All right. Great. Thank you. All right. Oh, last reminder. I forgot. Be sure to say your name before you start speaking. That helps me know who's talking because we don't know all your voices yet. So when you go to answer a question, feel free to start with, this is Adam and what I'd like to say is, sound good? Okay. So getting started, the first question for you guys today is this. What is the big critical issue that is facing the project today? And what is it that the association can contribute to addressing that issue? This is Howard Jacobson. I'll start quickly. I would say that for me, as not nearly as technically capable as most of the other folks on the phone, but a long-time user, it's just the barrier to entry for new users into putting up a Drupal site quickly that looks good, that's responsive, mobile first, all that kind of good stuff. And I think that's important because lots of people, there are lots of choices as WordPress, there's Jumla, there's Drupal, Magento if you're doing e-commerce. And people have a limited amount of time to make a technology choice and the lower we can make the barrier to entry, I think the more we'll see the community grow with new folks with a diverse set of use cases. Thanks, Howard. And you just reminded me of all of the talk. I like to go with Howard in every way. Sorry, guys, can we just pop in for one second? Let me just pop in and just say sorry. Howard just reminded me, well, his speaking reminded me. I forgot to introduce you guys. So why don't I run through really quickly the 10 people on the call? I'll give you guys one more moment to formulate your answer and then we'll pick up with that question. So the candidates on the call today, if Kelly Albrecht, who's from New Zealand and has worked in the project for, well, you guys have all worked in the project for quite a bit of time at this point, right? So that's, I'm going to stop saying that. But sorry, Kelly's not from New Zealand. Let me try this. Let me, wow. Not from New Zealand. You are not from New Zealand. That's Alex. And I'll just say that the third time is not the charm for me when it comes to me the candidate session. Wow. Sorry. Kelly, last, sorry. Are you ready? We're going to start again. Thanks. All right, Kelly, you are from New England. Is that correct? Do we lose him? That's correct. All right, I did it. So right here from the good old US of A. Oh, that's great. It's the delay. Gotcha, that's right. Good. Enzo is representing Columbia here today. Although Enzo, you live in Costa Rica now, has also been engaged in the Drupal community for a long time, and was one of the folks who helped us organize Drupal Con Latin America. Let's go around. Tom Grady, Randy is also on the call. Tom's from, are you still in Ohio, Tom? Yes, I am still in Ohio. Awesome. And so Tom is joining us here from the States. Rache Gupta is representing the Indian community here today, and has been helping us organize Drupal Con Asia, which we will put on in 2016. Adam Hill is from the UK, has been part of the community there for a number of years, has gotten ready for Drupal Camp London, I know, and has served in a variety of capacities in the Drupal community, including on the community working group, and has been a long time volunteer at the Drupal Con. Howard Jacobson, who's the first voice we heard here today, is also calling in from the US here today. We have Victor Lewandowski, who's calling in from the Ukraine, and runs a Drupal shop there in the Ukraine. Chris Lockhart, our Canadian today from Toronto. He's tired of being cold. I found out this morning. It's cold up here, eh? Yeah. Hello. Alex Matthews, Alex is from New Zealand. I don't know why Alex and Kelly are the same person in my mind, but you guys don't sound alike. That's for sure. I know Alex, you must be getting ready for Drupal South right now. And Michael Schmidt has been part of the project for a long time as well, and you may recognize Michael. He works at Amazing Labs in Switzerland, and you may recognize him from the Drupal Conds, where we somehow cajole him into climbing onto tall things and taking our pictures. So that's a brief rundown of who we've got. Howard, you were able to address that question first. What's the critical issue facing the project today, and how does the association, how can the association address it? Who wants to go second? Hi, I'm Gus here. I can find these. I'm going to call on Ratchett because we're having a hard time getting going. Okay. Thanks, Howard. So what I feel is the most critical issue at this point of time is awareness. There's a lot of initiatives being run by Drupal Association. There's a lot of initiatives that are being run in different Drupal communities, but how people are getting aware of what's happening here. I think that is something really critical. Especially, I'll highlight what's happening here in Indian community and different regional community in India. Communities are maturing very fast. We have done Drupal camps, which is like 600 plus participants coming and joining the event. But most of the people are not aware of Drupal Association. What are the things we are doing? There are so many initiatives that they are taking. So I think this is the point that I think you probably need to focus on. That's my point. Thank you. Thanks, Ratchett. How about Tom? Do you want to answer that one next? Sure. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Hi, this is Tom. We can hear you, Tom. Okay. Probably the most critical issue I think facing the Drupal project right now is getting Drupal 8 launched. Drupal 8, I think, is way overdue and has had an effect on both the community members like myself, who are waiting on the sidelines, as well as those who are actively working on the project who are slowly burning out. I'm just a very small developer, but I've watched the excitement begin to fizz. When I went to DrupalCon in Chicago in 2011, the community was just really alive with excitement over what was then a newly released D7. The sessions were just packed with enthusiastic members and community. Then 2012 came along and there were hints of Drupal 8. We were excited. 2013 came with teasers from Drupal 8. And then by 2014, we were waiting for a release. We thought maybe it would be released at DrupalCon, but it didn't. The grants that the association has created to speed the release of Drupal 8 have been great to get more people on board. But helping Drupal 8 get released should be the highest priority for the association so that we can once again start to rebuild that excitement that I think is missing right now. And I know me, for one very small person standing on the edge looking in, it's just kind of sad, and I'd like to see that excitement come back. This is Kelly. Let me know if you can hear me, and I'll give it a shot. You're good. You're loading too. Yeah, so I completely agree. I've been seeing a lot of the Drupal 7 fatigue, people eerily waiting for Drupal 8. And really just kind of fading into the background, waiting for it to come out. So I do think that the release of Drupal 8 will re-energize the community in a huge way. In the meantime, I think it would be great for the Drupal Association to seek to find ways to help give support to those local Drupal group organizers and Drupal camp organizers who are doing outreach into the community to help bring the community in to do more technology in general and to find Drupal and to be there for the excitement of the release of Drupal 8. Hi, it's Chris here. I agree with what everyone has said thus far, except I want to take maybe a further back approach on this or a higher level approach. And I think the word structure, structure, structure said three times and even more is maybe the thing that is the most critical issue facing the project. And that's probably the one area where the Drupal Association can really foster and spearhead all of these other elements, the community building and the Drupal 8 initiatives and getting Drupal 8 released and that sort of thing. So I think forming structure, there's been a lot of talk in the Drupal sphere about duocracy versus more structure and how that's all handled. And I think taking care of that from an organizational level will filter down into other elements of the project itself. And that can push a release of D8 and D9 and things in a more efficient manner and help to steer things through the issue of DQ and community building and outreach to other parts of the Drupal community that are multilingual or whatever the case may be. So I would say at a higher level structure and well-planned structure is probably the most critical issue. I'd like to jump in at another point. I'd like to just talk a little bit about Michael. Why don't we do Michael and then I think I heard Adam. Yeah, I think let's do Michael and then I think I heard Adam. OK, yes, so that's Michael. Yes, I want to add to what Chris said. And I think for me, it's structure is definitely a good thing. For me, it's also getting the small communities that we already have all over the world to connect with each other. I see especially in Europe, where I from where I go to a lot of events, I see a lot of small communities not really talking to each other. And I think that's where the Drupal Association really can bring in its global view to get to know all these people and to talk to or get the smaller communities to talk to each other, which are sometimes really close, especially in Zurich. Munich, for example, which has its own Drupal community, is really close, but because we are living in a different country, we don't really talk to each other a lot. I think that's where the Drupal Association can also bring in and then at the end also help get things done, like doing code sprints together to then again release Drupal 8. But that's one of the things why I also said, okay, I want to join in, because I feel a bit that the Drupal Association is especially the board, of course, the staff, because they are in Portland, but it's a bit oriented to the U.S., especially having a lot of U.S. board members in. And so I would like to see other board members from other countries in there or other continents to bring in the knowledge of the different culture or the ways how things work there. Thanks, Michael. Adam, did you want to tackle that one next, too? Yeah, that's okay. Just a minute. But I think the question is a really difficult one because I don't think there's a critical issue for the projects at the moment. I think there's multiple critical issues and I think that's not just talking about the ECQ. But I think just going on from the Drupal 8, I think part of the problem is often the language is used in the sense of people are waiting for Drupal 8. And I think that's part of the problem in the sense of people are waiting instead of people getting involved. And I think that the contribution side of things, helping organizations to understand core contribution and the value that core contribution can bring to their developers is also really, really important. And that fits into, again, a lot of things other people have said, but it says what Michael was saying about connecting people and connecting communities, bringing core contribution into user group meetups, bringing core contribution across user group meetups and, yeah, as I say, getting more people understanding that they can actually, the value of getting involved in contributing to the core development of the project. Thanks. Hi there, it's Alex Matthews here from New Zealand. And I'd like to strongly agree with everything that's been said so far. It'd be pretty difficult to disagree with any of the