I'm joined by George Barr, a Marine Corps veteran who served during the Korean War era. So thanks for being here, George. I appreciate you coming in and your willingness to share your story. So you served in the Marine Corps. What made you choose the Marine Corps? Well, during the war, I grew up during the World War II, of course, and I saw all that was happening with the Marines in the Pacific and what they were up against. And it looked to me like one of the best fighting units from what I read and saw the pictures of what they accomplished. So when I was about, that was about 13 or 14, at that point I was trying to decide what branch of the military was going to serve it because I wanted to serve my country. And I wanted to get it, you know, obviously it didn't last until I was old enough. But I thought it wasn't the uniform either that attracted me, it was the spirit, the way they were depicted in the news and in the magazines that they got that encouraged me to decide to join the Marine Corps. So tell me a little bit about your basic training.  I had no idea what I was getting into. I joined in the summer of 1948, June. And I spent 12 or 13 weeks down a kind of sand, which was very hot down there, and of course we had to contend with all the sand fleas and the bugs.  We were told directly, those insects have family, you can't do that. But I spent June till August in training. And after training they said, we don't have orders for you to go home. So they gave me a 10 day leave to go home and come back, which I wasn't too happy about. I didn't want to go back down there. But the training was tough. And some of the stories you hear are not exaggerated at all of what happens at the training down there at Parris Island. They give you a pretty good run for your money. But I felt good after getting all of you. So after your basic training, what was your MOS or your? 0311, which is infantrymen. Yep. And as you probably, I don't know if you've ever heard of this or not, but all Marines are trained to be riflemen, basically. That's one of the big factors that I think helps in the Marine Corps. We go through two weeks of rifle training. One week without firing a bullet, and the second week is when you do your firing qualifier. So I don't know if they still do now, but the Army, I think, was seven or eight weeks out of the shooting. Seven days, not when they train for the rifle. Again, I don't know if they've changed that enough, but that's one of the factors that the Marines really focus on is using the rifle and being accurate. Also did your, I know you served as a military police. Most of my career was security or MPs. My first duty station was, they sent me to what they call C-School to get trained to be part of a detachment on a large Navy ship, a carrier or a battleship, and that was a month of training down at Horseman Naval Shipyard in Virginia. After that they assigned me to a carrier that was permanently docked at Coinsett Point Rhode Island. The carrier was a Philippine Sea, CV-47, and that duty on the ship was security also. We manned the brig, we were executive on the ship, or captains orderly, and we also had a battle station. So the first battle station I had was one of the 40 millimeter weapons. And I spent almost two years on the side of the permanent detachment on the ship, which I enjoyed. That was probably one of the best parts of my duties in the Marine Corps the four years I was serving. So what made it special for you? Well, I liked being, one of the things before I signed up for the Marine Corps, I said I'd like to be on a ship, and what, and travel, as it turned out, I got assigned to a, but they didn't want to join the Navy. I won't hold it against you. Not that I had any guests on there, because my brother was a Navy Corpsman. But, and I got both choices that I was looking for, not that they gave me those choices. It just happened that way. So, plus I liked doing honor guides, which we did that whenever we had people on the dignitaries coming on to the ship, we'd have to fall out for honor guide inspection by the world. Okay. And I'll tell you a little story about when we were in, the ship operated in the Mediterranean, but we went over there for about four months, and we pulled into France and who comes aboard, or gets invited on a ship by a captain, was Rita Hayward. So, everybody wanted to have the Hiduli that night. But she came aboard with a full length, a big fur coat on, and it was beautiful as ever. And of course, the captain rushed her off to his quarters up over the hangar deck, so we never got to see much more of her. I enjoyed the travel, but that was one of the things I was looking for. Okay. Very good. I didn't want to be in one place for any length of time if I could help it. Sure. So, you know, you always thought about serving your country. I did. And you wanted to serve your country. It was in my mind, you know, throughout World War II. What really prompted that feeling in you? Well, I felt it was part of my duty, you know, for what we have to offer here in this country and the freedom we have. And I said, I want to do something for the war effort. And I guess the only thing to do is join one of the branches of the military. So that was my goal during World War II, to serve my country and pay back for all the good things we have here in this country. Sure. So how about your family? You know, you mentioned your brother. Any other family members that served in the military? Yes. My younger brother, he served in the Army. He was about six years younger than me. So growing up, I never really got to know him because when I came out of the Marine Corps, he had just signed up for the Army. So he was going through it. So it was about an eight-year period there that we had very, very little contact with. Okay. But, yes, he's the only, I had just two brothers and a sister. Okay. And they both served in the military, my boys, my brothers. Okay. But that was the toughest part, I think. We were faced with sandstorms and a lot of the... And I think this is a picture of you serving at China Lake. That's me at China Lake, at the main gate, yeah.  There's a booth there that I'm in front of. And I stood many main gate duty on there. But also keeping the sailors in line was not easy. They can be a tough crowd. But it's funny because a few years ago, I went back out to California to visit the base. They were going to dedicate a drill instructor's statue at San Diego. Okay. And a buddy of mine in the Marine Corps, he designed it and had it all set up to be installed. So I went out for the installation. I said, I'll go and check my old base out at China Lake, see what it looks like today. And believe it or not, they had security police at that point. So no military people doing security on the base was all military. I mean all private. So the guy at the main gate, I went over to him and I said, do you mind if I check out the God booth? And that God booth hadn't changed a bit. From 1950 to, I think it was like 2008 or something like that. I said, it's just exactly the same as when I was an MP here on the gate. So you fit right in. I said, nothing's changed except that now the security is on them. They had, we had a, that base was, I don't know if you realized it or anybody realized it, but I never heard of it. The second atomic bomb, Fat Boy, Fat Man, was built, part of it was built on that base at China Lake. Everybody thinks of New Mexico is where the bombs were all built, but I didn't find out until I went out to visit that base many, many years later. As you know, sometimes you don't, we've gotten stuff that we had no idea what was going on. Sure. Because we had to be interviewed and documented by the FBI to get top, not top secret, but secret security for what we were doing. But this, China Lake is still a naval weapons test station. It's grown. But the sandstorms out there were horrendous. We had open barracks, so we wound up shoveling sand out of the hallways. Every day. Every afterbury storm. Like snow when it was all sand. So what was probably the most, what would you say would be the most rewarding part of your military service? I have to say probably being assigned to sea going because at that point in time there was a select position. You had to be six feet tall and you had to meet the qualifications to be part of the ship company detachment. So the fact that I fell into the fact that I was going to be traveling a lot, and I liked the ocean, so being on the ocean, I got a lot of the things I was hoping I could get. So that kind of made me happy. Oh, good, good. So when you look at your life prior to the military and then once you were released from your military duties, how would you say your personal life changed? Obviously it taught me a lot of discipline and how to manage your life and how to help others too. But I think the discipline part of it was the best for me because it helped me in my work and it helped me in my private life in dealing with people. Okay, tell me a little bit more about that. So your interactions with others and your military service, I thoroughly understand the discipline part. Yeah. But were there other things that kind of helped you along the way or other people that influenced you along the way? There