ready to go. So I think we, I guess we should, but maybe we can go around and do a roll call real quick. I think it was everyone, but Angie. Okay, here she comes. Sameer is not on, let's see, Sameer, Matthew, Denise and Donna are missing today. Missing, Denise, Sameer, Donna. And Tiffany is on? Yes. Hey folks, sorry for being late. I'm here. I'm just on mute. Rob Gill is on? Angie, Grace is taking notes. I heard that. Where are you doing at, Grace? I can take over. Well, there's this folder. I'll unmute the link, but it's in the folder. Yep. And by the way, Holly, you said it as if it was some level of disbelief. No. Amusement, maybe. Angie is here to save today, that's for sure. All right. Sorry, Michael Amazon as well. Just, sorry, we have listed. We have Quorum. Actually, Vesa is Vesa? Yeah, Vesa is on. All right. Sorry. The floor is yours. The first item on the agenda is the Q&A from the operational update. So I'll just give questions as we go. Just feel free to interact with me. No, in July, we had a staff retreat here in Portland with all staff members except for one. We just recently undergone knee surgery, but it was great to have everyone here. And our focus at that meeting was to start to get all our ducks in a row for 2015. You know, start to get project plans in place that can feed into the budget and leadership plan. So we'll be getting more details out to the board at the September retreat in Amsterdam. And the finance committee will get a first look at those things before we present them in full in Amsterdam. So that was a great amount of work they got there, but also it was just really great to, as we have grown the team and have so many new folks, just really great to be together and learn about each other and, you know, work on some of the culture aspects as well. So it was really good for the team as much as it was good for the work. The tech team has been really doing so much stuff over the last month as well. So I think some of the things that I was excited to see put in place are the change notification emails so that hopefully deployments are no longer surprising to folks, which is good. And then we also deployed semantic versioning for the Drupal ant release, which was a big win. And one of the key projects of the triple software group, you know, wanted to prioritize. And then we also got RESTful Web Services deployed on Drupal.org in August. And there's some more work to be done around that to clear on documentation. But I think that issue we've been open on Drupal.org for like four years. So it's kind of cool to close an issue that was four years old. But we'll get into the Drupal cons. We definitely have some issues there that we, you know, that we need to address. But those are some of the highlights that, you know, happened in July. We're really excited to have going on. So looking at the KPIs overall, financially you can continue to, these numbers are, these numbers in the dashboard do not reflect our revised budget yet. We'll get those updated for the next month. When we look at a part of a strong community program participation, that's down. That's because of Drupal cons, primarily. A little bit of webinars have been a little slower than we might have anticipated. Some of them have been doing really well. So it's mostly Drupal con there. We'll talk more about that. I should say also the tech team on top of everything else, tabled a crazy spam attack in the month of July. And so, you know, two million site visits for the association website in the month of July. Record high. And we couldn't tell them how to try to figure out how to normalize it. That also hit the Amsterdam website and the Austin website as well. So we had to go close down some loops and see some reconfiguration of models there. The number of memberships is, you know, stand above 3,000. So that's really great. But our renewal rate in July was very low. So Liz and Joe are working on some campaigns to pick that back up. It may just be a summer thing. But this is the first year we collected month-by-month data. So we're not sure if there's a natural cycle to how renewals tend to flow for us. Membership revenue. I think I messed this up in the calculator because I think it's supposed to reflect supporting partners. Supporting partners. And I didn't add supporting partners in. So if you add supporting partners in, this number is actually green, and I'll fix it in the packet for everyone. As we discussed about last time, we continue to see the average spend down. Part of that is people dragging the slider down. The other thing we discovered looking more closely at the numbers is that we have folks that are set to auto-renew from 2013 and before. And they renew at a lower rate because that was the default price of membership at that time. So that also pulls the average membership number down. Those auto renewals also contribute to that. So the number of people dragging the slider down is not quite as drastic as we thought. Both things are contributing to that metric. Adoption. It's been remaining pretty steady. Contributors has been pretty steady. So has the annual d.o.c. traffic. Everything there has been pretty steady. And the one great thing has been measuring the responsiveness of all the maintainers. That has been really good this year. So those are the overall KPIs and where we're at. And a thing, things, you know, so far for this year, if you put in all the Austin stuff, things look good. Attendees, for attendees overall, I'll mention them where we're at. You know, it's in the green for now, but by the time we hit September, it's going to be an issue. These numbers are from Austin in terms of the evaluators, site owners, you know, the kinds of people we wanted to have come to the event.  The revenue numbers. God, it's something I did not see this the first time through. The revenue number year to date goal is clearly not calculating right. And I didn't see it when we put this together. That should reflect Austin in there. Those numbers will be probably in a yellow in reality, because we had lower than budgeted attendance for Austin. We budgeted for the stretch hold of 4,000 instead of budgeting for, you know, a smaller amount of growth or a flat, you know, a flat year. And so those numbers should be in the yellow. The real situation overall, we'll get more into Austin. There were a lot of successes there, but just to get into some of the details again. We budgeted for a stretch hold of 4,000. We ended up with right around 3,300 actual attendees. And overall, 440 training attendees with a goal of 500. We beat our business summit goal of, you know, was that, sorry, we beat the Portland actuals of 86. We set a goal of 120 in Austin. We hit 118. That's a pretty much goal. The community summit hit goal as well. And the net profit was behind because of that Austin, you know, actuals were way behind what we had budgeted for the goal there. So although we still had a very financially successful conference, it wasn't as successful as we had budgeted for. We are definitely going to go through Austin in more detail, but that sums that up. And just to give an overview of how we ended up with fewer numbers for Austin actual attendance than the goal, you may recall we're really on track for what we thought would lead us to 4,000 attendees through the early birth registration period. And then in the regular rate registration period, we had budgeted for a lot more folks to register in that period than actually did. So we fell way behind in that period. In the late period, we came pretty close to what we thought would happen in the late period. That pattern has held true in Amsterdam as well. We had a really successful early birth period, and we were really excited about the con. I thought we had good indicators out there because we had so many more sessions proposed for Amsterdam than we did for Prague, which we thought would be an indicator of registrations. The reality is that in that regular period, you know, we sold a lot less tickets than we had budgeted for. And if we can follow the same pattern as Austin and come in at what we budgeted for at the late rate, we're looking at a loss on the con but are trying to figure out how to get it to revenue neutral. We're really close now, Holly. We're really close now. We're really close, yeah. That number is much better. Okay, good. The numbers, the hotel bookings are down as well from what we thought that they might be. We don't have any financial liability at the hotel, which is good, but basically everything's down from what we thought it would be. So the team has been working on ramping up some of the marketing around the con. So we've increased some of the communications that go out the con, these letters, going out a little more frequently in this period to try to pick up some of that slack and pretty getting some messages out across additional channels. But really the big factor for mitigating this is working on the expet side and trying to bring that down. It sounds like they found a few more things and we're getting pretty close to at least a revenue neutral situation. Yeah, we're at negative five right now, 5,000. Negative 5,000 euro. Yeah, cool. All those according to plan. So going forward, we've been able to try to dive into the data and understand what does registration look like for con week by week by week by week. The data we get out of commerce is not super conducive to actually understanding tickets that were actually sold and which kinds of tickets were actually sold in one kind of time period very easily. So we ended up having to manually get that data in order. So we've been working on that week by week and that will help us have better budgeted numbers for 2015 to go with. But the other thing that we're doing is working to get a community survey out there to understand registration, motivation and see if we can figure out why registrations are flat this year. Flat or down this year so that we can figure out how to address them in 2015 before we get there. So I'm going to stop for a second and assume that we're going to have some questions. I guess my question is, do you think we'll... Sorry, did you guys hear me? Are we... Am I having a technical difficulty or are we having a technical difficulty? I think we're back if we did have difficulty. So I had a question. Do you think we'll have more data or better insight as to why attendance is flat by the retreat? I think that we are planning to conduct that research in post-Drupalcon. So no. Okay. And that's because of a resource issue or just wondering if it's just lack of time. I mean, it seems like the sooner we can do it, the better. Well, I think there's that. I think also, at this point, the only Drupalcon message we want people to hear is to register for Amsterdam. I think there's some concern about putting out too many con-related messages all at once. But I'm happy to hear that we need to rethink that and push it up. How are you guys going to collect data around people that didn't attend? Are you going to reach out to people that didn't re-register? We will, yeah. So we'll push it out through a lot of general channels in addition to reaching out to people who