Okay, well, welcome to our first ever career services podcast in the age of coronavirus. And we are coming to you today from our humble abodes because we want to make sure that we're staying in touch with you folks out there at the iSchool and we're, you know, trying to help quell any anxiety that you guys may be feeling. I'm the director of career services at the iSchool, Christopher Porello, and I'm going to throw it over to my partner in crime. Yes, hello, everyone. I am the assistant director of career services, Jeff Fouts. Nice to have all of you joining us today. Thank you, Jeff. It's nice to see you. Nice to see you as well. We don't get to see each other anymore. So this is kind of nice. I miss you. I miss you too. Great. Now that we got that out of the way. Yes. So I wanted to first start off by an email I got from an information management student last night, and let me see if I could read you part of the email. Alma says, dear Christopher, I'm writing this email to inquire about summer internships for fall 2019 IM students. I have not been receiving any calls from companies due to my absence of professional work experience, and many of them have canceled their internship positions in light of the new coronavirus pandemic. Since it is mandatory for IM grad students to do an internship, will all of us who have yet not got internships get a position with iConsult? And if we do, how will I go about it if there are still lockdowns in place? No. So yeah. So look, I kind of feel like this is how a lot of our undergraduate students are still looking for internships, and our current graduate students who are looking for internships are feeling right now, especially our international students, which have already started off sort of with a challenge of, do these companies sponsor? Will I still be able to get credit? And that sort of thing. So Jeff, how do you suggest we handle this student's email response? Well, so it's very interesting. So a couple of things that I took away from the email was, first of all, they said, let's be clear that it's the fall 19 incoming class. So it's the first year, second semester students that he's talking about, or she's talking about. Second thing they said is, I'm not getting any internships because I don't have any experience. And something that I know that we talk about a lot with students, whether they're grad or undergrad, is when you're going for an internship, it's actually better that you don't have a lot of experience because the companies want to be able to give you that experience. So you don't need to have a ton of experience in order to land an internship. It's better to highlight what it is that you're studying and the skills that you're getting and the program that you're in, rather than trying to highlight any type of work experience that you're getting because your work experience isn't going to reflect what you want to do anyway. So the fact that you don't have any experiences is not really a factor on whether you're getting the internship or not. So that's the first thing that I would say to them. Yeah, no, that's a good misnomer, right? That these companies, they're looking for an intern because they're not looking for someone to have tons of experience or else you would be hired for a full-time opportunity there.  And so it's a symbiotic relationship. The company is going to get sort of a young, ambitious, someone who's been studying in the classroom to help contribute to the organization. And then the student or the candidate will get the practical real-world experience and hopefully a pipeline for full-time work. Well, and the other thing I wanted to say, too, is you're a student.  So how much experience are you going to have anyway? Exactly. So don't beat yourself up on the fact that you don't have a lot of experience. It's not that important when it comes to landing an internship. It's all about drive. It's all about interest. And it's all about enthusiasm for the type of experience that this company is going to give you. Yeah, personality, right? I think that personality shows through your drive and your resiliency and to not harp on, well, I don't have this. Well, I don't have for years experience, because once you start framing your personality that way, no one's going to want to hire you and no one's going to want to work with you. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. Good. So the other thing that I wanted to make sure that we talked about was the fact that this student had mentioned he knows or she knows of a lot of companies that are taking away their internship offers after they have already given it to them or offered it to them because of what's happening with this pandemic. So what do you think about that one? So, Jeff, please back me up on this. We have not. Our office is not heard of any high school student, whether it's an undergrad or graduate student, ADS, ADS, IM, get an internship offer or full-time offer rescinded. So what I have heard is I've heard of one case from the School of Arts and Sciences. She may have been a philosophy or history major, but in this day and age, our students are still pursuing the most valuable degree and skill on the planet right now. And so I understand that the rumor mills are probably very reactive right now. And I'm sure social media and on the news, you see a lot of rumors that just aren't true. And I feel like the anxiety that a lot of us are feeling right now could be contributing to this rumor that students are getting their internship or job offers rescinded because otherwise I have not heard of it other than the one case with the undergrad and arts and sciences. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.  And look, everybody is working from home now. So it's even more imperative that these companies are looking for potential candidates that have the skills that we offer from the iSchool, especially when it comes to security, when it comes to how much work is getting done from their remote employees. And that's where data analyst comes in. Project management, product management, like all of those things are still valuable skills that companies are looking for even in this era of where things are starting to slow down and shut down. So, the opportunities are still there. Now, granted, you're gonna have to look a little bit harder, but they're there. And I was just talking to a student today, we went into Handshake. I'll use product manager as an example, because that's what they were interested in. There were over 2,000 jobs for a product manager, full-time jobs for product manager. And my point is maybe you don't wanna be a product manager, but the jobs are there. Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with you. I've had several appointments this week with students who are still getting interviews and they're just, they're virtual. So I have a student who has a super day with Amazon and she's doing it all virtually on Friday. She's a little bum, she can't be at their headquarters. But look, these companies are still hiring. Now it is true that there are sectors of the economy that are starting to slow. I'm not gonna lie, obviously the numbers are pointing towards a recession, but I feel worse for those students out there who are not in a degree program that's associated with the high school or with an engineering degree because these are skills that are inter-industrial. They go across industries. Oh, there's Jeff's dog. Hi, Coco, hi, Coco, sorry. Coco wanted to be in on the video. Of course, of course I can't blame her. But also that you just have to get a little bit more creative with your search as well. Yeah, right, and I was gonna mention that. Look, you guys are smart. You are bright students. So it's just a matter of you taking this creativity and the smarts that you have that you would normally apply in class and use that same ability when you're applying for a job or an internship. You know what to do. You know what you have to do in order to land that opportunity. So use that same drive to find that opportunity that you want. Yeah, and what I'll say, great point and what I'll follow that up with is use this anxiety you may have right now and channel it into being proactive, right?  So that's a great, actually a great lead-in into what I was going to start talking about next Christopher. So thank you for that. You're welcome. I actually found an article online from a, his name is Marcelo Barros and he is a expert in OPT and CPT. And he has an article on nine job search tips for international students in the age of coronavirus. So I'm not gonna read you the whole article, I did share this on LinkedIn, so I encourage you to check this out. But to go along with what you were saying Christopher, about being proactive, one of the things that it talks about that I thought was pretty cool is proposing a virtual internship arrangement. So maybe when you're reaching out and you're doing your networking, looking for an internship, propose the fact that you're willing to work remotely. That way they don't have to worry about how they're going to accommodate you, coming into the office when we have these new requirements of the distancing with each other and a lot of companies are shut down. But if you are proactive and you come in with the look I'm willing to work remote and still have a good internship experience, they might be willing to work with you on that. So I thought that was an interesting idea. That's awesome, that's a great idea, Jeff. The other one I wanted to mention and I'll just say that there are nine of them is when you are networking, start asking for informational interviews now. So this is a really good time for you to start finding out more information about the field that you're interested in going in. So when you're networking with people, don't necessarily network with them about opportunities, but network with them about the field in general, about what's out there, what it's like to work in this field, what types of skills do you feel I need in order to be successful in this field? Oftentimes those types of relationships grow. And then when something like this pandemic goes away, the person that you are doing an informational interview with remembers you and a lot of times will come back and contact you and ask you if you're still interested in an opportunity. That's awesome. Yeah, no, and I think the one key point of those informational interviews is the insight and knowledge you gain. And along with that, you gain the networking rapport and the relationship building with the person that you're interviewing, but also the organization. It shows you're invested, it shows that you're knowledge seeking.  And it's a tool that I think a lot of us forget and there's work that goes into it, it's not easy. And often a lot of times students will have to put aside some of their anxiety and their nerves about interviewing and speaking with people, maybe that they're not comfortable with or they don't have that previous relationship with. So fantastic article. I follow that guy too on LinkedIn, I think we're connected and he is a huge advocate for international students. And I think that it would be really amazing if some of our students out there are actually connected with him to chat with him. I agree. I think it would be great. And you actually said something that triggered something in my mind about like getting out of your box. And one of the things that we talk about with students is look, if you really want a job, if you really want an internship, this is no time to be shy. This is no time to be uncomfortable. You got to do things that makes you uncomfortable. And one of those things is reaching out to strangers and asking them for help. In this case though, a lot of times you're reaching out to Syracuse alumni. So they know what it's like to be in your shoes. They understand. And a lot of our alumni want to help current students, but they don't know to help you unless you ask. So you have to do the ask, right? And one of the ways of asking is establishing a relationship, doing an informational interview, going through the process of developing relationships first and not just coming out in the very first interaction and saying, hey, what internships do you have? Because no one's going to help you then. Nobody wants to help you. Or can you refer me? Can you refer me right now? Or here's my resume. Yeah. They don't want to deal with that. They would much rather give you advice or talk to you about the industry rather than going right in and telling you what's available. That's awesome. Yeah. Wow, thank you, Jeff. Yeah, thank you. So if you want more from that article, you can just go find Jeff's posts and just click on his post. Give him the profile views as if he needs them now. You know, too, maybe we'll send out a link to that article with this podcast. Well, let me try this and see what happens. We're doing this live, so we'll see how it works. Relax, baby. Can you see the 9-test? Yes, yes. There you go. Look at that. And here's the name. Arcello Barros. Yes, follow him on LinkedIn. It's very, very good advice. Nice. So, thank you, Jeff. So the last thing, because