was a gunnery sergeant on the ship who really had nothing to do with him personally. He didn't do anything with, he was like a god. After I got out of the military I joined the Philippine Sea Association, which was the ship I was on. Okay. And he had belonged to it too. And we kind of got together and became very good friends. And we used to go to the reunions together. Something I thought I'd never see, you know, being friendly with the previous gunnery sergeant. Sure. Because he was a fair guy, but he was tough. And he taught me a few things. Very good. So you had family that served in World War II and you served in Korea. So the Korean War has always been referred to as the Forgotten War. Right. So did you experience that when you came home? Or how was your military service perceived by others when you returned home? Well, it's interesting you asked that because I went in in 1948 and of course there was nothing going on at that point in time. And I have to say the general public, the people I ran into, kind of looked down on the military. Not just the Marines, but all military. You couldn't get a job or something like that, so you joined the service. But that wasn't the case. When the Korean War broke out, a totally different attitude. In my perception anyway, I don't know if anybody else proceeded the same. I never talked to anybody about it, but people couldn't do enough for you. Okay. Wherever you went, if you went to a restaurant or a bar or a coffee shop, they wanted to buy, pay for your meal or pay for whatever. Before that, they kind of ignored you and made no attempt to be friends with you or talk to you. Which I thought very strange, you know. Just because there's no war around, there's no reason to look down on the military. Sure. But that was my perception of the general public that I had encountered. And how about your transition from the military to civilian life? How was that? It worked out well. When I first came out of the military, I had two or three, not big jobs. I transitioned into a good job with Polaroid. I went to work for Polaroid for a couple of years. But my intention, before I went to Polaroid, I went to training at mass radio and TV for electronics. And the job I took at Polaroid had nothing to do with what I went to school for. Okay. But it was a job and it paid well. So I stayed with them for a couple of years with the intent of getting something in the field of electronics. So I decided to try the telephone company. So that's what I did. I got hired with the telephone company at a very good low salary to begin with. The ultimate salary would be very good later on after about two or three years. Okay. Automatic raises. So that's why I spent the next 40 or 50 years with the telephone company. Very good. And that electronic school I went to helped me in the job I was in. Very good. So you really didn't face a lot of challenges coming back, would you say? Not really. No. Okay. No. And how would you, what would you relay to the younger generation? I guess, not to put an age range on people, but the younger generation. Right. What would you have to say to them about serving in the military? Well, I'm glad you asked me that because it's, anybody I've talked to, I encouraged to put two or three years into the military after you graduated from high school. And a firm believer in we should have this country should have universal military training for every, every youngster coming out of school. They don't have to, they don't have to go into the military, but at least put in two to three years doing service to the community or the country. Like the, I tried to encourage any kids I talked to where I tried to, you know, tell them what the best thing to happen to you would be to get military training. I said, and even if you're only going for two or three years, I think three years is really what you should do because two isn't really not enough to get the full treatment of the feeling in the military, but the, you know. So what would they be receiving if they did that? What would be some of the benefits? Well, give them training and discipline, how to get along with people, how to work definitely how to work as a team. You're not going to be able to do it all by yourself. Your best bet is work with somebody. There's nothing better than, you know, working with the team and to reach an objective. And. There are also overcoming differences. Yes, yes. Unfortunately, when I first went in there, there was a lot of discrimination. But that changed, I think in 1949, just before the Korean War. I think the training and the, how to get along with people, how to work as a team is the best benefit. And even if you don't plan to stay in the military, that training will be with you forever. And you still have the rest of your life ahead to go to college or any other kind of training you wish to go into. Sure.  But unfortunately, I think they try to put in universal training many years ago, but somehow it's just no work. I don't know why. I think that's the best thing that could happen to all of our youngsters. And they don't, like I said, they don't have to go into the military, into an organization that is doing like charity work or whatever. And give back something to the community or the country. Sure. That's nice. What would you like people to know about George Barr and your service in the Marine Corps? About my service? Yep. Well, I just wanted to know that I felt that it's really everyone's duty to give back to this company for all that we get and all the freedoms we enjoy. And we're free to, we have freedom of choices, what we want to do, where we want to go. And that was my belief. I felt I couldn't get into World War II because I wasn't old enough, obviously. But that training, I would do it again. I would do it again. Very good. Well, George, I want to thank you for your time today. It's been great. I appreciate you sharing your stories with us. That was my, I was happy to do it. Sure. And, you know, just your service, I thank you. You know, it's tough for those Korean and Vietnam vets, too. Right. Because I think you missed out on a lot. That, you know, sometimes your service isn't recognized or valued as much as it should be. Right. But I want to thank you for being here today. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. All right.


Hi, and welcome to the session. Today we will discuss the following question which says, find the value of x and y if 2 into a 2 by 2 matrix whose elements are 1, 3, 0, x plus another 2 by 2 matrix whose elements are y, 0, 1, 2 is equal to a 2 by 2 matrix with elements 5, 6, 1, 8. Let's see its solution. We need to find the values of x and y and we are given 2 into 2 by 2 matrix with elements 1, 3, 0, x plus 2 by 2 matrix with elements y, 0, 1, 2 is equal to a 2 by 2 matrix with elements 5, 6, 1, 8. Now whenever we multiply a scalar with a matrix then each element of that matrix is multiplied by that scalar. So here to multiply scalar 2 with the given matrix we will multiply each element of this matrix by the scalar 2. So this implies 2 by 2 matrix whose elements will be 2 into 1 that is 2, 2 into 3 that is 6, 2 into 0 that is 0 and 2 into x that is 2x plus 2 by 2 matrix with elements y, 0, 1, 2 is equal to 2 by 2 matrix with elements 5, 6, 1, 8. Now we need to add these 2 matrices and the sum of 2 matrices is obtained by adding the corresponding elements of the 2 matrices. But the 2 matrices should be of same value. So here we will get a 2 by 2 matrix whose elements will be 2 plus y, 6 plus 0 that is 6, 0 plus 1 that is 1 and 2x plus 2. So this will be equal to a 2 by 2 matrix with elements 5, 6, 1, 8. Now if 2 matrices are equal then their corresponding elements will be equal. So here this implies that 2 plus y will be equal to 5, 6 is equal to 1 which is very clear and 2x plus 2 will be equal to 8. So 2 plus y is equal to 5 implies that y is equal to 3 and 2x plus 2 is equal to 8 implies that x is equal to 3. Thus the value of x is 3 and the value of y is also 3. So this is the required answer to this question. With this we finish this session. Hope you must have understood the question. Goodbye, take care and have a nice day.


like flashcards or notes, simply copy your objectives and add them into your notes and just write them in the form of a question if they're not done so already, because if you know if you can answer those five or ten objectives the professor gave you, then you likely will do well if they're testing from their lecture. So bottom line, if you can say it, if you can write it, likely understand it, likely will nail it when it comes down for test time. And to put the ribbon on this step, often when I get closer to the test or the quiz, maybe about five or four days away, I will often have a session where I just try to recreate the lecture if I'm going to teach it. So maybe I'll have a whiteboard run kind of talking out what the lecture is about and trying to identify those places where I just don't feel comfortable going to the next step. That means that my brain has convinced myself that I understand it, but clearly I'm not able to put pen to paper and that means that's the gap in my knowledge and if it shows up on test I'm likely screwed. I'm glad I discovered it now.