registered in particular. And I think I have a slide that I can share as well. If I put it in here. There we go. I think we're looking to understand why people decide to attend Drupalcon, for sure. We want to understand. We have lots of questions about what might be affecting this. We've had some anecdotal feedback that companies are sending to your people now, so we want to check in. If you're a company, how many people do you send? Is that more or less than you've been sending? And why? And we're going to look at the attendee data to understand retention from event to event. We want to understand what other events people are going to, those sorts of things. Design a good survey process. And then not really, there won't be other messages competing with it. That answers my question. I don't know what the right time is. I'm fine with either. It just seems like this could be a key issue for us. I don't know if there's time to, if we learn something to even tweak things relative to Drupalcon Amsterdam. I know it's a month away, which is close, but maybe it's still far enough to tweak, I don't know. Any questions when we got something out and got responses back, we don't have a week or so left to act on anything, you know? I don't know if that will be helpful. I just want to give you a preview that site is going online very shortly, and we have been working with the community there. I just wanted to give you some insight into how we are planning the budget for that event, which was, you know, taking the lessons learned. We basically, because this event is so, there's so many unknowns in this event. We took the most conservative approach possible, which is to budget all the tickets as if they would be sold during the early bird period. So if we sell them in the regular, and that just adds to the overall budget, right, 400, or if for some weird reason, all 400 actually did register at the early bird time period, you know, we would be taking any aspect of kids budget-wise. So that's the, that's the approach we took for DrupalCon very shortly. And the one thing that we are, you know, continue to flash out and get more clarity on right now is the translation service. So we're, we have that set up for a key set of sessions. And then, Lingotech has agreed to sponsor the translation of 20 session archives. So if we record the session, we'll be able to, you know, get it out in the alternate language as well, which is really great. Okay. Drupal.org, we still see just this whole mix of Drupal.org. I think same trends that we've seen all year long where site dropping is down compared to where it was for commit, number of contributors, all that stuff is down from goal. A lot of that has to do with where we are and the product release cycle. And, you know, just we've got a very mature product out there that doesn't need as much activity and the new product might. So there's a lot of that that's, you know, we think due to that release cycle, although again, to continue to try to focus on things that will help inch those numbers upwards in terms of the Drupal software working group, you know, regardless of where we are in the product cycle, just making it easier to use Drupal.org in general. Things that have been really great, core contributors, it continues to be above average and Kathy made so many things and, you know, other community members that recruited people into that. So that's really great. And the average commit to perversion is pretty solid as well. So we like those numbers. Page response time continues to, it continues to be in the red that we should be inch closer to goal month by month. And the CDN has been standing up now for quite some time, about a month anyway. That's quite some time, right? And it's definitely helping. So that, you know, we'll just continue to get closer to goals in the next year or the year. Test spot performance has been significant. What was that last month, Holly, out of curiosity? What was that last month?  Yeah. It might actually been lower last month, but last month it came way down from like above four seconds. Yeah, okay. Just because I thought that CDN was going to solve all of our problems. Like, do we have a plan for how to get that down even further? What's the next step in getting that number down further? Load balancing? Yeah, actually, the changes that went out yesterday related to our load balancers, that should also make a performance improvement. So now that we have it delivering well from the edge, we're trying to improve the delivery time that gets the edge. Because obviously the CDN is only going to really improve performance for those things that get cash out there. So if it's still having to run the query, there's still some performance and optimization that we can do on the servers and load balancers themselves. So that's where we're focusing the efforts now. But the CDN itself is performing very, very well. We're seeing awesome response on that. Definitely have cut response time for our European users drastically. We're also seeing pretty good response time from our users in Asia. We saw some issues in areas like China and a couple others. There's some things to definitely celebrate there, but there's areas for improvement as well. Rudy wanted me to add the IRC that we're writing for Google Analytics to catch up to because it's tracking full page load time. The actual time your response for pages is only 420 milliseconds. So what number do you want to measure? Well, but it really matters what the end user experience is right. So we cut that time down, but... I know, I know. And we actually... One of the choices that we made there too is we're currently reporting the page response time out of Google Analytics because that's what we started with. But if you looked at our page response time out of PingDoc, which is monitoring our uptime and also does some page response, performance response, we're seeing really, really good numbers out of it and it's got a little bit different approach to calculating that. So overall, it's an improvement. I think the little spike that we saw this last month was minor. Yeah, actually Rudy just pinged me again. He goes, the difference in calculation has to do with the difference in media versus average. Google is doing an average and so those who are having really poor response are definitely bringing it down. But if you look at the way that PingDoc calculates it, it does it based on median, which is what are most people seeing, not what are the edge cases seeing, and we look really good at median. We saw some edge cases that caused the average to look not as good as we'd like it. Okay. Thanks. Thanks for that reminder, Rudy. All right. That's fine. Thanks, I see. And then the last six years, we're still laying page traffic, which, you know, for not having a Google A product, that page does really well just isn't going to measure up to our annual goal, right? And just go with your process with the Google Content Working Group and have a plan that's going to be actualized shortly for increasing traffic to these landing pages. So, Google Arms, our newish content manager was with Joe is working to get that in place, and we should see some uptick in those numbers. You know, the site goal of traffic should have nothing to do with a Drupal 8 release or not. That's just a matter of us getting our stuff together and being able to direct traffic to it. We're doing that now. The text here for Drupal.org I'm going to definitely recommend it read through if you haven't gotten there yet, because we talked about, you know, Edgecast at the running. We had one issue there, it's been resolved. You know, we've been working on Low Balancer and had some really good Twitter account for Drupal infrastructure. So that's been great. And that's, I think, the sum of Drupal.org. Any other Drupal.org questions? Okay. On the community side, you know, things still look good in terms of our engagement with the community around Google training days and camp kids and stuff, fiscal sponsorships. We had a record number of camps that we're providing fiscal sponsorship services for this year, which is really great. Glad to do these things for the community. And like I said, the webcast, we started kind of slow this year, but I've normally been picking up. I've gotten some pretty good attendance and lots of great feedback. So we continue to do those and you can get a list of those on our site. What's up coming? Including the one I retweeted on 2015 elections. We also record all those and they're all up on our YouTube channel as well. Job work. And we knew the release date was later than we planned, but we do have we do have a product up in extremely soft launch mode. And so we expect to be able to release that out to the wider public on the 26th, I think, is our planned bigger launch date for that. And so far, as we have been slowly sharing it with partners to both get some content in the site and help us make sure that things are working the way they're supposed to be. Things have been looking pretty good. So we don't really see technical impediments to that release date right now. Which is great. And then membership. Like I said, number of members has been great. The renewal rate overall is 5% way off the annual goal. Member revenue, I need to get these partner revenue locked in there, but that's actually in green as well. So we're doing pretty well there. And we've been running a lot of different test campaigns. Liz has, which has been really wonderful. It's just to see what works and what doesn't in terms of engaging the community and getting memberships and renews out there. So I'm pretty excited that she's going to be able to take all that learning and put it into play in a bigger way for 2015. And then finally, you know, date marketing is what it is. But I'm feeling we're getting close and we'll take some things, which will be great. And just in general, DA communications have been getting more and more subscribers to things, more audience that we're able to talk to. We still, we recognize that we still have a lot of name recognition to build out into the Drupal community. There's lots of people who still don't know what the association is or what it does. But I'm really glad to see these numbers so solid, because that means that we're helping to tackle that. You know, the big highlights. Question, which... So do we have any insight in how much time we spend on infrastructure and data things versus features on DDoDo? Is it like 4060, 8020? I would say, so if I were to break down the tech team right now and talk about how they're split out, I would say that we are probably fairly equal in the amount of time being spent on infrastructure compared to the amount of time spent on Drupal.org compared to the amount of time that's been spent on Drupal jobs and Drupal con. So I would say we're kind of splitting our attention three ways. There's definitely been more successes to write about on the infrastructure side in terms of well I'll put it this way. Rudy is a very good writer. And so his section of the board packet tends to be really detailed and highlights all those areas very well. And we need to get a little bit better about