Today, on Around the Table at Emmitsburg, we're going to be meeting with a group of folks who are here for the multi-hazards planning course for schools. They're at EMI this week, and we're pleased to have them here. In recent years, we have found that schools are also vulnerable to a variety of hazards. Student violence certainly comes to mind, but there are other hazards as well. And this week, the folks are working on anticipating a variety of hazards and planning for them. Joining us is Alfred Roberts, who is an executive director with the Dallas Public Schools in Dallas, Texas. He is specifically responsible for crisis abuse and injury prevention. Alfred, welcome. Thank you. Glad to have you here today. Also joining us is Linda Mason, who is the director of education and training for the Arizona Division of Emergency Management in Phoenix, Arizona. Linda, we're glad you're here today. Thank you. Thank you. Leroy F. Cross Jr. is also joining us. He is the commander for special operations at the Thornton Police Department in Thornton, Colorado. Leroy, thank you for joining us today. Thank you. Glad you could be here. And Melanie Grandfrost is here, it's Melanie Grandfrost, excuse me, from the Shoreline Fire Department in Shoreline, Washington. Not too far from Seattle. That's right. Glad you could be here. And certainly last but not least, we even have a high school principal joining us today. Mike Narcowicz is the principal at the Bandon High School in Bandon, Oregon. Mike, we're glad you're here today. Thank you. Okay. Now, you've been working on school hazards all week. And I think one of the things I'd like to start out with here is, what kind of hazards do schools need to worry about? I mean, we talk about all kinds of things in the community, but what do schools end up with? Melanie? I would say, if you can think of it, it could happen in a school. The range runs from chemical spills to natural disasters that we're all familiar with, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions in our area even, to sniper fire from outside. We've had bank robberies that leaked over into the neighborhood that were a threat. Two things such as a tragedy happening to a family within a school that may have a lot of different facets. So as I say, if it happens in life, it could happen in a public school. These hazards are going to impact the school. Is that safe to say? Absolutely. That's good. Very well. Mike, it sounds to me like it's probably going to impact the learning process. It affects the learning process, it affects the staff as a whole, and when the staff's affected, most of the kids will be affected, and the principal has to be aware that all things can happen and prepare for that. Variety of hazards? Alfred, I'm sure you've had a variety of incidents in your district. Certainly. And I think the key to it is having a crisis team that's well trained and going through simulated exercises so that when the real thing comes, they prepare to deal with it in the best way possible. Leroy, from a law enforcement point of view, a lot of the things that Melanie mentioned, you're probably going to get to participate in, aren't you? Correct. It directly affects us, emergency responders, whether it's the place for fire or a combination of both. And it's critical that prior to those things occurring, that we have a good partnership and good understanding with the school systems and the local government to be able to effectively resolve whatever problem we're faced with. So we need to start early, we need a good team. Linda, I think the planning process is critical here, isn't it? It's very, very critical, and I'm really pleased to say that many of the states have been very aggressive in working with the schools and making sure that programs are available to bring them into the loop to allow them an opportunity to work with the first responder agencies in their area, because in many situations the schools are the hubs of our communities, and the more that we can prepare and work together and coordinate as a community, the better prepared we are going to be to handle an event or a situation when it arises. So it sounds like we need to start early on this planning process, but we have this potpourri of hazards, both external and internal. And I kind of like to talk about that for a few minutes. Mike, in your community, what are some of the hazards that you have to look at external to the school, some of the things that you might run into? One of the main things, being from the south coast of Oregon, would be weather, whether it be high winds, high rain, floods, two main bridges coming into town, one of the drawbridge, the drawbridge is stuck, that could be a hazard, so you never know. Being rural, having facilities, it takes an hour for someone to get there. If we need six hours for a bomb squad, say our police department, I think has seven officers, so if we need more police, it's 20, 30 minutes away. So those are the outside forces that we're planning for an emergency that we need to be aware of. Alfred and Dallas, what are some of the hazards that you've seen specifically from the outside that might have an impact on one of your schools? Well, certain things, such as chemical spills, we have an airport that's located right near a school, so the potential for some kind of accident is likely there. Other than that, some of the things that have been mentioned previously, violence in the neighborhoods, spilling over into the school, we do have situations where flooding occurs, so that could be a problem. Then we're in Tarnata, LA, so we are very vulnerable in terms of weather related to that kind of incident. Now, one of the other things that Melanie brought up, and I thought was interesting, is that there can also be things that happen in the school, and it's not just the violence kinds of things, there's some other things that could happen as well. What are some of those? Well, we've recently had a propane leak in our chemistry lab that affected the south wing of the school, and people started getting nauseated and everything, and we have to prepare for that, which we're going to do in case of a propane leak. We've had bomb threats, or A-bomb threats, and that affected everything. It's in the kids' home, the rats of violence, kids having a hit list, and that kind of thing. It affects not only the learning process, but the whole process of the school. What's happening in the school? Melanie?  It required a lockdown for seven hours of those two schools without very much information as to what was going on. That's probably our most recent, and it actually touched off our involvement, our multi-agency involvement, because at that particular event, some of us did not know each other. The police chief did not know the school superintendent, and we realized that that was a bad situation, and we're working to remedy it. So we learned from a very serious crisis that we need that multi-agency approach. What do you contribute to that? Well, some of the information that we teach in the multi-hazard program for schools is that to do not only an external vulnerability analysis, but an assessment within your school buildings as well. And that is where you identify areas that the school may be vulnerable to these events, such as chemistry labs, such as what you mentioned, and things of that nature. Look at other things as far as school structures located and what might be involved in causing damage, not only to the school property, but the participants in that building, such as when damage comes into the area as well. So it's not only what's in the community, but it's what's in the school system as well, and identifying those vulnerabilities early on is a way that you can mitigate against loss of life or damage. It's interesting that it sounds as though we're saying that whatever is in the community is also reflected into the schools, and vice versa. Absolutely. It really doesn't make sense not to have the schools in the emergency planning process, because that's one of the vulnerable hazards. Absolutely. Well, in our community, we are the evacuation point. If anything happens in the city, they come to the schools, and we have to deal with it. We have tsunami warnings, which are tidal waves. We've never had one, but we can go through the drills and proceed as an earthquake through California. I want to come up off of that, Mike. Let's go to some specific hazards here. What do you do for a tsunami? Go to high ground. That's a good idea. In our case, since we are the center of the evacuation point for our city, there are a lot of low-lying areas in our city with a lot of front, for example. They're supposed to evacuate. They have a siren that goes off and head to the nearest evacuation point. We have evacuation maps laid out that are handed out. Most of the people in the city are aware of one thing. We are a tourist town, and we have to identify our police officers. We have to realize that a lot of people don't even know what a tsunami is. That information, getting that out. The students take it pretty seriously at the same time. They know that a tsunami is not a real threat to them at this point. Your school would be a place where people would come if there were a warning. Exactly. It would be one of the gathering places. Exactly. We have high schools, middle schools, and grade schools. It's about a 10-acre campus and a pretty close proximity. We use the gyms and the canvatures as shelter for people who would have a tsunami. In the process of working this out, you've obviously worked with folks to designate your buildings. Correct. This is where anybody else can jump in as well. What are we going to do with the students while this is going on? In our case, since that is the evacuation point, they will remain at the school. We may not be in session having lessons going on at the time, but they will remain on the school grounds as instructed. They would stay there. They're sheltered. We can go from there. Alfred, I want to come to you. Tornadoes. They're usually pretty quick. We may not get a lot of warning. So what do we specifically need to look at doing? What are the actions that folks need to consider if they're in that hazard area? Well, fortunately, we've not had one to hit our school district, but the planning is extremely important. For example, our central control security office functions as the alert position or station. And the principals have weather radios as well as other supervisors. And so hopefully they will have those radios on so that they can hear the signals. And then, of course, they watch the weather channels as well as they're plugged into some of the email situations at Give Alerts. So the key is the warning system. And once the warning is given, well, if it's a tornado watch, then persons know it's a possibility that it might hit that way. And if it's a tornado warning, then one knows to go ahead and perhaps go into shelter. Our schools had a weather drill, all 218 of them approximately a month ago. They had to go through the procedure. And one of the critical things is finding the safe areas within a building. Some of our buildings are aesthetically pleasing but are very unsafe. So the schools, the crisis teams identify what areas to assemble the kids. And in high school, it's a little more difficult because you don't put them into the kneeling position unless the actual emergency is there. But the key is having the safe areas and knowing what to do in case the tornadoes hit it your way. How do we define a safe area for a high wind event like this? What do we need to look at?  