If we want to, we can structure the market differently. Inequality that we get from the market is a result of the way we structure the policy decisions. And what I want to argue is that we could have different policy decisions to structure the market differently and produce outcomes that are more equal. First off, I want to say that we have to learn how to slice and dice big proposals into manageable chunks, of which might be doable, and at the end of the day get us where we want to be. Second point, if you could do something at a local level, you could do something at the state level, do it. And if it's successful, other states, other cities will do it, and then ideally it will be done nationally. Third, private foundations can be useful. You do have foundations that are committed to progressive policies in different areas. We should figure out how to use them effectively. Last point, think like a Republican or a conservative, however you want to put it. The other side's been very effective in designing piecemeal policies that have advanced conservative genders, undermined institutions that we might support. So, for example, Medicare, they've adopted changes to Medicare that have gone a long way towards undermining the purpose of the program. We could point to the periods of big change in the United States in the last century. The New Deal and the Great Society stand out. The New Deal, of course, came about in the Great Depression.  We also had a militant labor movement, and those are not sort of reproducible conditions. First of all, we don't really want to see a Great Depression, so arguing that we need a Great Depression have changed. That's not a really good story. Militant labor movement, that would be great. I mean, if we had millions, tens of millions of people looking to organize, and they're very militant about that, that would be fantastic. But that doesn't just come out of the air. So there were very specific circumstances that gave us the political force to implement the New Deal policies similarly with the Great Society. The Democrats had super majorities in 64-66 coming in the wake of John F. Kennedy's assassination. And it gave the Democrats, gave progressives a rare opportunity to implement changes that we really haven't seen since. So it's just not realistic to think that we're going to have a political situation where you could implement big progressive changes all at once. That's my argument for why we need to think piecemeal, how we can construct big policies from a lot of smaller, more incremental moves. Okay, so just to take a couple examples, Medicare for All. There's certainly been a lot of talk, a lot of progressives have been pushing for a universal Medicare program for several decades. We're not about to get Congress to pass a Medicare for All program. But what we reasonably hope to do is interim steps. This will seem trivial to people. I know I've raised it with people and it seems trivial. Lower the Medicare age to 64, okay? It's 65 now, lower it to 64. All right, that might not seem like a big deal. But to my view, it is a big deal for two reasons. One is you will directly help people. So for a lot of people who are of health issues, they might not get health care insurance to their employer. The idea of qualifying for Medicare a year earlier will mean a lot. But the other and more important part of this story is, well, if you could lower it to 64 and that works, people will say, well, why don't we lower it to 63? Why don't we lower it to 62? Why don't we lower it to 60? Get a foot in the door. And it will also have the benefit that we'll see problems. Inevitably, there will be problems. So if we're tomorrow to say, okay, let's have universal Medicare, well, there will be problems. I'll guarantee that. If we lower it to 60, there'd be problems. So if we lower it to 64, we'll minimize the size of those problems. We'll know what they are. And that means we'll have a more open door. If a year or two, three years out, we want to lower it to 62 or 60. So it's a really, really big first step. I think it's something that's doable and it gets us on the path to where we want to be. Second, a public option buy-in. So again, there's been a lot of talk about this over the years. This isn't wholly transforming the system. It means allowing people to buy into Medicare. Now there's other issues we have to bring down the cost of healthcare more generally because the idea of paying for the current healthcare system through Medicare isn't very feasible. But the point is if we're looking to get to some sort of universal Medicare program, we have to think of incremental ways to do it. Free market drugs, that's another story. We could have drugs sold in a free market without patent or related protection. So they could all be cheap. Okay, well, we're not going to get there all at once. But what you could look to do is try and do it in specific areas. So say you did it for diabetes, researching new diabetes drugs, treatments, cancer drugs, treatments. You may be able to get the funding. It wouldn't be that much additional funding that would be needed to do that. And then it would offer an opportunity where you could set an example. So imagine that you had a great breakthrough, you had a new cancer drug, and it was selling for $300 for a year's treatment instead of $300,000 for a year treatment. That would be a great example. It would show the benefits of direct public funding, open source research, and generic pricing for drugs the day they came on the market. So if we could do that for diabetes or we could do that for cancer, then people will say, well, why don't we do this for heart disease? Why don't we do it for other areas? Get a foot in the door. The last point along these lines, price controls on patented drugs. The United States is the only country that we, on the one hand, give drug companies a monopoly. People say, you're interfering with the free market. We have a monopoly. And then we say you could charge whatever you want. Other countries, they have patents as well, but they don't tell the drug companies they could charge whatever they want. They negotiate a price. They set a price. That's a good thing to do. So again, it gets people with the idea that we don't have to pay ridiculously high prices for drugs. And also it fits well with the idea of more public funding for the research because the drug companies, if they have lower prices, they have less money for research, you go, fine, we don't need you to pay for research. We're going to pay for the research. There are policies that go really well together. And of course the idea of controlling drug prices, that has law support and even some bipartisan support. So that's not a far out idea. Okay, policies being implemented at the state or local level, long history of this, unemployment insurance, it was experimented with at the state level for many years before eventually it was adopted at the federal level. You had 40-hour work week laws being passed in many states before you had the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1937, which set up a national policy. Whereas 40-hour work week and people got overtime, premium pay, if they worked more than 40 hours a week. You had minimum wage laws in many states before you had the federal minimum wage. But currently we have many states and many cities that have raised their minimum wages well above the national minimum wage. In some cases double the national minimum wage. And again, it provides a great example that you could have a $15 an hour minimum wage in California, New York, other places. And in pretty much all cases there's been a lot of research. It hasn't led to large scale unemployment. So you're both directly helping people with these policies, but also setting the example. So again, it's not that the other states will sit down and go, oh yeah, you're right, or get it passed at the federal level. But that's a very, very powerful argument. Okay, states could take the lead in lowering drug prices and promoting free market drugs. Well, you have states, certainly the larger ones, a state like California, they could actually pay for a lot of research. So to my view a big mistake, and a lot of people I think are thinking along these lines is you might have California pay for more research, and then they would let private companies, private individuals own the patents, and then sell the drugs at the same price as everyone else. That would be, to my view, a very bad policy because you're basically paying them twice. We've done that sometimes. But if you had a case where California paid for the development of a cancer drug, and at least for the people in California, made it available as a cheap generic, that would be really a great model for the country. And a great model for extending it even in California. Also states can lower drug prices. Some states, even my state of Utah, its public employee health system pays people to go to Mexico to get drugs at lower prices. You wouldn't do that for every drug, but when you're talking about drugs that cost tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, a trip across the border might well be worth it. So these are steps that can be done at the state, local level, and can be great examples. They teach people in addition to directly saving money. Cities could experiment with creative work tax credits, or journalism, because again, this has been a big issue with the decline of newspapers. There's a lot of proposals to have tax credits or some sort of system of subsidizing journalism at either the state or even local level. That's something that can be done at a state, local level, doesn't require a huge amount of money, but it could have a big impact in both in increasing the availability, whether it's creative work more generally or journalism more narrowly, increasing the availability there and setting an example for other states. And another area states can innovate in is the corporate income tax. We have an incredibly inefficient wasteful corporate income tax system. That's not a secret. We have to find massive ways to avoid or outright evade the corporate income tax as it is. My proposal along these lines has always been to tax companies based on the return to shareholders, because that's what they care about at the end of the day. You just have to look in the paper and you can see