highlighting out those issues on Drupal.org where we're making some really serious movement. A really good example there. I mean, the rest of US while there are plenty of things to work through on that, it's huge to be able to have an API that we can start working with the community to improve and have them begin using that API as opposed to scraping the site. And so that's going to give a whole bunch of options for development and integration I think the semantic versioning was a significant amount of time that had to be spent on that in terms of pulling that in. And we have a really exciting kind of tipping point that we're working on right now. A couple of key profile changes are occurring so that they're removing some blockers for us doing some really great work around improving the user profile and how our developers look to the world, but also making it so that our organizations can show that link between them and their users and eventually between them and their contributions at a much higher level. So I think we've got some key blockers that have been being moved out of the way that are going to really allow us to speed up the process at which we're releasing new things on Drupal.org. It's also worth noting that we made the choice to hire infrastructure first. So one of the first two hires really that we made for the team whenever I came on were on the infrastructure side and so we definitely have some more momentum there. But I'm really excited we have a designer and a developer starting on September 15th, which is going to give us a lot more capacity to start cranking out some of those big changes to Drupal.org such as having a responsive theme or beginning to implement some of the issue cue changes that we've been been talking about wanting to get in there and implement. So that's all coming together and I also see a huge amount of progress happening with the working groups in terms of prioritizing the work. So you're going to see a lot more features start to roll. But certainly the things that we've talked about have been a little bit more focused on the infrastructure side. I think one of our challenges for 2015 and you know we'll talk about that more at the retreat is like you know I feel like we need to both accelerate the state of our infrastructure in terms of you know performance for example. I mean it's still slow even though it's getting better but at the same time we also need to accelerate in my mind at least features and functionality like the application layer to facilitate collaboration and all of these things. It will be interesting to see how you guys envision I think that will be a good discussion because I think we're behind on both fronts still. So over time I would love to see the majority of the efforts going towards features and functionality personally and get the infrastructure to a stable state so to speak where it's coming I don't know we can talk about that more at the retreat. Sounds good. I look forward to the conversation. Sounds fair. Anything else you guys showing ahead to the next item please? Please mute it. There we go. Oops sorry that was a mute. That was a mute. Alright so the next item is reports from the committees. My belief. Let's go down the list revenue, governance, finance, exec, and marketing. Sounds good Jeff. Do you want to fill in revenue? Or either. Megan you want to hop in? I feel like I can give a quick update. Thanks. Sure. So just in terms of revenue we're tracking really well. We've been over goal on all of our both Drupal cons and supporting partner programs are on track. We did do a pivot earlier in the year and the support program was not producing the way we thought it would and so we created some other avenues for recouping those funds and they're all on track so it's really great to know we can move quickly think fast and achieve those goals. We're launching the job board now and so we'll keep an eye on that revenue goal but we're working really closely with marketing to really get the word out. And the other goal that's really left to complete this year are the web ads, the Drupal.org web ads and we have some remnant space left that we're doing another campaign around and so we have another 30K there to go close but overall it's tracking pretty well. Awesome. Next up is the governance committee and Matthew I think you're the only person on the call from the governance committee. And Matthew's not on the call. Oh, sorry. I think there are no members. Matthew was on the call. I'm sorry. They're all out today. Okay. Finance committee Tiffany I think if you can provide an update. So finance met last week to review the July financials and everything looks fine. We did talk about what Holly mentioned earlier with the softness on the revenue side from Drupal cons missing target in Austin and as well as the projections for Amsterdam. That was really the majority of what we did and then I'm still Holly and I had met to talk about investment policy as well as ED succession. I think we're on the same page. I just actually have to write it up and submit it to everybody. So that is forthcoming. That's it. Awesome. The executive committee we haven't met yet. I think we can there's no updates to report. Any updates for marketing? Just last month I reported that the chair had left. So still developing a list of targets to go after for the chair position. All right. If there's any A question related to the previous section of the I'm really sorry I should have brought it back then. We still haven't announced dates for Los Angeles. Where is that at? Oh, did we get them on the site? Let me check. It was getting ready to be deployed earlier. Getting ready to be deployed. Okay. Yeah, it should be up on the site apparently any moment now. Oh, great. Thank you. Yeah. We're a get pull away. One get pull away. It's a static site so we don't have a deployment process for it because it's all checked into the code. We just need to push up the chain. Great. Thank you. And so it's at LA convention center. Do we know what hall? Well, we have in LA just one moment. We do know. We do know. We will tell you. We just have to retrieve that information from the cache. Yeah. So, we have the west hall for the exhibit hall is west. Do you know in LA convention center well, Tiffany? Yeah, I just want to make sure we weren't in Kendi because it's a dump. No, no. We did a site visit. It's very nice. Okay. Phew. All right. Any other questions? If not, I think we should proceed to the Austin review. Great. All right. Well, so we have closed Austin. So we could do this and give you the full picture of where we landed for the agenda. We're going to go through just an overview of strategic goals and the new strategic direction and then show how attendance and financials and sessions and all of that marketing have come out. I have solicited the help of both Joe and Steph Elhage to do this presentation so that it won't just be me speaking and they can speak to their expertise. So slide three, the strategic goals. This is just a reminder of what we try to achieve with DrupalCon. And slide four is the DrupalCon strategic direction and goals that we had specifically for Austin. Accelerate growth to 4,000. Attract new audiences, which we did a great job of doing and promote Drupal as a career. So we'll talk a little bit about that. Attendance and financials. Holly showed this slide earlier. We basically kind of copied Portland as far as overall conference attendees just slightly under. However, when we look at all of the tickets for all of the programs, we beat Portland. But of course we were budgeted for growth and we came in flat on attendance with training down. Business summit up. So that just points to why we have landed where we have for financials, which I'll talk about in a minute. Next slide. Who attended? No surprises here. Lots of developers, front-end developers, site builders. From the developer side we had 11% beginner, 33% intermediate and 56% advanced. What we found is a high percentage we'll talk about this more, but a higher percentage of people participating in BOFs in some cases than we would have expected. And we have some ideas of why that happened because they're advanced and they wanted to talk about certain things. That's interesting that project managers is almost as many as front-end developers. That's very interesting. Yeah. That was a big percentage. The next slide are the industries represented, which we thought would be really interesting to take a look at this year in this way. Our core industries are strong year over year education and tech services and geo nonprofits. And then healthcare retail, finance and pharmaceutical are down. So the question is does it make sense to try to go after these segments more? Do we care? It's just kind of the nature of the con right now. So I think it's just a question that we need to continue to ask ourselves. They're not down every year. They're just less. There's just a much smaller percentage of the overall attendance. Yeah. I have a question on that. I'll go first, Stephanie. It's related to the Portland area. Can the variation be explained by regional industry makeup? Hmm. So you were kind of cutting out there, Tiffany, but I think you were asking why there is a variance between Portland and Austin and geo and nonprofit? Or I think overall. I was just saying can the variation be explained by differences in regional industry distribution? Very possibly. Very possibly. We have to go and see, we have to get some data about the industries in each area. But I don't think any difference is super significant. I mean the biggest variation is 3.2 percent for media from 9 percent to 5.8. So yeah. So what I've been seeing outside of Drupalcon is that the smaller verticals have been emerging quickly, to be honest. Like healthcare and finance and pharma. And you know we have one pharma person on the call actually. And they're quickly emerging to be pretty important. So instead of doing less there may be an opportunity to do more and to think about how can we verticalize if Drupalcon even more and make sure there is enough great content for each of these different verticals. Because there is definitely strong interest in the world on each of these verticals. So it's not an issue with Drupal not growing in these markets. It may be a content issue for example or a location issue. I don't know. If you look at how much Drupal has grown in pharma over the last year it's a lot more than is represented here. And I was just thinking at least for my own team attending I'd be wondering whether they would all actually put themselves on the pharma especially when we have full-time people who are effectively working specifically on Drupal for other Drupal shops et cetera just like 100 percent allocated to Pfizer and Pfizer funded to go and attend these events. So there might be a little bit of that growing a lot faster than you might see in these numbers so you might see it expand a lot more. Also of the number involved in Drupal from at least from Pfizer the number actually attending is significantly lower than that because we're not going there for any kind of pharma dedicated content at the moment