fantastic comments you've all made. However, I would take a slightly different angle and talk more about the other stakeholders that are involved in Drupal. I feel as though the community is really strong and really good and very capable of looking after itself. And the association, I think, does a good job of looking after the developers and the immediate people who are involved in the Drupal project. However, I feel as though to grow the market share of the CMS and to bring in new fresh blood, it's really important that we're thinking about the other stakeholders that are involved in Drupal, which in my case, as a Drupal consultant, would be government clients, enterprise clients, the private sector in general, but also your local businesses and your cafes down the road and your students at university and high school that are looking for new technology they want to be able to use for their web projects and software projects. So I feel as though I would be more interested in thinking about them and how can we outreach to them in terms of letting them know what Drupal's good at. I totally agree with the comments around Drupal 8 and the confusion about that. And I feel as though this is a communications challenge and that the Drupal project needs to be communicating better back to those technology strategists and to the technology consultants. It actually ended up making a lot of the decisions about how web technologies are used. So I feel as though the immediate Drupal community does have a little bit of work that can be done, but I would widen the range and look more at who's actually making the decisions about how Drupal is used in the commercial and practical sense. Great. Enzo or Victor? Hi. Hi, this is Enzo. In my opinion, one of the most critical issues in Drupal is the worldwide participation. And one of the causes of this problem is the language barrier. Of course, English is widely used, but it's not good enough to cover the whole world. So I believe the Drupal Association could help to encourage local communities or to help to create local communities in different countries and stimulate the creation of documentation, resources, videos, blog posts, but not in English, in his mother language. In that way, we can bring new developers, new documentors, new technical leads. And with these resources, we will see in a short period of time how the contributions from countries like Latin America, Africa, and Asia will have a significant increase. Thank you. Thanks, Enzo. Victor, are you still with us? Yeah. Great. So it's Victor Andoske. So I think that the main thing that the Drupal Association can give me, if I have a problem with Drupal Project, yeah, I will, if I will need help, I will try to find partner from members of Drupal Association because I believe that members is very reliable companies, guys, yeah, who I can ask help and then will help me, help me, is very good quality. So I think it's the main point of such community, of such cooperation, yeah, and such help, yeah, so that's all. Thanks, Victor. Thank you. Yeah, and you guys, one thing, we had one candidate join us, remember when I was like, oh my gosh, we're all here. It's crazy, let's start. It's just kidding. We had one more candidate join us after the fact. So I apologize for not having him in the mix for it from the beginning, but we have one more Chris. Chris McGrath, who is with us. And so, Chris, you have now had a good amount of time to think about how you might respond to that question about what the biggest thing is that's facing the association today. To keep it to one thing is the point, I think. So I tried to artfully interweave three so that maybe I could get around that. Thanks very much, and again, same as many as started off there, response, everything that's been said, I strongly agree with for sure. And I think that for me, I really resonated with what Alex was saying that the product is for our clients, and the stakeholders often that are whoever they may be from their different markets, and it is important to look at what their unique needs are from a core perspective, but not only that, I think mainly, when we think of the association from a governance perspective, and I must say also somewhere to Howard, I am a front end guy, I'm a business guy, I'm a strategy guy, I'm a governance guy, as far as an entrepreneur is concerned, but I'm not hands on with the code reviews or code contributions from a PHP perspective with the contributed modules, and that I work very closely moment by moment with back end developers, so I have some glimpse into what's going on in the process and so on, and recently, I mean, let's say like after, let's say three years of working heads down with Drupal every day, I was like, hey, what's up with this? I hear about the process of contributed modules and then coming released and so on, and peer reviews and the different grumbles that we'll see out there, there's some threads going on right now just about changes that occur in a major module affect many, many other websites and so on, and finger pointing, things of that nature, and I think that we seem to have our act together with core, but the wider, larger, more unwieldly problem is really the governing process of contributed modules and to the best of our abilities, what being an open source community, the maintenance and sustainability of those modules, and I know that's always been a focus, but I think it's something that needs to be truly, truly refined, and that as someone who crafts messages who helps build organizations and so on, to me, that can only really be done when confidence is high and a good product, and for me, of course, that means security and governance around the core code that is being plugged into these websites every second of every minute of the day, all over the world, so that's what I really think the association could do. I'd love to be involved in helping out. Awesome, thank you. Well, let's switch gears a little bit. My ears perked up when Enzo mentioned the language barrier that faces the projects and how that's a tough hurdle to get over in terms of contribution. We have so many people from around the world who would contribute if they could contribute, potentially in their own language, and that's definitely something we've thought a lot about over here at the association and sort of what immediately comes to mind for us every time is that's really expensive to do, especially, we just did DrupalCon Latin America, we did some live simultaneous translation of sessions into English, Portuguese, and Spanish, and it was great that we had someone who stepped up to volunteer their experience in translation, a company called Lingotech, to translate some of the session videos, but every time we try to tackle this, we really run into the price tag of it, which does beg the question for us about what our funding sources should be at the association. Primarily now DrupalCon's Drive, the Revenue at the Association, we've been working on expanding those revenue streams, and I would just love to hear from some of the candidates about where you think the opportunities are for the association to grow the revenue to support these programs, and if there are boundaries around where that revenue can come from. Oh, yeah, I'd love to answer this one if possible. Yeah, go ahead. Adam, sorry. Yeah, I think one of the big things, I guess I'm talking mostly from my experience now, is that in Europe at least there's a ton of grants available and opportunities for funding and cooperation across countries for innovation, for technology, across all kinds of different themes, but I think this is a really missed opportunity. Having said that, European organizations, so it kind of comes onto one of the other points that I've talked about before in terms of how we develop the European or of course other outposts, let's say of the Drupal Association, but I think that's one way that could be looked into, that applying for these funds as a large organization that already has the infrastructure, it's not such a crazy thing, and I think it will bring really different opportunities to the organizations involved across Europe and also the neighboring countries and worldwide. Just coming onto the language thing, I think we've got to look at it in two ways. One, this is an open source community, everyone contributes and I think that from some level we can work with language on a contribution level, and the second one, as you mentioned, Vlingotech and other language companies are out there, there's a ton of Drupal innovations that should be able to help us with that, and I think if we can't, then it's a bit of a worry when there's so much of that kind of help within the community. Holly, this is Howard James again. Great, Howard. Go ahead, please. Go ahead, Howard. All right, thank you, Howard. This, the situation that the Drupal Association is in is really not unlike the challenge faced by any nonprofit, whether it's supporting a technology or it's supporting research for some sort of disease, and you depend on primarily charitable contributions, membership fees, and in the Association's case, we have DrupalCon as the major source of revenue. The one thing that I've seen working with some of the local nonprofits here is that relying on charity is a dangerous thing to do because charity generally ebbs and flows with the economy, and when people don't have a lot of money or feel like they don't have a lot of money, they tend not to contribute as much and nonprofits suffer. So I think the Association needs to find more DrupalCon-type revenue sources that can make it independent as much as possible of charitable contributors, and there are certainly many other needs in the community, whether it's training needs. There are obviously folks out there doing training in Drupal and making good money at it, and while it may be a delicate issue, whether to compete with those folks, I think the Association's long-term survival depends on as much financial independence as possible, and with respect to the language issue, I think it's almost certainly going to be a long time before the Association can afford realistically to meet the internationalization needs of all the different countries even represented on this phone call, and what the Association can do is bring to bear its community organizational skills to help local leaders, whether in the Ukraine or Costa Rica or other countries, to organize their own local internationalization translation efforts using as a resource the content that the Association has available and is usable by everyone on an open-source basis. Thank you. Hey, Holly, that's Michael. Hi, it's Chris here. Chris, Tom? Let's go Chris and Michael, because I think Chris, you were trying to get in last time too. Yeah, sorry. Okay, so I have a relatively fair amount of experience with... Oh, Chris Lockhart, Canadian Chris. You're all good to go, Chris Lockhart. Hello? Yep, you're all good to go. Okay, sorry. So I have a relatively fair amount of experience with the community in Japan. I've been there two or three times and I've done some work with them on their Drupal camps and trying to deal with the language barrier. And I think the thing that I've seen is that in terms of funding with money and time, because time certainly equals money and money equals time, as we all know, volunteerism has always been very strong with the Drupal community. And with a lack of funding, the eagerness has not been quelled, I guess. There are members of that community who are pushing vigorously to volunteer time to translate some of the Drupal books that are popular and also trying to do