You try to stay away from the open areas such as gyms and cafeterias, auditoriums because they're probably going to collapse under the strength of the wind. We do use our maintenance department, structural engineers, we even use the National Weather Service as well as emergency preparedness officers to help us locate those safe areas because we want to be prepared to save every life that we can in case we have an emergency. At good point, outside resources to help us identify where the safe areas are. Sounds like a good idea? Absolutely. Linda, does that fit in with planning because you've been talking about partnerships. That sounds like a possibility. And the partnerships from the state perspective is that we work with the local units of government at the county level, at the city level. In the state of Arizona, schools are considered a jurisdiction as well. And so we're heavily involved in acting as a liaison between many of these agencies. And especially in the school program that we're teaching the multi-hazard program for schools in the state of Arizona, we bring a multitude of agencies into the classroom and integrate that classroom so that we start out by encouraging them to work together in the classroom. And once they leave that classroom, they go back to their local facilities and continue that work through the planning process and address areas that they may not have thought of addressing before.  And it has so many facets and we've found that it's absolutely natural. We're in there doing inspections, fire inspections. So we're walking the building with the leaders of the school, looking at the building and talking about that thing, that part of their safety. And then we do mentoring. We have firefighters in the schools doing mentoring. We have fire and life safety programs throughout the curriculum. And we're just, it's sort of a natural part of the community. We're nearby, kids come to us, we go to them. And so they tend to rely on us and when they find out that we're willing to do more, that emergency preparedness is part of it, they're surprised and quite relieved. And to piggyback on what Melanie is saying, I mean, many of them have a vested interest. They have children in those schools or they have spouses teaching in those schools. So it brings it home. It makes it personal. And that's important. Leroy, from a police perspective, I imagine you've also got connections other than emergency connections with the schools. Right. In our particular city, we have school resource officers and those are uniformed officers that are assigned to a given school. And their primary focus is not making arrests or not what we initially term as basic law enforcement. But they're there to partner with the educators there to inform the kids and the staff what policing is all about, why we do what we do. And a follow-on job that those officers have is enforcement. So that's secondary. And while they're in the schools, they do things like threat assessments. You know, if we have a critical incident occurs, whether it's a severe storm like in the Denver area, we can have blizzards in the winter. What are some things that they can offer to the schools, evacuation points for the kids? If we have a immediate need to deploy more police officers because we may have, excuse me, an active shooter in the schools, we're able to get with that school resource officer who is connected with the schools to give us an idea of how to rapidly respond, how can we stop the problem from getting worse. So the police in this regard are critical stakeholders along with fire school folks and other person in the government. Go ahead. Our SRO officer, this is the second year that he's been in the school. A lot of us community and public relations, the police chief and our SRO officer have a weight lifting program in the morning before school and a lot of troubled kids will turn into education kids, go to those weight lifting and it's given a new perspective for the kids, for the police officers. Our SRO officer, we also use him on field trips as a supervisor. He's dressed in shorts and we took him on a senior trip to Calton and went down San Francisco. And the relationship that the kids see with the police officer is totally different than a uniformed officer. And I think it's been a huge benefit for our community as well as the school. It sounds like a lot of connections going on here. I might add to that that we have seen it that not only the faculty but the students begin to look at the police officer as a friend. And a lot of times the only time the police officer comes in contact with folks is usually during a critical incident. That's not a happy time.  When we have an incident, whether it's a suicide that maybe affects a member of the school system, police officers there and they're not there just as that. There's that cop there. There is a friend, someone that can help them and they feel much better. If the disaster is larger again, the officer is there as a resource. When other officers bring in, people are viewing those police officers as helpers that want to help solve their problems as opposed to the old adage, cops here must be a problem. Right. And our R-S-R officer also started an Explorer post on our campus where we have about ten students involved. And it's been a great program. The seniors graduate and certain students move up and it gives the students a buy-in to the safety of their school and what's going on in their school. And it's an excellent program. Mike, that's an interesting point. Do students have to buy-in to safety? Oh, absolutely. Go ahead. In fact, one of our directives has been to try to get things into the curriculum. This isn't something we don't ask students to follow the teacher on a fire drill. We want to teach them that if they were alone in that room, that they would know to look for their exit and go out. And so we're trying to put life safety lessons into the curriculum and make students aware throughout that this is something used throughout life. And also buy-in, even on things like the lockdown drills or the preparedness, we have students that are learning CERT, community emergency response teams, and learning first aid and CPR, bringing them into the process. So it's life skills. Absolutely. One thing that I've noticed is the seriousness of the students with the high media profile of the school students. When we do our evacuation drills or our fire drills or our lockdown drills, you don't see the commotion or the screwing around that we used to in the past. The kids know that we're doing this for their safety. And the student buy-in area, I'm not going to word that it continues that. But I think by educating the kids and letting them have a say, and we're a smaller school and we have more control at the same time that the students know the threat of violence or an evacuation procedure that we're serious when I'm messing around. Alfred, are you seeing something similar to that in the larger schools? Yes. And I think this course is very important because I've been in education over 30 years and in none of my courses at the undergraduate or graduate level have I had a class in how to deal with emergencies and the basic elements that we've gotten in the course. I think the course is critically important and should be part of the curriculum. And I need to put in a point that our schools are the safest places, even though our communities, if you will look at the statistics, many of our kids come from very violent situations, but our schools are very safe. So in terms of that, there's another important aspect. The curriculum must teach them critical skills of decision making, anger management, trust. And then the adults in a situation also must value the kids because in some situations some of the youngsters are not valued and that's why they may act out in the way that they do. So in terms of the violence that's created within the schools, we have a tremendous responsibility to try to look for signals that may tell us that violence may occur. So in the larger situations, the students are critically important because they will assume a sense of responsibility and when there is danger in many instances, will report that danger. Often it's done through an anonymous type of hotline situation. But they have an outlet where they can't. Right, they do have an outlet. I was just going to say that you can only prepare for a natural disaster, but in cases where the SROs are working in the firefighters, you can prevent some of the violence that we're talking about. It's good for people to know that we are working at that level as well, not just responding. It sounds like mitigation is an important part of that. Yes, very much. We've seen that in our setting where students have enough rapport with the students and that the students can either approach an administrator or a school secretary, whoever they need to, as an outlet, hey, I heard such and such. And we take all threats, everything's here. There's an investigation that goes on either by the vice-principal or myself or whoever the school counselor gets involved. It's a great process to eliminate, you know, instead of keeping a bottle up inside, it's not a, you know, we try to eliminate the, I'm not going to rat on my friends type of thing. And we've seen that in our setting where it's been a very positive benefit for our staff and students and our community. Have you seen that in some of your schools? Well, I teach the school systems, you know, the course and things like that. But as far as getting into discussions with the schools that I've been involved with, I totally support and have heard support for the comments. You know, it sounds like the school resource officer is also an important part is another connection for the students. And I think that's what I'm hearing you saying. We need to make sure the students are connected with somebody if there's a problem. Is that a safe way of saying that? Most definitely. They're connected. Matter of fact, we have seen that on days where the school resource officer may not be in his or her school because of some outside training, the kids talk about that. Hey, where's the school resource officer? You know, whether that's just want to chitchat or they have a problem at home that they can't deal with. They have valued being able to go to the school resource officer to unburden them. And very eloquently, the school resource officers either get them into some other network to help them overcome their problem, whatever. They don't feel like they're ratted out. If there's a problem in the school, an allegation of a weapon being in the school, these people come forth and they seek out the school resource officer. Where in the past, they may not have done that, and they didn't do that. And that helps. They're getting actively involved in keeping their school safe. So they're key to this whole planning process. Well, I want to actually now move into the planning process. And Linda, you had mentioned that early on we need to do a risk assessment. Yes. Internal and external. So where do we go after we've identified the risks? What's our next step? Okay, then you need to work with maybe the architect of the school to identify areas. The engineers located in their community to review maybe building codes, things of that nature. We have a lot of older schools still in the United States, and we have a lot of ultra-modern schools in the United States. And those are issues that, at the local level, working with their emergency management director to help coordinate maybe those assets and the local units of government, they can identify people in their community and within state agencies that can help them address those. Okay, so we need to start