just because it's not really there. If that was there it would grow up a lot faster I think. Sure. Cool. Yep. Great. Next slide. Strategic attendance goals and progress the personas that we wanted to go after we are we saw that we were able to get the C-suite evaluators is down primarily because we didn't do the CMS evaluator training which is where that goal came from. So that's why that's down but we feel good that we are attracting these different personas and we'll continue to focus on them. Now we have a kind of a benchmark for future cons. Yeah I think it's important I know that we set it up this year so you could only elect one persona instead of 15. Yes. Which is helpful and I was really shocked the number of content editors. Yes and we're actually going to be drilling down a little more on that one as well for the next cons. So financials you can see where we ended up 91% of goal primarily it's because we had less attendees and we did everything we could to lower expenses to meet that to match that but we couldn't get it quite all the way there. The other variables were that Portland we had a $60,000 rebate in Portland which we did not have in Austin and more staff wages were covered by Drupalcon budget so those are kind of two big reasons that we were a little lower. Yeah and we're doing a marketing study to figure out why as we've talked about. So here's just some more on why we missed net profit goal registrations flat we need to refine more of the reporting processes and then there were a couple other factors with in Portland we offered the symphony upgraded ticket which added some money to our bottom line and we did not limit non-profit tickets in Austin it's the last time we're going to do that I can tell you but we didn't limit non-profit tickets and as a result we were $30,000 less than Portland on this ticket type. How are we going to address these issues? We're going to be budgeting flat for 2015 we're conducting an in-depth analysis of orders by ticket type to use to budget revenue moving forward and documenting our policies for budget planning and improving reporting thanks to Josh we're going to be getting great reports coming out of Drupalcon the next slide shows an example of how we're looking at tickets moving forward we're looking at them by week by ticket type so this is just a mock-up of kind of how something might look and we'll be able to look at least as a comparison year over year to see how we're doing with milestones for early bird regular and late okay at this point are there any questions about that before I move to Steph Elhage Stephie the floor is yours cool are you going to advance for me? yeah I'm just going one cool so I'm going to do a quick recap on sessions as you saw in the slides this stuff did sessions ranked very highly so high five content team these are the sessions that ranked sorry that had the highest attendance and what I deduced based on what I know of the speakers and of the topics topics are really hot and also these speakers have some some street cred so all of these speakers are known for in both Drupal circles and outside of Drupal circles so the majority of them are anyway and I think that speaker history helped bring in attendees for their sessions the I put some stats at the bottom none of them were beginner which I thought was interesting one of the stats we're starting to see is that people come to Drupal con for more more meaner content so that's a good nod towards what we're doing for Amsterdam and getting in more intermediate and advanced stuff and also that people are really interested in coding and development and site building which is where interest has been in the past so it looks like we're still tracking good for that the next one is for session analysis we took the evaluations that we received on the website from attendees and I did rankings based on sessions that received five or more feedback results which was surprisingly not all of them some sessions got feedback on just one or two and I felt that those getting five stars kind of was unfair to the people who had feedback more than five people showing up so this is a analysis of that again a lot of these names are repeat names who've been on the Drupal con stage 4 one that I want to point out that was a positive surprise was Gwendolyn and Mike and Nello they did the Drupal career trail head lab and they got a five star which I thought was great they had some really good feedback which I think we're going to cover in a later slide but it was really good to see that our career initiative not only had a good turnout but it also had a lot of really positive feedback people actually took the time to fill that information out on the website other things was that they had to have an average of 4.75 or higher in order for them to run you can go ahead and switch to the next one I covered these in the previous ones but the other thing is that of course the sessions that have highest attendance are the ones that are they have good content and have good presentation on it because you can always enter the room and then within the first five or ten minutes realize this isn't really for me so it's good that these speakers have the ability to keep people in seats once they bring them in so that's good go ahead and switch and like I said the Drupal as a career lab was really well there's a quote in there from one of the feedbacks or one of the comments that we got from an attendee it gives us the idea that people are interested in learning about careers in Drupal perhaps people who are new or people who are looking for maybe like a vertical shift this ties into our movement for the job board we had 67 jobs posted to the Austin board and 63 in Portland I think that for Amsterdam we'll be using the sub-domain Drupal jobs board so we'll have to see how that tracks against this going forward alright next this slide is a little bit it's not my favorite slide what it shows is that we had 200 less individual evals received from people which on the grand scheme of things I don't know if it's actually usable so the things that we picked up was that out of all the evaluations received 78% of them scored above 3.5 which for me is a passing great hooray them but in Portland we had 85 and what's the discrepancy so it did an analysis and I broke down all of the feedback scores and I tried to see if there was a pattern and whether the 200 really made an impact or not and I really couldn't see that it made a difference the only thing that I noticed was that we maybe got more comments in Austin than in Portland but overall there was nothing that really stuck out as Portland did significantly better or Austin did significantly worse or anything like that for the most part the bell curve on a response of how many evals were received per session and their rating it kind of did a similar bell curve so there was nothing really that stood out the only thing that I could think of that was something that we need to improve on is figuring out a way to get people to give feedback and one of the things that we thought of was maybe the system that we have is clunky and maybe using something that's more intuitive or something that is usable to other people like joined in would be more of an incentive for people to use it so Stephanie I have a question do the speakers get to see their own reviews yes because I was going to say that is news to me and like if I knew I could see my own reviews which I don't see a way for me to see that on my session note but anyway that might incentivize speakers to get the word out for people to test it yeah that's a great thing so one speaker can see their own emails but it's in their user profile on the website two I suspect that one of the reasons that we had fewer feedback from people is because I did a review of the videos we had posted from Austin and almost everyone of like the 20 that I just randomly picked out didn't have a evaluate this slide slide in their presentation so people weren't being reminded constantly that that was important and then maybe just saying that in the closing session but I think we do or is there something like is there some touch point that people have I don't know yeah it's tricky right because after you get home from the conference then like you got to get back to your life and stuff so it's you really got to be in the moment I want to text me but that's another story for another day nice okay I had no idea I could see evaluations so maybe just adding a tab on the session node that's visible to speakers because then if I knew I could see this stuff I would be much more inclined to you know get the word out for people to review it yes and I won't mention anything about the part where it's in the secret email secret email yeah well you know I don't read that I go to the website many emails is a sad story but the biggest problem is people actually following through and reach out to speakers and have them do the hard work yep yeah so we're hoping that actually joined in kind of does that twofold as it makes it public not just for speakers but also for attendees one of the feedbacks the pieces of feedback that we got for Austin was it'd be really great to see what other people thought of this session so I would know if the video was worth watching because with a hundred videos like who has that many hours right now can we expose five star reviews on the on the session notes um you probably could um the reason that it would be it would be something that we have to look at is it's like a series of five questions which is just a one question type star so we'd either have to pick which one of those to make visible or whatever but it's definitely something that we can look at but for us join us and you know that would work and then again it's like you know now you're looking at somebody's watching a video and it's like well you're watching this please rate it you know what I mean like so it's kind of catching people in the moment hey you mean like your thoughts are they you where do you find that form for them I couldn't really hear what you said Holly um there's a lot of echo when um sometimes but um I suggest we maybe take this offline it's a little in the weeks maybe I think there's some good ideas but let's keep moving because we have um a couple of other topics to cover in limited time well thanks uh yep uh final thing for sprints is we had more people hooray and and lots more people at the beginning that too which I thought was great more in the you know getting involved core and core mentoring um but beginning of all the core had a lot more people significantly more people on Austin and Portland so it's really great all right well thanks Steph um so um overall uh ratings um there's on slide 22 and 23 are charts that compare Austin versus Portland for attendee expectations being met and slide 24 is a recap of that in words so uh the bottom line is that in Portland we had uh 938 filled out in Austin we had 454 so similar to what Steph was saying but in both cons we are meeting the core expectations for sessions building skills and networking those remain consistent and highest ranked uh parts of the con we're doing well