So, if you are here to see D8 lessons learned and how we can make D8 9 better, or sorry, D9 better, then you are in the right room. So, I'm Shannon Vitas. Hi. I work for Commerce Guys and I've been doing project management for a long time and I've been doing some project management on Drupal 8, which is why this all came about because I was able to get some information from the team about how things were moving and a lot of ideas kind of churned out of that, especially at DrupalCon Munich, lots of conversations were happening around how could we improve this, what are the problems that we're having. So, obviously that was a long time ago and lots of things are changing and evolving, but I still feel like those core conversations that were happening are still relevant today. So, that's why this happened. So, obligatory plug, go to the Commerce Village. It's amazing. We'll change your life. So, we have all kinds of awesome partners that are there with really amazing commerce services. We're doing a kind of challenge where you have to go around and get something from each partner and then you can come to our Commerce Guys saloon, which is tomorrow night, well, tomorrow at 3 o'clock and have a beer with us. So, that's your challenge and I wanted to point it out to you. So, please go do. And then, you know, obviously what am I doing up here? So, I've been project managing and I feel like I've been being a little bit crappy because I've been working a lot. So, if you're interested in working on Drupal 8, please do come and talk to me and give me your card. I'm recruiting actively all the time. So, we're looking for people to help and I'm just basically trying to get the word out about things that I think this is easy for me to do. Point out trends, point out issues and that's why we're here to talk. So, feel free to join the conversation. It's basically going to be like what's going on right now? How are things looking in the Drupal initiative like set up, the process that we're using? What is it? How's the organization? What are the teams doing? What if we did something different and then talking to you about like what is involved in that? So, here's what I think we're doing today. We have people at the bottom and I apologize for the small text. So, people at the bottom who I consider abstainers, they use the software but they're not really involved. They're not actively building things. They're not actively building core. They're just kind of there using it. And that's a big group. Then you have your novices which are people who don't have a ton of experience but you know they've done some things and they've got a little bit of experience and they're able to do limited things so we can't use them a whole lot. But we have a lot of those people and we like those people. So, keep coming. But then we have another level which I'm calling tier two which is beginners and so they have experience and they can do stuff but they haven't worked on core extensively and they don't really know about the process and that's where people like Jess are awesome because core mentors and you can go to Drupal.org and search core mentors. They will give you all kinds of information there. Beginners are really useful to us because they are people that we can turn into experts which is the next level. And experts and beginners are kind of cruelly missing in our triangle as far as I can tell today. And then you have initiative owners which are kind of these awesome people up front who are doing things and over here they're interspersed. So initiative owners are I think you know carrying the torch for what they want to do and trying hard and they're getting totally run over by all the work that needs to get done and burned out. So our current organization right now is pretty much an initiative owner with some help and I think that there are a few problems that are involved in this. So this is the current organization right now. So you've got initiative owners at the top. They've got a couple of experts working with them usually maybe a few more than just two but not usually like five or six or ten experts that are working with them. Usually it's just a couple of people that are just really awesome really dedicated. So they're bearing the brunt of all the work. And these people are also helped out by some reviewers which are all the little diamonds underneath and those people are awesome too. They help them get things done. But it's not like there's a million of those people. It's limited in the initiatives and so this is a problem for us because we're missing those two key groups and these are people that we can kind of level up and teach and bring on board. So the current organization also has a couple of other parts which are obviously like people like me who try to do project management which is right now very limited. So it's basically down to communication and then people who do committing and finally people who do front-end things. So that's the second group and finally you have a third group which is just other community people. So people do ladders, teachings, you know how to get involved with core. People work on funding and people who do all kinds of awesome design stuff and then all the other community members just a random person who comes in and reviews one thing and then leaves and just like this is too hard I can't do it or whatever. I'm lumping them into that kind of other community people. So this is how we're working today and it's a little bit hard because obviously the people in that top level are really doing all the main hard stuff all the time. So they're the most prone to all these different problems. So burnout and well poisoning. We're picking the same people to do the same things because they've got core management knowledge and they've got all this background info and they know how this works because they had to work on that. So they keep on having to pick the same people to do the same things and they're getting really, really burned out. And then they also have lack of information for the public because these people are so knowledgeable they can't always take the time because they're really overburdened to do all this stuff to give a weekly update of what's going on in the initiative. So everyone else is like when are we getting Drupal 8? They don't know anything about what's happening or maybe they get some information but it's maybe not in the digestible format that they need so PMs could really help with that but they're hard to come by and we're all really busy and blah, blah, blah. So that problem exists and then we have some poor interaction and dependency issues because, again, the same people are really burdened with all the same work. It's hard for us to take the time to sit down for two hours and say, okay, in the next month where are the dependencies that are going to affect us? What is the biggest risk right now? And we're doing some of that but not enough in terms of being able to plan for them. It's more just reaction. Like, okay, we're on fire here. What do we do about that type of stuff? And then that also leads to really hard to plan schedules issues. So it's almost impossible right now in the current setup to actually plan anything because people are not reliable. Myself included to do stuff because we're all volunteers. So planning a volunteer project is really tough because we don't have any funding, we can't organize correctly. And also it's just really hard to onboard newbies because we've got those two levels that we're missing but we don't necessarily have the infrastructure to teach them how to do stuff. So I wanted to talk to you about an idea that came out of Munich which was how could we organize teams for the next round of Drupal development and maybe even something that we can use during the last legs of Drupal 8. That would be awesome if people would kind of rise up and get this done but I'm not going to hold my breath, I'm just thinking more D9. This would be cool. So I think that it would be really cool if we could have three groups. Helpers, builders, and organizers, or sorry, designers. So the helpers are people who are going to help organize things and communicate and fund. So these are all the support mechanisms and people like initiative owners, I don't think, want the burden of that on top of having to do all the architecture and all the big heavy lifting and all of the onboarding and teaching and documenting and upgrade path building and all of that. I think if we could have a group of helpers, that would be really cool. Builders would be people who obviously are doing all the building and testing and documenting and reviewing and designers are people in my mind who would be doing UX, UI, reviews, usability all kinds of really awesome things that are not incorporated enough into the initiatives right now but also very, very important. So let me tell you a little bit more about this vision and then we can have a conversation. So the first group helpers, I see it as project managers so coordinate, document milestones then there's people who teach so they would find the education gaps like where do people get stuck where do they not know how to learn how to do something help build letters that they can learn those things and then find new mentors and track those KPIs and finally communicators, people who will meet with groups communicate about their progress and basically keep all the rest of us who are not in the issue queues every single day like watching what's happening kind of up to speed on how things are going like well we're getting close to the end or we're really far away that type of high-level thinking is not easy to communicate unless you're in regular contact we need more of those people so that's what communicators are to me and then finally funders I think it's really important to have funding in order for this method to be sustainable because it's so hard to plan a volunteer team you don't know where they are you don't know when they're going to be available something personal, something professional might come up and trump whatever they're doing volunteer at any given moment so it's just impossible to plan for without funding but if we could fund people and we have been funding people, especially Greg it just makes it easier so I think that that's a really important part and then you'd have tier one and tier two so this is basically people who are interested but don't know what to do and then tier two would be people who have been doing a little bit of it and who can help the tier one people kind of learn more and that's what I see as helpers and then you have builders which I really think is the key to this having multiple levels of builders is where we're going to see the most success and you'll have initiative owners who are there to do architecture monitor progress, unlock issues help find teachers and funders and help coordinate with communicators and project managers on what needs to actually happen in the initiative I see these people as the leaders they're there to set the strategy and they're there to communicate about the strategy and the progress of that vision and then the experts I see as people who are there to do the awesome stuff so this is a bit of a switcheroo from what we're doing right now because right now it's like the initiative owner is the expert and I think we need to have them be in a different level than the experts experts are people who can do stuff and this is where we're cruelly lacking people right now funding might help with that so these people code stuff, they maintain things they do summaries, they do trainings, they find people they can do all kinds of things Tier 2 would be a certain level of beginner who have some limitations they're not yet experts but they're pretty well up there maybe they can train Tier 1 or maybe they can even train novices and then you obviously have people who are just getting started who need some documentation so that's how I see the builders group these are people who are actually doing things in terms of code and then finally designers I'm sorry I'm lumping it into this category if that makes any of you mad but it was the best category that I could come up with I see this as people who really care about how things work for the user and who care a lot about usability and user experience so I see that it's a little bit tough for me to really define what that should look like but I'm thinking like themers, designers UXers unite to find ways to review the work that's coming out of the code with Project Manager and with an initiative owner on the progress of when is the right