translations just in different aspects through YouTube tutorials and that sort of thing. To explain simple concepts to entry-level Drupal users like views, the word view in English means one thing, but views means another thing in the Drupal nomenclature. So it's a difficult thing for them to get around. So volunteerism is certainly a strong thing. And again, maybe jumping back to the first question about how the DPA can help and the issues with the Drupal project, this whole idea of organizing and providing organizational skills and opportunities for the project as a whole and people around the world trying to get involved, helping to organize that is maybe not a way to make money, but it's a way to save money and time, I think in the long term. And again, traditionally, grants and sponsorships are a key thing. Those things come from government sources, capital interests and that sort of thing. So those are certainly key elements of it as well. Thanks. Thanks, Michael, I think you're welcome. I'll jump in next. Oh, go ahead. Oh, sorry. Yes. Who's going? Here's what we figured out, you guys. 10 is two minutes. I'll take the last. Sorry. We have so many awesome candidates, but I think Michael wanted to go. Michael was in line after Chris before and then we can move on. OK, good. Yes, I think one interesting thing is that we just shortly mentioned like that actually the Drupal cons are responsible for 75% of all the revenue that the DA makes. And I think whether that's really cool. I mean, as you said, Holly, it's important that we try to spread that out. And as the DA board currently already decided, you want to bring that for 2017, we want to bring that down a little bit to have other streams. And I think one really interesting thing in the Drupal community right now happens is that companies are more and more involved to get known for what they do. We heard that from Rhys talking about that we want to show what companies paid for or that they sponsored some of the contribution. And I think that actually goes into not just having sponsorships where you as a company can sponsor a con or just be a member of the, or a partner of the association. I think it's more and more specifically that companies can say, okay, I want to sponsor the last critical bug that was fixed on Drupal 8 or something like that. And because all these opportunities are out there, it just needs a lot of time from the DA to generate them or to generate these opportunities to talk to companies. But I think if we provide more of them, companies rather spend more money or sponsoring money to support them. And I think if I look at the amount of people we want to hire in the Drupal Association right now, I see a lot of them are in the revenue team. And I think that's already a really good start to just have more people that can support the companies if they want to spend money how they can spend it inside of Drupal. Because I don't believe that the money isn't there, it just takes time to tell them and find them on. Thanks, Michael. Can I jump in here at this point, Ollie? Do it. Alexia. Cool. I'll try and be quick. Really good comments from everyone else. However, I'm surprised that a few other things weren't mentioned, to be honest. I think obviously making the most of the Drupal cons and optimizing and maximizing the income streams that we already have is a good idea. However, I think there's a conversation that still needs to happen about potential services that the Association can offer. I think that if you're looking at diversifying your income streams, from a business perspective, all you can really do is think about other income streams. And one of them, in my mind, could actually be two birds with one stone in terms of providing that communication strategy around the release of each version. So for instance, I've got a lot of large clients who spend hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars on Drupal websites. And they have a really strong interest in knowing where Drupal is at and where Drupal 8 is coming. I know that a lot of this information is public already. I feel as though there'd be large organizations that'd be willing to pay extra through the Drupal Association in order to have perhaps a dedicated communicator who would be able to put together regular reports for them in detail and a lot of analysis, where Drupal is at, where it's going, how far is Drupal 8 away, how many issues are there on the core modules. I feel like there is actually a service there that could be provided that enterprise and government would pay for just to have a larger degree of detail and information around Drupal strategy and technology strategy in general. And finally, I think another income stream that should be talked about, that was talked about years and years ago. I remember at Drupal Con in London, it was a big deal.  And that is specifically the idea of a premium Drupal marketplace and actually commercializing a certain degree of Drupal.org and being able to sell premium themes and modules there and distributions and so forth. And I know that's a highly sensitive topic and I'm not saying it has to be that way. But if I was challenged to think about how Drupal could make more money, definitely some kind of commercial marketplace would be a thought that would come to mind. OK, I'll do it on this this time. Can I jump in? This is Tom. OK, do I have both? Two Tom's or one Tom there? Kelly and Tom. Oh, Kelly. One Tom and one Kelly. Let's go Kelly and then Tom. OK, yeah, so I was going to say something very similar to what has been said before. One thing, though, that I will say about being, we got to be careful with donations or contributions resulting in special benefits for companies.  One thing that I would think would be pretty cool would be if the Drupal Association focused on the million. Although you look at all that there is to do in Drupal and it's just a treasure chest of potential projects and to group those projects up, get levels of effort on them, and then sell sponsorships to them. So it's very much like what Michael was describing, where people could sponsor, maybe we could get a level of effort on some of this translation things that we're trying to do. And then people, you could find a good fit for that. I'm sure Lingotech is already donating a lot of their time. Maybe other companies would like to sign on to that. Maybe a little larger company, a huge company, would just want to put their sponsorship on a specific project and then we can get the funding for those things and figure out how to organize resources to get them done. Thanks, Kelly. And Tom, I think you're next up. This is Ratchett. Oh, hang on one second, Ratchett. I think we'll do Tom, Randy, and then Ratchett. Yeah, so this is Tom. Yep, Tom, you can go. I'll probably take after that. All right, thank you, Ratchett. Yeah, I'm a Drupal developer, but I'm the guy who's never going to be a core contributor, like many, many others. And we feel that we have a need that there's a place for us in the Drupal community, but somehow we don't feel like we belong. And there's thousands, hundreds of thousands of people like me that we need to reach out to. And those new and French developers to leave their sense of not being good enough or large enough of a player to participate and by doing so grow our community. As more members join globally, the cons get bigger, the membership capital grows, and it becomes easier to get sponsorships. But to get more members into the association, we need to come up with, let's just say, a welcome to Drupal path that shows people new to Drupal or those who are outside the bubble how to get involved and why their participation counts. It's not all about core. There are so many other areas where help is definitely needed. But to make that transition easy and welcoming for all countries, maybe in their particular language, so the association grows globally, and our association revenues grow along with it, we're never going to be in a position where we can have offices in every country that are staffed and paid for. But perhaps we can have some sort of representation upstream from those different countries to counter representation on the board. And then they're going to feel like they're more involved. But getting back to that small person, I really think there's hundreds of thousands of people out there like me. I'm a member, but there's a lot who aren't members just because they just don't feel like they're good enough. That's all. Thanks, Ratchet. Do you want to hop in now? Hi, this is Ratchet. I agree with the point what Tom brought in. And in fact, I'll focus more on that. So what I have been seeing in my community is these regional communities, the local communities, are doing excellent job. They're doing a lot of awareness. And they're the one who are giving a lot of these informations about coming on board on Drupal Association membership, participating in different initiatives at Drupal Association. And these local communities are doing huge camps and events. I have seen several camps that has happened in India. And they have done an excellent job in raising funds. So my point is that maybe Drupal Association can have representation at national level or could have an office at national level, which facilitates these camps. And the revenue that we generate from these events can be the fund that we can collect for a Drupal project. Other way this can hurt is these local communities can also help in giving the first-hand information, making people more aware of what the benefits of becoming a member, how your participation can help this project. I think there is a huge potential there. I don't see a lot of people coming and becoming a member, especially in a growing and maturing community like India. I believe this kind of model can really play a very significant role. Thanks, Rajik. Chris McGrath or Enzo? Yes, I am the last. Holly? Yeah, Enzo? Hi. Yep. This is Chris. OK. OK, go ahead, Chris. Oh, no, go ahead, Enzo, no problem.  I love it. And then let's see you, and then we'll finish up the video. Yeah, smile. OK. Me or Chris? No, please, Enzo. OK. OK. I think to tackle the problem of worldwide participation in the language we read, we don't need to create a big multilingual event, like the Drupal Combogotha, which was an association event. But I think in the beginning we need to find key players who speak the language of the country of the region we want to help. Let me say about the history. How it was in Central America. The first event we have was led by a German guy, Ferris de Latre, in Nicaragua. He created the first Drupal Central America. And I believe it was the first international event in Drupal, even in the world, where we have participation about nine countries. And we have some good key players. Ferris was one of them. Enzo from Sibin Actions, he did some really good sessions in Spanish. Not very good Spanish, but really good Spanish. And also, Ferris invites some people interested in Drupal from Costa Rica, Panama, Mexico, Guatemala, and after that event, because we have some limitations in English in the region, we try to connect each other to try to help us to resolve the problem and to create the connotation in our language. So I think using this approach is not really expensive, because we can find some key players who do that job as a volunteer. But if you don't have the resources to do that, maybe they have the time. And then the Drupal Association will help with the expenses to try to help this community. And I think, for instance, that is something I can do, because I speak English and Spanish, but I can go, for instance, to Guinea-Aquatorial, who is the unique country speaking Spanish in Africa. And if I do this, that will be the seed for something bigger with a small investment for me or for part of the Drupal Association. And I believe that is something we can do better in Latin America, but also we can repeat this experience in Africa and Asia. Thanks, Enzo. Thanks, Enzo. Yeah, again, a lot of great points from everybody. And some take the words out of my mouth. But I think that to end those points, to start off, it is, for me, to find strong regional leaders even from a volunteer perspective. They don't have to be directors. They don't have to have any particular lofty title. But I think if you find those folks like Enzo that are in other areas that are willing to tackle that problem, at least that will begin on the road of internationalization, which it is a long road. And it is huge. I mean, I was speaking with my team in India today. And they were telling me about Drupal Camp Hydrograd and how there was going to be 200 people there. And that was just tiny.  