what the shareholders got by way of dividends and their capital gains over the year. States could experiment with that. And again, it would both be efficient, beneficial to a state that had a corporate income tax to make it as simple as possible. That would also be a great example for other states and ideally at some point the federal government. There are many, many areas where states and in many cases even cities could experiment with innovative progressive policies that offer both immediate benefit for their residents but also set an example for other states and in principle at the end of the day the federal government. Private foundations have all sorts of different agendas but many are ostensibly committed to progressive policies enhancing progressive cause, progressive equality and we should try and take advantage of that. Try to get their funding going for productive purposes. You could get the money to finance some open source drug research at least in principle from a private foundation because the amount of money involved isn't necessarily massive, so a few billion dollars of research for cancer, a particular type of cancer. That's not in principle an undueable task for a major foundation or set of foundations if it were the case that their research proved successful, had a new drug developed and it was an effective treatment it sold for a few hundred dollars rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars it would set a really powerful example. So again, there are foundations that have money that are committed to improving public health committed to equality that's the sort of thing that in principle could have a very, very big impact and I'll just mention the Gates Foundation is going the exact opposite direction Bill Gates is not a secret he made his money off of patent and copyright monopolies and they've been very conscious to resist any efforts at open source research. They're about protecting patents and to my view they've been a very, very poor influence in the public health arena particularly in the developing world because of that. Also part of the story when we think of how private foundations could be more effective in promoting progressive change they could partner with state and local governments so I was just talking about the idea of a creative or tax credit or make it a journalism tax credit again there are foundations that are committed to supporting journalism having more diversity of voices in our public debates you could have a tax credit put in place at either the state or local level where much of the funding came from a foundation that claims this is their interest this is their concern so again we're not talking about huge amounts of money say 25-50 million that could go very, very far for providing for a tax credit that could be put in place in a large state, a mid-sized state that could have a very big impact on the journalism that's produced there if that's the issue we're talking about so if we need 50 million dollars to have a journalism tax credit in Illinois well if you can get 25 million of that from a foundation that cares about promoting journalism then you've made it that much easier in the state of Illinois to raise the other 25 million from tax revenue so again think how we could partner state and local governments with private foundations that ostensibly are committed to the same cause the same purpose okay the last point thinking like a republican thinking like conservative the conservatives have been very effective in finding ways to get the camel's nose into the tent and they've been on top of things Medicare Advantage referred to that earlier that was a really, really big deal that dates back to the Reagan years what they did is allow private insurers in effect into the Medicare program and it was quite deliberately designed to undermine the program so people who don't have major health conditions they're not seeing all sorts of different doctors all the time very often Medicare Advantage will actually be a better program so this is the story of adverse selection that fragment the market so rather than having everyone in the same Medicare pool what they're trying to do is say okay we're going to have an option that's more attractive for people in good health that makes the expenses of the traditional Medicare pool that much harder to meet so you can envision a story where enough people go into Medicare Advantage that the traditional program either deteriorates in quality or just ends up be very, very expensive on a per person basis as it stands now close to 40% of new beneficiaries opt for Medicare Advantage and that's largely because it's a better deal for many of them a lot of it is probably because people don't really understand the issues because who wants to read through insurance pamphlets but in any case they managed to get a very large share of current and new enrollees in Medicare and you can envision a point where the traditional program really has a hard time making ends meet 401k plans you know define benefit contribution plans these came into existence in the late 70s they were a clause in the tax code that I suspect no one in congress understood what they were doing but in any case these have largely eliminated traditional defined benefit pensions so if you get back to the 70s you had around 40% of the workforce had a traditional defined benefit pension those are almost gone you sell them in the public sector but in the private sector there's very few private companies that still offer traditional defined benefit pension a lot of people 401ks and of course it's not better than nothing but for most people they would almost certainly prefer saying okay I'm getting a thousand fifteen hundred two thousand a month from my pension I'm going to have that as long as I live as opposed to a 401k plan that often times people don't put enough money in they often have high expenses and again those don't typically give you an annuity that guarantees you money through your lifetime so if you happen to live a very long life which most of us probably want to do you might find that the money in your 401k is really good for you die so defined benefit pension plans have a lot of advantage but for companies 401ks are much easier they don't carry the same risk basically they dump it off on their workers so from the standpoint of people who don't like defined benefit pension plans they'd rather have workers take the risk than the company 401ks were really great and they were very very successful but I give the conservatives a lot of credit for designing ways in which you can have a piecemeal and never have to confront them head on and as I say they thought that way we should think that way one way to reverse their movement into 401ks IRAs give low cost public plans and a number of states have taken steps in this direction so you could take advantage of the fact that the states already have public employee retirement plans piggyback on those and offer the people working for private the option to join those plans and pay much lower administrative cost than workers currently pay with a 401k or an IRA you could also offer annuities which you don't generally have with a 401k or IRA so that's an option could be done at the state level and as I say several states have looked to do that public option Medicare plan again I mentioned that earlier same sort of story so if you say oh you know we don't want to get rid of private insurance we just want to give people an option for private insurance okay we could adopt their same terminology and use it to undermine private insurers rather than having them use private insurers to undermine Medicare okay last point just basic principles markets a tool we should think of the market like the wheel it doesn't make sense to say the wheel is bad you know people can be run over by a car and that's bad but the wheel isn't bad okay so what we have to do is figure out how the market works how we could structure it how we like the rich have done that they structure the market to benefit themselves we have to flip that around and structure a market so that it leads to greater equality same story with corporations corporations exist to make money so sometimes people talk about greedy corporations I think that's almost definitional that's why the corporations there it's there to make money so that's not a secret and again is that good is that bad well it's our job to make sure that there are productive ways so they can make money producing clean energy to my view that's a good thing they can make money producing good affordable housing to my view that's a good thing it's our job to make sure the ways in which they make money are serving social ends we don't do a very good job of that now you're welcome to not like corporations but they're there to make money so saying that they make money they're profitable they're greedy that's aside the point of course they do about what the market is what the institutions are and try to structure them to serve progressive ends rather than the answer


Ukraine gets its first Patriot Defense System and missiles from Germany. Germany delivered Patriot Air Defense System to Ukraine. This is reported on the website of the German government, where the updated list of delivered military support has been published. The list includes, in particular, the Patriot System, 16 Zetros trucks, and two border protection vehicles. It should be noted that the German side reports on the transfer of weapons when they are already in the territory of Ukraine and are delivered to the place of deployment. As reported, Germany sent Leopard 2S-6 tanks, Martyr IFVs, and mine-clearing tanks to Ukraine. The United States has also agreed to deliver a MIM-104 Patriot Air Defense System. However, on April 18, the Pentagon again refused to say whether or not the system had been delivered. US officials recently confirmed that the Ukrainian air defense troops training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, had completed their training and left for Europe. However, the US officials refrained from disclosing the delivery timeline of the MIM-104 Patriot Air Defense System that the US has pledged to send to Ukraine. The Ukrainian military aims to strengthen its missile-interception capabilities in anticipation of a spring counter-offensive to reclaim Russian-occupied territories.