moment to step in when is the right time to really start talking about UI I know it's a challenge we face right now in D8 it's not super clear and I think that having some more structure around this would be great so if anyone in here is working on that type of content I'd love to talk to you afterwards and just get your feedback or maybe even during the session since it is a conversation so basically the big difference that we have to do is that right now we don't have a clear plan and we're just kind of going about as best we can so we plan a little bit we don't really know how to train anybody to get started it's more like, core mentors please come save us teach people how to get started and I think in an initiative level it would be great for them to have each their own core mentor an onboarder, a person to help they're doing instead of just one group that has to cover all areas and you're all over the place in triage so I think that's where we are right now and it's really hard to train because we're all too busy doing things D9 I think would be great if we could actually plan ahead know more about what the goals and milestones are based on what didn't get into D8 for example and then decide if we like the initiatives and how that's going maybe we can do another round of funding and try and get a set group of teams I think at least the initiative owners and at least three experts should be funded for every single initiative I think if we can't do that yay if we can't do that then I think that we're just relegating ourselves to the same fate that we've already had which is try your very best but no guarantees I don't think that's what anyone wants so I think that's going to help us and I really think education is key to this methodology working having a way to bring people into the fold is important especially with each release how much more complicated and how much more interesting and awesome it's getting it's also getting much harder to teach people so we need those steps so there are a few dependencies and questions that I'm going to put out there for us to discuss and then I'm going to shut up basically initiatives need these trends so what if you disagree with initiatives not everyone likes this idea so right now if you're not familiar with it initiatives are basically different groups of goals for features like whisky and views and all of this stuff so not everyone agrees with initiatives if you disagree I want to hear from you to know why you wouldn't want to keep doing that ladders is another one initiative I think it's not got its legs yet it's sea legs it's still trying to find people to stay involved I was involved briefly but got pulled away and a bunch of stuff so maybe that's happening to everybody so basically ladders is a teaching initiative that says I'm going to learn how to do something I'm going to document it and then I'm going to share it and then I'm going to teach someone else how to do it and then they become a mentor to someone else and they tell two friends type of thing it's a great concept it would be really cool if we could do this but I think there's also dependency like we need to do this now if we're going to be able to use it in the next round so we'd need a massive following to get on board and that sounds kind of tough to do and then finally the big ugly question of funding like who do we ask who gets what how much how much do we need it's just all very hairy who manages the money it's a big problem in this environment especially because we're open source and we're non-profit so we can't just say oh just write me a check I'll deal with it no it's like really a tough issue to solve so that's a whole other question and I'm interested in whatever ideas you have and these are some alternatives because what I just said is super ambitious so maybe we could try like funding one initiative or like one resource initiative instead of all four that might be a little bit more realistic trying to leverage several parts of visibility to get interest so really a lot more communication about what we're trying to do to help people who are busting their bums almost at the A word trying to get funding and help them get that really good reasoning of why this is going to make a huge difference maybe we could focus on ladders that's another way instead of trying to get the money we could try to get the people and then finally just combining roles so this is kind of the route where we're out right now it's like pms slash communicator slash coordinator slash whatever and that's a way that we can have fewer people involved to do these things but I think these things still need to happen individually so like you should have someone to communicate but you should also have someone to organize and if that can be two people that's better but worst case scenario it'll keep being one person so then finally trampoline off ladders to get special educational perks basically have their employer sponsor what they're doing which is what commerce guys does a lot so we've got several employees who do a lot of core work and it's a great way to try and get the help so those are some ideas that are a little bit less ambitious and that's everything that I had for today so now we can talk about stuff so things to kick us off that conversation I'm really curious to know first of all do you have any questions about the D8 organization right now and these ideas on D9 and then second I'm really interested in having a conversation about what do you think about the feasibility of these teams and these roles does this like even make sense to you or does this sound weird someone answer you who do you see as organizing all of these things is that a role for the DA or is that a role for the community and self-organizing teams or for a company to who becomes the initiative owner and who becomes the project management lead and who becomes whatever okay that's a good question so I think right now we're doing it in a kind of self-organizing way and it's very organic I think that's the best way it's a scratch your own edge community and if you want to take a big chunk of your life and devote it to Drupal 8 you should be allowed to do so you should stop you so I don't think it should be the DA coordinating and organizing I think maybe in terms of funding that might get trickier because the DA or some other entity would need to handle the funding for that so maybe it's like the community decides and then that person gets funding support in order to do it so the DA is actually prohibited from trying to shape the direction of core development that's like part of their charter so I think that's something important unless we wanted to change that some people suggest there should be like a different organization that's responsible for that but something else that I think I might disagree a little bit is that there's something to be said for being willing to work on something but you get people who are a lot more committed when you ask them say I've noticed that you're interested in this and you empower them to be a leader to be an authority in a particular area so I think that just saying that it will happen organically I mean I think that you get people interested in organically but I think that then like nominating them to be someone and do something and giving them responsibility and control over it makes them feel a lot more successful and then they'll give you more time without feeling burnt out about it so Totally. Agree with you Me first So what Jess is saying is really relevant to Ash's talk that was on diversity and how underrepresented groups don't volunteer themselves for things they just don't so if we want some diversity in leadership we might have to recruit and ask because they won't volunteer themselves they don't have any like you know there's no pictures of people that are like them in whatever way like is like so I think that's true for the for some of the under level but I think for like the lead top queer people they need to come of their own free will I don't think we could ask someone like Hey Larry do you want to be an initiative owner That's like a That's what he did to you Wow okay All of you I am wrong Most of the Drupal 8 initiative leads currently were invited to be so by Dries based on things we were already ranting about doing some of us louder than others some of us were more willing than others but we were all appointed by Dries based on trends he was seeing that part I don't think is a problem definitely getting the team like you're describing behind those people and making sure that those people have the backing and authority to be able to then coordinate that team and get things done I think is critically important so it's building up that structure and accepting that structure is the challenge I think figuring out who's going to be part of it is an easier problem to solve to an extent like they have the will but not the means yeah you know like Greg was willing to you know throw himself into configuration management because he's just that crazy but unless he'd had you know support from his employer at the time to do so probably would not have been able to do so not everyone has an employer who has the willingness or financial capability to put someone 50% on core for a long period or 100% or 100% so those employers that can have off to them but not everyone does and you know that's where I could I think the which parts of the team get funding and how much I think that's really the trickiest problem followed closely by accepting that their structure would be there and that would be direction setting for core even if it's that's still coming down from Drees it's much more top down than we've done in the past the first year of Drupal 8 was a lot of painful arguments and discussions about that you know this isn't bottom up grassroots how dare you and it took a very very long time and not a small amount of blood to get past that and so we need to make sure we can keep doing that I didn't add that into the presentation but it's such a good point that like even when your initiative owner and we've seen this under Blake that doesn't mean everyone just lines up behind you and decides to do what you're doing and you guys need some support that is top down and you need the authority in order to make those decisions and get consensus obviously it's not over look that but it's often easier to build consensus when you're building consensus from a position of authority than from a position of first among equals the process becomes smoother even if the end result is the same thanks that's Larry if you don't know Larry you can know him by his vest so I'm Gabor and I want to talk about the money question so there's like three or four reasons that I did not go into the money thing for the EMI so the first is there was a lot as I've heard and as I've expected there was a lot of overhead to get money so if you ask Greg he took a lot of time to pitch his stuff and to get money proposals and convincing arguments and expectations figuring out how you propose at all and then the next thing is the entity that handles the money so if I would take money then I would need to pay taxes on top and I would lose like a third of the money at least on paying taxes for my government so I would not take that would not be a good idea so we would need to have an entity that's not the DEA because the DEA is prohibited from directing core development so they might not be able to handle this money and we don't really have an entity that can handle this money so we have to create one which is why it's so hard so we need to figure out some kind of entity that will be able to handle the money and just funnel it through and the third one is was Larry said how do we get the money and how that's decided is like if you're doing a sprint then you're flying in people and like maybe some people the company will pay for them others they don't have a company they need to pay for themselves if they are freelancers they earn money but they don't have money to fly and if they are students they don't earn money and there's all those hard questions of course they're one of answers to them so there's no clear rule that we can set and I think just to piggyback on the last thing that you were saying about like companies sponsoring people like commerce guys sponsored me to be here and about 15 of my colleagues which is awesome and yay but not everyone is so lucky but at the same time like if like Chris who is an initiative lead owner and works for commerce guys if he weren't if he were able to get a scholarship would commerce guys fund