I was like 200 devs in a city. That's a lot, actually. And that leads to many places. So it's important to foster in places like in some of the backbones of the delivery of the product, in many cases, the community. And I know Drupal Camp is going there next year. And as an example, however, it's certainly not just normally. And so also, I think that through that, it's a domino effect, where some of the things that Tom mentioned, we need to be reaching out to the students to grow in the talent pool, to increasing the attendance of DECONs so that we are strengthening one of our key revenue sources. But then again, to Alex's point, where we are also creating other products and diversifying. We have the job board now that's a strong one and certainly should have happened. I think you could similarly roll out something. I hope this isn't exactly what Alex said. It was something to the effect of a training marketplace. I agree with that. If you use the leverage that the association has for brand awareness to help the little guys, as they have in the past with the product itself, I think that's just going to be a good thing to perpetuate. I think you could do the same from a support offering perspective, almost a paid volunteer. I mean, we're not all maybe going to get what we would out there in the marketplace, but we're supporting the product. We're healing one of the biggest gaps in the product. And we're doing that at the association grassroots level rather than some lullabots or whoever the corporation is that's offering that formally. So that as well as the corporate sponsors. And I remember some of the lobbying comments. I think that, again, if there is corporate sponsorships are key, not only from a code sponsorship level, but from a donation perspective. So clearly, there needs to be at least some small team surrounded around cultivating, steering, and making sure that that is a success. And I would say similarly, but separately, in the grant department for any nonprofit, as mentioned earlier, we are a group of volunteers. We are a group of volunteers that has such a skill and highly paid talents, we certainly should be able to find some experienced grant writers, I would think, that can help us. So that would be my thoughts. Thanks, Chris. Victor, do you want to round us out with a few words? Yeah, sure. So my suggestion is to use crowdfunding manner so Drupal Association can publish, I think, can publish a project for crowdfunding like Kickstarter and Drupalistas will fund this by project in the direction. Yeah, this is simple, I think. That's all, thank you. All right, you guys, we are going to take a cue from Victor and enter a lightning round, because we've only got about 35 minutes left in the call, and I want to make sure we get to another couple of questions, because I do have some from the community here. So we're going to do our best to keep our answers super brief here, because we have so many of us here today. But here is the question for you guys. In that last round of answers, we had a lot of different funding ideas for the association. And thank you very much, I wrote them down. Things to think about, for sure. But one of the things that, one of the communities that the association and the Drupal community doesn't really cater too much right now are businesses that use Drupal, some Drupal customers, not developers, not agencies, the end users of Drupal. Should we be incorporating those end users into the community more, and what can we do to bring them to the community? If that's the question, and remember, we're going to try to answer in lightning round format. So Holly, this is Howard Jacobson, if I can. So far, Howard. Really, really quickly. 15 years ago, I was the senior business development executive for the largest public-region open source companies, since moved on from that. But the key, in my view, to getting customers connected to the community is enabling the consultants, development houses, development shops with great information about Drupal because businesses are interested in their business. Technology is just a tool. So if we give our developer community, our consultant community, great information, great resources to educate their customers, we leverage the investment the association make to reach out to a much, much larger group of end users than we could in any other way. Thank you. Hi. Hi. I'd love to talk to you. Sorry. Here's you go, Holly. Me? Sorry. I'll be very fast. Let's go ahead, and sorry, guys. Let's go ahead and go with Alex. OK. I'm going to very, this is a topic I'm very, very passionate about, and I've got some strong ideas on it. I feel as though we need to be outreaching not only to businesses in general and end users and the wider stakeholder community. I feel as though the web resources and Drupal.org could do a far better job of facilitating this. I also feel as though we could actually be zeroing in on specific communities of practice and giving them more tools and resources, such as Drupal for hospitals, Drupal for government, Drupal for entertainment, Drupal for the school down the road. Drupal for young web designers. I feel as though you could actually segment off certain parts of the Drupal.org website and provide specific resources for them. For instance, if you want to make a website for a non-profit or environmental agency, Drupal has a lot of distributions and themes and modules available that can help that. But finding them all in one place and finding a resource that's perfect for an administrator of a non-profit is actually quite hard. So I feel as though we could actually be making targeted resources that would benefit for specific communities of practice. Hello, this is Rajat. I agree with Alex's point. Many of the interaction that had had the community members, one of the big challenges that end users are facing, they're not aware of what's available. I had an interaction with a professor in an institution and they were trying to use Drupal for their institution website. But they find it very challenging and they had to consider it a Drupal shop, which was very costly. So making them more aware, giving them more resources and information and how easily they can use Drupal, consume Drupal. I think it's already there. It's just a matter of giving them the right sort of information. I think that's my point. OK, I'll jump in. This is Kelly. Tom and Kelly. Let's go Kelly then Tom. You are in sync, man. Yeah, we're just ready to talk at the same time. Well, the way that I've seen it work really well is the Drupal marketplace, I think, is a really beautiful thing that there's already efforts going into making that even more effective. And I think that's working great. So more of that, I think, would help. But then I would also say something about another way I see it working is a lot of times when a customer is a good fit for Drupal, it's because they have something fairly complicated that they want to do, something a little bit outside what WordPress could do or some website service platform can do. And really what they're looking for is just somebody who's really smart, a top-notch programmer, because the complicated thing that they want to accomplish needs the right tools for the job to be used. And a lot of times, most of the times from what I see, those programmers and web developers want to use Drupal because they see how it's a good fit. So getting more consultants, more programmers into Drupal will get more people recommending Drupal to those customers knowing about Drupal and being able to see that it is the most elegant way to do so many complex and complicated things. So it's not directly finding ways to target a customer and connect them to Drupal, but it's enabling and empowering web developers and programmers to know and recommend Drupal as a solution. Tom. Chris. OK, hi there. This is Tom. Hi, do you think so? Tom, sorry. That's all right. Go for it, Tom. And then we're going to go to one of the Chris's. OK, call me concerned, but I'm not so sure that we want to bring businesses into the community because the voice of the individual developer who feels empowered in the association becomes lost to larger businesses who could start influencing the voice of the association. To me, the association is about the community of users, not the community for the businesses that have the deepest pockets. And their money's important, but I don't know that I necessarily want them being part of the association. Great, which Chris wanted to go next. Can I completely disagree with that? I'm going to let Michael completely disagree because that sounds interesting. I think I would completely disagree with that. I want to see everybody that has anything to do with Drupal. I want to see being part of the community. And I brought my own clients to Drupal Cons to see that they can see what the community currently is. And I can tell you, they so much more loved it. They so much more understood what Open Source is, what Drupal Con is, what Drupal is, that they went back to their bosses and told them, we need to do more with Open Source. And so I think it's really important that we get everybody that has something to do with Drupal in the communities understand what it is. And at the end, spread the word about Drupal and let us do more websites with it. This is Chris McGrath. I agree with Michael and I thought we heard that before. Corporations with money usually helps Drupal. I mean, look at Omni Media, Martha Stewart, these accomplished major goals with major funds because they have goals and then they leave it behind for us. So usually, I would say that can't be too bad of a problem, I believe, as I mentioned earlier, we probably need some governance around it. But important, should we involve the end client? As Alex was saying, absolutely, absolutely, we need to promote quality, ensure quality, give constant assurances in every way, similar to these educational ideas that Alex had mentioned just in general, constant outreach so that someone who heard word press was easier and they may be a client and they may go on to tell whomever in their midst that Drupal is what they're using is what we need. That's what this is, organic growth. And so I just feel like we have to do that, promote constant organic growth, and just answer needs. I mean, that's how the client will come to you, the end user will come to you via a need. I need training. They made me adopt Drupal from high up. I need support. I'm not sure what will happen. I mean, Drupal to me is we need our own FDIC, as others have said. People have millions invested in