with these top drivers the minority selected to hire or to find a job what's interesting is so the folks that are trying to hire ranked it the lowest uh the job seekers are a bit more pleased this year than last so uh the question is do we need to improve Drupal Con for hiring um it's not a driver from the majority so we don't really think we do but it is a question that uh we could look at folks putting more focus on in terms of activities another comparison Austin versus Portland uh and slide 27 shows the feedback uh it's interesting in Portland the top three uh ranks were sessions keynotes and networking in Austin sessions exhibit hall and networking so sessions in networking are the drivers keynotes were considered less useful in Austin than in Portland so we're looking at how to improve the selection strategy and get out in front and really be able to promote some great speakers we did get a bit more love for the exhibit hall maybe because the audience is maturing maybe because there was a ton of fun stuff to do more educational opportunities there uh in Austin uh so we're looking to make sure that we have really exciting exhibit halls uh continuing uh the other category was interesting if you look at both of those charts you'll notice there's this huge spike of people commenting on this other category and in Austin one said they were really happy with it but we don't know what it is we think it's probably trivia night and women in Drupal reception and all of the parties there were a lot more parties in uh Austin than in Portland and that's what we think that is but we need to unpack that a little bit and ask more specific questions next time by slide 28 the value that attendees uh feel that they got from the conference um you can see it's really in line uh they're getting they continue to be impressed by getting more value than expected Austin we increased the percentage of attendees who feel they receive much more value and the question is maybe we should look at ticket prices if we're exceeding expectations and costs are rising slide 29 is the net promoter score uh essentially we have a baseline now 53 a baseline we don't know really what it means at this point but we'll know next year answer to your question yes 53 overall rating summary um attendees like what they're getting we're nailing the key drivers uh we need to do better with keynotes and we need to understand why the talent marketplace is dissatisfied and whether we should do something about that so any questions about that before we move to marketing okay Joe alright for Austin we used a four prong approach uh and they're listed there paid advertising content marketing email and then social word of mouth as I've noted there uh paid advertising and this content marketing approach were uh these were new for Austin and just to note for Denver actually we did do some paid advertising uh but it was pretty limited to some specific sessions um so uh moving on to the next slide some results from those so paid advertising what we found was the impressions were high and the engagement was fairly high we had uh over two thousand two hundred thousand impressions and four thousand clicks uh we were sending people to the Austin site uh various pages on the Austin site we had set up a conversion as clicking over to the registration page and so uh that's a that's a pretty long path to go from an ad that you see on Google over to the site and then actually click to the registration page to start filling out the form so that's a tough conversion but that was pretty low another thing we uh found from advertising uh this was my uh first opportunity to use Twitter ads and uh was was pretty impressed the engagement rate was considerably higher uh than Google AdWords uh content marketing uh and by the way we've always produced content for cons but uh that's primarily around communicating uh dates and things like that for this con we actually uh used a strategy where we developed kind of high level persuasive content marketing the event uh to our audiences that Steph talked about earlier kind of interesting the topics with high engagement were um topics like convince your boss and uh how to become Drupal 8 ready and that's Drupal 8 ready from a skill standpoint uh not necessarily preparing your company uh for Drupal 8 but uh hey site builder or developer you need to be um getting ready for Drupal 8 topics with low engagement uh were DrupalCon ROI so topics more geared toward the business audience uh why you would want to send your employees you know what is the return on investment for attending or sending your employees uh to attend the event so I thought that was telling next slide uh email this is always a balance we want to make sure that we're communicating effectively with email but not emailing so much that people feel like they're being spammed uh engagement rates were comparable to uh Portland uh generally very good with you know compared to industry standards uh again pretty low conversion rates over to the registration page but again that's a tough conversion um and one thing that we did knew for Austin that was very well received was this attendee daily snapshot uh where we sent an email to all attendees with a quick list of the things happening that day just sort of high level bullets and uh heard lots of great feedback on that and the metrics there uh bear that out so like a miraculous number 70% yeah it's pretty amazing uh social media um was comparable to uh Portland slightly up on engagement that's retweets and ad mentions primarily on twitter is the way that I measured that uh one thing that was way up interesting was clicks from social media to the Austin site were significantly up from Portland um up 47% uh to the number listed there 5,688 clicks to the Austin site and some learnings um with the paid advertising in particular it's really difficult to tell uh because that conversion is so hard uh it's really hard to tell what is actually driving registrations so great for awareness building but we need to create more ways to direct directly attribute uh marketing efforts um and paid advertising in particular to ticket sales so we can look at ROI and make decisions based on what's most effective and how to spend budget um we need to perform research to better understand Drupal con attendee trends and motivations about that a little bit so that's in process uh and again uh general advertising strong tool for awareness building um but we really don't know how well it did to drive registrations um highly targeted advertising channel such as twitter did better uh we thought then Google AdWords so definitely looking uh to to twitter going forward and on the next slide I'll talk about LinkedIn as well and then just the last point their audience is definitely hungry for content and tools that help them convince their companies to send them to Drupal con and uh recommendations uh I think we can use things like promo codes and there doesn't necessarily have to be a discount tied to it but I think promo codes will help us uh with this tying the spend to the effectiveness if we use a promo code in an ad for example and that gets used we know that that ad drove the registration um and uh we may want to tie discounts to those too but you know we'll see on that part of it um again I was impressed with twitter and think the LinkedIn would be another option to explore for our upcoming cons and would like to dedicate some budget to LinkedIn um that attendee daily snapshot by email that I talked about I think we definitely need to keep that as a regular Drupal con feature and the research piece again mentioned that that's already in process and then despite the low engagement that I mentioned on the sort of C level messaging um I do recommend that we keep continuing to create content and and trying to better target uh those folks and uh try to increase engagement there great any questions before we move on okay so just to summarize uh quickly so to grown strengthen the community we we saw attendance was flat um we grew skills with sessions and trainings community summit uh trivia night brought people together we had 18 we awarded 18 scholarships um for Austin and from these countries so it was an actual actually really great program and we hosted 57 countries in Portland we had 43 so that was fabulous uh to accelerate the project we supported more sprints we secured venues and sponsorship for the extended sprint so we helped with that in Austin which we're doing the same thing for Amsterdam uh supported the sprint mentor program funded 18 critical con contributors with grants uh Brian Gilbert led uh the core mentoring workshop um and we partnered with symphony uh they had a day of uh sessions and we hosted core conversations again so uh we're meeting that in those ways promoting Drupal through marketing we had paid advertising content marketing uh email and then social as Joe just went through and finally uh we generated revenue 802.7 so uh thousand dollars it's looking forward uh we want to keep offering great sessions and networking the things we're looking at improving our budgeting and reporting understanding why attendance is flat improving keynote process increasing the number of evaluations we're going to try joined in and determining if it's time for price increase to match the value and that is all right any questions or thoughts number that was actually going to be my feedback um it's all it's a lot of data which is great because we didn't have that much data in the past so I think that's a great improvement I think the next step is you know I think ideally we would you know analyze the data a little bit more and come to more insights and maybe recommendations that I'm you know maybe this is the next step but I for sure would love to know how we boil all of that information into here's the things we're going to change you know what I mean well we had some uh you know we had some learnings on that last slide some things that we're going to work for sure that the data um I think what we you know our next step is to try to backfill some of that data so we just looked at Austin and what we knew about Portland where we were practically pulling more numbers uh there's some data that we can collect from the previous cons that we can backfill for and that might help us tell a more complete story because obviously with just two North American cons where the data it's hard to call that you know a trend line or really get insight out of that so that's um that's coming um and um the full board will get the retreat agenda shortly but we're looking to have some more complete data for you guys to look at as retreat all right is there any other thoughts or comments or next topic is licensing issues I think we're a little behind schedule so mm-hmm the third block point to another monstery that there's like origin there yeah the review of the onboarding yeah so let's do the licensing issues and then switch to the executive session I have a I have a hard stop you know in 35 minutes okay and I assume others may as well so let's let's try to stay within the sounds good the available time I'll speak real quickly uh also I'm going