Hello everyone, welcome to future of mentoring. We're here at Drupal Khan Barcelona in the year of 2015, which will become very important later. I'm here with Davide Hernandez-Ruiz. I'm Alina McKenzie, and this is Kathy Thays. For those of you who are not familiar with the format of a core conversation, we're going to be up here for maybe 20, 25 minutes or so, and with that, we're going to have an open mic afternoon where we all can converse about the future of mentoring. This presentation is already online, so if you want to follow along on your device, you can do so at bit.ly-future-mentoring. That's bit.ly-future-mentoring. And our speaker notes are also there, so if you want to take a sneak peek at that, you're more than welcome. This presentation is done in reveal.js, and it's available on GitHub, so if you want to give this presentation yourself, you're welcome to clone our repo. We also have a Google Doc for collaborative note-taking. It is located at bit.ly-future-mentoring-notes. That's bit.ly-future-mentoring-notes. And I would like to kindly ask one volunteer who loves taking notes and is ready to be our official volunteer note-taker. If you can please raise your hand. Thank you. Go ahead and put your name in the spot of glory on the dock as the volunteer note-taker. And we would like to ask you to take notes during the Q&A, especially. Hello, I am David Hernandez. I'm a Drupal developer with more than six years of experience. I'm also the local organizer of my local group. I'm part of the Spanish community, not too far from here. I'm also been mentoring for at least three Drupal cons in a few more local events. I'm Alina Mackenzie. I am originally from Poland. Right now I'm based in Chicago. I'm a system administrator and web developer there. I've been working with Drupal for about four years since Drupal 7. I've been involved with the community for about two years. And I'm a mentor. I'm Kathy Thays. I'm Yassiti online. I started with Drupal nine and a half years ago and have been a mentor probably at least since Portland. I work at Black Mesh, and it's my full-time job to do mentoring and contribute to CORD. I don't know. 2013? Okay. So we are going to follow a little bit of history. So past, you are not defined by your past. You are prepared by your past. So I'm going to talk about where we are going starting from the very beginning. And we must acknowledge where we have been and where we are now. So this story starts at 2011. Drupal.org gets a new feature that allows the issue summaries to be editable. Then there was also an initiative to get as many issues to get updated. That initiative was started by XGM. Yes, say hi. Also, we start doing the IRC office hours. An initiative started by Katz, with the help with XGM again. And they started doing weekly meetings on IRC. At the beginning, it was easy to get in only. Also, the needs tags were starting to get used and getting popularized. The office hours helped to standardize all these usage of tags. We started using the spreadsheets to track attendance and skill levels to the office hours and sprints. We move a little bit forward to 2012, where D. Hotsdon Jennifer created the first contributor task document as a central page placed for people to find out how they could contribute to Drupal. We also have the first DrupalCon Sprints Day in Denver. It was a full day of sprints with two rooms, one for general sprints, one for mentor sprints. And it was called the core office hours sprint. It was also the first time with the sprints and also the first time with a live commit. If you don't know what the live commit is, it's when Drees or another core maintainer, but I think always Drees comes to the stage and commits done during the sprint. Also, it's the year where Drupal Mentoring was created by XGM again. The idea was to build a community around mentors and mentees where people could say what they were doing, what their attendance list, who were their mentors, and so on. In 2013, Drupal.org got upgraded to Drupal 7, but that looks cool, but also removed the JSON feature with information about the issues, and that broke Drupal Mentoring.org. So it forced us to start doing the things we were doing on Drupal Mentoring on Drupal.org. We'd have to find workarounds. So before the Asignet field was used to indicate when people started writing code on the issues, and Drupal Mentoring used it, we used Drupal Mentoring to put the information about what we were doing apart from the writing code, maybe reviews and so on. So now, we start saying on the comments, I'm starting on a task, and I say what I'm going to do on the issue. The change in the behavior had many benefits, as it helps participants conquer their fear to comment on issue keywords, even if they are not providing a patch or doing a big improvement. It also happens that it also helps to the community to see what's going on and what everyone is doing, and more exposure of Mentoring integrated into the normal workflow. So 2014, it was the first time where the Drupal Association provided t-shirts for the mentors. Yeah, it was the first time the Drupal Association provided t-shirts for the mentors on the sprints. Drupal, the editor added the button to add the remaining task template. That was a big improvement. Mentors in the past before on the sprints, the mentors had to help the new people to set up the full environment, like installing Apache, PHP, JIT, teaching about JIT. That took a lot of time, and there was a lot of different environments. So there was an initiative by Brian Gilbert, who's here also, say hi. Hi. We had the goal to pick some standard set of tools that were likely to work on a wide variety of machines and were good enough to get people started on a sprint day without wasting the time of the mentors teaching all the tools technologies. So we decided to start using Akiadev desktop that was not that disabled before. So Brian and I worked very closely with Akiadev to get the app better ready for an upcoming sprint in time. So the Akiadev desktop evolved thanks to the mentors. To get useable for us during the sprint. It also was the first time we used the contributor task cards. It was on New Zealand, Drupal self, and it has been used all around, all the Drupal cons since that, and we refined them over the next Drupal cons. Oh, yep, we have the cards here. So now we had originally only five cards, the explorer, community contributor, user mover, developer, and mentor, and this year we have added the documenter task card. These cards have a little information about what it's all about this role, the tasks that the people on this card can do, and also the links to documentation. So it helps a lot to get started and everybody can download it and print it, print them to use them on their sprints. We got the stickers if you achieve the goals. Oh, yeah, they are in English and in Spanish. Fantastic, thank you, David. So this brings us to the present. They say, or actually Bill Keane says, yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift and that's why we call it a present. So I'm Alina McKenzie. I've been involved with the core mentoring program essentially since last con, since Amsterdam I would say, in a more involved capacity. I am the lead mentor for communications, and I'm also kind of the person that's behind the scenes doing a lot of little things to enable other mentors to be their best and not have to worry about things like documenting things or preparing or writing emails. So I'm going to define the present not just as like today, now at 226 p.m., but more so in the last couple of months to tell you about the exciting things that have happened since last DrupalCon here in Europe. One great thing that happened is that we've gotten a lot more Drupal Association support, and DrupalCon sprints and mentoring are very tightly linked. So at Bogota, Kathy and the DA sat down together and documented all of the sprint planning tasks, and there's quite a lot of that. Since then, having that documentation has helped the DA staff to begin implementing sprint planning tasks for LA and sort of take over some of the load and some of the activity that we had to do ourselves. What does that mean? They provide financial support for the sprint task cards, which David just showed you for printing them. We're still responsible for designing stickers. Everybody loves stickers. New contributors and sprinters can pick them up during the sprint. We have lunch, right? Food gets people to get through the whole sprint day. Signs and the booth at the exhibit hall that recruits more mentors and participants at the con. So we're really, really happy that the DA has taken a more active role in supporting the core mentoring initiatives. The DA also provides DrupalCon tickets for experienced mentors, which otherwise some mentors cannot travel to DrupalCon, and that makes it a lot easier for mentors to be there, especially experienced mentors. Since last con, we now are on groups.drupal.org. We have a mentoring group, and our main goal for that group was to make our collective mentoring wisdom a lot more distributed and a lot more transparent. We want our activities to not just be locked down into Google Docs or emails, but be public so that anyone can come in and see what we do and how we do it. What do we use the groups that Drupal.org site for? We announce our monthly mentor meetings. We have meetings every Saturday at 20, 30 UTC, and we announce them on the site. We also, after each meeting, we post our meeting minutes so that if you miss the meeting, you can review what we talked about. And we, of course, have people who post questions to our group, and we address those questions from mentors. In addition to the group, we now have an official project. And the goal of our, we've always had the project. It was a sandbox, I believe, under XJM's sandbox space, but now it's an official project at drupal.org slash project slash mentoring. And the goal here is to have our to-do lists, our tasks, discoverable so that any drupal.org user that includes everyone in this room, to be able to comment, to edit, and to work on them without having explicit permission to access that information if we were to have it instead in a separate system like Google Docs or some other site or more specified, more specialized tools like Trello. We track tasks as issues, and we use the plan issues for documenting overarching tasks that have sort of a global meaning, and then we use specific issues for conference tasks, conference-related tasks. And it also allows us to track due dates. So, you know, by what point should we have a given number of mentors signed up and so on? We've made great strides in improving our documentation. This documentation can be found as the child pages of drupal.org core mentoring page. We have a mentoring at drupal events doc, which is quite expensive. It includes notes that were taken at a mentor orientation in Bogota. And now we use it at a mentor orientation. We do a dramatic reading by all of attending mentors to sort of get them engaged in the material. We have a mentoring coordinator and mentor lead responsibility pages, which describe the responsibilities of the sprint and planning lead, the sprint room lead, the booth lead, the communications lead, the first time sprinter lead, sprinter workshop lead, and novice issue triage lead so that that information is not locked up in our heads or our personal notes but rather available for anyone to see what mentors do. In Los Angeles this year, we've had our core commit that David mentioned. It happened at the earliest hour ever. It happened at 2 p.m. And that's sort of like a high point of the day. You know, everybody gets up on the stage and the core committer is there and explains what they do. Everybody's role is explained. It's kind of like who it goes directly into the project. After that, usually people kind of taper out and head out. So our core mentor sprint room, as it emptied out, what we did was we had the remaining first time contributors join the general sprint that's usually in a separate location. And together with the general sprinters, the new contributors could continue their work together with experienced contributors and initiative leads, which sort of shows us a trend that we have which is integrating, you know, separate sites into Drupal.org and integrating our new contributors into our general contributor pool. Finally, we've improved some communications. When I first started last year at DrupalCon Amsterdam, I used my personal email to send out emails and then I used a Google spreadsheet add-on to mass-email people, which is kind of unwieldy. We now use MailChimp, which has been great. Starting with Bogota, we use MailChimp and the reusable templates and scheduled emails are fantastic. And we plan to do some more things with that. So Drupal 7 had 900 contributors with commit mentions. Drupal 8 has over 3,000, right? We can kind of say that we are successful, yeah? Yeah? I think so. In fact, our success with getting new contributors involved in mentoring has inspired other open-source projects. We've had folks from Docker who were interested in investigating our techniques come and ask us what we do and how we do what we do. So I think this bodes very well for the future. The future. So I'm Kathy, Yassiti. I went to Denver as a participant and then have been involved in like every Drupal con almost since then and got really involved as like a lead in Portland with Jess and Andrea and Addy. And so I've seen this whole thing. I've experienced it personally. The pain of the past and the changes that we've gone through and all the conversations that we've had about what we want things to be like. So vision for the future. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. So in general, I think what we want to do is make it so we don't need mentors to help new contributors over barriers that are in their way to contribution. We want the information that people need to know in order to contribute to be on demand, discoverable and usable for them. So they don't need to have somebody to show them how to get there. They just, it just works. And when we do that, that will free up all of these incredibly passionate people that we have that are doing the mentoring that we have right now to do a different kind of mentoring. So that's back to the future and he's saying, 2015, you mean we're in the future? All right, so to get our vision of the future, we want to continue getting more automation. So we still have a ton of manual tasks that mentor, planner, leady people are doing. And they have more valuable skills and more ways that we could use their time to be getting even more participation from people if we could free them up. So one of the things that happens for Drupalcon is we have a page on the Drupalcon website where people can fill out a web form to sign up to mentor. And when they fill out that web form, we get an email to now generic Gmail mentoring account, which is nice. And it has the information from the fields and it has a couple of snippets of text that's formatted to make some of the manual things we have to do later easier. One of the things, though, is we have to get each of those people on the list inside MailChimp. And then MailChimp is awesome and is doing all kinds of automatic stuff for us. What we want to do is have MailChimp integration on the event site that uses the MailChimp API so when somebody fills out the form, they get added to the right list. That's completely possible to do. We just have to figure out what the barriers are to it and implications and then help make it happen. So the way we're tracking that is on issue 257.2663. The other thing that is done manually is we have a page on the Drupalcon sites for each event that talks about what the core sprint is, what the mentored core sprint is. And it lists all of the mentors that sign up. And what we used to do is get an email and it would say somebody signed up and we would go onto the page and edit it and then add that person's name to it and save it. It was very painful and very boring. And what we'd really like to have is just have a view of the web form results and it just gets the person's name on the page.org and makes that list for us. But since we are in the future right now, it turns out we did this yesterday, last night. So like one of these huge manual tasks that we had to do, now we don't have to do anymore and so now we have that time to do something else and it's really great. And the DA staff is awesome. Oh, the reason why we list the mentors on this page is because it's an acknowledgement, like a recognition of these people who are volunteering and giving up their days and also doing a bunch of planning ahead of time where like, look how awesome these people are and then they can show their friends, they can be like, look I'm an official mentor and it's on the website. The other thing having a list of mentor does is it gets more people to come to the sprint because they look at that list and they're like, oh my God, Justifish is going to mentor all day on Friday. I would love to work with Sally Young and then they sign up and then they come. Or like whoever is some name that they've heard of somewhere that they can see who those people are and then they come and then they want to work with them. So it's really good both for the mentors and to encourage participation. So it's nice that that's automatic now and it's just going to happen. So this issue, if you want to see what it looks like, it's part fixed, it's 223903, 2239073. Another thing that mentors always have to do is help new contributors find an issue. People are experts in Drupal, they know all tons of things, they have a job or they have their own project and they want to contribute. And I have had so many people here at this con stop me in the hallway and say I went into the sprint room but I didn't know what to do and I don't know how to work on an issue, I want to help. There was a tweet about it on Twitter, right? Like I asked people and nobody will help me figure out what to do. Like people want to help but they don't know how to do it on their own. So one of the things we can do to help people with this is to make it easier for people to find relevant first issues for them to work on. One thing is we have a ton of documentation on Drupal.org but it's confusing, it has duplicate information in multiple places, it's really long, it may not be the most discoverable thing. So we have an issue to consolidate it, distill it, make sure it's updated and make sure it's discoverable by those people who are wanting to do something. And this is to improve our novice contribution guide on Drupal.org. And it's 233-2789. The sad thing about this issue is it's really old. I think it was Austin. The two days after the sprint, one of the days I sat down with Boyan and we identified the problem, gathered the information, all the locations of things and made the issue. And part of the problem of why this isn't been fixed is we don't have any one person to champion this issue who will just grab onto it and not let it go until it's done. Neither me nor Boyan can dedicate all of our energies to that so we really need somebody who can grab onto this. And then the other thing that makes this difficult is it involves changes to Drupal.org. So we have to consider other priorities that Drupal.org has, maybe upcoming improvements that we might want to wait for that would make doing some of this easier. And so this is a hard problem but it will help so many people. We really need somebody to help with it. The other thing that will help people discover relevant first issues for them is something that is planned to being done but not right away. And that is to get topic pages. And so issue for this is 1-2-9-0-7-4-0. And the idea behind topic pages is it puts all of the relevant information all together so it's discoverable and you have context for understanding things. So a topic page would have recent news items, a sticky post that describes the current priorities for example an initiative like a multilingual initiative. It would show people who are active in their issues that are current priorities and if the leads of that initiative have tagged things as being good for new contributors it can have a special like new contributor section these issues for that initiative. And so it's not just an issue picked out at random and you don't understand what the priorities background of the thing is. It's putting everything all together. So that will also really help people be able to find their own first issues. If they find their own first issue the next thing that mentors do that we can automate is have instructions on the issue for how to work on the issue. People can have a problem, Google for it, find the issue as part of some site they're building and then they're like great you know what I'm already doing this for this project I can also help fix this issue but they're looking at the issue page and there are no instructions on that page for how to work on the issue. So I have a couple of different ideas for how to help that. One is 2013222 and this would add some metadata to an issue that would say these are the remaining tasks that need to be done in order to complete this issue it could track whether or not they're done but still say what they all needed to be and since it knows the tasks it can include automatic links to instructions on how to do the tasks. That will be really helpful for people who are looking at an issue page and say they want to help they'll see what there is to do and instructions for how to do it. There's a little bit more context that is needed also on an issue and another different approach but essentially this would also help with that problem so another approach is it 2193871 and this idea is to use context and put blocks on issue pages that would say something like this issue status is active it is possibly in discussion or discussion is done and waiting for a patch here's how to make a patch so it can get more information about lots of different things and then put that information on the page where people want to see it. Part of the context that people need when they have an issue is impossible for a new contributor to open up an issue page and say this would be a good use of my time or this is not a good use of my time they don't have that context. Experienced contributors who are mentoring or working at the sprint can help people pick issues to work on because they have more information so we should figure out how to say that information and just put it on the issue. So 2572061 is add a dismissible notification when somebody goes to a core issue while in whatever phase of release it is just scared so I made this issue like yes so the idea is there is a first time that you go to an issue and that issue is in the core project and we have dismissible notifications I think we have seen them before on Drupal.org maybe the profile thing terms of service the security thing but there might be or not but the idea is your first time you open up a core issue and you get a notification and it says something like core is currently in well okay so actually I think what I changed the words to be was like depending upon the phase of the release certain issues can be worked on or something got to work on the wording and then it has a link to a docs page which is about the release phase release cycle of Drupal which hopefully is updated with the current release phase and then that probably has a link to the docs page which explains what's allowed to be committable during that so like if we had this for the beta it would have said depending upon the things can be workable depending upon the release phase go read this thing and it would have gone to the page that said here's the release cycle we're currently in the beta here's another docs page which explains which things are committable in the beta and then they would have found that awesome flow graph which explained