we're running out of time, the last thing I wanted to address was just that final piece in the email where, look, iConsult will still be up and running. You have to give them time, just as with anyone else. I'm sure that iConsult will have some sort of accommodation to continue online. But to be honest, we haven't even heard whether or not summer classes are going to be happening or not. So we have to let the other pieces kind of fit into the puzzle first before we worry about that. But I guess the one thing I want and sort of an in conclusion kind of piece with this is I wouldn't rely solely on iConsult. iConsult is great. And yes, they have amazing opportunities that can usually take the place of an internship. But look, the market is still working out there. Don't get bogged down into believing that no one is hiring right now for internships or full-time jobs. Just keep looking, stay resilient, stay positive. And book an appointment with us, especially if you haven't already, all right? We've already seen some of you same people eight or nine times. Give your other classmates a chance, please, unless you just miss us. And so I wouldn't settle for iConsult right this moment because there's still plenty of opportunities out there. Absolutely, well said. All right, anything else that you'd like to close with Mr. Fouts? Hey, we are open for business. Career Services is here to help you to deal with any of your frustrations, your angst. We're still there to support you. So even though we're remote, we're still here. So it's the same process. You go through Handshake, make an appointment with Christopher and myself, and we will get back to you with a link, probably using Microsoft Teams or Skype, whatever you prefer. We don't care. But we're still available to help you, as Christopher has said. So don't be afraid to reach out to us. Perfect. Well, thank you, Jeff, for all the help that you've been today. Hopefully this podcast is informative and helpful. Yeah, have a nice day, everyone. Thank you, you too. Bye.


statistics and Excel mean and outliers get ready taking a deep breath holding it in for 10 seconds and looking forward to a smooth soothing Excel first a word from our sponsor yeah actually we're sponsoring ourselves on this one because apparently the merchandisers they don't want to be seen with us but but that's okay whatever because our merchandise is is better than their stupid stuff anyways like our crunchy numbers is my cardio product line now I'm not saying that subscribing to this channel crunchy numbers with us will make you thin fit and healthy or anything however it does seem like it worked for her just saying so you know subscribe hit the bell thing and buy some merchandise so you can make the world a better place by sharing your accounting instruction exercise routine if you would like a commercial free experience consider subscribing to our website at accounting instruction.com or accounting instruction.thinkific.com we are in our Excel worksheet if you don't have access to this workbook that's okay because we'll basically build this from a blank worksheet but if you do have access three tabs down below example practice blank example in essence answer key practice tab having pre-formatted cells so you can get right to the heart of the practice problem blank tab just having our data set in it so we can practice formatting the cells within Excel as we work through the practice problem let's take a look at the example tab to get an idea of where we will be going we're gonna have our salary data on the left-hand side we'll do some calculations for it including the mean create our histogram and then we'll think about what if we add one more line item to that salary data that being an outlier possibly the CEO's salary and what would be the impact on the mean and something like a histogram with that outlier in place so let's go on to the blank tab now if you want to have practice data sets to work with we suggest taking a look at Kaggle dot com K-A-G-G-L-E dot com you can also create the data set or simply type in a data set if you so choose it's not too long of a data set we're working with here let's do our normal formatting as we do every time I'm gonna select the entire worksheet or pretty much every time and then I'm gonna right click on it and we'll format the cells this is my baseline underline formatting we're gonna then go to the numbers tab on the left currency and then I want to make negative numbers be bracketed and read I don't need any dollar signs and right now no decimals are needed so I'm gonna remove the decimals and add them as needed and then okay I'm gonna make the whole thing bold by going to the home tab font group and the whole thing is bold that's how I work I'm all bold all the time that's how it is man anyways not really but still we're gonna then we're gonna then insert let's put our our tab here and we'll go to the insert and make a table out of it tables and let's put a table in around our data so I'll go ahead and insert our table let's pull that over here so we can see it dancing ants look to be in the proper locations I've added up top the formulas we created in a prior presentation so we will not recreate them but if you want to be able to type in the formula remember you can go to the insert tab symbols group equation and then within the equation I recommend using the ink equation helping you to basically create what you're writing into the format in Excel which is quite nice okay now the data on the left represents salary data we're imagining for a corporation for example so let's do some of our normal statistical calculations before we do I want to make a skinny bee column because I don't want to put anything right next to the table so I'm gonna put my cursor between column B and C left-click and make a skinny bee skinny bee alright and then let's type in here that we're gonna have the average or mean let's say mean or average mean or a or average average and this is gonna be created from Excel and I'm gonna make the column C a little bit larger I don't think I need the colon here and then I'm gonna do the formula equals the average and then double click on the average as we've seen in the past I'm gonna select the data because it's in a table I can just use the down arrow so the dancing ants are now around the entire data set they're doing their Mamba around and working their magic their their voodoo magic that somehow creates a formula when they dance they can make rain too I hear probably not but still median median calculation equals the median and double click on that