights in general or just this section? Nope, in general. Sorry, I'm all done is what I meant. I thought it was a couple of other sections. Yeah, there's a couple of other sections, but. All right, there's no questions. I think we can move on to the updates from the board committees. All right, let's get started with the revenue one. Oh, we'll use the order in the overview table at the top. I don't know who's presenting that. Revenue or finance? Whoa, hang on. Revenue. Revenue. Revenue, is Megan present? Probably muted when she's, sorry, hang on. Yep, I am here. There we go. Yay, Megan. Megan, do you wanna be our spokesperson? Do you want me to say anything? I'm not sure. Oh, sure. I'm sorry, can you repeat their question? It was a little quiet, just an update on revenue? Yeah, they're just looking for the regular committee update. Sure, right. So, what we've been doing is, we left Drupalcon Austin for the first time. We walked out of Drupalcon Austin with so much pre-sales, which is great for 2015. So, we're already almost at half a million in terms of Drupalcon LA and a great pipeline for Latin America. So, taking Austin, using it as a platform for pre-sales really worked well and set us up for a lot of success in 2015. Of course, we're keeping our eye on the ball for 2014 as well. Been working with Holly in terms of where we are and where we think we're gonna end up when we've made some adjustments. Things that I've been communicating in the past, but just to recap, the technology supporter program just requires a lot more dedicated time and a lot more of what we call hunting versus farming in sales. So, in other words, a massive, much more heavier lift than we anticipated. And that would jeopardize some revenues. And so, we did make a shift. We didn't, we're not shutting down this program, but we did just launch the hosting supporter program to compensate for the revenues and this has been a very popular program out the gate and we're already at 60% of goal there because we were doing some pre-sales kind of when we were testing the concept. We also are compensating that revenue by going over on the hosting listings on Drupal.org. And so far, we're moving well in that direction. We are testing out some new listings. We've been testing them for the last two months and we're ready to start selling those spots. We're really fortunate that we have Philip, I'm not gonna say his last name correctly. Philip is our new content manager on staff and he's gonna be working with me to make sure our web advertising and our listings have better traffic so that we can start scaling up the revenue opportunities there. And so, we're just pivoting around the tech supporter program so far is looking very positive. The other area that we're keeping an eye on in 2014 is the job board and we're looking to launch that in the next few weeks. Trying to get out of July with that launch and we did a lot of early promotion about this, talked about it a lot obviously at DrupalCon Austin. So there's been some nice buzz and good awareness. It's gonna be a heck of a lot more coming out the gate with the marketing department once this goes live. And so we did adjust some numbers around the job board just because we are just compensating for the timing of the release but we feel pretty strongly that the interest is there and we're kind of all, everything's like ready to go so we can start marketing and selling that product. And I can't think of anything else so then DrupalCon Amsterdam is also looking very strong especially from a sponsorship standpoint. And so we are at, as of yesterday, we're at 99% of goal on sponsorship and still pipeline and products to sell. So we'll be using that additional sponsorship revenue to help offset any overages on the expense side. So we're just kind of watching the overall health of the DrupalCon Amsterdam profitability and kind of pushing in all fronts to make sure that's gonna be where we anticipated from a profit standpoint. So I think I've covered all of the products. Do you have any questions? Do you wanna just give them a quick update on what we talked about at Austin? I can't remember, did we report back up for that? You did. That breakout of the committee? Okay, all right. We did and just an update on that is I'm actually in the process of scoping out those different opportunities now and getting it out to you, Jeff and the rest of the revenue committee. So that way I can make sure I captured all the ideas, flesh them out enough and then we can start even testing them. So I definitely, I'm starting to move on those concepts already. Yeah, okay, cool. Any questions on that? The next one is the governance committee. I guess I could give a quick update on that. So we have, we met in Austin and we haven't met since and actually we have a bigger session or section I guess later in this meeting around some of the changes that came out of or proposed changes that came out of that meeting. So maybe we can skip over those for now and then circle back later. Finance on those first questions. So we haven't met either. The May financials were emailed around to the committee members on July 1st. We haven't seen Junior as Holly mentioned. We'll see those soon. We decided to not meet on July the 4th and instead Holly and I are working are going to work on a couple of policies that the committee is gonna review at our August committee meeting. One of them is a succession plan for ED and the other is an investment policy and foreign currency policy. So those are the two things where I guess I'm gonna be working on and then the committee is gonna be looking