which things are workable and they would have learned about beta evaluations and documenting the issue and everything so the idea here is something to make it discoverable but not annoying on every single issue but I would also be up for annoying on every single issue so I would be really keen to get some help fine tuning the idea here alright if they find an issue that they decide is worthy of investing their time in and working on we can also alleviate some repetitive work from mentors by making it super easy for those contributors to get in an environment for them to do their work so automating the setup having it be the tools that experienced contributors like have kind of congregated around by setting them up super easy we've changed our mind over many many years about what that should be and there's two different needs there's one for what do we need on the sprint day when we Wi-Fi is an issue and there's also what do people need long term after the sprint day if they're at home and they have great Wi-Fi what should they be using all the time but I think we're ready to come back and look at this and think about it some more so that's 23509 and then the other thing that is part of my vision for the future is to remove a barrier not just to new contributors but to remove the barrier to becoming a mentor and there are a bunch of people who cannot travel to a Drupal Con and so we want to continue the documentation that we've done in terms of getting everything out of people's heads about how you pull this thing off and putting it on Drupal.org because like everything else it makes it discoverable and it also allows for more improvements because now anybody who has a good idea can edit it and improve it so we still have a few things to kind of document about the how do you have a sprint at Drupal Con so we want to have the open mic conversation I have some things, some topics I would like anything, any idea that's popped into your head since we started that would be great but also I don't know how we measure the success of the mentoring program like if we make a change and it isn't making it better or not so we need some ideas on how to measure success and the idea here is to free up mentors from these repetitive manually tasks but what are we freeing them up for like people say sometimes mentors want to do real mentoring like what the heck is that so open mic while we have the conversation I'm just going to leave some links up here one to evaluate our session and the other one for the notes because anybody can edit that Google Doc doesn't have to just be that if you could say your name and your Drupal.org name that would be great Hi my name is Anna, Drupal.org is a Kalata, I'm a first time mentor and actually have received a scholarship I guess or grant to attend Drupal Con because of me trying to be a mentor and I guess I was wondering are there any models in open source communities in other communities for automating this whole onboarding new contributors anything that we could use as a guideline or are kind of like we going to be the example once we figure this stuff out I don't know if there's any patterns that we can look at for automation of things I don't even think I've asked myself that question before so we should find out I know we are one of the most successful open source projects in terms of getting people involved and a couple of times this summer I went to not Drupal Conferences and talked to people from tiny open source projects, Unix distributions WordPress, Docker like just tons of people and when we talked about mentoring mostly they had questions for me now what we have looked at though that other open source projects are doing better than us is their new contributor documentation and so that issue that I talked about that needs some help has some research already on it on what other projects are doing and some samples and then some ideas to just take what they're doing as really well and do that so I know we've looked at the documentation of other open source projects but I don't think we've looked at automation that's a good idea to do Brian Gilbert, realitylooper on Drupal.org I think from my experience being a mentor at several Drupal Con's now the freeing up time is probably so they can attend the conference because this is the first time I've been to a session for about four Drupal Con's so I think that would help people be more willing to be a mentor although I was doing things that were probably more involved than some of the regular mentors but I just had an idea and I've already put it in the Google Doc of we could potentially automate the booth which would free up a lot of time aww but that's the birth of the humans I know but if you make it really funny I don't know alright it's an idea anyway it doesn't have to be done but that's one thing that could you know motion sensors it wouldn't so like hey you so earlier I was talking about how one time after Drupal Con I sat down with Boyan and we went through the thing about the new contributor task document I'm pretty sure that was the day after I sat down next to Brian and Brian and I had led mentoring for the first time and he was sitting down next to me and all he did was tool me up like he'd be like watching me do something and he's like no no no there's an app for that like we can automate that and we can automate that that's what I love about Brian changed my life well well the bold I would extend Brian's suggestion and we can not only automate the booth we can automate the whole mentoring process and Kathy has talked about that that the issue page needs to contain some links maybe to how people can work on that issue but I think that there is a lot of work done on that direction and there are a lot of links like contributor links first time contributor links and we have links to better evaluation phase what needs to be done my personal problem with that is that if I want to read all this first of all I need to click I don't know 100 links on one page so and I really need all this information because I need to be able to to write better evaluation I need to keep open 15 docs at one time I think so I think first of all we can borrow a user interface if you work with the editor on an issue you keep being on the same page always opening in pop-ups so it's much better for me at least and that's the first point and the second point what if we can make interaction with the same editor or some other tool like because better evaluation is basically a wizard so it's a series of questions that I as a reviewer needs to answer and next step is based on answer to the previous step so this is pretty a wizard so I click on several places and end up with ready better evaluation I'm intrigued and that's not a big deal I think in terms of developing very cool so that actually reminds me of one of the things I tried to work on for I think for LA was to get conditional fields because adding extra fields to the mentor sign up form or sorry just the conference sign up form was something that the DA didn't want to do and I did some work with Jay Perry about that but I don't know where it ever got to so that could be something that's integrated but it's also a really good thing that the extra time that we free up for mentors could go towards my name is Kalpana Goyal K Goyal on Drupal.org so in my previous session I said like participants can add mentor to their D.O. page so that's just a small token but what else can be done so companies recognize the value of mentoring because we are all volunteers spending time not working on issues for ourselves but helping other people working on their issues so what can be done so the recognition is much more wider than just the D.O. profile page also I have been saying that why DA always for all the Drupal cons provide mentor t-shirt I think that is just a expense that can be eliminated not a big deal but just an idea and thought I wanted to share the third thing I want to say that mentoring does really good job for novice issues but what about mentoring mentors on the major and critical issues so those are not just limited to the top core contributors but overall to the community so we cannot we can say that contributors are not or participants are not just limited to novice issues or writing issue summaries or doing manual testing or re-rolling the patch but much more and maybe we can encourage them to come and repeat contribution because they will gain support by working on some more critical or major or important issues.  So the purpose of the t-shirts we mentioned when the DA started giving them to us is that they are a different color than any of the other con shirts or the volunteer shirts and at the Friday sprint what we have is we have maybe two to 300 people in a room and we need some way of visualizing identifying which of those people are wanting to answer your question. T-shirts are the best way I think to do that. We did something in Bogota where instead of the DA paying for shirts Bluehost brought black shirts that were very mildly logoed. It was very small, mostly black and we got green painter's tape and mentors took turns putting designs on the back of each other's shirts so they were black with huge neon green designs on them and that worked out really well but I think in terms of the benefit that we get from it I think it's totally worth the expense to have a specially colored shirt at a Drupal Con. I also think that some people their first mentor T-shirt that they wear at other places is recognition and a badge of honor for them at the next con. They can show up with a mentor T-shirt from a previous con and be like I've mentored before and people can recognize that they have mentored before too. It's like putting on your Drupal.org profile on the mentor except you wear it. So that's pretty good. I think one of the well I mean Justice here we could let me know if I'm right or not but if we think back about one of the purposes that the Drupal Con mentored sprint has served in the past was the general sprint room where there would be leaders in their area so maybe you know media I don't know what the heck people worked on before there was composer right rules but then also initiatives with inside Drupal core so there were people who had maybe a team so like one Uber experienced person who was blessed by trees and then they probably had active contributors that they dealt with normally and these are like the super skilled people who are working on the really interesting issues right and those people in the past when approached by new people who are like oh my god you're trying to think who I can use as an example oh my god you're a hay rocker like I want to help with CMI I can envision that it may have been some thoughts that passed through Greg's head like I don't have freaking time to teach this person how to make a patch and I'm going to explain to them where we are and what our priorities are and I'm going to invest my time in them and they're going to work on a thing not get it done won't post their broken thing on the issue leave and I will never see them again and what happens to initiative owners or other people who have big projects is they have this experience over and over and over again and even though they as humans want to help each individual because they have this pattern they learn that they don't get their return on investment their time is better spent being focused and this I think this was especially true many years ago and one of the things that the core mentoring program has done both through the office hours and at cons we take people who have never done anything before and we teach them the basics we make sure that they understand how to change issue statuses so they don't go into somebody else's like super critical issue and totally set it wrong we make sure they know the basic things for whatever they're going to end up doing so like maybe they're going to be doing QA testing for UI changes so we help them do that and make before and after screenshots and