to unmute Larry in case he needs to correct me you're unmuted Larry you know there's an overview of the issues that one of the reasons that sort of instigated the you know wanting to talk about um talk about this in the board board level but together a presentation here after taking some time to meet with community members who've been working on licensing on group level for a number of years um they've all looked through the slides these slides so hopefully it'll make sense to them but so the general problem is that we have lots of licensing issues that are on things have been called out as you know being not not compliant or questions that people have don't want answered and when those questions are being answered or when the issues are being resolved it's the basic feeling that folks involve that how we apply the policies that do exist is pretty inconsistent um so both things are a problem for the association because we are legally responsible right um and additionally licensing does there's a relationship between licensing and security we are going to want to make sure that we are we have policies that are being consistently applied um from a security perspective so as I mentioned I pulled a bunch of books together here to attend it and was able to contribute some notes which should be accessible to everyone um and we agreed during that um that meeting that any issues that were found by folks uh would be tagged licensing policy and so you can click through and see all the issues that are now tagged with that um bondcruple.org and it's a not insignificant number and some of them are really old that these folks uh felt that we were running into this problem so that we have issues is increasing um there are more reports being made um and that when the posts are made they're being tagged inconsistently so they end up all over the place it's kind of hard to tell what's really out there most of the time I think our standard policy right now points folks to post these issues for the webmasters queue uh so if there's a licensing issue most of the time it ends up in the webmasters queue but we don't train the webmasters queue volunteers in licensing issues right um and so the general feeling was that uh a lot of folks feel like they don't really have the authority to make a decision or make the call yet that means the licensing criteria or it doesn't um they don't have the authority because they don't have the skills uh and knowledge to be able to do that so we need to support them uh you know in being able to resolve some of these issues so if that's the problem um we took a look at licensing issues so I put these in here for folks to uh for folks at Peru um you know WordPress it's general license they're whitelist things that are permitted like for fonts and icons in particular um and they do allow for licenses that Drupal.org does not account for now um I could not find a process for the report of violation I'm sure it's somewhere if you know what I'd love to know what it is they have a license and then they whitelist other things um that are commonly uh included in contributed code including fonts and icons um they also have a list of licenses that are specifically excluded right so you cannot submit something with this kind of license and here's why um which I thought was a good good addition um and then they've got a licensing mailing list uh with volunteers who staff that and make the judgment calls and deal with the issues that are raised there by the community Juma this is their statement about that um and they also have an email mailing list where they deal with um deal with issues pretty lengthy they've got a bunch of stuff going on um uh it's pretty complex how they deal with it and they have a group uh a committee basically essentially that deals with uh licensing issues um and lastly um but I don't know how to say this if you guys know how to say this let me know Aperio? I'm going to say Aperio the contribution I got um these are Missoula public license sounding in addition it may be permissible haha uh to import third-party code um part of their um licensing policy there they also have a licensing team that deals with um issues that are reported so the stakeholders for us um in this is you know the association obviously we matter because we're on the hook things go sideways um the project contributors we want to find a resolution that really serves the project contributors because I think they're the folks that end up getting most frustrated right you just built a module you want to get it up on truple.org it uses an icon set you can't tell if you can commit your code with that icon set or not um and then I think the security team as I mentioned I also want to include because some of those whitelisted libraries are you know we may um allow for a library file that later out later on turns out to have a security issue um you know they need to know what our policy is and how to remediate those kinds of things so their proposal for how to resolve these issues and move forward is to build an official licensing team um and uh you know folks that are training the issues that have common understanding of how we resolve and apply to the policy and can uh you know always be tasked with answering these questions um and we could put that team together in a number of ways it could be a community team in a way that the security team operates where there's no board authorization but also no board control uh the what would be to have a hybrid team which has a board appointed chair like the marketing committee um but is otherwise made up of community members and then the third model would be to make it a full board committee where all the members are appointed as in the working groups so those are the three models that we could use to build the team and we would want to obviously you know recruit folks who have past experience in licensing issues and we recommend that we have one number of security team to serve on the licensing team you know mostly as a liaison what they would do would be to get training advice from the association legal team uh they need to draft a charter take a look at the policies and see if we need to do any revision there um they would recommend creating a licensing queue so that the webmasters team doesn't feel like you know these are issues that they have to deal with and then you know announce all these changes um and do you know make sure that we have a consistent enforcement of the policy including we may need to go back and look at issues that have already been resolved uh but where the policy is now out of compliance uh or the resolution is now out of compliance um or with inconsistently applied in the past and now we have to rectify what they would need a queue, some legal training from us um and uh also proper get access so that they could take care of projects that are in violation which is one thing uh folks that they lack now they can they can make a ruling but oftentimes they can't do anything about it. Get your feedback and put a proposal out to the community on GDO and uh you know get working on recruiting team members and a chair we would get the legal team up to speed get training together for folks provide policies, create queue publicize those changes and then work on focusing on enforcement. Succession. Sure, so I can start I guess um so I think this is um an important topic I think we absolutely need to up our game you know at the same so and it's an interesting dynamic in the sense between the community and the yes and the Drupal association here because it's kind of on this in this gray area for example um you know like I'm very opinionated about what license Drupal should be and I see that as part of my role as a project lead to determine um so I wouldn't be comfortable with a licensing team determining what license core ships with at the same time I do see the need for a licensing team to help scale um you know a lot of the support to help resolve you know other questions um so from a so and I think we should I think one of the discussions that we should have is what is the exact responsibility of I guess association a licensing team and also sort of you know I guess me as a project lead but even like you know module project leads as well yes um let me talk about that in the team briefly and nobody felt in the meeting nobody felt that the team should have responsibility for determining the license of Drupal of Drupal core on what are the policies that we're going to have around enforcing whatever that license is right um and um and so there's that anyway so that I don't think that's on the table in this discussion or in this discussion of what the teacher looks like so yeah so I do think it is a good I personally am I'm very curious to know what other people think as well but I think I feel one of the things we should do is maybe try and draft a charter that outlines these things like what is the role what is the scope of the work of the licensing team um and so that's something that I've done with all of the other you know groups committees you know with the help of Angie and others um so I'm happy to help take that on and to work with anyone else here you know Larry and for you Holly or even other people to kind of try and charter a draft um charter I guess for a licensing team and I think the question is when do we share this with the community I think it may be best to share it once we have a draft charter because then there will be something more concrete to provide feedback on I mean it's not like we can't share it early but um I'm not sure I don't know these are my quick thoughts I was going to say I don't see this as a working group where the board would approve every member I think that's because you know as I understand that this is going to be a problem that's going to continue to scale so we probably need more members sitting on that committee then the board realistically should be appointing or could even handle in terms of volume but I do think that the chair should be appointed by the board and you know and I certainly agree that the charter should come from you Dries and that you know you could be the chair if you wanted to um but if you wanted someone else to do it I think the board would need to approve it I just don't see it as an entirely board committee I think one of the other discussion point I guess is this is a board committee or a community committee you know I mean that's exactly what I meant with what are the roles and responsibilities here I think because our mission has us you know we have to support financially the legal side of it I think there has to be some level of board involvement in it just because we have the fiduciary and financial responsibility for the legal protection of the Drupal project right correct yes I agree I guess the question is should should the board appoint the chair or not so I mean I don't know I think then if the board is not appointing the chair if it's an entirely community run committee then we there is a separation I'm not trying to imply that the board appoints the chair the board has like control over everything the committee does but at the same point at the