at in August otherwise not much to report. Any questions? Is our next meeting on Friday? No, what are our next meeting be? In August, we've decided to skip July. We're totally skipping the month. I knew we were skipping that day. I just didn't know we were skipping the month. Summer break. We need to look at these statements then or sorry, the May statements. Yeah, and you'll get June early next week. Okay. And we can review on August 15th at our next regularly scheduled finance committee meeting. Okay, cool. All right, the executive committee we haven't met. We have no update that brings us to the marketing committee. Yeah, this is Joe Saylor. The unfortunately, the main update is that our current marketing chair, Betsy Endsley has left her position at Think Shout and is also vacating her position as chair of the marketing committee. So we'll have to go back and try to identify a new marketing committee chair. So I'll be working on that effective immediately. So she did have a few initiatives in progress and I'll continue moving those forward, but Betsy has moved on. So onward. We know she's in a better place, right? I think she's moving to the East Coast. Beyond that, I'm not sure what her plans are. I should come back to DC. Oh really? Okay. One thing I forgot to mention, sorry, as the executive committee, while we didn't formally meet in a meeting, we did email conversations around the incident with Morton. And I believe you guys are up to speed on that and we can definitely talk more about that in the executive session. That's the correction, I guess, on my end. All right, with that, I think we should move on to some updates around the board governance. We met a Drupal con Austin, the governance committee, which is Matthew and Denise. Amir wasn't there. Myself was there as well and Holly also participated. So did Donna- I don't know who's gonna present. Is it Matthew? Are you gonna present? Yeah, I'll present. Donna participated too, which was great. She participated as well. Apologize. As election A alumni. Yeah. It was super, super good to have that context. So thank you very much for that. No worries. Let's go on to the second slide. Actually, let's go through the second and onto the third slide, if we could. We might, hang on. Okay. Okay, so we talked about community elected board seats and part of the conversation around it really was fit. And one of the observations of the committee is that we don't really have problems finding candidates. We usually have 13, 14, 15 people who appear to be interested in running for the board, but the pool of individuals is largely in tested. One of the things that we talked about was the fact that in the last election, there were really only two recognizable candidates. And that poses a challenge. There's often no significant track record around those folks in terms of participation in the community. And there's a little sense that the candidates would be a good or a bad fit culturally. All of these are a bit of a risk. So we talked about pre-qualifying candidates a little bit. Right now, anybody can run. Anybody who, in fact, I don't think that we even have rules around whether you're on D.O. Basically, anybody can get on the internet and jump onto one of those forms and self-nominate themselves regardless of their time with community or not. So we started exploring limiting those who could run with a simple rule. To run, you must have shown a desire to serve by sitting on one of the public board committees. We feel like there's a lot of different committees that people could sit on and participate with. That shouldn't be a huge barrier to those who are truly interested in making this kind of commitment to the association. So let's go on to the next slide. Can I just speak to that particular issue, Matthew? Sure. I always part the conversation, but I do want to raise that participating in those committees have some barriers. You have to know about them. You have to be in the right time zone and being part of it. You sort of have to find your way onto the inside club to participate. They're not really super transparent. So I think if we're going to make that kind of rule that we also need to put some effort into communicating that they exist and that that is a pathway. Otherwise, I think we're in danger of becoming of it being too much of an insider's club. That point is very well taken. Yeah, I agree. All right, so that's the first sort of thing that we'll talk about in just a few minutes. The second thing was the idea of expanding the number of community seats. We briefly discussed the possibility of increasing the number of elected positions. There are a few issues around that. Again, part of it is cultural, the number of fits that we could reasonably hope for, hope for in a given election period is one of those issues. We know that if we get the wrong person elected to the board, that could be challenging. And what that really means is that we need to actively recruit, I think, folks to run for the election. We need to be thinking very hard, just like we do for appointed members. We need to be thinking very hard around the kinds of people that we'd like to have run that would fill voids that we've got and also that would fit within the culture that I think we have currently in the board. If an elected member doesn't fit well, we can mitigate this by a provisional period. And I'll talk about the provisional period in just a few minutes. And I think at this point, we're gonna open this up for a discussion around these two concepts. One, having a pre-qualification for community candidates and number