so they even know that that's a thing to do so that they can identify which issues need that so that they know to put their before and after screenshots in the issue summary so they know not to screenshot their whole entire computer screen and to crop it and to draw arrows and that they need we teach them those things so that when they go to join these initiatives or work with these people that they really want to work with they are not annoying they actually know what to do so you could walk up to to Gabor and you could say hey I want to work on an issue and he could say you know oh what do you want to do and he'd be like oh great we just had this patch posted on this issue it makes a change this form can you do before and after screenshots on it and that person does it and Gabor doesn't need to sit down and teach them how to do it so if you think if you consider that that was part of the purpose that's I don't know like that's what we were doing we were getting people ready so that they could join the group that would organically integrate them and first have them work in pairs on a major and then have them work on a critical and I would say if our community is failing at getting people involved in the real issues I don't necessarily think that's a problem with the mentoring program I think it's a problem with the people we are picking to lead initiatives and if we pick people with a different perspective to lead initiatives then that would be solved I don't think we need to solve it with mentoring we don't need special mentors who mentor like the cool things now what Mr. E said in his keynote was four features or initiatives or whatever is that one of the lessons that he's learned is that you need a diverse cross-functional team to lead and I would hope that one of the qualities that would people who are picking these teams would look for is that you need somebody who's going to be thinking about mentoring not mentoring new contributors but mentoring inside their group and the other question that you had was how do we recognize mentors I think we have the shirts which they get, we have their profiles sometimes we take a big picture at the end of the day that's pretty sweet because you can show it to your friends there could be a blog post like a wrap up blog post is something I think that I've done a lot I could use somebody else to do that but those can list the mentors and then that can go out on Drupal Planet that could be great I don't know if part of your question was how do we get people's employers to recognize the benefit to the employer of people doing mentoring and I think if that's a question I think we should think really hard about that maybe put it specifically in the Google Doc and get a lot of people's different opinions about that I don't think we do a particularly good job right now of having like a letter to your boss about over or left are we ten minutes over great I don't think we have like a letter to your boss this is why you should fund your employer fund your employee to contribute to core the best thing we've got I think in terms of that is the blog post that I wrote on the black mesh blog a while ago about strategies for companies funding core but it's still not really the benefits to the company so I think we have a need for that we could do a benefits for funding mentoring but I actually don't know if there is no way man let Alina go one thing that this is not Alina I'm not Alina I'm Jess I'm XJM I'm Drupalate Release Manager core mentor mentor mentor how many did we get three one thing that Kalpana has pointed out in the past is that we need to make sure that people who mentor contribution on an issue also get credit as contributors for that issue on Drupalate.org we have this new functionality that allows us to surface issue credits for non-patch contribution for reviews and other kinds of contribution on the issue that goes on someone's contributor profile it can go on their organization page and there's all kinds of work under development so that organizations get credit on Drupalate.org for the way that their members contribute and so one thing that we can do right now is when you're mentoring contributors on an issue or when you're mentoring other mentors about mentoring contributors on an issue make sure that mentor also posts a comment on their issue and says I am helping so and so work on such and so on Drupalate.org and it's not if your name you actually right now post an issue comment yourself because I as a core committer can once that issue is going to be committed to core just so long as you have one comment on that issue somewhere check a little box and then your organization and your user profile will receive credit for that issue because of the mentoring work that you did. So I think we should add that to the instructions then for Friday to tell our mentors that's super good idea and in terms of benefits to the employer that will only like that will give recognition to the mentor which will be nice we need to make sure that those people know how to attribute their time to their company if they want to so if they are being paid to be there on Friday they could attribute that effort to their company and then the company would get a benefit from it. I'm Eric on DDoDo Sutors on the new documentary card gave me an idea would it help if we in our wisdom as community or mentors whatever decide that a certain subject is not focused that certain subject doesn't have enough people working on it let's say UX we want to have more UX people in the community being active getting active would it help to make for example a UX card to starting tasks and then by that way attracting well make surfacing a subject for new contributors yeah I'm not sure I have to say that initially I thought these cards were a terrible idea and I really didn't want to do them but Andrea was like they're freaking awesome and I trust Andrea like we don't have to agree on everything and if she sees value in it and wants to like make it be done I'm like fine good luck and lots of people like these so are they being used they are being used in the fact that we are printing them and handing them out I don't know how useful people are finding them one of the super great things about having Alina on the team in the last year is that she's brilliant and she's one of the things that we've automated that we left off of the presentation was the mentor feedback so we sent on a survey and and then people answer and then we can evaluate things I think we could do the same thing with the participants of the sprint if we had a list of people who had participated in the sprint and we could send them a survey and we could ask them did you use the sprint card did you find it useful we might maybe also ask mentors at the end of the day whether they have people seeing using it that's a low tech indication so I kind of think maybe like we haven't really talked about measures of success of mentoring yet but that could be something that maybe we would want to measure what we want to invest our energy in is like adding more things to this I think UX people who have never contributed to CORE before are still going to go through the steps that we already have and so if we're talking about the sprint day I don't think anybody could get through these steps and another one that depends on these like this is already a ton of stuff to do so and then now you're talking about somebody's second sprint experience so they've done this and now they're ready to do something else and so I don't really know so we should think about it yeah hi I'm XJM again so I just wanted to respond to a couple of things one question that Kathy asked or was it Alina one of you asked earlier was so what are we freeing up our time to do if we take these things that we shouldn't be doing that a computer could do for us and make sure that people can get the information by themselves I think one thing that a lot of people think of when they think of mentoring is of doing like pair programming and pair review collaborative like one on one or one on three small exercises I think because of the scale of our sprints at Drupalcon and the scale of nitpicky things people have to learn we lose some of that because mentors become in some ways like crowd herding sort of like high level task selection management helpers and have less opportunity to share their individual knowledge and experience with someone and also they lose some of the opportunity to learn from that that new person that they're mentoring as well because it should go both ways so that's my hope for the future I think Val's suggestion about the interactive issue summary evaluation is huge like the beta evaluation is like a particularly it's right exactly it's like an extreme specific example but the questions that you have to answer for that are always relevant I think that I believe that symphony has some github integration that covers some of the kind of metadata about an issue that we care about for for issue evaluation of Drupalcon we should look at that we should look at how they do that and we should try to do something similar so that people have at Dreadator is always a first good step to prototype stuff but you know eventually it should also be part of the functionality on Drupalcon.org one of the nice things about the new maintainers of Dreadator they're refusing to put any new features in it so they're like no, we should be fixing things on Drupal.org because we want our tools to be available to everybody not just people who knew about the secret thing you have to download and I think that's actually a really good thing I will say that one challenge for this kind of functionality and I also like Kathy's suggestion about a notification that this issue is filed against Drupal8.org.x which is currently a candidate, here's a link to what that means is beautiful and mind blowing but what challenge for that as well as for the other issue evaluation is that Drupal.org issues like core is a significant audience but there's also thousands of contributed modules and themes and all kinds of distributions all kinds of other projects that all share the same like the same node type the same field set and so it makes it easier to introduce things in a way and we have this problem with change records too there's a lot of customizations to how change records work that we would like to add that would make them more helpful for Drupal.org issues that aren't necessarily relevant for other projects or that it's hard to make them generic enough custom settings per module makes a feature harder to implement but more tolerable by contrived who doesn't want to have to mess with stuff just because core does they do I mean we come up with that with the issue tasks problem too Neil Drum said they have their own rules okay so one more from Brian or sorry I have two more things okay the session just ended but there is a 30 minutes break we're two minutes over three minutes over there is a 30 minutes break 15 minutes now we can take all time go ahead so have you guys been out in the exhibition hall you saw that thing on the floor that has my name and Kathy's name and who was ever in big letters and people keep tweeting at me about it we should have something like that that's not about patch contribution we should have that of mentors that information is like at triple con portland we did the same thing on the mentor booth the thing of the core commit message name tag cloud thing we're so far past that mentors are the people that we should we don't need any new contributors we have 3,000 of them that's kind of well so so wait did you really think a tag cloud of mentor names is a good idea yes how do we get the data no I think that I think that including mentors we need to make sure that mentors are included in that contribution information mentoring is a first class kind of contribution it is as important to resolving an issue through the comment attributions but I also would love to have a like here are people who