identifying safe areas. We need to look at our buildings. We need to get folks involved from the outside. We've identified our safe areas. Now what do we do? We need to evaluate and exercise our plans. I'm reminded of a quote that General Eisenhower said, that plans are nothing, planning is everything and talking about the process. And I think we've all probably been there some time in our career where something has occurred and we've reacted to it and then we go back and say, you know we had plans for these, but we never really exercised those plans. So a key ingredient is the plans that we have in place, are they effective? And maybe they're effective today, but they may not be effective years from now. And are the right people involved in those plans? Do we have too many people, not enough people? So it's very critical. And the exercise of those plans can take a multitude of stages from around-table discussions such as this to an actual full-blown scenario. And they don't have to happen once a month. They can happen, you know, once a year, once every 18 months, something like that. But that's critical. I want to come back to planning here, to the plans. Who's responsible for developing these? Who do you get involved in the planning process? Well, in our district it starts at the superintendent and the superintendent's a very hands-on type of guy and it's ultimately the school principal's responsibility for the building. At the same time we have a district-wide plan where pretty much the nucleus of the plan, they're all the same. And we just customize it for our building and our staff and how many students we have. And the bus evacuation drills and everything. We try to prepare for everything you can think of. But at the same time, the nucleus of the plan, everything's basically the same. Just altered for different disasters or if you have an intruder or whatever you have, the nucleus. Is that district-wide plan? I think you look at what is it that we're looking at and what we're planning for. And then from that saying, who are those people within the community that are affected by this plan and the problem? And you really need to make sure that key people in those respective disciplines are involved. The fire department, police department, other areas of local government. Key people within the community. And they start formulating and being part of the process of putting the plan together. If we try to put a plan together by ourselves, it may be very effective for us, but not for anyone else. In the years that I've been in law enforcement, I've had many classes I've gone to that were 100% law enforcement. And we dealt with a problem, we looked at from a law enforcement standpoint and never considered, or at least through the class, well, how does it affect other people? The value that I've seen of this class that I'm going through right now is I'm seeing concerns and issues that affect my peers outside of law enforcement that I thought, I never considered that. I need this thing done. I didn't realize they have all these stunning blocks and it makes me look at things a little more broad-based. An example for us that I think is very descriptive was where we had a drill, a mock drill, a bus accident, and fire department responded and the school district responded. We were kind of operating in these separate little pods and then we realized that during the triage process, and we did have injuries and some deaths that were staged, but during the triage process, we were sending one patient, one patient, two patient, three patient, four to the hospital. That's the way we do it. It's very organized and we know just who we sent where. And the school district was saying, I've got parents that need to know who these kids are. And we went, oh, we never do names. We don't do names. And then we realized we have to back up and we've got to start doing names. So we actually designated a position that will stand right next to the triage officer that will begin to try to identify kids. We're using a school counselor. We may even grab a yearbook and try to do that because names is crucial for those school people and it's not something we ever did. Linda? Yes, getting back to the planning process and a natural in the community to assist the schools in writing plans or your local emergency management coordinator or director. That person is already charged with putting together a community emergency plan and should be heavily involved in making sure that contact is made with the schools within the area to access the information in the school's plans so that it complements the community plan just as the local community plan should complement and work with the state plan and the state plan complements and works with the federal emergency management plan. So we're all in this game together and the more that we learn to work together the better off the whole nation is going to be. How often do we have to look at these plans? Oh, frequently. At least annually. If not more often. Well, we review ours annually and before school my staff may go over all procedures and as incidents occur we evaluate what we're doing and is it effective? Do we need this? What do we need to add? Having an SRO officer, having another idea or perspective of what's going on is great because usually more times than not the different perspective will help you reevaluate your plan to make sure that you are working together and that things run smoothly in case of an emergency. And we're all here for the kids' safety we're not involved with who takes credit for what we want to make sure our schools are safe and that if we do have an emergency to let our community know that we're planned well in advance of what we're going to do we have confidence in ourselves to be able to handle any situation that pops up at our school. Alfred, you have a huge school district how do you manage this process with all these schools? I think Linda gave a good overview. We've gotten with the persons from the city and they obviously have linked up with the persons from the state and linked into federal. The district has a plan that's kind of a template for the schools but then each school has to develop its own plan and implement its own plan each school has a crisis team and I think in terms of the planning and implementation that's very critical because on the team we have the support staff represented we obviously have the administration represented we have the nurse, we have the custodian our building engineer we have the community person the community liaison if there's a security person we have that person we have the cafeteria managers so everyone that would be affected in the upper grades we will use students as part of the crisis team as well so each school has a crisis plan and has to test that plan and upgrade it as needed during the school year. I'm glad you brought up testing because we've mentioned drills and exercises but how should we go about that I assume that most of the schools have a monthly drill requirement if nothing else for an evacuation drill but what else should we do about drills and exercises? Make them realistic. Ah, okay, run with it. Okay, first of all I would encourage individuals to refer back to your vulnerability analysis and what you have identified are your risk you're going to prioritize those risks and deal with it and extract part of the plan that might be applicable to that risk and exercise possibly that portion of the plan you don't have to bite off the whole chunk and try and swallow it at once you can take parts of your plan and exercise your plan and set goals for your exercises that are reachable goals and not goals that are going to set people up to fail and those are just some considerations that you need to look at when you're exercising so we're thinking we don't start off with the full blown tornado hit the building we have hundreds of casualties you all come that's probably not a good place to start what kind of exercise are you talking about that basis for your plan and nucleus for most of our evacuation drills everything we do is the same if it's a tornado, a fire, whatever we're doing it's the same and getting that nucleus so it's well versed and everybody knows what's going on is the key to your evacuation plan your safety plan if you don't have that in place and you're in big trouble because you can't predict the weather you can't predict if an intruder and you have to be ready for anything so I think that's a key piece how do you say a norm in your school that oh we're doing evacuation you want everybody to realize the importance of what's going on and that they take it seriously so those actually, those monthly drills can be the basis for a larger exercise program what I would suggest is for instance taking a small chunk would be just the communications portion that's where our school district found they were the weakest they were calling everybody in the district and so they exercised just simply didn't even name the event but there's something that goes on where do you call, who reports to whom and they just exercised that communication portion which is a critical piece obviously schools have hundreds of students and that means hundreds of parents that want to know what's going on absolutely when you involve parents and that's kind of when the hysteria starts that's when you earn your money right then and there it's a key piece we rely on computers but if you have a disaster the power could be out and you need to make sure that you have hard copies of everything you have on the computer and sometimes relax with that because of the modern era and I feel that in an emergency you can't rely on computers so you're going to have to be prepared Leroy you mentioned just the idea of tabletop discussions is that another good place to bring folks together to get our plan out on the table and see what happens with it you bet and one of the perfect times to do that is we may have a situation happen in some place in the United States that doesn't immediately affect us and that may coincide with the weekly or monthly staff meeting and you say you know we don't want to take any extra time let's take a half hour and say we had this incident happen in X city are we prepared today that if this would occur in our city tomorrow would we be able to deal with that and through a discussion like this we can say you know you think I haven't looked at the plan yet and say I think we are or I think we're not and that discussion there will grow it may take 15 minutes or 30 minutes the most and it starts you thinking it starts that process and maybe the next staff meeting you say let's spend the next staff meeting doing an analysis of this particular plans we'll prepare it's kind of an ongoing event and it's critical that if you're going to go into an exercise make sure you have objectives and people know what you're trying to accomplish and then leave them at the end with some level of success because if you always find the negative is which is one of the intent of an exercise so you can work those up but you leave it with 100% negative people will feel we're never going to succeed in these things we're human so we want to feel some successes Mike piece that I like to do is after every drill I have 20 teachers on staff as to personally thank the teachers for going through the time and taking it seriously and once in a while I have a teacher forget the role book or something and don't turn it to big huge things but stress the importance and positive feedback with I think positive feedback to the staff and to the students we always if things go very very well we thank the students in our daily