this, major, major dollars. They need security. And Acquia can't be the only game in town, nor should it be, in my opinion. Can I agree and disagree? Absolutely. You can if you tell me who you are. Sorry, not with you. Sorry, it's Adam. Thanks, Adam. Excuse me. Yeah, no, just in terms of the agree and disagree in terms of them being involved, I guess I think there's different spaces for different people. An amazing place for client-friend users to bring pretty much anyone. It's just an amazing place in general. I'm not sure, for example, the ACQs of Drupal.org is exactly the place where those people want to be. So I think we have to be aware of which places are for the right people. If you look at maybe what Dries has done with Drupal.com and then think about in terms of what you want the end user to be looking at and the kind of information you want them to be seeing, then I think we need to choose wisely the places where those people go. But I do absolutely agree that I think that the idea of the end user being involved is kind of paramount. Those people are the people who are going to make Drupal more of a kind of household name. And I think that also from the association point of view that's about also educating or helping to educate or supporting the agencies to be much more clear about the fact that they're using Drupal, what Drupal is, to the end user, as much as it is about the Drupal association trying to reach out to the end user, because I don't think that's a very realistic proposition. But I think the kind of multiplier effect and giving support to the agencies to really reach out to those end users will be really time and money well spent. Thanks, Adam. Hi, Canadian Chris here. Sorry, I'm talking like that's awesome. Carry on. Well, it's one way. Chris, look, our Canadian Chris, it all works. So Drupal is inclusive. So the idea of not allowing different entities to get involved with the Drupal community, I think, is probably wrong. It's just a matter of how to organize how all of that works and to cater to the different end users properly, whether it's developers, businesses, clients, et cetera, et cetera. People will come to Drupal because they want to come to Drupal. Historically, I think that's been the case with Drupal. Drupal doesn't necessarily reach out, per se. People are coming to Drupal. Companies are coming to Drupal for their business needs to make money, save money, save time, and that sort of thing. So it's a matter of how to cater to them properly. And I actually think the seeds of this are already in place with the Persona series, because that's a gateway to a content strategy for Drupal.org that can reorganize the information that's on the site and engineer it so that it goes to the right audience at the right time. So how that all works is it's a pretty complex pot to stir, but I do think those seeds are already there with the Persona series. And building on that and engineering the content to get to them properly. So when people come to Drupal.org, usually via Google searches or whatever, if they're not knee deep in the project already, they will get to the information they want quickly. Whether it is siphoning off different areas and siloing them for specific use cases, maybe that's the way, or maybe doing it all within the home page and then filtering it out from there or whatever. But those are decisions that would have to be made and dealt with appropriately. But I do think some of the seeds are there for sure. And it's just continuing to nurture that properly so that those people reaching into Drupal or outreach in the content matching their needs is dealt with properly. Thanks, Canadian, Chris. No problem, man. Follow your partner? Yeah. Enzo, why don't you go ahead and go? OK, about the question of how we can involve end users to Drupal community, I think we can provide tools to allow users to propose new features. Using tools like a user voice. So my idea is if suddenly the end users, they see new features they propose included in Drupal, this is a direct message. We are listening to our end users. Also, I love the idea of Al is about to create a documentation for vertical business. And I think we can materialize that and founding some distributions to attack the vertical business. Thank you. Thanks, Enzo. And I think Victor is the only one I think we're not. This is Tom, if I may. Oh, Tom, go for it. Sorry, I missed you. Oh, I just wanted to clarify. I don't believe businesses should be an influential part of governance because users like me end up feeling like our voice is no longer going to be heard. And to bring clients to a con, to educate them, for them to see the power of the community is fantastic. But not as part of the association out there. I just wanted to clarify that. Gotcha, that definitely makes sense. And I appreciate you taking a moment to clarify that. And then I think, Victor, you are the only other person, did you want to add something here? Yeah, OK, I'm here. So from my mind, I absolutely agree that we should promote Drupal also to users. Yeah, it will let us to have Drupal more popular. Yeah, and we will have more users. We will have more clients. Yeah, we will have more projects. So that's all. Thank you. Brilliant. OK, you guys. I think many of you got the lightning around thing down. Good job. I think if we apply those principles one more time, we can ask one more question from the community here on the call, which I'd love to get to. Because it's something we haven't talked about in any of the other calls either. And that is about the age of our community and bringing new people in. So we've talked a little bit about geographic diversity. We've talked about diversity in terms of the types of folks that are engaged in the projects. What about the next generation of Drupal developers? How do we bring in all the cool kids who might be thinking that Ruby is somehow more exciting than PHP? Hello, everybody. This is Ruchit. I'm going to talk about one of the initiative that we are working on, something called Drupal Campus Ambassador Program, where we are trying to reach out to educational institutions and trying to build a kind of ecosystem where we find some open source evangelists in these educational institutions who form a kind of committee and promote Drupal, evangelize Drupal within their campus. These persons are called campus ambassadors like we have Google ambassadors and ambassadors. So these are going to be Drupal ambassadors. And we already started tying up with a few universities here. The idea is to get Drupal at that level when they are really learning the new concepts, learning the engineering concepts. And they are the one who can actually, without worrying about the pressure of work and a lot of activities around managing other stuffs of the work, they can involve with the community, they can contribute back, they can prove to be the next generation, the biggest contributor from all over the regions. So I think this kind of initiatives could lead to bring a lot of new brains, newbies, and that could resolve a lot of issues, one of the biggest issues that I hear in these communities is Drupal resources, the scarcity of Drupal resources. So a lot of industry, a lot of companies are really interested in these initiatives. So that is my take. Hi, Canadian Chris here. I've got a couple of points that kind of speak to this whole idea of reaching out to a more youthful attendance, I guess, or participation in the Drupal community. So slight digression, but as part of organizing a large Drupal North event that's coming up, we tried to ensure that it was hosted at an educational facility, Ryerson University, in our situation here. And we've always tried to do that too because then we're hopefully going to cater to students and that demographic, I suppose. And one of the first questions I asked the venue is, how do we get your student population to get involved in the conference? How do we get them to attend? So that's part of it, outreaching at events and trying to target those kinds of facilities and events and audiences. Marketing in some respect to that demographic, I don't know how to do it other than actually having events there and that kind of thing, but some sort of a marketing campaign about not getting students involved with Drupal. From a developer perspective, the cool features in Drupal 8 that I'm looking forward to are things that might excite students getting to work with cool things in a headless Drupal kind of configuration or whatnot. And maybe that, again, is part of the marketing concept or just sharing that knowledge throughout communities outside Drupal. And I can think of a couple of specific cases where companies are actually specifically hiring out of colleges and universities so that they can train raw talent and get them to use Drupal. So somehow encouraging companies to do that or creating some kind of incentive for companies to do that is maybe one way the DA can help out. Those are just some quick ideas, some quick thoughts. Thanks, Chris. Anyone else want to hop in? Hey, Holly. This is Howard. Thank you, Howard. This is Howard Jacobson, if you don't mind, Holly. Thank you. The cool thing about this conversation we're having today in the association has every day is that it's the same conversation that's been had many times by many different kinds of businesses trying to figure out how to grow their business. 15 years ago, Linux was having this conversation. I was at the table listening to the very same sorts of discussions. And I think the key for the association to manage its limited resources is to look back at how other projects like Linux were successful and not successful. We did things right 15 years ago. We did things wrong. But one of the things we definitely did right was turn Linux into a worldwide powerful technology, not just for big business and not just for hackers. There's something for everybody in Linux. And I'd say the community there is as vibrant as it has ever been. And I'm sure that Drupal can learn a lot from what others have done to stand on their shoulders. Thank you. Yeah, really well said, Howard. I think Alex was trying to hop in there next. If we go to Alex Matthews. OK. OK, I'll be very quick. I completely agree with all those points. I feel as though the reality on the ground, coolness happens on the ground with real people. I mean, recently I've taken on three new interns and two new themas, none of which should ever use Drupal at all. They had no idea about it. And they'd heard bad things about it. To them, it wasn't cool. But as soon as they started using it, as soon as they got some basic training and some basic education, they instantly fell in love. And I see this happening all the time with new adopters to Drupal. I think the barrier to it being cool is just people getting into it. It's like criticizing a TV series you've never actually watched. So I feel like at the end of the day, that is going to be facilitated on the ground. I feel it's the best way for the association to help would involve, similar to what we were talking about yesterday, in terms of supporting local chapters, supporting local meetups, supporting the sort of culture heroes that actually push Drupal out. There's a lot of resources that could be developed as well online. But I really feel as though engaging with local communities, universities, high schools, providing training opportunities, and potentially adding a new role on Drupal.org for local chapter organizer that would allow them to have a communications network and extra resources available to help them in the advocacy of Drupal. So I feel as though that's something that the community needs to do, and that it needs to happen on the ground. This is Chris McGrath. I can jump in. Hi, let's go. What's up, Chris and then Tom? That sounds good. Sure. Yeah, I agree with Rich Sheet, and I agree with Alex as well. You have, I myself have taken steps to, I want to get everybody I know in Drupal, basically. I'm talking my waiter. You work with WordPress part time? Forget that, Drupal, et cetera, et cetera. And it is that kind of passionate thing. When we went to revive the user group here in our area, which is the state capital of our state, it's important that government here is aware of Drupal, knows it's strong, knows it's thriving. We did also take concerted efforts, such as Chris did, to make sure, or actually, we were lucky, the only folks that were really paying any attention were the academics and we haven't had them in colleges. But taking that, we formed our own nonprofit Drupal institute.org and got together with Chris from Build a Module and said, hey, no, you've got content. We need to get certifications. We need to get people out there, we need to get study groups. Can all be controlled by Acquia, the one financed entity. What can Drees do to get involved in things like code.org? So we are taking it from the college, CS department level, out to the marketing departments, where we get other 50% of our decision makers for client contracts and down to the high schools and the middle schools.  