have mentored it at triple con barcelona and see their names there that some that's the kind of like it unless they prefer not to be listed like having their user name is like that's fantastic they're part of this in the same way that speakers are like important value part of that so are the mentors the sprints are amazing for people and then that helps the two things that are most dear to my heart that and I forgot to note down who actually raised them in the q&a number one is getting both mentors and credit new contributors up that next rung of contribution so that they go from working on the simple task to working on something that's more difficult I think that that's another place where I would love to see mentors mentoring more is like okay you've mastered the basics now let me show you what I do what I work on and here's how I get involved and and and the way that the area that I work on also depends on me and also I think that definitely depends on having having people work on what matters at sprints making sure that whenever we recommend tasks for people we really are picking something that is something that is going to be included as much as best as we can anticipate is part of what's most important to whatever initiative or project or you know Drupal core final beta that they're working on at the time that's all Brian Gilbert reality loop again I think one of the things that we should be trying to tell companies like I see a lot of people when we're at the mentor booth are you going to be here on Friday no I'm going home if they've been sent here by their company I think it needs to be potentially today I think to say that that's part of the conference as one of the days specifically in the date range or something yeah it used to be that Drupal con dates on the site only included Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday and over the years we've gotten them to include Monday and Friday on the dates on the site but still a bunch of people are leaving on Friday and their flights are at 5 and you know they don't get up until 11 and they have to leave this print by 2 so they just don't come I'm even seeing people who are leaving Thursday night yeah so yeah I wonder if there's some messaging we can ask the events people to use when they advertise to companies somehow or campaign to them to yeah and I think someone else in the crowd said it the value to companies is that they're getting more experience there's a lot of companies who have people working with Drupal who've never contributed to call never done a contribution even this is how it's going to get them started so I think it has a lot of value as a company owner myself so right I think I think we have a little bit more experience with thinking about the value of working on issues but I don't know if we have as much experience with thinking about the value of having other people help other people work on issues now I say that but that's my job right so there are some companies that don't just see the value of paying a core committer full time to review and commit and work on issues but do see value in not directly working on issues all the time but helping other people work on issues so if we and part of the value that black mesh gets from having me is I'm uber visible and since I'm very visible then our name is very visible too so if we're looking to maybe take some of that benefit and give it to all of the mentors that we might want to consider giving every mentors companies name visibility somehow and we mentioned that as part of the comment attributions but maybe there's something we can do a little bit more I don't know if we have any statistics on what's the drop off on people who mentor across multiple conferences but that's somewhere a tag cloud might help that type of thing reality loop although it's my username but as a company we run the local mentoring and meetups in Australia our whole team is here to mentor at the conference I don't even know that we get much out of it in value for the company but to me it's an open source project if you don't contribute to it it's not going to continue to exist yeah you know you have a microphone you're giving the session you don't have to queue up you get to interrupt the people not wait in line so hi I'm Alina Ali Mack is my username I'm gonna if you've made it this far into the recording you can't see me but I am taking off my operational slash planning mentor hat including on my mentor mentor hat one of the things that I've had difficulty with as an occasional contributor to give you an idea what that's like I have a modest like 20 commits commit mentions but I don't work on Drupal all the time I pretty much only work on it at sprints and at Drupal cons and other Drupal events so there's that kind of difficulty I experience in ramping up to fill my brain back with issues that I can mentor others on because I know them better because I've noticed that that's a really helpful thing is whenever I know an issue more more deeply I can then be a better mentor towards a person who works on it for the first time yes and I want to give a shout out to Emma Maria who is the component maintainer for Bartek for being a really great person who is also a mentor and kind of combining both roles but that's she does that but other mentors are not component maintainers or are not teams or are just occasional contributors like me I think it would be helpful for us to be somehow connected better with the teams and the component maintainers to have them give us a run down of issues that we could become more familiar with I don't know how I imagine this or envision this I'm just saying that it would be great to have more integration I definitely think getting more involvement from maintainers would help occasional contributors and occasional mentors be more effective I suspect part of why we don't get more component maintainers or components around work why we don't get more core maintainers in the front room on Friday is in part because they think we don't need them we already have 60 people we're going to have like 75 people you don't need us you've got plenty of people over there so we could tell them that we need them directly so we could email them and say we need you and this is why we need you there may be other I think this would make an incredibly good section in the Q&A Google Doc to flesh out I think we can have a lot to think about and I think Tim has some thoughts I have some thoughts on that wait give a little bit of background I helped start mentoring with Jess and I haven't mentored since Munich because after Munich I became paid to work on core so I get to come to Drupalcon and I'm basically required to not mentor I just wanted to say that there's other reasons that core maintainers aren't mentoring it's because we're here to sprint ourselves there's a huge amount of pressure on experienced contributors to core to get the criticals done or get whatever is critical in their project done there's a lot of pressure to do that I just wanted to point that out it's like I miss mentoring but it's my job to not mentor at Drupalcon basically maybe we can bring instead of bringing the core maintainers to the mentors we can assign mentors to core maintainers that works too I mean mentees of course that might work but with each as the cycle grows longer the issues get harder and you need to have known about that issue for three months to have all the background information blah blah blah and it's terrible and it would completely soul crush anyone who already wasn't working on that issue soul crush is us too it's pretty bad I love to think of more ways to get people to what Brian was saying with companies somehow convince them that being a mentor is very important I get to take half day of mentoring I think we should think about this some more list of all of the blockers and then brainstorm if there's anything we can do even if you think sure on the day you have to work instead of on the day why don't you go through your issue queue and pick out five issues tag them novice update the issue summary with the remaining tasks and then we'll use those but even the part of the day that somebody would take to do that is they're still under pressure to just be working on the things that they have to work on so it's going to take a lot of thinking we should probably be done very soon very soon I will be quick well Tim needs to get set up oh you're not next well Donna needs to get set up I think there is kind of controversy here from one side Cathy said that one of the things that we have achieved is that we have offloaded part of the work from core maintainers and to become more effective we need to work with core maintainers just more so the question is what if we try to work with core maintainers before the day before the Friday to not to not bother them on Friday what we try to do with the core maintainers this time and failed by the way alright okay so can I have the last word you can totally have the last word I don't think it's an either or thing we either take these people and bring them to mentors or take these people and bring them to core maintainers like you said we can brainstorm some way that will satisfy all of us combined good alright thanks now it's all yours


Yeah, reintroducing E1 and Osmo BSC. As most of you know, we started originally with E1-based BTSs, actually, Dita back there, much to his credit. Open BSC and later Osmo need to be started with E1-based BTSs as the Avis interface towards the base station. And until the NITB split, E1 support also remained present and maintained in Osmo NITB. So we could have E1-based BTSs as well as IP-based BTSs. But even other code, even the original Osmo BSC, implementing SCCP light, never had E1-BTS support with double P, of course, apologies for the typos. Nobody looks at the slides until I say, oh, there's a typo. And also, since the new Osmo BSC is sort of a derivative of the original Osmo BSC, also it has no E1-BTS support, which means now in the new split NITB architecture, which is much closer to the GSM specs with all the individual elements of the network, we don't have the support for the original BTSs, which is, of course, a bit of a bummer. So let's look at how things were actually looking in the Classmic Osmo NITB setup with E1-based BTSs. We have a BTS here attaching to an antenna, providing the radio interface. We had an E1-T1 line with 64 kilobit time slots as a backhaul. Then we have the big box here called Osmo NITB, which had an E1 input module that would provide a single time slot to what we call a subchain demultiplexer that splits the 64 kilobit slot into 16-bit subslots. So we have four 16-bit subslots, and on each of those 16-bit subslots, we could have a draw decoder which would parse the draw frames, which is the format of how voice is transmitted over these subslots, and then hand that to the MNCC interface. And on the MNCC interface, we don't only have call control, but we also have the actual voice frames called GSM TCHF frame, or also GSM EFR frame, depending on the codecs, to which you attach an external PBX like LCR or like other PBX-type software. So that's the architecture that we had back in there, and the important part is that the MNCC socket would handle both the signaling as well as the voice in this old setup. Now if we change to RTP, still with an E1-based BTS, basically the entire left-hand side stays the same, if I flip between those two slides. The only difference is that here we have RTP towards the external PBX, but still we have an E1-based interface here, a single time slot, and a sub-gen-D multiplexer with the four subslots, the draw decoder, and here we convert to RTP frames for the voice on the right-hand side. And if we go the evolution even further, that was basically with an IP-based BTS, such as a Nano-BTS or Osmo-BTS. We then have RTP frames even here on the Avis side, we have an RTP socket here in the NITB, which goes to another RTP socket on the other side, which then goes to an external