him like money because obviously like saving 10 grand a year whatever in flights and what not is kind of nice for a company so I think it gets really like so hard when you start talking about funds because then you have the chicken before the egg issue of they have funding today but will they have funding tomorrow if they find out that they can get a scholarship it's also hairy so I mean honestly if I were to decide today it would be something like um look at who is in a company that is getting karma for doing a lot of work and then balance that like 50-50 with people who are making a really big contribution who can't go themselves and I think we have to favor people who would onboard and become experts over um things like you know random person who does stuff once or twice if someone is habitually committed to an initiative I think that's a great sign of someone who should be funded because then maybe they can become you know a lieutenant to the initiative owner or something and I obviously think initiative owners should be funded because you guys are so critical to the entire process I mean would any of you even accept that if you could get a year of funding to work on Drupal 8? Yeah, sure I had a better job Yeah That's a separate question No it's not For a year That's the hard question So I think the hard question is what you do a year later Right, so I mean if we're gonna Exactly Right Just to repeat that for everyone in the back um funding and like giving up your job to do this for a short time is different for a freelancer than someone who has a full-time job it's just not the same commitment so I mean that's just where it gets really tough and I think in order to have the success that we need like we need you guys to be available it's really hard when you have a second job besides Drupal Initiative owner and you can't always be around to support and you know help because you need to earn the Dalla Dalla right so I mean it's tricky And there's at least two more points that I wanted to mention about money as the other the other one which dovetails in what you said is that if Commerce guy if Chris or me would come on a scholarship would we get a scholarship since we're already working for Aquian Commerce guys and Aquian Commerce guys are here to have their big presence at the booth and market their company so why would we get paid for it come because we're also Aquians and Commerce guys people and you know this is a wishy-washy question I would get sent either way so I don't need a scholarship but maybe like if my boss heard that I can get a scholarship maybe he wouldn't for to send me and then I'd be like oh shit I need to get a scholarship or something I mean we don't know how it's going to turn out and then the other thing is like the who gets the money is we have we work a lot coming up coming up from the from the beginner part from from down and what's the point when when they are at a point where where we finance them and how do we tell so we have in the EMI we have quite a few people who just grew out of out of being told the new contributors and they are like in that they like we have people who are like 2% they they are mentioning 2% of the core comets in Drupal 8 which is huge and they just were an unknown 2 months ago or 3 months ago so that's a hard question yeah maybe it becomes like rolling funding short term funding tough so hi Christoph initiatives were really interesting for Drupal 8 because can you get a little bit closer to the mic okay so initiatives were really interesting for me during Drupal 8 development because it got me really deeply involved into Drupal core but I'm now talking from from a field API perspective as a co-maintainer our plan we had a really nice slide this morning during our session the plan for Drupal 8 for field API was just sit back and relax and basically just I mean that was it I mean field API is in core and you can do a lot of stuff and then suddenly Drupal 8 decides to rewrite everything and then we have to do and we have to follow that there are not really an initiative but there's a lot of work and I mean a lot of stuff touches what Greg has been doing but there's also the plugin system so do you see some place for subsystems in core that are not an initiative and we actually really need a lot of help on that part as well I mean just basically only me and YChat and maybe two other people but we don't have that visibility I mean field API needs to be converted but it's not open and public I mean so you bring up a really good point at what point does something deserve initiative status essentially right I think my personal choice would be when the workload exceeds four to five people working their asses off then it kind of seems to me like it deserves attention because that means lots of people are going to need to review it and comment on it and make sure that it works with everything else Yeah right now we could get a decent team together like that's I think the point of having a team if you're an initiative it's because you need a team of people so I think if you're getting to that point where you're doing the work of three or four people and it's burning you out you could use a team, you should probably be an initiative and if that means that we have like 20 initiatives for Drupal 9 so be it, fund everyone get your shit done and be awesome So I've said in a bunch of core conversations now and the topics keep coming up the subject keeps coming up about we need the resources and if we can actually do the funding and oh yeah we want to get a lot of new people involved in core as core contributors and so one of the points that I think that I think needs to be considered like you're talking about for Drupal 9 like oh I've got this great idea we're going to have the initiative owners and we're going to have this many experts fund this many people for each of the initiatives and we've already started touching on some of this stuff here with the idea like I'm a freelancer and so there's also been talk in other sessions about like oh yeah so just demand I think it was Greg who actually said demand that your employers pay for your you know you are a resource that's in demand so demand that your employers will pay for some of your time to work on core well there's people like me that are the freelancers that like you know we don't really have that situation that we can just demand hire us and pay us money to work on doing core stuff and again we're freelancers so if I'm volunteering my time doing stuff I understand when anybody volunteers they're not going to pay but like I don't have a salary and the time that I volunteer to do things I'm not going to be making the money so yeah no I understand but so like when you hear the talk about yeah we want to get more people involved in core and we want to be able to fund things and so that you know that's the thing that like for a person for me it's like yeah that would be awesome to be able to get some funding so that I can actually work on Drupal and do stuff with this but then it does bring up the questions because like who do you know you need some of these experts on the project but when you're looking at these experts like Larry and the question was already brought up so even the idea of funding Larry okay so if you're going to fund Larry because he puts in a ton of work and he really knows what he's doing that's great and he's being rewarded for it but then you're not meeting the goal of getting new people involved that could then maybe pick up some of the work later on and then there's also the other issue of like even the idea of funding Larry like when Greg brought up like yeah but are you willing to quit your job for a year if we fund you for a year so this the the idea like oh let's get funding and let's add more resources has another component to it is like then the those practical aspects of like when you're talking about who gets the money you're asking me like what initiatives get the money but there's a big there's another question as well like but who are the people that you're going to be paying to do it because there's the pros and cons of like you guys don't know who I am and sure I'd love to be a step up and say yeah pay me to work on Drupal but you guys are going to want to look to somebody who's like but we don't know him and we don't know if he's going to be any good at this we don't want to give him the money so we want to look to the people who have already proven themselves but then you're tying yourself to the situation of like they're invested and you aren't bringing new people into the process so there's another layer of this that I think that you need to think about is like the how the dispersal of the money would work because there's tons of people in the community like me that say yeah that would be totally awesome for me to be able to get paid to work on Drupal but so that's currently an expected investment from your part before we get to know you and we get to know you but that's the truth of any job you know personal growth that's true of any job personal growth and job development is always our own personal responsibility on our own time and so you know if that means contributing the patches so that you get visibility or taking a class to learn a new technology or building a personal project to get more visibility those all fall into the same things yeah like that's why I think it should be tiered because if you're like your situation you're a freelancer you're interested in working on this you're willing to commit to it if someone can fund you because you just can't afford to stop all your freelancing work and do it full-time I completely understand that neither can I so I think the best way to go about that is to have you start at the beginner tier so you start reviewing patches and you work with Jess and all the awesome people doing core mentoring and they will help you start out and then when you feel comfortable you move on to the next level and you help document where you came from and how you got to where you are so that that that learning path can start to begin for everyone else that is a critical component to the entire project if we don't have people doing that teaching other people how to learn what you did then we're kind of screwed so it's a huge task it has to be crowdsourced it has to be a group effort and if you want to get to the point where you feel like you're an expert I think you need to start at those levels unless you're just like a crazy genius and you can just go straight to the top in which case you've probably already like committed major patches and got the visibility that you wanted so deciding who gets funding is a tough it's a bear but at the same time I think that like experts are critical to the project success initiative owners are critical to the project success if we want to reduce all the pain points those two pieces are needed more than anything else so I would start there and I think the initiative owners are going to be really key into helping decide who they want in that core group of people working with them every day or every week or however much funding they have to get those people regularly on their team and I think that they know who they need to work with Larry said like finding the people is not hard getting them to do this stuff is hard because either they need training or they need time right so I now agree with all that I totally understand what you're saying but then what that brings you back to is because the reason I bring this up is that a lot of the talks has been here like all our problems are going to be solved if only we would have funding for the people that's not what I'm saying nobody's saying that but there's what you get back to and I agree with your idea that you need to put in your time, you need to prove yourself, you need to personal growth but then that puts a person like Larry in the position that I'm like okay yeah I want to make my way up the ladder here but I'm not going to give 10 hours a week or 20 hours a week to pull that I'm going to you know maybe I want to do something for an hour a week and then put something like Larry in a position because he made the comment he's like if I've got 50 people for one hour a piece I really can't get anything done with that I'd rather have the 10 people for five hours a piece Larry has access to experts who have access to funding anyway anyway yes thank you for your comment I have like two pages of notes here I don't even know where to start everyone else sit down I actually sympathize a lot with the last speaker I of course did quit my job to get funded