same time given that as Tiffany mentioned we're on the hook financially and legally it makes some sense that we would want to be able to appoint that chair and how that chair you know serve serve the board so yeah and I'm not against that necessarily I'm just trying to think this through I think I guess where I would start is as I mentioned writing up the scope of the responsibilities and I think that will at least help me personally understand what that working what the team members of that working group you know should consist of and if that is a board appointed chair or not I can easily see being a board appointed chair but I guess would like to think about it more I don't know if I may I would like to have a session around at DrupalCon or even a breakout session at the retreat or something I don't know if we can wait that long but Dries if I may Holly just unmuted me yeah go for it so I do think I agree with Tiffany that it should be a board appointed chair in part as she and Holly said that the association is on the hook if everything goes nutty but also because that does lend some credence and authority to the group specifically the kind of questions that are open right now that I believe this group would be responsible for resolving are things like under what circumstances do we allow GPL compatible third party code we checked in to a repository right now the rule on that is if someone happens to say so somewhere and people remember it and we need to do better than that so this group would be charged with you know what the guidelines are for that decision enforcing that decision and then recording when we've made allowances for that so that group would be responsible for things like do we allow you know a GPL incompatible font to be used by a module by core because there's no legal reason why we can't because it's a font not code our usual policy historically has been it's not GPL so you can't put in the repository period should we change that that this group would be the form in which that decision is discussed and gets made and then being a working group you know with an appointed D.A. chair it could have the authority to be able to say yes or no on that rather than sit and wait until this consensus which historically has not worked very well on this question so that's the kind of things that I see in scope for it you know certainly Drupal itself is a GPL that physically can't change so that's not even on the table or anything like that it's more you know the tactical logistics of the fact that we're now working in a much more multi-licensing world and we need to manage that better than we are I totally agree with that with the exception that it's just tactical I guess I mean the decisions of huge strategic impacts could have big strategic impacts on the project both positive and negative yeah I suppose that's another reason why it would be good to have the board's blessing on it because then the board has a direct conduit to be involved in any decisions that are farther reaching right so well I agree I'm very happy that you guys brought this forward and that you're thinking about this and that you're effort into this as I mentioned I think it's really important so I don't want to be the downer here I don't know I feel like this is very useful information I feel like the next step is for us to have a breakout group maybe to through brains to carry this forward and to make something happen so I don't know if that's what you guys recommend it or not I don't feel like we'll be able to resolve all of the questions around this in this call I think the ask from the people that Holly met with was hey board we feel this committee needs to exist are you on board with that and then assuming yes how do we go about putting that together I think that there's two past work we get the board to work on a charter or I can go back to the folks that were stated first level and get them to work on a charter that is about some of those mechanics to break the board's proposal personal opinion like we can go back to the original group I'd like to join that group maybe somebody else wants to as well if we have a charter we bring it to the board's approval and so the board doesn't have to make the charter with just any what's it in the end that's my personal recommendation here trees I volunteer to help with that also great so I don't know the logistics there I don't know who there are the names of the people that are involved great when I can circle back to these folks and copy you and Rob into the conversation and just set up a time to to work on set up a process for working on a charter great do you want to handle that in the same way the um should I join that sorry go ahead Andy sorry trees should I join that as well to you know it's up to you we definitely be helpful and involved with the other charters same time I don't want to force you to join this that's fine yeah so I guess put me on there too awesome I think that is it for the open session we'll do the review of the onboarding materials another time I think we ran out of time we only have 12 minutes left for the executive session I think we should do that and maybe focus on the financials for Q2 sounds good alright well let's switch bridges


And it works for you? Yes. That's great. I was trying to think. My absolute favorite, actually, is Nestle. It's one of my favorite apps. And why is that? Why is it your favorite? It's a great aggregator. It gives me an easy interface. It helps me say things that I want to look at over time. Okay. So it sounds like the things that came to mind for everybody were apps that you use all the time. You use them all the time because they're easy and they fulfill a need for you. So today with scenario-based planning for engineers, we're going to talk about how you two can try to achieve the same end result. The app is not working for me. So the question here is how do you want your users to feel when they use what you've created? Do you want them to feel that same amount of excitement, that same desire, that conviction to use what you've created? And how can you do that? So do you want your users to feel like this, wondering endlessly not understanding where to go, what to do, or do you want your users to feel like this? Accomplished, excited, successful, confident, and how can you do that? So scenario-based planning can help you achieve that result. Scenario-based engineering is really a method of planning that allows you to assure that you're meeting your users' needs and your business needs in a flexible and fast manner. So what does that mean? So it's the difference between, for example, making a list of features that you want to deliver versus an experience that you want to deliver to achieve those end results. So why should you use it? You'll deliver faster, better, allow you to use complete tasks. And a story I like to tell around that is Jared Spool, I don't know if any of you are familiar with him or his work. He's a usability specialist researcher who has a company called User Interface Engineering, and he's been doing this for probably over 30 years. And he tells a story of the $300 million button. And what it was was his engineer, he, a client of his, the engineers designed a system and developed a system.  So there was nothing special about it. User name, email password, reset password. But the abandonment rate was really high and the client couldn't figure out why. So he went in there and what they unearthed was that, you know, users didn't want to commit to have to be part of this specific club or whatever it was. They just wanted to buy what they wanted in their cart and get out of there. And the User Interface didn't allow them to do this. It was a scenario that wasn't taken into consideration. And so what they did was they, it was really the placement of the login and registration and the task that was overseeing, which was allowing users to continue without having to join the club or login or register. So they moved the login screen. They put the continue as guests button. And the, within one year there was a $300 million increase, $300 million increase for that customer base on their consumer site. So how does it work? We're going to go through how it works at a high level first using the example of you wanting to make macaroni and cheese. And I don't know if macaroni and cheese is an American dish or if everybody here is fairly familiar with it. It's pasta noodles with a cheese sauce. So there are many ways to accomplish this, right? You can buy boxed, homemade, frozen. You can order it out or to take in based on your requirements, right? So if you're heading out to the store just to pick out things that you think you might need, you might put orange juice, you know, maybe some pasta bread. And you get home, you want to make macaroni and cheese. And this is what you get. And that's not terribly appetizing. And it's not macaroni and cheese. So you're not getting your desired results. Versus you know the end result, the scenario that you want to accomplish is making homemade macaroni and cheese. So these are the ingredients you go to the store to get that you know you need in order to accomplish that. So you come home. You have all your ingredients. And you get to your desired outcome, which is macaroni and cheese. So how does it work? So first you want to plan based on your user-centric scenarios. So for instance, I want to make my macaroni and cheese homemade for the first time. I need to buy a pot, a measuring cup. I might grab some packaged cheese because I think that might be a little bit more efficient and easier. And I've scoped it down for my deliverable homemade macaroni and cheese. And I want to be able to accomplish that. And in order to do that, you have to first spec out your scenario. This is kind of the high-level process. You want to establish your scenarios, your release goals, maybe some pain points and some enhancements that you want to include. Pain points are things that a user encounters in your product that prohibits them from accomplishing the tasks or frustrates them. I'm sure none of you have ever encountered that in a software product at all or any other product. When you expect it to act or behave a certain way, and it doesn't, and then you have to spend time losing productivity to figure out why or maybe you're not even able to figure out why and so it's actually a blocker. So you may want to look into some pain points that users have and think about some enhancements that will extend the experience moving forward for them. And from that, you want to establish goals and for each goal, there'll be multiple tasks that come out of that goal and for multiple tasks, for each task, there'll be multiple steps and if you're using Agile, it might be stories, for example, or issues.  