So it is possible and it isn't, I don't believe also, just within the youth. I think we've got a lot of PHP developers out there still that have not been sold on Drupal and are not sure, are not helping to contribute to grow the talent pool, which in reality is really, if we want to answer, what is the other biggest barrier in the product success, it's that. Again, lack of resources, as Richard said, really every day, I mean, basically think about what can we do and other than to reach out, cultivate, create scholarships, et cetera, that's it. It's a non-the-ground thing, basically. As well as the marketing campaigns, I think that is a fantastic idea also that Alex has had amongst many. Hi, this is Tom. Thanks, Tom, go for it. Hi, this is Tom. When I first came to Drupal, it was an eye-opener for me watching kids camp on laptops at Drupal cons, huddled in the halls. It was really cool to see them, but they've gone from being the majority to the minority in a lot of these cons. Once the suits started showing up, the kids started disappearing, and I can't imagine the kids in candle shorts and the skater shirts started wearing suits as they became more immersed in the Drupal community. But as Alex said, schools are really a great place to start. I personally taught high school for 10 years and helped vocational schools start web development classes before I even heard of Drupal. Here in the United States, there are vocational schools and comprehensive high schools, teachers who, in many cases, have no curriculum to follow when it comes to web development. Just as Cisco grabbed a foothold in these schools, so can Drupal. There's a huge outreach right now for programmers with the code.org that we could jump on the bandwagon with right now. I'd love to see the Drupal Association reach out to schools worldwide to help kids become viable candidates for Drupal jobs by bringing Drupal into the schools. Thank you. Love that. Michael or? Hey, how are you guys, Michael? Yeah, I think. Yes. I think one other important thing is what happens right now with Drupal 8. Before Drupal 7, we as a Drupal community had our own little, let's call it Unicorn, that especially the other PHP developers didn't really like or they talked bad about it because everybody knows the learning curve if you type in Drupal learning curve in Google how that looks. And I think with Drupal 8, we started to come together with the PHP community. We have now symphony tracks on our Drupal cons. We had in Amsterdam where I was part of the team. We the first time had a PHP track, which was not specifically about Drupal. It was about PHP. So the PHP community comes together. And I think that's also really important that we as a Drupal Association also start to talk to the other associations inside of PHP to just get people being involved in PHP and not like Ruby. So because if the people can program PHP, and maybe they learn PHP with symphony, for them it's really easy to jump over to Drupal because all the things they know from the state of the art programming languages, as we know it from symphony, they can use in Drupal. So it's just much easier for them to work with. So I think as a Drupal Association, we should use the momentum right now that happens and bring that in to talk to others and educate people about PHP in general. And of course, this can happen in schools where the people are because I clearly would say that these people, they don't go to cons. We should go to them. And that happens at the schools and the universities. Thanks, Michael. Adam or Kelly or Enzo? I'll go. Yeah, I can go. I think that was Kelly first, let's get Kelly. Yeah, this is Kelly. I really like the idea of putting together curriculum. It's an expansion of a simpler idea that I've been thinking about would be cool. A lot of times in our local Drupal group, which meets every month rain or shine, it does really well when there's an agenda. And it's hard to always make sure that there's a good agenda. When you have a good agenda, more people come. When you don't, when you have an agenda that's basically just saying leave agenda items in the comments and nobody comments, then the same few people come and then it just becomes an event about work thing. But so to fix that, one of the things that I was thinking it would be cool is if there were a collection of things you could do a presentation on, a 15-minute slide deck that could be a pool of things for people to draw from to work on their presentation skills or to add to an agenda to just run through different things. And I think that that could grow into a curriculum and I think it'd be really cool if the Drupal Association put some resources into that effort. Thank you. Hey, it's Adam. So yeah, this is a really, I love this question completely. It's, I come from a non-formal education background. I've done a lot of educational work. Our company gives training in universities and started to work with schools now. There is actually an open, it's called Open Drupal, a curriculum being developed in the UK. I think the hardest thing with this is globalizing it. I think that in every country you're gonna have a different scenario. But I think probably one of the biggest things for me is getting the young people when they're really young, like when they're kids. And I think part of that is actually about changing the approach in how you introduce people to Drupal. So it's not really about a curriculum. It's not about formal education. It's about creating a non-formal space where people bring their laptops, like we had a code of Dojo recently where the young people are using Scratch. Scratch is an entry into PHP, sorry, into Python, and I guess into PHP as well. But because Scratch is a completely different approach, if we could develop something around Drupal in terms of site building, information architecture, thinking about what all without having even specifically initially to touch Drupal in the form that we know it as, I think this is where we could really get young people involved. It's the accessibility to the concepts and the really quite complex things that are involved in what Drupal is. So for me, one of the things we're working with in a local school is to come up with an idea, maybe of a distribution, or as I say, maybe of something built in a slightly different way that's really accessible to the youngest kids. And then that's like the stepping stone into Drupal. I don't think curriculums are great, but they're very formal. And I think the way most people learn Drupal not sitting with one book or one curricula, it's finding all the resources out there and being pointed in the right directions and then learning the other bits for themselves. This is something I could talk about all day, but I'll leave it there. Thanks, Adam. I think Enzo and Victor. Yeah, Enzo. Yeah, hi, okay. Well, this is a huge question and I think the best thing we are doing that right now is using the global training days. So mixing, and I agree with Michael would say, right now in Drupal A we have a really attractive tools like Symphony, Bagman, and others. And now we can, or soon we will be able to create some helpless tools. So in terms of fancy tools, I think we are okay. And I think we just need to, as a first step, is include a little more structure in global training days, providing more resources to organize in Drupal training days to prepare people in universities to use the new changes in the platform for Drupal A. That is maybe my initial idea to try to bring new resources to Drupal community. Thanks. Victor, you wanna get the last word in? I don't know if we left. Yeah, sure. So my main thought is to have more Drupal events. The more Drupal events, the more people attend them, the more people know something new about Drupal. Yeah, so the more events we have, the more people we will involve. Yeah, that's all. Thank you. Thanks, Victor. All right, you guys. Well, could have been a comedy of errors. Thank you. Thank you so much for putting up with me at the beginning of this call. And for waiting through the know you go portion of the call as well. I love how polite you guys are with each other. And I think one of the my favorite parts of this experience is just has been seeing how supportive you are of each other and how that is so indicative of the Drupal community in general. So thanks for being awesome humans, huh? So to wrap up for us today, this is the last Meet the Candidate session. We'll post it, the recording online along with the others as well. But it definitely doesn't have to be the end of your communication with the community or the community's communication with you. We have lots more opportunities for that. Your candidate profile pages come with these handy dandy comment features down here. I apparently got logged out. But if you're logged into the association site, you can actually leave a comment for a question for the candidates. Candidates keep an eye out over the next few days and please respond to folks as they have questions for you. And that period will end. And on March 9th we will do voting. So voting will open up on March 9th. And just as a reminder to everyone we use the instant runoff version of voting, instant runoff voting process, sorry, for our elections. And you can look that up online. There's a couple great videos that explain it. But essentially you'll be able to rank your candidate choices. So although we have only one seat open for a two-year term in this election, you'll be able to rank your favorite candidates and we'll use those rankings to determine the winner. So voting is open March 9th through March 20th. We will then download all the votes, run them through the software, get our result, get that ratified by the board and have a public announcement out by March 25th. So I think that is it. And for now I'll just say to everyone out there, to the candidates, again, thank you so much for putting yourselves out there for the passion with which you answered all these questions here today. And good luck to everyone. If you need anything in the meantime, you guys know where to find me, I hope. Thanks and have a great one. Thank you, bye. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, Ali.