two, expanding the number of community seats. This is Angie, I guess, I totally understand all the reasons we wanna do that, but to me, it's sort of this idea of pre-qualifying the candidate, especially by a process of committees that we own. To me, it sort of changes the nature of the goals of those community elected board seats, which is basically giving control directly to the community over what the board does. Because the cynical way to view that is like, why don't we just abandon community elected board seats and just appoint everyone? Because obviously, not any random yahoo can just show up to, you know, governance committee meetings, right? Like, they would have to like be approved by the existing governance committee to come on board. Exactly, exactly. So it's just a roundabout approval process at that point. And then I think you've hit on all the challenges though, which is why I'm nervous to expand the number of community elected seats because like plus one to everything on slide, like three, you know? And it would just expand that again. I think actively recruiting fits to run, that's something we should be doing regardless of the number of seats. I agree with that. Yeah, I would say I'm not in favor of pre-qualifying by sitting on a committee that we have control over, that kind of enjoyment process, I think doesn't feel right, doesn't feel like why we created those positions. I'm personally very comfortable with the two community representatives, particularly now that they have two year terms and then they alternate each year. I actually would like to see that play out before making any adjustments to the number of community seats. Hiya, hiya. Hi there, this is Denise. So the pre-qualification by, well, let's say the community participation requirement works very well for Apache as an example. It's effectively impossible to become a Apache board member without having done work in the project other than a single project that you care about, but broader work and the committees are functional, they do things. Like manage the incubator or manage infrastructure, or they have other uses. And it's well understood that that's how you gain visibility that leads to board participation. And there doesn't seem to be any geographical barrier to entry because I've seen plenty of people use that method from parts of the world that aren't North America, even though North America is where everything's hosted. So I have seen it work for what it's worth. Denise, is that participation broader than just having our board commit, because I think this proposal is that it has to be a board committee and that's a very small, a very sort of narrow, pre-qualifying criteria, whereas the Apache projects are much more expansive, I would have thought. Yeah, Denise, could you clarify? Is it just participation in one of the Apache like incubator projects as a developer, as a UX person, as a project manager, anything? Or is it specifically working with the Apache software? No, that is not enough. That is not enough. You have to have done some work with the foundation. So that's also how you gain membership for what it's worth. And they have tens of thousands of developers working on a single project, and some handful of developers working on more than one project, maybe even achieving leadership in that one project. But that's not considered a good measure of whether they're gonna be an asset to the foundation and larger movement. And so the things that are considered good measures of that are working on projects that are shared across all of the areas like infrastructure or legal is another one, or at one time there was a liaison to everything it had to do with Sun and Java, that was one of them, because that spanned a whole area, right? So it's pretty clear, and they don't have the explicit, these are board-run project areas, more like these are areas that are common enough that people across the foundation will have experience of you in a leadership position. And I have a better idea of how you would fit in on the board, which is really what we're looking for. So it sounds to me like our real issue is surfacing, maybe also making it easier to participate. The OSI's using this as well, by the way. They've been doing open nominations because they were restocking, but now they're switching to, you have to have served on one of our committees so that we have some idea of what you'd like to work with for the same reason that we wanted to do it. I think the concern I have is that there's very few places where they could serve. I think marketing committee is one of them, a nominating committee is another, but even that I think we restrict to the advisory committee for the most part, if they're not a board member. And then there's the working groups, we chartered three of them, but then there's a couple that are chartered by Drees directly, that's about it. And it's a lot of the same usual suspects. I think we've noted that we had an opportunity, like we have an opportunity when we're ready to take advantage of it, to have more committees with people on them. And then once we have that established, I think it makes a lot of sense to use that as the pool, just I think we're at right now, I'm concerned about how it would work very well. Maybe we need to decouple sort of how people can qualify and focus on the notion of, we can think of other ways for people to qualify, whether it's helping with Drupalcon or something. These are also things which could potentially work as mechanisms to qualify. Imagine a world where we have different ways, enough different ways to get people