And in this case, it's John. He's a junior developer. So understand your users and the product that you're creating, the scenario for. And then you want to develop your scenarios. And scenarios, if you're working at a company, you might get them from your product management, product development. Support is really good for understanding pain points or things that aren't working for your users that you may want to develop scenarios around. Marketing can be included. If you're a contributor or you're at a small company or an independent, you can look at, even as a UX specialist, you might look at forums to see what kinds of issues of trending around your product, what kind of questions people have, what kind of things are saying, I wish I could do this. Short of customer visits with your product management and a UX will engage in, that's a way to get some insight into your user base. And once you've had a chance to establish your scenarios, tell them out like they're a story. The story communicates the needs of the user. So in this case, the user wants to persist their environment that they're working in so that when they revisit and they come back to it, it's always as is. They don't have to keep resetting things. They have the challenge that this particular user is an independent or a contributor and likes to work from a coffee shop and doesn't have two screens. And so how can you make this user more efficient and productive without having to navigate around a lot and waste a lot of time kind of moving between environments? And this user would also like an embedded library which maybe currently resides on a website and there's a lot of back and forth. Maybe there's a lot of downloading involved. And gee, this person thinks it would be really great to not have to do that every time and to maybe be able to access that from an embedded library and their IDE, for example. So I like to tell the story of, I don't know if you're all familiar with Starbucks. I know they have one here in Brno now. But Starbucks has a crafted and specific experience that's very well-branded for their customer base. And so when you walk into a Starbucks, you have a certain set of expectations. But each experience for any one person can be very different. So for example, I might walk in and I have a food allergy. And so they may have a different script, a scenario that they have to deliver on based on my food allergy or your preferences. Maybe it's a first time for your visit and you don't know where to go to pick up your coffee, right? Because you haven't been into a Starbucks. It's unusual. But it could happen. It doesn't have anything to do with your hair color or what type of shirt you have on. It's really more about the experience and the scenario that you fulfill when you go in there. So the next thing you want to do, once you have your driving factor here, that's the story that you want to fulfill. And then to do that, you want to plan around that. And that might be in the form of your release goal. So what do you want to accomplish based on that scenario for your release? And maybe in this case, it's increased productivity on different environment and different devices based on your environment so that you can access assets. Then you want to ask how and this is, how can you do this? And this is based again on any pain points you've ever been earthed on any enhancements you want to include. And you're basically making a thoughtful vetted out list based on that that will address those issues. And then, you want to take those and you want to establish work as goals. Establish the goals to solve the pain points and the enhancements. And in this case, we're going to go with the first example of persisting the settings and configurations for the workspace. This way, if I go to Starbucks and I log in, and I ask or, you know, I go on a business trip on a different device. Maybe it's an iPad or maybe it's a laptop. My experience is, and I don't have to keep going and maybe reconfiguring. It's set for me. And then, you want to scope those down into multiple tasks. And in this case, you know, the first one would be, the step would be, the task would be, you open the IDE, you configure it, maybe you go into a, I don't know, dialogue. You don't want to give a solution, but you just want to kind of understand what the task is of going in and configuring the environment. Maybe they directly manipulate the IDE workspace and configure it.  We're not quite sure how, but we know we need to do just that. And then, based on that one task, what are all the steps they have to do to get there that will build out a story? So now you're getting to a very finite focused piece of work. And this is really great if you're across distributed teams, remote teams, contributor, that you're all working towards one goal and you understand maybe other things that's influencing, but you can work fast and focused because they're in very small bits. But when you release and you deploy to your user base, they're not getting bits, they're getting all these pieces coming together to fulfill the initial scenario. So this is a high level representation of the process. And on the left, you'll see the goal. So keep the environment sticky for reuse, say is the goal. And then you can write a description about it. You identify the user or users if there's more than one. And then you put the tasks across the top and then below it, it shows each story that you've broken the task down into. And this might be each path for each goal might be for one release, depending on how many groups you have or how many contributors, or it could be multiple release goals depending on how you structure your product. And this can be done in a spreadsheet. It doesn't have to, you know, necessarily look like this. It's a really easy way to plan and see your kind of high level needs and goals based on the scenario. Kind of out flat and how they relate to each other. A nice high level overview of what you want to accomplish and how. So if you zoom in, you can see, you know, the two tasks, equal small focus stories. And this can allow you to rapidly iterate and deploy. Versus a list that you might come up with to say, oh, well, I think that maybe if I want a better environment, I could just say, I want to reuse component code. But you don't say, how or why. Or workspace environment. We know we want to do something with that. And then everybody kind of comes up with their own ideas. It's not fulfilling any user's needs or addressing any pain points. So this is a list versus a scenario.  So to recap, user-centric scenarios, they're very focused on desirable, scalable. They can be very rapid and they alleviate a lot of pain points and enhance user experience. Thank you. Any questions? Do you have any pointers for how we can develop scenarios and who we should be talking to and how to get that initial information? Yeah, sure. So I'm not sure if you're here earlier. Depending on how you're working, if you're working in a company, traditionally you have things like marketing, product management, UX teams that can all kind of contribute and help you or even give you the scenarios or give you some kind of idea of what you could build on to do that. If you're an independent, some other tools are forums, blogs, things that people say about your product or the technology you're working with.  So those are good resources. They can give you insight. What else? So, do you iterate over the tasks and the pain points? So, yeah, so you may have a longer-term scenario that you want to fulfill and you may break it down and see that there's a lot to do there and you may break it into levels of accomplishment. Like, what do they need to do first to be successful? And then you could say, okay, well, we're going to do these three things first and then next time we'll do the next three. But you're all the time you're working with the end result in mind rather than just a random list of things that you need to check off and you might not deliver them in any sensible order that makes sense to your users, right? So, that way it's, right.  But at least you're still kind of heading towards the same goal with the same goal in mind and you may have to adjust it along the way. So, do you ever put value stream into sort of the idea of the scenario probably if you have this scenario and you break it down into goals that might be when you want to prioritize if it's a real necessary goal or not. And, you know, these are things, again, within a company you may get from product management or you may work very closely with product management on. If you're an independent it may be that you work with your customer on that as a client or if you're a contributor you may work with the community. Usually, it's nearly the same scenario. I mean, for example, with the environment I can imagine like sending it as a file or maybe having some centralized server for synchronization or diodes or whatever. How or at what time or important you decide which way to go or how does this work? That might be your goal or the task. Somewhere within that I want to be able to achieve this and it might be as quickly as possible and you might like in my case I might work with product management development to determine what that is and if we say we have a week to do it well, okay, developments is the fastest way they can achieve that is to import a file. Okay, and maybe next time if we want to revisit that because people are really not happy with that or they want additional functionality to make it easier then you maybe visit it and say, okay, or you schedule it out so that next time you then have the next way to do it and you kind of build on it that way but you don't give them no way to do it until you have the best way to do it so you progressively prioritize how you get there. Do you anticipate that the whole product can be built using this method or is it some additions or some new features? You could start out trying it on a feature to get the hang of it but I think if if you have enough force you could plan your product like this depending on the scope but you could break it down into individual areas and then just keep like within maybe an area of say planning if you may break that down into different scenarios for planning and establish which ones you want to ship at first that are important so you can kind of break them into different areas of your product and plan it out that way it's really a matter it's like a it's really a scoping exercise that you use your focus Yes sir Question So I was trying to think about how this is different than behavioral driven development just in the sense that here we're creating a scenario so is there a distinction in your mind or is that What would your definition of behavioral driven development be? So I would think that I would be creating a situation where I expected some activity to occur and then that and then verify that activity is indeed occurring So it sounds similar except for your this is more user centered rather than just like technical verification so it's almost it's similar and then you pick that kind of skewer like T and you align it to what you might be what value you're bringing to your users So the same just kind of more user centric for the experience to enhance the experience and not just the technical not just the technical value right So Spotify could give you access to music anywhere and it works beautifully but it takes you 10 minutes to get to the song that you want Is that right? Yeah, okay Thank you everyone for coming