for Drupal core and managed to do it successfully as a freelancer and I did but I mean I had all of the downsides that were brought up I did give up 35% of that income straight to the federal government I did suddenly at the end of that find myself with no money and wondering what I was going to do now with my life because unlike normal I mean you know normally you're freelancing and you're reaching the end of a gig and you're shopping for next gigs and I was at the end of this gig but I'm not really a freelancer I'm just a guy who got a bunch of money to work on core and now all of that money's about to be gone and I'm like well do I want to fundraise some more do I want to get a real job do I want to be a freelancer to which the answer of all was no but that's a personal decision you know and I mean a lot of stuff comes down to priorities in your life and things like that but you know I sympathize a lot and obviously not all of the 1,000, 1200 people who contribute patches to Drupal Core are going to get funded I think that's a realistic thing to say I guess I'll leave my comments to the most controversial ones in your slides and Larry was saying this too you sort of had an initiative lead and then a team and I think that's the wrong model I think the initiative lead should be a team and I think that the way that the views team did that is really excellent and should really be used as our model because I don't believe and I don't think it works well with our community that the single vision of one person should be going top down to all of these people you should have I like the idea of having a variety of viewpoints and a variety of skill sets together coming to these conclusions as a small group and then branching those off to the greater community and it actually helps a lot because you know when I launched my 350 comment thread about file formats for CMI I was the only one sitting there trying to manage that and you know within eight hours I wanted to shoot myself I had nobody else to fall back on but if you've got a team of people you can all come out you can all respond to different questions depending on your expertise and everybody can sort of take the brunt of it and when somebody gets burnt out they fall apart and somebody else can come in and you're on vacation you don't have to be thinking about it and stuff like this and I think having a small team of equals leading each project is a really really important thing right so this IO block you want like three or four of those and then like five or six experts in that case because different people working with different groups well to some extent that melds because they're the experts as well and they did a lot of the work but they also had a lot of people underneath them contributing up as well yeah but that's not sustainable if you want to do the other stuff like the communication coordination long-term planning all of that is hard to do all at once it is all hard to do all at once but you have people with specific skill sets in there that's right just interrupted Greg to say you don't have to be to also be the person who oversees like the strategic integration with larger entities and that's all because I did the second part and definitely not the first ever because I mean if you have a cross-functional team of four people and one person's really good at being the communication and project management part and one person's really good at being the technical architect and one person's really good at the front-end side and then one person's kind of a generalist who helps work on and review patches I think that's a really really strong team that you've got there especially some of those skills translate among the other members so that they can fall back on each other when they need to this concept of cross-functional teams has been very popular in software development in for the last few years and I think it's super and I think it totally applies to us of course that comes to the problem where we have no project managers and designers and things like that but that's a recruiting problem that's something else but do you have the recruiting problem on your level right now like could you tomorrow come up with a team of three or four people to support you I could if I had a way to fund them you know I mean you know who you would want on that team so this is definitely a possibility I mean I've already got four major contributors to CMI there's like me, Alex, Son and Bejibus now that's not as cross-functional as I might necessarily like but it's more maybe more dysfunctional than cross-functional cross dysfunctional yeah but the concepts are still there I really wish that I had started with a team of four people it wouldn't have been those four people because I didn't really know any of them at the time and started funding the whole team from the very beginning instead of just coming up with that for myself at the end another really controversial thing I want to bring up is the fact that 10 seconds as a community we are extremely suspicious of centralization and that's a huge problem it's a huge problem because it's really really really difficult to do the kind of fundraising that we're talking about without some sort of centralization and without some sort of organization behind it and the kind of businesses that typically drive our community namely service businesses to be honest don't have the kind of funding all the time to be able to fund at the level that we need and they don't have the long-term vision either their businesses are very cyclical they tend to have to put a lot of money away through the downsides of the cycles and it's very hard for them to devote significant resources beyond say 10% of someone's time to this kind of contribution unless they want to take away 4 people's 10% and give it to one person which doesn't necessarily work out in all situations I've talked a lot about how I've talked to members of other open source projects for a long time about their funding models and almost all of them have a commercial entity behind them and while there's a downside to that I mean the Fedora project has it written into their clause that their board of directors has to have at least two members from Red Hat and it's a representation of Red Hat's dedication of resources to the project but on the other hand it means that there are dedicated resources to the project and vision coherent focused vision not necessarily something the Drupal community has been very strong at over the years and while I understand the suspicions around centralization and around focusing power and sort of ideals around a specific group I think it's going to be very very very difficult to achieve our goals if we don't figure out some way to do that and I mean just the monetary side is like I think that we could probably convince the DA to sort of be the fiduciary representative of an initiative because they do that with Drupal camps right now actually they hold the bank account for the Drupal camp and act as the money people like they do the granting basically and so the camp people collect money and they just provide a bank account an illegal entity to hold it but I mean without some sort of organization collecting money the scale of money that we're talking about I think things are going to be really difficult I think that's something that we as a community given the size that we've grown to are going to have to really really think about over the years okay let me recap what you're saying and I won't say the A word let me recap what you just said so not one person as a figurehead at the very top of the tier but a team of two, three maybe even four people working as a hive mind and then having a group an entity that's responsible for money management so that you guys don't get taxed to death and get screwed basically and then having a way to make it acceptable to the community that some people are getting funded for certain things and some people aren't and then a lot of that funding is being centralized in one place and that may also mean that that one place has a greater voice than others do is evil I'll leave the rest of my notes for later okay yeah thank you Greg sure for a beer yes let's so we already do have some funding models that live in parallel to what's getting proposed here we've got the large scale Drupal project that Acre has running that have I so my understanding of the large scale Drupal project is that large organizations like NBC have contracts with Acre that involve hosting and other services and it involves a sum of money that is pooled for common interests I don't know exactly what that funds but I imagine it's things like large scale performance because large sites like NBC have similar needs I don't think there's anything stopping say a consortium of colleges from starting a nonprofit that could fund fixes that colleges need and that may not line up to you know a nonprofit funding just whiskey but if we had a nonprofit that was interested in making Drupal better for all universities multiple universities could give money directly to that nonprofit that nonprofit could then fund whatever they want they could give 10% of their money to whiskey 10% to mobile we don't need we don't necessarily need one funding model to rule them all there's nothing stopping anyone right now from creating a nonprofit dedicated to making Drupal run better on shared hosting I was just about to add to what you're saying because like why is everyone talking about funding as in giant entity X funds 20% of someone's salary what about crowdfunding we are huge we are millions of people why can't we crowd source this bit you know sure we so we could even didn't you raise a bunch of money in Kickstarter no no okay okay so maybe that model doesn't work but maybe it also doesn't have the same visibility like da has a lot of visibility at the Drupal con maybe if there was a be a core benefactor you know badge that you can put on your site or it goes on your tag or something and you donated five bucks to help work on core if a million people do that what right you'd have to like that's implied so what I'm saying is we don't necessarily need one entity to rule them all we already have de facto entities like commerce guys that funds the open source project Drupal commerce that is a funding model for supporting open source but they're an entity right they have taxable issues and things like that sure so what I'm saying is to my knowledge there is no legal barrier stopping anyone in this room from creating a nonprofit dedicated towards solving issue X in Drupal and I think the large mental hurdle that we have is if we start a funding agency the Drupal community will push back against whatever centralization there is that that nonprofit could be dedicated to solving the least controversial issues in Drupal it can be dedicated to fixing the oldest code in Drupal if the mental hurdle we have right now is that funding by its very nature is controversial someone in this room could start a nonprofit dedicated solely to fixing Drupal WTFs only yeah I mean they could but how many people actually take that step I feel like if there was an entity dedicated to handling just the fundraising and then the delegation and the allotment of that funding is a crowd sourced decision or a consensus based decision that would take a lot of the so and so got money and I didn't kind of crap out of it because it would be a group decision I think that that would make it a lot easier to manage versus like you want to do something go start a nonprofit how do I do that I think you have to be really motivated I think it's a great idea I'm not going to shoot down your idea it's awesome go do it what I'm saying is I don't personally have the motivation but if all of us just keep saying we need an entity we need an entity we need an entity we're not going to get one until someone just makes one I think we have to have infrastructure to make that happen I just want to give you data because you asked about LSD and you have ideas about what my allotment finance I think does not want to brag a lot about it because we're not doing it so that people see we are all doing all that stuff part of it is because the central control problem that oh aqueous funding all this stuff so everything's controlled by aqueous but there's been there's been funding for things like the from the new note edit form all through to the views initiative to configuration management to to parts of whiskey so different people in different areas where have been funded and helped by funds from LSD their individual block posts about