I'm the Grinch. Hey there, Mighty Max. Okay, it's an empty present. Today, I'll be getting the Christmas community. That's a lie. Dreaming of a light Christmas. Just hit me in the face. Hey there, Mighty Max. And welcome to a very jolly edition of Ask IU. Today, I'll be getting the IU community in the Christmas spirit. Here we go. This is Maxie and I'm Sabrina. Maxie, like the Grinch. What's your favorite Christmas movie? It has to be The Polar Express. Polar Express. Polar Express. Polar Express. Ooh. How the Grinch stole Christmas. Oh, The Grinch. Christmas Vacation. Christmas Vacation. We were just watching it. What is it called? Oh, Santa Claus? Santa Claus? That's not mine though. Sorry. You said you're incorrect.  The first one. The OG one, of course. I didn't watch any of the series because they did the series last year.  What's yours? Elf. Um, elf. Lynn's elf. Elf. I've never seen elf. Have you seen The Polar Express? Yeah, I don't like that one. The Santa Claus movies? They're okay. The Grinch. Probably loves that. Yeah. Oh, it's a wonderful life. Oh, that's my favorite Christmas movie. I love it. Every time you hear a bell ring, an angel gets his wings. You got it. Home Alone. Home Alone. Home Alone. I don't know which one. Just Home Alone Count. That's Home Alone Count. Can you name Santa's Raiden Deer? Rudolph. Rudolph. Rudolph. Rudolph. Rudolph. Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet. Cupid. Donner. Blitzen. Blitzen. Wait, to pick up my slack. Dasher, Dancer, Donner, Vixen, Prancer, Comet, Cupid. You know... Vincent. Vincent? Is that one? Prancer. Is that one? Dixon. Is that one? Dixon. Brickson. Brickson. Nope. Victor. Dasher. Dancer. Prancer. Vixen. Comet. Connor. Connor is a guy you know. You know Dasher and... Connor. Nope. Wait, what's that song? Rudolph the Raiden Deer. Dasher. Dancer. Prancer. Vixen. Comet. Cupid. Donner. Blitzen. Rudolph. Suppressive. No, I would have not gotten that. Dasher. Prancer. Comet. Vixen. Cupid. At some point you named them all. Yeah! Yeah! Macca is holding to sing. On a bright Hawaiian Christmas day. Who wants to sing with me? Nobody. What is your favorite Christmas song? Maybe just Jingle Bells. Rockin' Around the Christmas Street. Please not be died. Last Christmas of the year. Yeah. I want a hippopotamus for Christmas. All I want for Christmas is you by Mariah Carey. So we're going to sing Jingle Bells real quick. Jingle Bells. Jingle Bells. Jingle all the way. Rockin' Around the Christmas Street. I don't need another word. Last Christmas I gave you my heart. I want a hippopotamus for Christmas. But the very next day you gave it away. Oh what fun it is to ride in a one horse open sleigh. Oh together now. Only a hippopotamus will do. I give it to someone special. I don't want a lot for Christmas. There is just one thing I need. And I don't care about the presents underneath a Christmas tree. That was really good. Oh my garland. Our campus is snow full of Christmas cheer. I hope you all have a wonderful winter break and a very merry Christmas. See you next year Max.


Alright, so hello back and thank you for giving us the opportunity to present our experiences. So today we'll talk about our experiences with centralized machine learning service at CERN and using Kubeflow and how we've been changing it to make it better for our users. My name is Ricardo Rocha. I'm a computing engineer in the CERN Cloud team. I do a lot of containerized work, networking and some machine learning as well. I'm also a member of the CNCF technical oversight committee and I co-lead the research and user group also of the CNCF. Hello, glad to be here. My name is Dane. I'm a software engineer at CERN Cloud team. I work on containers and machine learning and Kubeflow and I will start with some introduction about our project and then Ricardo will discuss things in more depth. So we work at CERN. CERN is a research organization for particle physics in Geneva, Switzerland and it's operating the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. The mission of CERN is to find the origins of the universe to answer the fundamental questions such as what is the universe made of and to understand how particles behave at the smallest scales. So to understand how particles behave at the smallest scales we need to use very high energies. So to do that we build particle accelerators and LHC is the biggest particle accelerator in the world. So it's a 27 kilometers ring of superconducting magnets that runs 100 meter underground in Geneva and in that magnet particles are accelerated near the speed of light and then they're collided at four different points for collision points. So after particles collided these high energies physicists gather results using detectors or experiments and then they use this data to get valuable insights into the science of the smallest scale particles. So we can see how magnets look like live and this is one of the detectors. We can see people here and how this structure looks like and this is essentially electronics to extract data from the collisions. So how do we use machine learning at CERN? So the data acquisition system works in a specific way. So there are 40 million collisions that happen every second basically at the LHC but computer infrastructure can only sustain 1000 events per second. So we need to somehow go from 40 million to 1000 and to do that we use trigger mechanisms. So essentially those are algorithms that select interesting events to save and to further process. So to which the question is what is interesting and how these interesting events are selected and to do that we can either use deterministic algorithms or we can use machine learning algorithms and for that we would use supervised machine learning algorithms that can either run in L1 trigger or at high level trigger to select interesting events and this works quite well if we know what we are looking for but the question is what if we are looking for some new physics. So so far machine learning has been used extensively at CERN for example to find to prove the existence of Higgs boson boosted decision trains were used quite a lot but there are other physics theories that were not confirmed by LHC data which were expected to be confirmed for example supersymmetry or extra dimensions so that hasn't been found in LHC data yet. So the question is what if our signal hypothesis for trigger algorithms was wrong so what if there was some kind of bias in supervised learning. So this calls for some unsupervised learning some algorithms that could actually learn during online processing that could train on experiment data not only on simulations. So besides these high level overviews of machine learning there are multiple groups at CERN that work on machine learning and they all have their own local infrastructure so our motivation is to provide the centralized infrastructure where users can actually use GPUs and FPGAs and TPUs and they can that they can have a user friendly platform to run their workloads. So this is our motivation for Kubeflow to develop a centralized platform that can be used by by different groups and we have been working on that for for a bit. The idea is to provide a full machine learning life cycle with Kubeflow to get data from detectors to perform data preparation to run some fast iteration jobs such as notebooks and to validate machine learning models and then once we're happy with our models to do distributed training and model validation and actually train our models and then to store the models and use them for serving for inference and production and with Kubeflow we can do all of that and this is why we are using it. So we started with a single user Kubeflow 1.0 at this point we were exploring available features making sure that pipelines work that cut-tip jobs work and that we can run our machine learning workloads so this was the initial stage. Then we moved to 1.1 instance with a multi-user and we integrated that with other certain services. We integrated that with a single sign-on with we are managing that with Argos CD and we have onboarded the users at that point. So we are at that point still working closely with users to gather their feedback to discuss things to provide support more closely and we were discussing the previous KubeCon in more detail that are bursting to public cloud and currently we are working with 1.3 instance where our focus is on security. We want to provide credential management and namespace management and vulnerability scans for Docker images and then also some runtime checks. The idea is to provide general availability of the service to be able to open it to thousands of people who work at CERN and this is our idea and Ricardo will take over. Thank you. I'll actually build on this one. So this diagram really shows the evolution of the service at CERN. We got to the point where we could scale to the size and the amount of resources that our users needed but then before opening it to production there were a couple of things that we had to focus on and this is the list that we see here under 1.3 and this is the requirements we had before making it generally available on premises. So the things I'll be covering here in addition to the resource availability I'll cover the management of credentials for the users, some like decoration of namespaces with user metadata, the scans and checks for images and then using things like OPPA for policy enforcement and runtime checks of the workload. So these are really requirements that we have that are not only for a machine learning service but they're quite important if you're having a like multi-tenant multi-user deployment. But the first thing I'll cover is regarding resource usage. So then introduced that one of the motivations we had was to kind of improve the efficiency of the resources we have at CERN instead of having multiple groups having each of the groups several GPUs we wanted to have like a central pool of resources that would make it more efficient overall. So we have an example here where we have different groups at CERN, say CMS and ATLAS which are experiments at CERN. So ATLAS, SUSE is supersymmetry. We had also groups in IT doing anomaly detection or in beam calibration doing reinforced learning while they calibrate the LHC beams. All of this is kind of inefficient because each of the groups have still maintained their own GPUs and also the resource usage is restricted to these individual groups. So moving to something like this where we basically have a single entry point for everyone to come and then benefit from these GPUs is a big improvement for us. Also we can integrate things like FPGAs and other accelerators as required. It does pose some challenges because you suddenly start sharing the resources between users. The other thing we wanted to do which Dejan also mentioned and we presented last coupon is we want to scale out. The amount of resources we have on premises are actually not enough for what we need in terms of accelerators. Both in terms of GPUs we don't have enough but also accessing specialized accelerators like GPUs which we'll probably never have and they are restricted to the cloud providers or IPUs in the case of Azure, TPUs for GCP. So we want to abstract all of this so that our users don't have to understand the infrastructure, they just have to run their workloads. The other part, so here it's where the integration starts. We rely on Kubeflow as we mentioned but then if we have this big pool of resources we might have say NVidia B100s and NV100s which are quite good at double precision, very good for distributed training when you're doing things like deep learning and we expose this via PCI password. We also have NVidia T4s which we use for notebooks, training and inference again using PCI password. But then if you're just using a notebook for validating your model with a small amount of data you probably don't need a full GPU. So we started looking at this idea of doing virtual GPUs and the previous talk was talking about sharing resources for model serving. This is similar, a similar concept. And then also we started looking at adding NVidia A100s, they will arrive soon and here we can actually do physical partitioning instead of just time sharing as with the T4s and VGPUs.  