involved. Are we comfortable with the idea of pre-qualifying? Well, I think the whole idea is to set them up for success because we haven't had a ton of success in our program to include community seats, but obviously community seats are important. So we're trying to come up with ways to make sure that those candidates have the best likelihood of being successful so that we minimize feelings, hard feelings when it doesn't work out. I guess like, yeah, I think the pre-qualifying makes sense for a number of reasons. My problem is like, let's say you do all that, right? Like you pre-qualify, you do all the work to you sat on the marketing committee for six months, but because you're on the marketing committee, none of the developers know who you are. And so they see you sitting up there and guess more than you're living up for more than you. You know what I mean? It seems like pre-qualifying is something that we would do for our England program. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, Janice, I'm just going to mute this back up. Come on, mute yourself. I think you have a lot of background going on. Thank you. Could you repeat that, Ange? I didn't hear half of what you said. Yeah, I mean, my only concern is that, like, judging by how community elections have gone, and this is pretty much a general rule that I've extrapolated, whoever has the most Twitter followers wins every single time. So my concern is that when we pre-qualify people in this fashion, what we would probably end up with is either a situation where we have someone with a lot of Twitter followers and two other people with very little Twitter followers, especially if it's board committees, because these are even non-technical things, like serving on the marketing committee or whatever. They're going to be doing all this work to pre-qualify for essentially no reason, because they're never going to win an election. And the second thing is that, ah, shoot, I had another point. It doesn't matter. But gosh, darn it. I hate it when I do that. I have no idea. So, Ange, I'm going to counter that with a statement, a personal statement. I put myself up both when the association was a Belgian nonprofit and also after the association became a U.S. nonprofit. And I believe that I put myself into the fray five or six times. I think that there are, I think that if we're engaged in some level of pre-qualification and we know that there's an X number of board seats, let's say it's two for the time being, but maybe in the future it's more than two. But let's say that it's two and they're staggered. And let's say that you're going up against a Morton one year who has tons of Twitter followers. You're not going to be going up against Morton the next year, right? I don't know that that, I'm not sure that that really should, I feel like that that shouldn't be something that we decide is a motivator against. Figuring out whether somebody is going to be a good fit or not. I think when we take a look at historically, the community members who've come on to the board, we've had mixed, really mixed, mixed. It's been a diverse crowd. Yeah, and I personally, I'd love if we're in a position where we know somebody is highly committed, they're going to work hard. They're going to be tired at the end of their term. They worked their tails off to help the association move its agenda forward. And it's something that they want to do. I think that I'm not sure that a lot of people who run really understand what it is that they're, what they're getting themselves into. Some people I believe do it out of the idea that it would just be something fun to do, right? So I don't know. Well, what I'm getting at Matthew is not anything about the candidates. I'm getting at the voting pool. The voting pool has no idea what the hell you did on the marketing committee because they don't care about the marketing committee. Yeah. And so they're either going to vote for the person they know the best or they're not going to vote because they see a bunch of people up there they don't know. That's what I believe would happen. And so I guess that's my concern with pre-qualifying for elected seats because the whole point of elected seats is a popularity contest. And, you know, you're either going to vote for the person you know or you're going to vote for no one, I think is what most people do. I think you have the problem where whoever sits in that seat for two years is the kind of not even by just the handful of people that decide it right now, but a micro handful where it's like literally like 20 votes might decide, you know, who wins. I don't know. And that's my concern anyway. I think pre-qualifying makes a lot of sense for people we're going to appoint for like our board, but the community elected just feels like a weird fit. But that's interesting to me say that it works well in all the time. And those are elected seats as well. Yeah, all their seats are elected. So they're effectively all community seats. In the interest of time, I think, Matthew and the rest of the governance committee, I think you get some useful feedback on that, I think. I don't know if you guys want to regroup about that and go back to, you know, maybe come back with a variance of the proposal or something. But I think in the interest of time, we're an hour into this meeting and we have to, you know, we have to tackle a couple of other topics here and then switch to the executive session. Maybe we should take that input. Maybe we can take it offline and come back with either the same proposal or a different proposal. But I'll leave it up to you guys. I would love