bulletin and let them know that the positive feedback that they were that this is important to us so when we're finishing up we don't just finish the drill or exercise there's actually another step isn't there you don't just walk away from it and reassessing you reassess that was the planning that we had prior to this up to snuff where do we need to tweak it to make it good again that's part of that long term strategic planning we always dust it off and make sure it's timely and relevant if we don't do that as best we try we always seem to miss something and fix it so we have to plan the exercise we ought to pick the pieces that we may be vulnerable to or we're not sure it will work we need to make sure when it's over that we know what worked and what didn't work and we need to make sure people understand that it did have a positive impact because it sounds like part of the positive impact is we found something that wasn't workable we can change it we go back re-evaluate, reassess re-write the plan if necessary retrain the plan and then re-exercise the plan so it's circular ongoing process I think Mike that's an important part what I've been hearing you all say is that even though the plan is a document it's really the process I think that's kind of what you were saying I think the process is where we come together true and build our community connections I want to deal with an issue here that actually formalizes our community connections and a lot of times at incidents and Melanie you brought it up the school district's over here and the fire department's over here and I suspect there's times when the police department's over here and we're not we're not all working together on this so incident command is this something we need to start looking at in a circle incident command gives us a process that we put the key components together to make sure that we resolve our problem you have a ton of people out there and if everyone's doing their own little thing we all have the same objective and the same goal but we're all running in different directions trying to accomplish our objective of working against each other incident command pulls that together under a unified structure assigns various personnel to various responsibility to make it flow and to make it go basically so incident command is critical and everybody who's involved shares a piece of that incident command system it's not it may be a fire and we don't say well that's up to the fire department police we're just going to guard the streets and go home it doesn't work that way and the school obviously has to be involved in this and in the course the multi hazard program for schools course we have an introduction to the incident command system but schools already have a system in place and we have just offered this information to make them aware that the first responder agencies also have a system in place and when we can unify the system so that everyone is reading from the same sheet of music that an event will be maybe handled much more cooperatively if the structure is used Melanie in your instance you mentioned the triage and we're kind of doing separate things incident command sounds like that might help resolve that it would resolve it fully the other thing is that people do what they think is right when for lack of information otherwise and so everyone has good intentions but this kind of formalizes those good intentions with one specific area and also people are overwhelmed by too much to do and that's another beauty of the system is that it gives you a small area you own that and you don't have to worry about being overwhelmed for us it is the way to go and it puts us on the same page as you say we're speaking the same language there's another little area that it helps work on and that is turf you've got school superintendent and a fire chief and a police chief and that's a realistic human thing we're looking at turf and this is a way to put those positions together in a unified command as it's called and to kind of work through some of those jurisdictional problems so we get to bring the decision makers together an incident command to make sure we're making good decisions together doesn't mean anybody's giving up their turf means we're coordinating our turf from the sounds of it doing what they do best and in a large school system it may operate in a different way the principal is in charge of the incident command center and the principal by nature of his responsibilities her responsibilities has to coordinate where the kids are and whether they're safe and whether the media is being taken care of but it's important that the principal be in the command center or have a representative to carry on the communications and a large system the principal would work with his supervisors and may request the activation of the emergency operations center which is a major operation with all of the key people maintenance facilities communications at the central office level so that all those key persons are in touch with the incident so the communications is very important and the principal and I talk with some of the persons from fire and from the police departments there and I'm interested in coming in and taking over the responsibilities of the principal but it's critical that they coordinate with the principal in the operations that are going on Alfred it seems to me although I'd like to think it's obvious that even if there is some sort of critical incident going on to school the school district is still responsible for the children that's correct so we can't leave them out of the loop because they have to fulfill their responsibilities for example what happens to lunch periods the bus schedules all of that still has to go on it has to continue as we as we wrap this up I'm going to throw you a little curveball here go around the table here if you were speaking to other professionals in your arena what would be the one message that you think they absolutely positively have to get from your experiences both in the street and here in the class what's that one message that if you were going to look them in the eye and tell them that you would want your colleagues to hear from you now there's lots of messages but if you had to pick one what would it need to be and Alfred I'm going to start with you we got to start somewhere what's that one message for your colleagues throughout the nation as we are quite aware student achievement has perhaps been the focus principals have extreme accountability in fact I was reading yesterday about the principals in Maryland some of them are being retired involuntarily because the test scores didn't go up or whatever so it seems to be the key focus is student achievement I'm not saying that it should not be but I would say to principals and others that student achievement is critically important but also the other part of a student's life is also important the social development I'll call it a kid needs to know how to get along with other persons needs to know how to protect himself or herself during an emergency and this extends into the homes when the emergencies on the street and the homes I think if they're taught well how to deal with emergencies in school this will carry over to the homes I guess the simple message would be student achievement should not be the only focus because if my kids are not safe and if they're not alive we can't deal with student achievement good point thank you Linda from the emergency management perspective well I definitely have told my colleagues throughout the United States that it is really critical that we look at the schools as another customer and that we not only need to make courses available not just the school course but there's a lot of supporting courses such as emergency planning courses the incident command course other courses that we offer to the local first response agencies and other government officials that are quite applicable for the school systems as well and if we're going to integrate the classroom to include all of these agencies and school systems in the classroom we need to make sure to put our schools on our mailing lists when we announce our courses for those communities that aren't doing it it's critically important in my opinion that the senior executive officers of the agencies the police chiefs the fire chief the school district personnel or school district representative superintendent need to meet at least annually to discuss issues that affect the school and how that contacts and impacts the other agencies police fire and such and how it affects our community they need to meet to know each other face to face to get that particular rapport once that occurs they will send the orders down to the people who do the work and they'll carry the task but if those folks who are the ultimate decision makers don't meet then a lot of work that may be done below may not have the credibility may not get to where it's supposed to go so I think it's vitally important that the ultimate bosses get together every so often we realize they're extremely busy to talk about issues that are affecting the schools and how they affect the community and everything good point Melody I'm sorry I have to echo it we have SWAT teams and high tech communications and high tech firefighting techniques it still comes down to interpersonal relations and unless you are face to face with people that you're going to be in a crisis with and understand each other's language and how to share information you can have all the tools in the world and it won't be successful Mike we started with an educator we're going to end with an educator My number one message would be to not be naive enough to think that it won't happen in your school because it will and it could be sooner or later but always I know it takes a lot of time to go through your emergency plan to educate all your teachers and your staff but it'll be worth it in the end if you can save one life or keep a kid out of harm's way it's worth it and we're all we're all in the test scores we're all in achievement and that's what makes the newspapers but the safety plan is absolutely critical and to communicate with your staff and the fire department, police department and just to make sure that you're prepared when it does happen to you because it will and they're ready to go good points well as we've seen school safety is not simply a matter of the school working it's the community working together and I want to thank all of our participants for being here and thank you for joining us on Around the Table at Emmitsburg