And here I would highlight what we are aiming for and we'll come back to this is when you see their GPUs available to use, no, we want to express to the user actually what is the availability of resources so that they don't just try senselessly to get a resource that is not there. And again we want to integrate the public cloud resources into the same setup, so we are like halfway there I would say. The other part which is, yeah I mentioned the A100, so if you've played with the NVidia T4s you know like you can virtualize these GPUs over A100s with this time sharing which is kind of like a fake partitioning, you're not actually partitioning the resources. But with A100s there are these multi-instance GPUs support which is really exciting because it gives us a lot more flexibility on how to partition resources to the end users without having to like do any compromise in terms of the expected quality of service. And then really building on the previous talk I would compliment the things we are doing so I mentioned NVidia virtual GPUs with times for time sharing. There were, I will just put a note here if you're using this one thing we learned is that this was not really suitable for all our users because the ones that need GPU profiling or want to use a tensorboard or something similar they actually require the profiling to be enabled on the GPUs. This was a limitation with the 12 drivers, the version 12 drivers of NVidia. This is actually fixed in version 13 we've tested this so we actually are about to deploy this to our users. This will make the use of our T4s much better. But again the next step is what we are getting early next year which is this new NVidia A100s where we can do up to seven times physical partitioning. And this is something that is supported directly on Kubernetes. The NVidia drivers are able to do to manage MIG cards. So this is really great because the VGPUs are not something that Kubernetes handles natively. And then the other part is the multi-model serving. This is also a requirement we have to make the best out of the GPU is to be able to split to reuse the same GPU for serving multiple models. And this is something like this is a very basic example where you basically create a single inference service and then you have one or more actual models that are linked to that inference service. So this is something that we also try to do and it's like a follow-up to the really good previous talk. So the second part I would mention is this requirement we have to integrate with our on-premises resources. So we rely on mutating mission webhooks for all of this. We are actually using the Opal Gatekeeper. If you've deployed Kupflow you know that you can do a lot with customizing in terms of changing the YAML that is being used for the deployment but this is not enough. One example is for example the notebook template to customize the notebooks in the Jupyter web app. It's quite limited on what you can do this if you want to like change the template dynamically based on some runtime information you can do this with customize. So we do this with mutating webhooks. This is used already in different parts of Kupflow. I'll give some examples and then I'll go a bit deeper. One thing if you want to for example to start a pod speed notebooks or pipeline jobs with the proper UID GID of the local users for multiple reasons we do this change at runtime. Another thing is that we need to manage the credentials for the users so that they can access like storage systems or any kind of other internal system. We inject those credentials also at deployment time of the pods creation time. Yeah the volume mounts for internal storage systems as well. So this is an example for the credential management. I would say mostly we have two types of credentials that we have to handle. The first one is Kerberos. The second one is OAuth 2. Most of our services require one or the other both. So in both cases they are short lived which means like you might have a credential use your training but it takes hours they will expire. So what we've done we've written a small tool that actually manages the credential renewal for the users transparently. So when they basically get a notebook they will upload say Kerberos credentials to their namespace and then the tool will know how to handle this and keep the credentials up to date. So if they then submit a pipeline training job or any kind of other workload on the cluster the mounts of these secrets will actually make the credentials available for the workloads to use and this is true both for OAuth 2 and Kerberos and you can see here like a diagram the first step is for a user to like push the credentials into a secret and our job will renew them and then the actual workloads have this mutating webhook that is actually mounting these secrets and making them available so that they can access things like storage or the internal spark clusters, the batch cluster which is based on HDConder the registry to upload their models things like this. The second part is what I mentioned that we sometimes have to annotate workloads with the metadata of the user so an example is again notebooks have to have a UID GID that matches the actual user so we do this by actually when a new user is on boarded they get the private namespace but we have a component that will basically fetch all the metadata from say LDAP the internal LDAP and we'll put all of this as annotations or labels in the namespaces of the users and the same is true for groups this means that we have all the metadata we need about the users to then do mutations at runtime when creating the pods to deploy them with the appropriate security context all the the proper user group that is required this is like a requirement from our security team and then the last one I would mention is the internal registry so all we mandate that all the workloads running on the cluster have to come from our internal registry which means that they've they've been through the vulnerability scans we 3v4 this we also sign all the images then we have the different policy enforcements at creation time which for example prevents external images from being run but also can do checks like is the security context correct or acceptable or does the workload have all the metadata we need like for accounting for example so we do we do have some some sort of caching and replication from Docker into our internal registry that then triggers all these scans and then we we go from there the second part is that at runtime like this this will help us at deployment time but if you have long-running jobs we also need to do some checks at runtime so we are using Falco for this and we do basically two main things one is to see that whatever vulnerability checks were done are still valid that there's no new vulnerability for some sort of long-running notebook for example and the second one is that the workloads are doing what they are expected to do so there's no shells being spawned inside the container there's no packages that are not supposed to be installed being being installed doing some weird system calls or network connections so we do this checks live and one thing that is quite uncommon at least but I think everywhere is that when we describe this stack to our security team they were actually very happy and this having a security team being happy about new services is not common so this was quite satisfying I think that's it so so far we have been working with a couple of groups at CERN who have been using our Kubeflow instance and in the next couple of slides I'll describe some individual user feedbacks so the first one the users really like is the integration between notebooks to pipelines they really enjoy using Kale so if they can go from a notebook to a pipeline seamlessly without writing any Docker images or anything with Kubernetes that that's really a big advantage for users so this is something we have a very very positive feedback so far then users really enjoy the ability to get resources on demand so for example if they have some models that need hundreds of GPUs to properly train they can't have that locally and on the public cloud we can provide access to this number of GPUs so users really like that and they ask for such abilities and then there we have some advanced users for example we have a group at Atlas one of the experiments that they have some they have a repo with machine learning project and then on that project they have continuous integration and yeah whenever they commit they want to run some continuous integration they would like to add a step that would trigger a pipeline into our Kubeflow instance within their CI so they need the API access to Kubeflow so this is something that we also need sometimes and then we need some better UI for when resources are not available for example for notebook creations for GPUs we implemented this additional tool that tells us if we have available GPUs in our system and as Ricardo was mentioning to select the profile for for a GPU so if users could actually automatically see if they have a GPU it's much better for them so to to sum up Kubeflow has been very well received at CERN we are about open to all users and all groups after we validate with our security requirements that Ricardo was discussing so yeah we want to provide credential and namespace management as well and for the improvements from the actual Kubeflow it would be great if we could have a complete isolation for example for pipelines it's already done in the back end it would be really great for us to have that in front end as well also pipeline artifacts to be isolated and also we would need some better debugging of cut-tip jobs because users can't see logs on the UI and yeah maybe a better feedback speaking of resource availability but in general Kubeflow is like whenever we have a presentation and certain people are very excited and our users so far really enjoy using it so thank you very much and guess if you have any questions let us know


Lavender oil, distilled from lavender flowers, is most often used in aromatherapy and massage, despite its popularity only recently, as scientifically-based investigations have been undertaken into its biological activity. However, there have been small-scale studies suggesting benefit from lavender massage, but maybe it's the massage, not the lavender. There was a study on patients in intensive care comparing massage with odorless oil to massage with lavender oil, and though patients massaged with lavender oil did say they felt less anxious and more positive, there were no objective differences found in terms of blood pressure, breathing, or heart rate. Frankly, maybe the lavender was just covering up the nasty hospital smells. Subsequent studies using more sensitive tests did find physiological changes, though. We know, for example, the smell of lavender changes brainwave patterns, but what effect does this have? Well, it evidently makes people feel better, perform math better, faster, more accurately, whereas the smell of rosemary, for example, seemed to enable folks only to do math faster, not necessarily with greater accuracy. What if you actually eat lavender flowers, or in this case, take capsules of lavender-infused oil so you could double-blind the study to compare lavender head-to-head to a drug like Valium, or raise a PAM, known as an Adavan, for generalized anxiety disorder. Generalized and persistent to anxiety is a frequent problem, and is treated with benzodiazepines. Benzos are downers like Valium. Unfortunately, these substances not only make you feel like you have a hangover, but have a high potential for drug abuse and addiction, so they decided to give lavender a try. The drug Adavan certainly reduces anxiety, but so does lavender. By the end, you couldn't tell which was which. In fact, among those that responded to either, the lavender actually seemed to work better. Since lavender oil has no potential for drug abuse and causes no hangover effects, it appears to be an effective and well-tolerated alternative to benzodiazepine drugs for the amelioration of generalized anxiety. One cautionary note, however, there was a key series published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Pre-puberty gynecomastia linked to lavender reports of young boys exposed to lavender containing lotion, soaps, hair gel shampoo, starting to develop breasts, which disappeared after these products were discontinued, suggesting that lavender oil may possess hormone-disrupting activity. And indeed, when dripped on estrogen receptor-positive human breast cancer cells, lavender does show estrogenic effects. And a decline in male hormone activity, though it's unknown if similar reactions occur inside the body when lavender flowers or lavender oil is ingested.