to have a follow-up meeting and digest the pros and the cons that people brought forth. Maybe I think that works for me as well. Okay. So the next, the next section really has to do with, again, with, with fit. We, the committee discussed having a provisional period where the, where a board member is on, that is on boarded would have a provisional period that would last a year. And after that period is complete, both the current sitting board and the new board member would evaluate if the fit is right. I think that the, the goal in that is to, is to put us in a, in a place where, where, there's an easy out if, if the fit doesn't feel right on either side of the, side of the fence, so to speak. And we'll talk about that. We'll open that up to discussion in just a minute. The second thing that we talked about was, was term limits. So many boards have term limits. These term limits are designed to do quite a few things. One, the biggest thing is to reduce burnout. Typically, if a, if a board member has been known on a board for six to nine years, they are tired. If they've been, been doing their jobs effectively. However, there's often a sense of ownership. There's a sense of guilt. If you're, if you, if you say that you need a break, and it can be really difficult for a board member to give themselves the permission to just take a break. Limiting terms sort of takes that out of their hands and, and allows that allows that, that sort of recharging period to occur. Typically in these cases, after suitable time period is passed, veteran board members can cycle back onto the board. The, the idea here is that we can also promote positive turnover. So new ideas can infuse the organization. What boards need in expertise is not static. It changes over time. Term limits allow for easy trans transition for these kinds of things. And I think it's important to note that when a board member does rotate off, it doesn't mean that they're saying goodbye. Often, often boards will use these people in committees and auxiliary boards to keep that expertise in place, but reduce the sort of general burden on, on that individual. One other, one other really good reason for limiting terms is to, is to spread institutional memory across many, many people, not just a few or worse single person, that institutional memory is really, really critical for the health of the organization. So we propose that we, we set limits at six consecutive years with one year off between terms, minimum year between terms. So somebody could sit for six years. Go, rotate offer for a year, sit for another six years if they wanted. So what we'd like to do is, is open this up to discussion real quick. And then if people feel like this is generally an okay idea, a vote to amend the bylaws. I'm probably not going to support voting on it today since we're not really going to get enough time to talk about it. But I do want to point out that there actually are already term limits in there. If you have it in your slide, folks who are listening may not be able to see it. It's four consecutive terms. And I think what I'd like to see incorporated in this, because we actually do have several people on the board who are filling partial terms. And that's not accounted for here. So usually you would say, can they serve two, three year terms on their own in addition to filling a year or two in a partial term? Or how does that actually play out? That's the reason why when we drafted it, four was nobody in their right mind is going to serve four terms. So we just left it and said, okay, this is the max amount of time that you could serve in the board. But if you're going to go ahead and go this route, which I'm not going to comment on, I do think it needs to say the maximum number of years and account for partial terms. I do think that it needs to account for partials. And I think in our conversation of modeling the fact that there's a bunch of people coming up for election in a minute here. And for instance, I just served a two year term. And so if the maximum is six, then I wouldn't be able to serve again as it just needs to be part of the consideration. But there's an example of the partial terms. I think what we said was two complete terms for the sitting board, or in other words, who grandfathered the board in whatever full term they're in now is a full term. There'll be one, there'll be a full term, now they'll get to have two full terms. That's all. That's the end of the week. I think, Denise. Oh, here I was going to restart my computer. Everybody else heard that too, huh? I think what she was saying was that it needs to be changed so that it's two full terms in addition to any amount of partial terms so for no more than eight consecutive years. Is I think what she was saying. But I also heard robots. I wrote down in a minute. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, I think, I think that what you should, I think, I think that you, Tiffany, you, you, you interpreted the robot and the, and the white noise correctly. Do we want to, do we want to have additional, additional conversation or do, do we want to table this until then the next, next, next board meeting? Yeah, and I'm not, I'm also not clear with some of the wording. I need to give it some more thought about, I think we need to clarify that terms commencing with the, the first class of 2011, that wording seems a little confusing or awkward to me. Because I think what you mean is in the newly reconstituted board, then, so starting with that first class that was in 2011, that makes sense to me, the November 1st, 2011. So I probably put, you know, that date in there, because we all started our terms at the same time then. Although Dree's Angie and I have terms that predated that. Right. And I think you're excluding those or if I'm reading this correctly. But I think there's some, some really good feedback. I think, I mean, I don't want to speak for others, but I personally think there's some good ideas. And like forcing a one year break, for example. So maybe you guys can go to work a little bit more and then we'll talk about it more at the next meeting. Yeah, I think that that's, that's Mark. Okay. And then if you skip through the last, the next slide to the last slide. We've tried, we, we, it was indicated in today's, today's, today's meeting that we were going to have a three minute update for activities for each committee. Clearly the, the, the second bullet sort of happened. The first bullet, I don't think did happen. So what we'd like to do is make sure that each committee meet at least once a month. And, and, and I think that that probably ought to fall to the, to the committee chair to, to organize and make sure that those meetings happen. Really? Because I'm not sure that like, I'm not sure that governance needs to meet once a month for the whole year. Like I think I'm okay with setting some sort of minimum, but 12 meetings of, of the governance committee or 12 meetings of the nominating committee, like a monthly meeting of the nominating committee. I'm not sure that's effective use of people's time, especially since nominating meets more frequently once it, you know, once they're actually doing the nominations. I do think that there's value. Let me just counter that for a second. One of the things that came up in our, in our, in our self-evaluation is that we don't communicate. And, and, and it was, you know, it was indicated on multiple occasions, rather by multiple people that, that between board meetings, there's very little communication with some board members with, with the, with the body at large. I don't think the meeting needs to be very long. It can, it could, could literally be a Skype, a Skype chat or an IRC chat that says, Hey, is there anything for us to discuss? And if it's no, then move on with your day. But I do think that not setting meetings is going to, is going to set us up to not have meetings, period. Like nothing will change. I personally don't like those kind of, you know, a meeting that's disrespectful of my time, you know, we all have very, very busy and sort of have a meeting that I have to block on my calendar to then show up to the meeting and have there be no agenda that, that doesn't sit very well with me. So the agenda could be set out, sent out in advance that simply says, Hey, is there anything that people need to talk about? And if they don't, then you don't have the meeting. But the point is we're not, we're not even doing that. This is Samir. Can you guys hear me? Yeah. So yeah, I think, you know, the, the, the frequency of the meeting should be set based on the task at hand, rather than just having it set on a schedule. Because of this, this problem, which is, okay, so we set a meeting every month and then we have nothing to do. That said, of course, you know, unless we have something to discuss, there's no point in having meetings. So I think we need to address that issue first, which is, you know, like for instance, the nominating, not nominating committee will not have anything to do other than, you know, during the duration when we are looking for people. So I would rather have the agenda drive the schedule than the other way around. And I'm totally cool with that, but I do think that once a month, we ought to be saying, is there, are there any agenda items? Do we need to, do we need to meet? Well, so for me, that, that just happened, right? We just had, this is a new part of a board meeting and apparently it's going to be a standing part of the board meeting that every month there's going to be a three minute update from each committee. And I think that's the point at which the rest of the board could say, hey, nominating committee, it's August, we should probably get on elections and they go, oh, you're right. And then, and then the next month they will have something to talk about and they will meet in a month. And I think that's perfectly reasonable. Okay. So that to me is the first of, or the second of those, but not the first. So the meet once per month is, we're all going to meet once per month. People who are on committees are going to give an update, if any. And if there's more that needs to be done there, the rest of the board has the opportunity at the public board meeting to raise it. And then we get to what Shamiya said, which is, you know, like having the agenda drive the schedule. It sounds like there's not, because of the nature of the committees, there isn't a hard and fast rule, Matthew. So I think that the overall goal is meet regularly and appropriately. But it doesn't necessarily make sense for them all to meet monthly, especially if they have that board check in as Angie has just noted. So I think we have to find the middle ground on this one. All right. Cool. Same thing as with the other points, I think. You know, good feedback. Let's think about it and, you know, let's see what the government's committee comes back with. Any other topics any of you want to raise before we move to the executive session? All right. Well, thank you for this meeting. Thanks for attending. Thanks for working on this as well, Matthew, and the rest of the government committee. Let's regroup on the other line for the executive session.