PBX. So the Osmo-NITB would just run an RTP proxy, and that RTP proxy even was optional, so you could disable it, so the RTP basically goes directly to the PBX, which is this picture where Osmo-NITB only handles control, a call control messaging, but the RTP goes directly to whatever external application. That's sort of the latest step in user-plane evolution in Osmo-NITB, which is a very common setup before the NITB split. Now if we go to the post-NITB side, and we look at this, it looks like this. We have the BTS on the left-hand side, we have the signaling basically on the top of this diagram, we have RTP at the bottom, so the signaling Avis signaling goes to the BSE, and the BSE then uses MGCP to control a media gateway associated with it. We have the same over here at the MSC, which again uses MGCP to control another media gateway, and in the end we have an external PBX over here. So that's the post-NITB split architecture that we have today, where the left and the right-hand media gateway, as we have heard earlier today, can be merged into one. If you have a small network, then you can run only a single media gateway here to avoid having to run two instances of that, but that's the architecture. And this is all IP-based. So now the question is how can we attach something E1 like on the left-hand side to this newer network? Well, today we still cannot, but we have a very current feature ticket that we work on to reintroduce this support, and how would it look like? Well, basically here, in this we have IP-based communication, and here we then have E1-based communication. So again, the signaling plane uses E1 with RSL and OML, and of course, LAPD inside. So that terminates an OSMO BSE for the signaling plane, and then we have some other E1 time slots that would be opened or attached to by OSMO media gateway, which can then convert from the, can have the subchain demultiplexer from the 64k to the 16 kilobit subslots, and then do the RTP conversion, like we did in an ITB before, but this functionality would then be in the media gateway. And for this to work, the E1 driver needs to support that a single span or a single line of E1 can have time slots where the RSL and OML time slot, which is a LAPD, well, sorry, LAPD, not LAPDM here, actually, signaling goes into OSMO BSE on the upper half, and that other time slots can be opened by OSMO MGW at the bottom. With Dadi, that definitely works. That's the Digium E1 interface, a driver stack. With MISDN, I'm not entirely sure. I think it should also work, but I would have to study the code again. But for Dadi, definitely, this is an architecture that can work. And actually, the top part should, in theory, still work because none of that code in OSMO BSE has changed. I don't think anyone has tried in a long time, but all the code is still there in Libosmo Avis to open the E1, and it's the same Libosmo Avis that's used by OSMO NITP, so the signaling plane should actually already work today. But what we need to introduce is this opening E1 time slots by OSMO MGW, and then stacking the subchain demultiplexer on it and converting to RTP frames. And this, of course, also will then affect the MGCP signaling here because if you paid attention to Philip's talk earlier on, basically right now we have RTP bridge slash something as an endpoint name because we have RTP on the left and the right-hand side. And now OSMO BSE then basically needs to use an endpoint name, which encodes the line number and the time slot number and the sub slot number. So it would basically be, okay, I don't have it here. Here at the bottom would be something like E1 slash line 1 slash TS4 slash sub slot 2 at MGW. So the endpoint name basically here would differ from an RTP, pure RTP IP-based BTS setup, but the endpoint name has to change. And that's also actually rather simple because the information what to put in here is already present in the OSMO BSE configuration file, just like it was in the OSMO NITP configuration file. Because for every radio interface time slot you have to specify which E1 time slot and sub slot is mapped to that. If you look at that, we can quickly open an example, I suppose, or quickly. An example config file and look at that. Let's make that huge. OSMO BSE, okay, so we don't have actually a config file here, but if we look at an old OSMO NITP, let's say a BSE 11 example, open BSE.CFG. So here you see, well, you see that for each radio time slot here at TCHF as a voice channel, we actually already have this in the VTY. And this part actually is already present in OSMO BSE, so this should even work today. We say time slot 1 and this refers to the air interface time slot of this transceiver. We say E1 line 0, time slot 2, sub slot 1. And that's exactly the mapping which is then used by the OML code to instruct the BTS to connect those two. So in the BTS it will basically do this connection from time slot 1 to a given air interface time slot 1 to a given E1 time slot and sub slot. And this information we need to recycle in OSMO BSE in order to send the MGCP commands here to the OSMO MGW to a given MGCP endpoint. And once that is in place, basically we are done. And the media gateway can then take these audio frames from the E1 side and send it over RTP in the rest of the network. So actually it's very little work to add. And that was also the plan with the new OSMO media gateway and with MGCP and the entire architecture that we can easily reintroduce the E1 setup. Now the question is why would you do that? Well, of course, this is where we're coming from. So we have a historic attachment, of course, or legacy there. I don't think there are so many like actual real world users of OSMO COM that still use E1 based BTSs. Nevertheless, we have plenty of them around. And as we will see in a couple of the other talks following now, there is a quite interesting hardware now again or still actually more again available very inexpensively with E1 interface that makes a low cost and very powerful BTS hardware that we can use with the OSMO COM stack. So I think there is some new interest in E1 or new possibilities in E1 if we reintroduce this. Also, it means that it's again one more user group that we can migrate from Osmonit B to the new BSC and MSC architecture. Okay, that was it for the topic of reintroducing E1 and how that will look like. If we do have questions, we should ask them by using a microphone. I'm not sure where it is. Kevin has it in the back. So if you can quickly grab that. So you were talking about DCHF, what about DCHH? Yeah, okay, so it was recorded. Well, it's fundamentally the same. So in the E1 system, it works the same way. So every radio interface time slot is always connected to a sub slot. And so whether you have AFR or EMR or half rate in there, you have these sub slots. And we do have already this code in place. So with a nit B, you can have a half rate setup with a BS11. And that's not really anything different. It's just you need to configure it. And of course, the trough frames, the frame format for the frame is different. But in Osmonit B, we do have this for EFR, FR and HR. We do not have AMR support for E1 BTSs in Osmonit B. That's because the BTSs that we were using when we did this development, for example, the BS11 does not do AMR. It's too old to do AMR. But with modern Ericsson BTS, for example, we could of course also add AMR support and complete that. But it's basically parsing the trough frames for AMR and converting them to the AMR payload format that we have in RTP and vice versa. So it's again some bit shifting and interposing. And then we have that too. In the previous implementation, I mean, I don't know at all the interface from the process to the actual E1 card. But it's not a problem to have two different processes having to connect to the same. That's what I mentioned basically here, is that the driver needs to support that a single line, one time slot can be opened by one process and another time slot can be opened by another process. And for Dati, for the Digium-based interface, that definitely works. Because every time slot is a separate device node that you open as a file. So it's very easy. Actually, you can just open TS1 from one process and TS2 from another process. For MISDN-based cards, I'm not sure. I've forgotten how the detailed interface looks like. I still remember it's sort of socket-based interface that they implemented. So you have an AF-MISDN socket that you talk to. And I don't remember whether it was one socket per time slot or not. So there might be some difficulties there. But I think even if we only have Dati card support, which is the much more common... So for MISDN, I think the only cards you can find is for E1, is HFC E1-based cards, which are for PCI slots. And I think even for 5V PCI slots and not for 3.3V PCI slots or so, no PCI cards whatsoever. So it's rather difficult to attach them, those cards. But Dati, you get PCIe, low-profile cards and whatnot. So I think if we have Dati support, I would already be happy. I would expect also to be able to do this from MISDN. I just don't know. Okay, any other questions? Good. Then that concludes this talk.


Hi everyone, I'm Joe for jaspyscasebrakes.com giving away some teams in mosaic pick your team for and Some spots in the mosaic random team break That's pretty nice and we're giving away a spot. So this was an eight spot thing So there's three and the five right there. We only sold seven spots outright and one of you are going to win an Extra spot. That's our first dice roll second dice will be matching up with either a random team spot Or a team Let's roll it and randomize it one and a six seven times Top name extra spot one two three four five six and Seventh and final time Ben Congrats to you After seven an extra spot going your way. All right now Let's uh, let's get you a random some random team spots or a team in the next break. Oh That's sorry that was one. We're gonna randomize it two and a three five times already randomized once two three and Then two more times four and good luck fifth and final time after five Daniel Nick and Ben you're gonna get some spots in the random team break and Daniel Ben Jeremy Daniel Daniel You're gonna get teams in the pick your team There's how it looks right there So there you go Daniel Nick and Ben you get three spots in that mosaic break Daniel get the nuggets and pick your team for Ben with the bulls and pick your team for Jeremy with the jazz Daniel with the clippers and Blazers and pick your team for there you go gang. I'll see you in the next video for the break. Jasper's case breaks.com


And still talking budget, Governor Buigao Itala of Oshun State has presented an appropriation bill of 129.76 billion naira to the House of Assembly for the 2022 fiscal year. It's 20 billion naira more than the budget of 2020 and as most of the project had spent in going to infrastructure, education and health. The budget is aimed at consolidating on the state's achievements according to the governor. Speaker, the process leading to the presentation of your 2022 budget being presented today was inclusive and participatory in line with our avowed commitment and part with the people of Oshun. This was done first at the level of medium-term sector strategy, MTSS development process and later through stakeholder engagement in three senatorial district. The main focus of the year's 2022 budget would be gear towards aggressive improvement of our internet-generated review drive to ensure optimum performance in the coming year. Consequently, workable strategies are in place to boost the revenue of the state without putting a nasty burden on our people. The Seventh Assembly will consider and pass a budget that will reflect the priorities of our people in terms of education, health care, security, agriculture, youth development, infrastructure and economy development with intent to look inward on how to execute the budget without depending completely on federal allocation. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.