their work mentioned this funding there's no like central list of all this stuff that's being funded so it's not secret information but it's not something that aqueous wants to break about because there I don't think it's a point there's a point in bringing about it I'm somebody who has quit their job to work on Drupal 8 what's your name Alex Pot Alex Pot I just met him but I've been like saying his name for a year so it's we're not really confronting one of the facts that core development has become professional can you get closer to the mic core development is professional we are behaving professionally you actually have to face the mic to figure out what you're saying easy to talk to you facing it core development is a professional activity now and there are big companies involved in funding people to work on it and the reason that we don't let the DA fund it is because we think it's got some direction on it but companies have direction on core so there is a conflict of interest already so get over ourselves we have to create some entity to do it I want to ask a question why do you think companies have input into core because commerce guys has like zero input into core Chris decides what he wants to do okay so you're saying commerce guys would fund something that we think will benefit us in that way right but actually I don't know that's really benefiting commerce guys directly I think they just like we should fund core that's it that's why I started working on CMI is because I was deploying massive sites and I was struggling with features and I was working for Capgemini really really big company and I wanted to go solve that problem so it was easier for Capgemini in the future to do it so they funded me there was one more thing that's kind of completely slipped my mind what was it it's gone sorry well come back five minutes of questions or five minutes before the break five minutes before the break fine so long I've gone and it's back so it was about both for the gentleman who said that he was interested in contributing and being involved but in a freelance schedule didn't feel like he had the time to devote to it and also about the funding question in general so I think that something that we can do more of a middle ground is like micro grants and this can take the form of like $200 or $500 that you give someone to work on one issue this is something that well never mind I probably can't say it but there's also there's also the idea of giving someone a specific donation or contribution contributions that we're supposed to use to do something particular like checks like paid for my airplane ticket to Barcelona so that I could go to Barcelona to help solve problems for views in CMI he just gave that contribution and he gave it directly to me because there was a trust there but that kind of small funding $300, $500, $1,000 is also useful especially for people who aren't ready to quit their full-time job and work on core for 10K right and if there's you already have some minimum level of the way we vet people in an open source community is through their contributions so you already have to have some minimum level of work to demonstrate that you're going to make good use of funding that you get but I think that for people that we already have trust in and that we know will do good work that's like our interview process right and I think that is kind of the thing I think is possible and I also just wanted to mention a bit how views in core was funded because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about it and this is kind of in response to your point Shannon so our community chip in raised $13,000 which is amazing but the most well-known module in the world only raised $13,000 so half of the $13,000 went to fund my time and I was living like practically poverty level like I worked out a situation with my employer where I would work five hours a week from them which is very generous of them because they knew they were kind of screwing me over and that I was going to leave soon so that was sort of their way of patting me on the back that was probably not the best way to say that but but I worked out that situation and then I was paid with chip in money for the summer and it wasn't a lot of money and again it was just enough to like make my rent and feed myself but I was willing to do it because I was really excited about what I was working on it was still a dream job and I think that a lot of people are in that situation where they deliberately deprive themselves of things that they would get through employment because they really enjoy the work that they're doing and they care about it but I well you know that's bullshit but on the other hand let me say this to the people in the back in here it's bullshit that people have to deprive themselves in order to work on core amen I made a decision I made a personal decision you know and I don't regret it at all because what happened is at the end of that summer there was a situation where I wasn't going to have access to the funding anymore and I went through a brief period of panic where I oh my god I'm going to get evicted I don't know what's going to go on here but at that point when it became clear that VDC was about to lose a quarter of its contributors before views was merged in Acquia stepped up and and funded me and it certainly wasn't full time but I got like $8,000 from Acquia significantly more than I got from the chip-in and that was for the next segment and then for the third segment of the release cycle Tengen actually funded me and so even though the community chip-in raised a lot of money which is amazing the amount of money it raised compared to these these large companies with an interest in open source who are have their entire business model built around an open source project you know contributed a lot more to the funding and that's just me like three companies so Airdfish, Zivtech and oh yeah a new digital partnership thank you see they all work for different places now Daniel doesn't but so three companies actually funded like a third to a half of those three guys and they've got their heads down and they're not even paying attention but and that's you in the back the value of funding them was a lot greater than the value of funding me in terms of just the number of developer hours that they their companies didn't build them for so so basically like community chip-ins great idea but not necessarily for large scale fundraising and mostly big companies companies tend to chip in more than your average person in terms of the total sum is the summary of what you're saying then more than the aggregate of people okay yeah that makes sense wait how are we doing on time do we want to run through the break okay do you want to set up yeah you can take over while we chat so a lot more things like I was thinking in the line that I could say but a lot of us is let's try and think about ways to be creative about how to go off and incentivize people to go off and to work in core there's a lot of different ways we can do it it's not just about finding money to go off and pay people full-time if the micro grants is a really good idea if there's a way to go off and simply provide advertising or some sort of company recognition on Drupal.org so you can identify who are the companies who've gone off and contributed the work that I've done on accessibility in Drupal I've gotten absolutely no contracts from that put in hundreds if not thousands of hours and a lot of companies have benefited from that work it hasn't been an open concept that has benefited from that work it would be good if there was some way to go off and to I mean there are people who are talking about ways that the accessibility is really a marker for people to one of the differentiates Drupal from other CMSs in the sales CXO meeting on Monday I'd really like to see some of those people go off and say well I'm an expert and let's draw in those experts and try and find ways to not just on accessibility but on views and there's people who here have donated serious time and energy to that but there's no way on Drupal.org to acknowledge that and there's not a culture that is where we're seeking out each other's experts we're finding those people who have really contributed a lot to bring them in to go off and solve a problem just to, I gotta cut you off because we're running out of time and I have to go really soon because apparently the buff people are like so just to come back to your point and Jess's point about micro funding I was just having a conversation with people yesterday about these two things and the idea that we had was to do like benefit dinners for micro funding and karma distribution at the same time and then for like the people there's some debate about creating leader boards and like people who contribute more than others like giving them more recognition I mean of course we want to like pat people in the back and make them recognize them for their contribution and for their code contribution there's also an element where I think we can do more to reach out to the culture outside of the Drupal shops and say how do we get people who are using Drupal to go off and find ways to contribute to the effort there's a lot more that the effort to go off and find ways to bring here all of that money came from the Drupal community almost exclusively that money came from within our ranks it didn't come from the people like the governments and the universities and other agencies who are benefiting from the work that's being done on accessibility is being done from within our ranks and we have to look outside of our ranks and think big so like how do we bring other people in to go off and to make this happen because we can't just keep you know get asking each other to give more money so going outside of the Drupal community to raise funds yes star real real quick guys I think we can probably take like two more questions than I have to go so sorry this is my first Drupal con I represent one of these large organizations we do three billion dollars a year in revenue congratulations over six hundred million dollars we are betting our business on Drupal as a large corporation I can tell you that unless the community comes up with a way where we can and companies like mine can contribute in a way money is easy for us to give we don't have we don't have necessarily specific agendas we're a member of large scale Drupal I think you need to as a community figure out how you're going to deal with some of the stuff where you're going to put the money throw out all the issues about control you need someone simply to do the project management the helping to organize the all the administrative stuff even if that organization did nothing other than just hired people whose job it was just to help answer emails that administrative background and I think this everything you need to do is you need to this is already been solved Mozilla Linux foundation MySQL there's a plethora of communities out there who have solved this problem why are you trying to solve it again this is the first step to that but I hear what you're saying so we should find the people who will get the infrastructure together and fund them first so they can continue on basically so obviously I enjoyed your presentation but one of the funny things is that committers weren't on your thing and they're really scarce resource right now they were the big C crowd sourcing where the funding goes in the community is a really good idea rather than crowd sourcing the funding instead of crowd sourcing the funding where the funding goes so using the crowd to decide who gets it instead of asking them for money cool thanks everyone