So we've got plenty of questions, so we have no problem running through all these. These guys have promised to answer every single question as long as it takes. So we'll be here all day. So we're going to go for a little while, and then I could ask Xena, maybe, or somebody to just kind of give me a time check. We'll get through the stack, we'll go as far through as we can, and yeah, we'll see where we go from here. So thanks for all your input. Okay, so first question, and I'd like to address everybody here. Actually, you know what, sorry, let me do some introductions first. Apologize, let me do introductions. First, I have Olivia March. I'm just going to let you do your own introduction. How's that? I work at the ACCC, so the Australian Competition Consumer Commission in the energy regulation sector. We have six Drupal websites, and I've just been involved in the development of the most recent one, and previous government and education experience. And I'm Vesa Palmo. I'm the CEO of Wunderkraut. Wunderkraut was formed last summer by merging some European Drupal shops, namely Crimson, Meara and Node1, including some private individuals. So we are today 150 people focusing only on Drupal in nine European countries. So it's rather distributed organization for now. I'm Felipe Rubin, chief architect with CINT, which is a Brazilian company. We have about 1,600 people, but about 300 developers or talents in Drupal spread out across Brazil, China and Argentina. So doing global support and development for organizations, farm organizations from the US with global reach, pretty much. And I'm Jeff Walpole, I'm the CEO of Face2 Technology, based in Washington, D.C., and New York. So I'm the token United States representative here. Okay, so our first question. Is using open source different than proprietary for enterprises? And if yes, why? So how is open source different for enterprise organizations? I mean, from the companies I have worked before or currently working on, the challenge when it comes to using open source and compared to proprietary in terms of support, for example. That's the first thing that comes. But later on, as they start adopting open source, that really gets mitigated. So in the end of the day, it goes down to the license fees and that part related to it. And really getting to know and how to work with the community and work with something that they don't have so much control when compared to calling to a company or to a proprietary model organization. That's one of the big differences that I felt when selling Drupal or putting position in Drupal within large enterprises and they were used to that proprietary model and then they need to change the mindset and really get the benefits out of the Drupal community, which is basically, in my view, the flexibility and time to market. So that's something that was really different for those organizations. Yeah, I think the real bigger difference is if you're working with somebody with, let's say, a single vendor CMS against the big ecosystem, if it's open or closed, I think that's the largest difference with potential vendor lock and so on. That being said, with some commercial products, you might not get what you really want and sometimes it's impossible to get some new features in and these kinds of things, but I don't think if that's really all that common. I'm not there to say that there are not that many differences. The community aspect is a big difference because you can't just pay money for somebody to support it or you can't, but that's not going to be enough in all cases if you are large scale Drupal user, for example. But mostly, I don't think it's a major difference actually. I don't think you get much of a difference from the user level but I think in terms of the executive level and trying to sell it up, there's a perception that open source isn't as safe or secure but there's also a lot of noise in the open source sort of market whereas a single vendor, you know who you're talking to in open source, the message can get confused, especially at a non-technical level. Great, great. Now a very provocative question. Do you genuinely think that Drupal is amazing or is it simply the best there is? i.e. is it just the best poo in a pile of poo? I'm not making this up, this is what people write. What's that? Yes, you can tweet that. Just don't attribute it to me. What do you think? I don't think I'll use the same language. I don't know if it's the best. I do kind of look at everything in terms of the best tool for the job. It is one of the better, that's for sure but I don't think there's any perfect solution that fits everyone. Yeah, I'm not going to go with the poo one but I personally have some sort of love-hate relationship with Drupal and it lacks a lot of things but that being said it's the best solution out there currently so definitely the best option for large enterprises at least. Yeah, I agree with you guys. There's no super bullet. One important thing is about the right tool for the right job. Like you, I have the house of the hate and love thing with Drupal so I've seen cases where people chose you as Drupal and just screw up by using that for the wrong purpose so I think that's the overall plan anyways. Did you want to caveat that those are not the official thoughts from the Drupal Association in your board seat? I'll do that for you. Okay, this is a pretty simple question but it's also a very complex question and it's one that I think a lot of us get a lot which is what's the real competition for Drupal? And of course we realize that different sizes and in different places it's different so I think it's interesting mainly from a regional perspective to hear what you're seeing in the countries that you're in and I'd also be interested in terms of size. Large enterprises is it different than what you're seeing what you're seeing is sort of simple website building software? That's a really good question and we have physical offices in nine different European countries and for us each market is different if you look at the competition today I can't say there would be like one primary competitor and definitely it also comes to the scale as well somebody could say WordPress is the biggest competitor for Drupal in enterprise level that's definitely not the case today but that may be the case in a few years if you look at how WordPress is moving forward today but I would say it's mostly proprietary software solutions which are different from market to market they range from Java to Microsoft to whatever basically I think our list of primary competition has something like 20 products today and as I said different from one country to another I would be interested to hear what those are in the Australian market though Yeah me too I'm not going to risk and take some names but in my past two experiences when selling Drupal and I'm more focused on large enterprises there was just a couple of two that were standing out out there against Drupal and Drupal in the end was just the SPS case was the winner but was more Java one I think Oracle Fed was called Fedwire and also in Brazil so that case was in the US first so even in the US for a Fortune Fit pharmaceutical company they chose Drupal on top against Oracle Fedwire and also in Brazil Oracle was really big over there with the new CMS product which I forgot the name but I was a big contender with Drupal over there so that's what I've been facing more in terms of competition but still and my focus are companies more towards digital marketing so all the sites that we've been building is not specific use case like LMS or any or government but it's more like final sites or websites for consumers so that's where Drupal is really standing out even with such proprietary solutions If I can quickly add actually something Funnily enough I'm currently based in the UK and our biggest competition there is everything about Drupal because there are so few big Drupal shops so quite a few customers have been recently leaving Drupal because they've been so disappointed that they can't find proper big Drupal vendors to actually help them out and they've been leaving to Java or Ruby on Rails and to commercial solutions and to all sorts of directions so like big part of my job in UK at the moment is to sell our competition we have great competitors here and you're not going to get stuck with us if you want a big Drupal sort of funny place to be at trying to sell your competition all the time but in some of our markets that's what we absolutely have to do like every day Okay, I've got a few In government it's pretty much better than what you know often and it's often a Microsoft solution Kentico is the latest one that's been pushed a lot but then you're competing with legacy systems so people are used to SharePoint they don't refer to an intranet, they refer to SharePoint they don't know the difference so it's in terms of, they don't know the difference between CMSs or that there are more than one in Victorian government it's very much my source matrix which I hate so I guess it depends in terms of the education sector it's either Moodle or Blackboard in Australia Great, so Oh yeah, sure, in the US I'd say definitely WordPress WordPress and Joomla for open source CMS on the more sort of ubiquitous CMS side larger enterprises I would say Adobe CQ5 tends to be the thing that is cropping up the most and seems to be competing with Drupal and doing a good job at it at the top level tends to demo real well, shows real well I don't know how well it actually works I'm sure one of the fine folks from Aquia can whip up all the research on how it compares so next question I have for you guys is a little bit more of an architectural question and the beauty of sort of crowdsourcing our questions like this is you get a variety of different perspectives and what people are interested in and this one's a little bit more architectural so bear with me but the trend in enterprise solution seems to be to serve many many websites in a traditional IT systems approach and then it's a question why not produce many many individual sites as disposable IT solutions so you never have to upgrade you just rebuild you have no cross site integration issues and you keep up the pace of fast and light web so in other words using Drupal as open source without licensing fees can we build disposable websites faster and cheaper than building a monolithic platform I think you can say there's pluses and minuses migration of content is always going to be an issue so if you've got a standard format you can automate that but in my experience being government sector and education people want the information they want they don't want to hang out so the second you move a resource or you move a page even you'll get handwritten letters, emails everything I worked at the Bureau of Meteorology for a while and I think they moved where one of the forecasts for farming was and the number of complaints that were made just because they changed one level of architecture was insane so if you're creating multiple disposable sites there's not many people that want to invest the time to relearn how to use your site unless you have quite a dynamic audience so I think in terms of consistency of user experience is probably the main risk in that one I think one of the great sites of Drupal is that you can do so many things with it and I find that we do three things all the time we do massive sites that have everything in one site and multi-site profiles what not we do platform service kind of sites internally for customers where they can deploy 50 or 500 sites internally let's say a big university for example they're going to end up having hundreds if not thousands sites internally and that's more like a platform as a service kind of thinking and I find we also do quite a bit of like I don't know if they're exactly disposable you think of them as disposable but it's really difficult to get rid of the sites in the end but sometimes it is actually really good to quickly just whip up a site with the small budget and the developers tend to hate it because it's not as challenging because you can do it out of the box with Drupal fairly easily but sometimes it's really a good solution for the customers so I would say there's no single right answer to the question I agree too and I think Aliva had a point about consistency so again with the customers we've been working on they came from an area or a scenario where they had hundreds, thousands websites disperse pulverized across the organization different departments, different requirements and was a madness to maintain all of that and being able to provide the same as one department we would hear from the other department about the benefits they would have on that website and they won it at all and then sometimes different technology so we started losing control across a large enterprise so keeping consistency is really key for IT department to maintain and manage the platform yeah so I would just I would like to add as well I think that from my perspective and that my company's perspective like Vesas we've done a variety of these different platforms what I find most interesting and most fascinating and helpful about Drupal is that it's capable of doing all those things so the SPS case study earlier where you've got a large platform and you insert Drupal into a stack that includes a variety of other things is possible the disposable website concept is also possible we've done that for a publisher where they have a very strong content repository and a system of feeds and APIs and we were able to spin up hundreds of websites that you just throw away when you're done that are just you know not even really more than a standard theme some CSS changes and they just inherit content from this feed and when you're done with them you don't you don't need them anymore all the content resides in the repository so it's interesting that we can do all those things so transitioning to a few individual questions based on your experience Felipe someone wants to know what is your biggest frustration and pain point operating a software development company I guess and I think it would be more like Drupal related right or so if I can stick with that when we started with Drupal first was really the learning curve and training and getting resource and once we reached a certain level we established our own training center within the company then it was mitigated after that working with different customers I guess would be the mindset of open source working customers that were not used to and then be able to manage the whole modules which platforms would be created based on those modules for those customers and of course the developers wanted to use different modules that are out there and then be able to manage correctly with the right customer and the right modules for that I guess from Drupal perspective that's the biggest challenge for project manager from my team when dealing with the developers and be able to keep up with what the Drupal community is putting out there for us to leverage well it has and it hasn't I think it hasn't really helped us to win more business for Drupal as such because at least in European market currently there are not that many big Drupal players there are really big IT giants like Accenture and Capgemini there but when you actually have a look at how much resources they have they are relying mostly on freelancers today and they have some of their own teams but they haven't really built up the competency so our goals with all of the merger and everything we did were like to well one of the goals was to create a bigger and more credible player for big enterprises because they just don't want to work with shops that have 10 or 20 people on staff they find it's too scary to work with small players often I don't personally I don't know why but that's their policy so it has definitely helped us to win a lot of business when we compete against other Drupal vendors but that's not our primary goal our primary goal is to expand Drupal so in that yes it's been helpful but we would need to have a couple more Wunderkrauts in order to make a really big splash so if somebody wants to do one for Australia why not so I think my answer is yes and no and now for both of you a question from your panel made here what are your pet peeves when responding to tenders or in dealing with customers what can and should be done differently by the customer specifically that's always a difficult question because you get all sorts of requests for proposals half of them are complete crap to be honest half of them are okay or excellent my biggest problem with those is usually the legal department when they get involved because we do only agile projects and that's a nightmare for most legal departments so they want to know everything ahead of time and everything has to be fixed has to be fixed schedule budget scope everything and I think that's the worst thing for us so if I would have to just name one thing it would be the design first kind of thinking that especially many of the large enterprises are still into and public organizations often as well luckily that's changing slowly but today it is the primary problem I have on my side something I guess similar will be work with the customer in partnership so when it comes to RFPs we will be discussing later about the new RFP that comes out and then you get the whole team set up for that and then the customer just cancel that and you have all the team ready to start a Drupal excellent team and you just have to think about what to do with that development and even when you have an agreement with the customer for six months or a year the chains will come and there's sometimes not so much partnership in terms of working with your vendor and making the best usage of that team to help your business I guess that's as a system integrator that's one of the biggest pains and that goes across the large organizations different departments they just wouldn't worry about only about what their business are not so much about what they can deliver I don't have an answer for that it's really we try we also use Agile so we try to we show them by using a dedicated team for a long time it's better for them to get to know your business so not only the Drupal learning curve but learning the business so trying to get a long-term commitment that's only beneficial for them and that's where Agile really gets into place with this ground methodology that we use 100% as well and when we're able to show to some of the customers they really get into that and then we have a partnership for a few years but there's still some businesses some large enterprise that have a hard time getting into that model so that's where we struggle our project managers business directly struggle to convince to get on board with that model so Jeff what's yours all the above maybe so we see a lot of delays in RFPs or tenders customers that put them out and then take a long time to make decisions that's frustrating I think also just customers not realizing the right level of detail that's helpful to a vendor so if you're putting out a tender for something that's a Drupal site and you're specifying modules or versions or anything like that or you're talking about content types or taxonomy or nodes you've gone too far stop and refocus on what problems you're trying to solve and let the vendors who are responding prescribe the appropriate technical implementation I think that's probably the number one that we see more often so yeah sure not that you get me started I think one of the yeah one of the really big mistakes some customers do they don't really reveal their budget at all it's like you would go and try to build a house and they ask like okay how much can you afford to invest well whatever give me an offer for a house it's you know just you can't tell for some cases unless you have some idea what the budget range is and I've been also buying services and I always put in like exact amounts like well this is what it can cost so let us know what the quality would be on that and everything instead of just trying to get the lowest possible price because this is absolutely buying a website is like buying a car or a house without defining anything else if you just get the cheapest one you'll know what you end up getting so changing gears a little bit we've talked quite a bit today about technology platforms let's talk about content because obviously content is the most important aspect the reason that we have a content management system to begin with Olivia can you tell us a little bit about any lessons you have in terms of incorporating legacy content migrating content things like that in terms of Drupal implementations I'm a big fan of automatically sort of scraping and reloading as required but if you're looking at a distributed website or a legacy website that's potentially built in something like Lotus Notes you're not going to get that sort of you're not going to be able to really leverage that so I think procedures and policies come first so how often do you review content what is archive content and sort of what is necessary one thing we have done is across departmental team so people from the different business units represent the content have come along to web training have come along to accessibility training have come along to writing for the web and it's their responsibility to manage the content within the area whether it's migrated or whether it's archived so putting it back on the business units that created it and setting a standard to meet for future part governance in the order that you tackle things but then also ownership right good so I would like to ask all of you because I think this is probably a good question for everybody to be thinking about but what are the biggest blockers for the enterprise to sharing their code back to the community so what examples have you seen in which people are doing a good job of sharing their code back and examples maybe where they're not and why I have two customers one on each side one just started Drupal a year ago large enterprise as well but the right mindset so the background of the person the decision maker that chose the platform across the organization globally he started with that so we wanted to build something we're going to be leveraging what's out there in the community and I wanted to give it back and you Philip as a vendor you do have authorization to whatever code that is not specific to our business it's easy the other organization is just they don't have this mindset they don't have the people with that it's just the whole background think about proprietary think about scary what that means put a code out there and I could really sacrifice my business if I do it so it's really hard to sell them even though we tried a few times so I have an answer how to convince that because I haven't convinced the organization to do that yet but really talks are happening as they see but it's really my experience is really having the right person and really trying to focus on that person within the organization the decision maker is going to be responsible for the platform and since the beginning so we're going to be building this and we wanted to give it back because you know you're leveraging this, this and that from the community and that's just the right thing to do but there's no real recipe I fully agree on the mindset that's the primary thing the traditional enterprise mindset is that every paper says confidential on it basically even if you look at like toilet paper or whatever it's always confidential everything you're trying to patent everything if you can and then take all of your competition to the courts that is pretty obvious these days if you read the news on what Apple and Friends are doing in the courts you try to get patents on everything so that's the traditional mindset and moving from that mindset to hey let's work together with our competition to create more value for us it's a pretty big leap so it's something that in many especially in high-tech companies I think it's a way too big of a leap to do at once so we have a lot of customers who do contribute back quite a bit but none of them are actually in industries where it's really traditional to try to patent and make everything confidential they are more in like media and public sector and so on different