Hey everybody, David Chang here and welcome to another episode of the art of thinking smart where we learn to live and think smarter lives. Now today's guests, I'm very excited, I've had them before and just because of so much interesting stuff that we can learn from him, I have Michael North and his wife, Xiaofeng Zhou North, and both of them are co-founders of Asia Pacific Group, so they do quite a bit of business in China and also the co-founders of the Zhou Enlai Peace Institute which I do want to spend a small segment talking about who Zhou Enlai was and what the Peace Institute does. The topic of today's show is doing business in China and tips for success and why it's so important to do so. Even if you are a small entrepreneur in your hometown or even just kind of being a manager or an employee of a business, why is it important to learn about global infrastructure or cultures and especially China? And one of the key things that we all know, China is the largest country in the world with over 1.3 billion people and their growth has been phenomenal and they are now the second largest economy in the world. So they overtook Japan just a few years ago and at their current growth rate it's only a matter of years that they probably will overtake the United States when it comes to the size of their economy. So today I do want to talk about how the world is becoming a smaller place and as a result of it with internet, with technology, it's very important that we understand other cultures particularly China because they are a major kid on the block and it's very important that we take them seriously and learn about our partners and about the Chinese people and their culture just as though we would want them to learn about us. So Mike, thanks for coming on the show, I really appreciate it. And then also thanks for Xiaofeng being there and what I want to first do is before we get into the China side, I want to go back a little bit of history and talk about Zhou Enlai. I love history and I studied him and I think he's a marvelous person and for those that don't know who Zhou Enlai is, he was the premier, second in command of China back when Mao Zedong was the ruler of China after the Communist Revolution in 1949 all the way up into the early 70s when he passed away and he's also known for the ping-pong diplomacy where if you ever see the movie Forced Gump and you see him going back and forth when he's in China, Zhou Enlai is the one who started that and has credited it with a lot of stuff. So Mike, maybe if you want to just spend a few moments of talking about who is Zhou Enlai, why is he an important figure for people to know about and why he created the Zhou Enlai Peace Institute? Yeah, we created the Zhou Enlai Peace Institute because we felt that there was a need for people to be able to understand China, I would say, to study Martin Luther King. Right. Even just between those two tragedies, you can understand, right? Right. Right. Which by the way, the Chinese love A-Watch. That would be great and to also note that she is related to Zhou Enlai so that it's also very helpful that she has internalized a lot of the values that Zhou Enlai had and for our listeners and those watching the show, I think they, if you do understand history a little bit, China during the 50s, 60s, and 70s went through some difficult time periods with the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, where many of those educated business people, those that were professors, were systematically purged and Zhou Enlai, even though he's second to command, he was the one who protected a lot of those people and in fact, he himself almost was purged but because of his relationships that he had with people, he was able to save himself but those are, I would love to hear from Xiaofang, I love just kind of the story she has about him and the great things that he did. Okay, I'm going to pass the phone to Xiaofang now for a moment. Hi, David. Hi, Xiaofang. How are you today? Thank you for being on our show and we're just talking about a few minutes of Zhou Enlai and before we get into our topic of doing business in China and tips for success because I think it's very important for us to understand someone like Zhou Enlai to have a better view of working with the Chinese and what he represents and so if you can give us a few minutes of what he meant to the Chinese people and why you created the Peace Institute, the Zhou Enlai Peace Institute. Yeah, thank you, David. You know, when you mentioned Zhou Enlai, the name, in China anyway, regardless of being a taxi or a hotel or on the street, everybody, they just put their hands in their heart and this is how people feel, remembering him, not, yes, he is the first Premier of China, he is also First Ministry, Foreign Minister, but he is also like uncle, like a father to the people. He has no offspring, he has no children, but he adopted so many orphans during the war that he is really deeply not just a respect, but loved by the people of China. So I was shooting their documentary, follow the footsteps of Zhou Enlai the year before and then we'll continue to go following these footsteps because these footsteps are all over China, all over the world, except America. So, you know, the reason for us to create the Zhou Enlai Peace Institute, like what Michael just said, we really like to bring the family value regardless of the politics, the cultural differences, but family. You know, the common goal, the common interest, and we could Zhou Enlai wanted to say, you know, it's a cold existence and now it's a 21st century, we really need a cold, not only cold existence, but collaboration. It's so important. And through all our ancestors, you know, the battle, the war, the death, the bloodshedded for freedom, for peace. Got it. And this, yeah, this has to be continued, not just for China, for America, for people, for humanity. And that's why, you know, the backbone of the Peace Institute. But Zhou Enlai is the channel to what he did for the people of China, for the people of the, you know, to the world. We really need, this is our journey, this is our time, and this is our responsibility to continue to carry their legacy and do what we've got to do. Got it. Now, thank you so much, Afang, really do appreciate it. It's good. And those listening and watching, you can go to ZhouEnlaiPeaceInstitute.org. So Zhou Enlai is his name, the first premier of China, and Institute.org to get more information. And now what I want to do is, is now switch gears a bit and talk about doing business in China and the importance of understanding the Chinese and why it's so important for us to do so. So Mike, are you there right now? Michael, you want to talk to Michael? Yes, please. Hey, what's up, Mike? So yeah, wanted to now circle back about talking about doing business in China.  It's the second largest economy. It'll soon be the largest. And with Chinese having purchasing power. So you founded the Asia Pacific Group with a variety of other folks. And so what I wanted to do is just touch on briefly. Okay, if somebody is thinking about I want to go global and I understand the importance of growing global. How do I start? Now the Chinese have a certain culture. And unlike us Americans where things are done in a very business like very professional, get it done as quickly as you can matter, the Chinese are very much into patience time. Let's get to know each other. So maybe if you want to spend a few moments to talk about what are the cultural differences between the Chinese and Americans? And what is it that Americans need to know about when doing business in China? Okay, here is a really simple decoder ring. It's very simplified. So don't take it as the final answer. It's a one dimensional one. But here is one thing that I know you've noticed it. Americans begin with this. They begin with the transaction. They begin with the deal. I am this. I have that. You want this? Let's make a deal. Here's the price. Where's the order? Lunch, dinner, family, perhaps over a period of years. They like to exchange emails, you know, see each other on a vacation, meet each other's mess. Maybe the relationship involves a little bit of bio, you know, that white light night liquor. Yeah, the liquor, right, right. Maybe it's a little green tea. It's an experience without talking business. Without talking numbers, price, let's make a deal. No, if you do that too soon, in a relationship with Chinese, you kill. So really, it's just like, you know, dating somebody, you don't want to just propose without getting to know them, you want to spend the time to date them, get to know who they are. And then after a relationship is established, then move into that next step in the relationship then. Then the deal happens. Then it deal happens. It's a natural course, right? But it doesn't happen. You can't force it. You can't put a deadline on it. If you try to hurry it, you slow it down. If you push it too much, then if you chase it, it runs away. Got it. Got it. So that is a really key difference. And I would say if if someone is, let's say we have a young entrepreneur, got it, there's the Chinese chamber. So the you can get tuned into one of those. Got it. So the first thing is is learning about it. Obviously, you can learn about China through books, through talking about it, but it's important to actually experience it. And one of the best ways that you're saying to experience it is to go with people who are familiar with it, just like a trade group, chamber of commerce, any type of organization, and establish that relationship beforehand.  How does somebody, okay, they go to China, they meet some people, how would you say that they get started on establishing a business and how should they structure it to prepare themselves for the future? Engineer to be global from the very beginning. Okay, what does that mean? And that means, and that means mobile. Okay, everything, all your communication has to be multi lingual, so that you can switch it into do with several of the big, but in this case, we're talking about Chinese, you can not only translate Chinese website, you'll get got it. So you get to save money there time by doing that. And so that's I think extremely important is having you know, before everyone had to learn English, but now it's it's a matter of us being able to take that step forward and saying, Okay, you know what, we want to learn Chinese, and be able to meet the Chinese halfway and making sure that all of our materials are translated so they can read it.  And there's just so many opportunities. Want to talk about what kind of what what do you think is the opportunity of of the future if somebody is looking or if they're in a business and is looking to kind of start a new branch or or say you know what we want to do business China because we know that's the future. What type of industries do you recommend looking at or doing research on something to add? So anything that needs that can look at to human undersold, when you come to agriculture information, information, when you come to health information, even you have that can work in those fields is extremely valuable. Got it, got it. Okay, that's great. So understanding that the different industries in China, obviously, is very important. And you see that big growth that they have there. Now, what are some of the precautions that people should have? You know, you've heard, you know, back 20 years ago, when the law or or some of the rules and regulations weren't as strict as they are now, you had some issues of corruption or some counterfeit items goods. What would you say is is a something that people should be aware of? When do you visit China and how to protect themselves? And it's like they're right, the universal. Like, yeah, okay, that's interesting.  Let's make a deal. Let's do this. He came here, consulting. He just gave me a retainer. Okay. No, no, no, no. We've seen that game. We sell tide soap. And we sell starbucks. They don't want to copy America. They don't see America. They see America as a series of less, maybe not so much. One belt, one road. You may not know what it is. But if you type in one belt, we're begun 40 years ago. Got it. Got it. And the idea of one belt, one road is China is investing in all the economies of the world. Right. They want to be at the center. You know, for example, in India, they want to be at the center of economics into the power infrastructure of India. Right. And I think you know, as much as you know, I think we can have another show on the one belt, one road. I think for those that listening watching, that's something definitely to to do some research on and and I think that's something that we should probably revisit. But Mike, I want to thank you and Xiaofang. I think it's important for us that we know that okay, you know what Joe and lie is one of the most important figures in China and understanding him and what you've done to really spread knowledge about him and the work that he's done. And also coming back to you know, what China is a major player to work with. And what we're looking to do is learn about their local culture, the customs, and make sure that you work with those on the ground visit to do business in China. And you have to end the show here. I want to thank you again, Mike, Xiaofang for being on here. And I want to thank those that have watched and listened. And I look forward to seeing you on our next show for the art of thinking smart where we all learn to think and live smarter lives. Thanks so much.