kinds of verticals so I think the only way to actually convince them to contribute is to show them success stories we have really lovely stories from our existing customers where they have been doing let's say upgrade from Drupal 5 to 7 and the custom modules we originally wrote from them have already created for free to Drupal 7 because so many sites use those modules already so they ended up saving a lot of money and we have these kinds of stories to tell but I think they only work if the mindset is even somewhat in the same neighborhood if it's completely on the closed side and no nothing leaves this building ever unless somebody pays money for it then it's going to be obvious really really difficult to sell much to add I think the business cases that have worked you're always trying to change your mindset but try and change it at the start rather than the end of the project and if dealing with government always address security concerns I think I have two examples to add one is in the government space in public sector I think the argument there is reuse I think the argument you can make successfully is reuse so if one government agency has developed something that meets certain regulation and presumably done it with public funds why would that same a different agency have to go out and procure the same solution twice so that's a very academic argument you get into the specifics and it becomes very difficult but I think that that's something that appeals to most people in public sector our experience on the commercial side or the enterprise side of things is very similar to Vesas and Felipe's it's different organizations with different mindsets around legal in particular but the most compelling argument I found is really just the dollars and cents of having someone else maintain that code for you and letting people know that if they put something back into the community it's in essence being maintained for free if they have to branch and do things on their own they're in essence either paying their own staff or you as a vendor to potentially keep a branch of that code alive just so that they can use it down the road and that's not a very good business argument so try to attack it from that my experience with a lot of commercial companies is they don't react as well to the open source culture if you will it's more about the business sense so a specific question from an audience member about multi-sites and I suppose also relates to governance in terms of how you manage users within your implementation with multi-sites what are the cost support and security implications especially around people grabbing cool third party components so I'm assuming this is about stopping rogue users from installing and using components on a multi-site architecture I think this is in the end it's not a technology question as such it's more about what sort of policies do you have in place what sort of best practices you have in place how do you train your people you obviously don't let like just anyone install modules on any of your triple installations or if you do I think you have all sorts of problems anyway but if your crazy developers just go on and always install something and things break down I think the problem is actually in some other place than your triple multi-site installation it's about your culture of how do you work and what your quality practices and so on I don't really think there even is a technical bullet for this but of course some of our devs might disagree with me on this so I didn't know but I really really think it's a people question more or less I mean you could implement a lock in to prevent people from developers adding modules but it's not part of the standard I guess you gotta write I mean governance it's really one of the customers is basically defining what's gonna be their platform which means what's gonna be the set of modules that gotta be reused and those are the standard modules as my organization if we need to do one it has to go through some enterprise process which might delay the time to have that module available in the platform but it's really worth to prevent the world developers from adding anything they want making sure that they're getting really stable modules not just beta versions if you're getting a beta version you get some sort of blessing but of course without incurring on the traditional take a long time to add a module process right it still has to be agile has to be fast but some sort of control place to prevent that but really not technical it's really about ensuring it's you're doing the right thing I mean thing one more thing to add on that might be that building an organization where when something gets pushed to production it's not like these developers can do whatever and then you have the maintenance guys to clean up the mess make them clean up their own messes when they break everything a few times and they have to clean it up and they have to explain to the customer when why everything broke down it sort of discourages them to do like the crazy things at least so that might be an easy fix in some cases. So related question about about how to handle coordination amongst people developing on Drupal how do you manage global development teams with a multi-site setup so when teams need to develop on separate sites but also share some global functionality how do you handle that sort of coordination amongst those different parts and I would think that Felipe might be it's a good question we have one big case where we serve a multi-site instance of Drupal in Europe so about 15 to 20 countries now I guess and we start the support of that platform in Brazil and follow this unmet so the process China continues that on the next time so there's some intersection but still how do we do it so we use tools, we make sure that we use Jira all the communication goes smooth between the teams and of course the repository source code is shared but I guess the key is communication there really isn't even if it was a multi-site, if it was just a regular site would be the same it's just process, tools and communication and that's how I mean that, it's being a success right now but as far as multi-site I don't see from development standpoint it's really about other developers in both countries knowing how to deal with the code of course before transitioning to China, we started in Brazil and then to China there was a knowledge transfer phase, make sure that the team could handle that but like you said business as usual you're going to have your team spread out so the key part is communication so we manage communication so there are quite a few alternatives for that yeah we have a bit different situation where everybody is within two time zones basically so communication is a bit easier based on my personal experience where I would say like make it work locally first it's quite typical to go into distributed teams right away but if it's possible try to get everybody in the same room in the beginning when you are starting and grow it out from there, especially if you are trying to learn something new like let's say you want to transform your organization into being agile it's really difficult to do in a beginning if it's a distributed organization it's much easier to do in a beginning when somebody is in the same room and the communication is quite a bit easier that's the first thing the second thing we do in order to get people work cross borders basically make sure they meet face to face and drink some beer more or less that's the thing so we airlines like us but of course those are short flights so we get people together when we get new people and we have a lot of projects where we have mixed teams because our markets are in between let's say the UK and Latvia the price difference can be it's not exactly tenfold but almost so there are like massive price differences on the markets so Latvians can easily work to UK but if you send somebody from the UK to a Latvian customer that's going to eat up the budget really quickly so we can mix between markets but we have to be a bit careful on how to mix so mostly what this means is we just send people to stay at another office for extended periods like weeks or months because working together is really all about knowing the people as well so initially they meet face to face and when they actually get to know the teams and know the people then it's no longer so important you have to meet every now and then but not on a weekly or daily basis we also do this if we have problems with the project we get everybody on the same room including the customer and that tends to get problems fixed so even with all the videoconferencing like FaceTime is still quite invaluable in that I think there's like 1,001 other things but I was going to go back to the governance as well so once you establish the process so who is going to be managing that platform the global features how that can be enabled across countries so I'm going to make sure all the teams are aware of how things can be done so it's all about the governance of the platform okay another very provocative Drupal questions it's after launch and people need something try to give this one just your most fiery answer you can give there's one thing about Drupal that frustrates you what would it be okay, only one I don't get the name many I'm going to say the logo sucks I would think the one thing that is underway in Drupal 8 much better I was just talking before this session it's the whole move to production management so that's something that is not perfect and we know that other products do better this so managing the push between stage and prod and managing content in prod or staging so it depends on the maturity of your content so that's something that we had to either use a few modules like deploy modules etc and customize a little bit based on the requirements and in the end of the day always end up creating scripts to manage that the way they need it so I guess that's the part that we as assistants struggle more because every customer they want to do a different way and there's not a single solution in the Drupal yet for that you can do several ways just like in this sbs case there's different ways of doing things and for that particular one which I think is very critical to eventually come out with two tops ways or just one idea of doing those content and code and configuration pushes between the environments I guess that's the thing that we as a management support as well the support have to be very careful when pushing things in different environments yeah perhaps I can now try to answer for real I got my brain moving it's 3 in the morning for me sorry if I'm a bit slow I think my personal like favorite topic on what's wrong with Drupal today is Drupal marketing there's like us and Aquias and all sorts of other companies out there doing a lot of Drupal marketing on their own so I'm sure all of the markets have one or two or ten companies doing Drupal marketing all the time and we are basically doing the same things over and over and over again we've been trying to change this as we being the Drupal Association in this case where I'm a board member as well but it's slow going and hopefully we get to change it at least slightly during this year already to pool all of the marketing things together but it turns out doing open source marketing is quite a bit more difficult than technology because in marketing you can't do like branches and forks and everything all the time or you can but it's not going to be really great marketing and everybody wants to do like different marketing messages so I don't know I hope we can do it because at least I'm sick of paying for a lot of the European Drupal marketing on our own I would much rather pay it together with everybody else I'm sure Aquias feels the same way so that's probably my favorite topic at the moment I'd have to agree with that production being a little bit messy and changing but I guess the other thing is like any CMS it can get incredibly heavy incredibly quickly I don't think there's a module for that I think there's about 50 modules for that and making the wrong choices for the organization or for the solution can have a lot of consequences that the initial phase doesn't really pick up so I guess planning ahead and knowing the technology before you actually implement it I think no one had actually asked a question so I'm going to insert my own question as part of this answer which is talent I think one of the things I've heard over and over again and I think Felipe mentioned earlier is you know how many of you feel in general like you're struggling to get the right resources either hired or contracted or whatever that's a decent number of people so I guess let me ask you guys a question how do you find good or develop or build good triple talent in the organizations that you work in like I said before we develop our own training center within the organization so new developers we get them of course knowing programming skills having programming skills having no PHP that's of course one step ahead otherwise they go towards the learning PHP first phase and then go towards Drupal and after a couple years we've been able to optimize this training in a way that we can do it in a couple weeks and then have a developer almost as good as a guy that has been doing Drupal in four years but before that was really struggling to find that initially in Brazil but I would know Drupal the level that we needed to those people to know I feel like there's a lot being done in that area I remember Dries Keynote in Denver I guess last year about the talent pool there was a kid in the pool so the Drupal training day last year was I think the four editions were a success there's a couple there's four more happening this year as well so I think things are getting better for us starting to hire in China so it was a better scenario than in Brazil when I started down there but still there's a bit of a challenge but I think the association the community are doing their best towards that area I think I have to do this in two different parts because we are in a sort of strange situation we have too much people people are applying jobs and we have too many talented people applying for jobs we just can't take all of them in and it's like part of that is we've always focused only on two primary things customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction basically and this actually it's a small community and we have a fairly solid reputation in the community so people with experience apply for jobs and we do have a lot of customer demand as well but it's a consulting organization so you can't throw in people 50 people in right now that would just break down the entire organization because you can only grow on a certain rate while still being profitable at the same time and this is all of the like there's all of these like triple hiring companies out there calling us every week like do you need new people it's like no we have like 50 people lined up for like new jobs as soon as we can take them in but I realize that this is globally definitely not the situation and even in Europe most of our customers are trying to hire like small in-house teams and they have huge difficulties hiring and so on so what we've done on that that part is we've done cooperation with universities and and done some like free training in universities to mostly to promote triple because if you go in for like two days or three days and you talk them about triple and you teach them how to do stuff with that you're not gonna get like extremely talented triple people out of that but hopefully you will get like people that are interested in triple and will learn it afterwards and you will in few years time you will get a lot of triple talent so training is one thing another thing we are trying to push like actively some sort of triple certification program that's another of my personal favorites as well and going nowhere but hopefully one of these days will have something like that so those things I think are probably the ones I can think of we attack it in a few ways we have some full time staff who are developers and designers and they have a fairly strong connection with one another and share learnings quite often we hire in resources whether it be individuals or consultancies when we're doing bigger projects and need more resources in terms of contracting out we haven't always found the best company but we've found some good ones lately so I think it's a little bit of everything making sure we're learning from previous projects and sort of upskilling while we go along I will say though that I think Drupal could do with a little bit more promotion in Australian universities I was working with some friends who were lecturers the other day and they sort of said what's going on in industry what should we be teaching I did mention Drupal and apparently a whole lot of other senior academics had said anything but Drupal so it does have a little bit of a perception problem in some areas and I think that could go a long way we do have some fairly talented programmers that are still in school and still in university and I think tapping into that would be a huge bonus for Australia because I know that we do at times have limitations okay so you're trying to convince your boss, your customer someone that you believe needs to be on Drupal what are the top things that you think make Drupal what are the selling points for Drupal that you think are incredibly important for people to understand besides cost I'm going to go with one of my favorite ones that isn't used often enough there is competition I know I work for the Australian Competition Consumer Commission but I've also worked in other parts of government where they've sort of locked themselves down to a single vendor technology and just the impact on that and the delays that you can incur so I do think that there's competition out there and that it's broadly used for people to understand how often it's broadly used so selling some of the success stories but there's also quite a few companies that support it and good ones I would go with the references existing Drupal sites out there and the community being to primary things these are really special for Drupal even if you compare against other open source communities and other open source products it's pretty difficult to find any product that would have as great references as Drupal has globally Yeah I agree with that it's really to beat almost a million developers I guess in the DO that we can see over there registered it's really hard so showing off the community what you can get out of that community basically what I sell is time to market especially for the commercial area if you really wanted to get a module after a new social network couple of weeks ago most likely going to have a module like Xena said in the beginning someone has built that so it's really fast for you to really keep up with the market and that along with flexibility as well which gives you too much power so you have to have control of that responsibility but the flexibility of Drupal is really a key point when I'm selling to different organizations as well Okay we're almost done I'm going to mix it up a little bit just to see if we can get our panelists back answering some tough questions throwing a lot of softballs here I want to get a tough one out there so does anybody in the audience have a real stumper for this crew up here when you have a question you want to ask the panel right now live question something hard alright where will the web be in 10 years that's an easy one I think it's going to be quite a bit like it's today it's just going to be a lot more of everything and a lot more of everywhere yeah I guess probably goes down to the same point about the internet of things getting a little bit more technical about the API so being able to provide like I guess Peewa was saying in the keynote about being able to provide data and service across the board so I guess that's where we're going to be able to reach out to any API anywhere and get the data and provide business value for whatever we're building I guess that's the rest of the API that's a key part evolving somehow in 10 years definitely but I think we're going to be sticking with the standard which I think is great I do hope that big business and governments sort of set the tone and do develop shared standards and that there's not so much clutter and noise and that it is a bit more open because I am very strongly into the quality of access for information but I think there's also risk of it going the other way and various countries around the world controlling and limiting access so I do think that we have an incredible power but we also have incredible risk okay well thank you everyone appreciate all the great questions you had and thank you to all the panelists for your thoughts and your time so everyone please thank the panelists


Hi everyone, Joe for jazby's casebreaks.com coming at you with a prism salo pack prism football salo pack 2020 Panini prism football salo pack number 26 with six spots being given away here So we're gonna do the break itself first and at the end will re-randomize everybody's names And we're gonna see who ends up in the mixer Thanks everyone here. They're the teams right there. Let's roll it. Let's randomize it six in a two eight times for each list one two three four five six Seven and eight obviously we're gonna do the break itself first not Simon down to Sean And then we'll do the Giveaways in a different dice roll six into two eight times for the teams one two three four five six and eight We got the bucks down to the Jets All right, so there's the first half of the list right there There's the second half of the list right here. No trade windows in these little filler breaks We just want to get to who's gonna win those teams Let's sort by column B Let's print and rip we got one more of these packs coming up And then a third pack will fill up that football mixer the off-season football mixer that you see on jazby's casebreaks.com Originally I thought we only had to do two more. I was mistaken. Sorry about that We have to do three more But now that we're down to our last filler. I'm sure they'll be Sure, they'll be pretty quick. All right. Let's see what we got in here We've got green cam acres Devonte Parker and key Sean Vaughn green cam acres green acres going to Martin about randomized the Rams in this filler pack exclusives Red, white and blue. Oops. All right. T. Y. Hilton AJ Brown and Henry rugs the third It's my guy right there. Las Vegas Raiders Garrett. All right here So not a bad pack The important bit though is Who is going to win those spots? All right, so let's get those names back in here. Let's roll it. Let's randomize it snake eyes two times so it's gonna be the top six After two good luck one and two So from seven on down my apologies, I'll get them next time, but I appreciate you giving this a shot and Once again top six Congrats to top six after two Nicholas Raymond Martin Garrett West and Martin to spots for mix-up. There you go. There you have it We'll see you in the mixer couple of these packs to go and then we're in Breaksville I'm Joe for jazzy's case breaks calm. I'll see you later for that one. Bye. Bye