that's the one where we if we ordered the data from top to bottom we would pick the one in the middle so I'm gonna select the whole data and then say there's the median so if I was to order it in order then that would be the one where we pick the one in the middle and then we have our max let's do the max calculation equals the MAX this is gonna be the largest number so I'm gonna select the max select our data and enter and then the men calculation equals the men it's gonna be the smallest number these are quite useful formulas select the entire things or functions you also might have quartile one right Q1 that we can put in place equals quartile one which is kind of like the median but for the first quartile right I would select the entire range and I have to add then comma one I'm doing this fairly quickly because we've seen them in the past and then Q2 or not Q2 Q3 because the the median is Q2 Q3 equals quartile double-click the quartile the entire set of data comma and this is gonna be 3 for quartile 3 so there's our data set now let's recalculate the average and this is what I mean by basically converting something that's in a in a formula standpoint instead of doing the algebra on it and doing it by hand and instead of going to the other extreme of just using a function or a formula in excel we can kind of make a little table for it right we can create a little formula which is useful for us to see the steps that are being taken and in excel so we can say let's do the average or mean calculation and this will be the manual calculation now this is you can think of this kind of like making up a tax return or something right you're doing you're showing your work in like like a tax return format right we could see the formulas line by line so in any way so we could say we're gonna we're gonna if I if I look at this this format what I need to do is sum up all of the x's right so this formula means x bar the mean or the average of x1 x2 x3 these all represent x right for the number of x's that are here so x1 x2 x3 and so on and then we're gonna sum all that up and divide it by in same thing here the sum represents the same thing as the numerator up top we're summing all the x's where x starts at I and then it goes to n I equals 1 to n divided by the number of n so we can we can tap that down here and I could say well let's calculate the numerator which is basically the sum values of we could say x's the x's equals let's use our trustee some function this time summing up and everything in here so we'll sum it up all these items which represent x1 x2 x3 on to xn for our however many x's are there and then we're gonna say that we want to the divide divide by number of values which is we're representing as n in our in our formula right so we're gonna divide by the number of values to get that I'll use the count function equals count brackets and we're simply going to select our data set which will count all of the items that's the number of items there's 51 of them and that will give us our average or mean and then I'm gonna say this equals up to to the sum of the data divided by up one for the 51 there it is so we get we get the same calculation here and here let's put an underline home tab font group underline now if you're making a table oftentimes I might make the top like a header right home tab font group brackets let's make this black and then the font white you might indent some of the internal sides right so the useful little indent thing home tab alignment indent so because it has a colon this is a sub calculation within it and then down here the total I might double indent home tab alignment double indent so I might make this a little bit wider so there we have it let's put some blue around this because that's my normal data input color home tab font group drop down bucket if you don't have that blue it's under the more colors standard and then blue so we'll say okay I'm gonna put borders font group drop down borders so there we have it I'll do the same thing here with our data here home tab font group blue and border okay so there's our normal stats and we thought about our formula in a table format a little bit more rigorously now let's let's go and make our histogram so I'm gonna select the entire data set and I'm gonna go into the insert tab and go into the charts and histogram and let's make a histogram of it I'll delete the title because we could see the data set and it looks something like that so there's our histogram so that looks good we can of course change the number of buckets on the left if we want let's let's play with that a little if I hit the buckets on the left let's make it it's on automatic I'm on this symbol I can say the the let's say the number of bends let's say we want like 11 bends so then I have something that looks like this and so we've got more data on the left and then we've got a couple data sets on on the right so there's kind of our our mapping of the data it's it's not really populating as like a bell shaped curve right it's it's tailing off to the right you know kind of shape of the data all right well let's just take this what we want to do now is just think about well what if there was an outlier to the data right so now we're gonna add an outlier so let's take this entire thing and I'm gonna I'm going to copy it to the right so I'm gonna take this entire starting point and because everything is relative to each other I could sorry about that I think I swallowed a fly the fly was so sick of hearing me talk it took a it took a kamikaze death charge down my throat and tried to stop me from talk any case we're gonna let's copy the whole thing so I'm gonna go from column a I'll select the whole column and then I'm gonna go on over and we can go all the way to let's say column L control C our copy right-click and copy if you so choose and then I'm gonna put it in column in so in column in right-click and I'm just gonna paste it normal so now it pasted the whole thing just normal right so now I I'm gonna make a skinny column M now I want to make sure that everything is populating the way it should so in other words like this this is now pulling from my new data set it's not pulling from the old table over here that's what we want to have happen so that one looks good they all look like they're pulling from my new data set which is the same numbers but a different table which I'm now going to modify so that looks good now that let's check the chart the chart is pulling from the old data set so it's pulling from this table so I want to change my histogram to pull from the new data set this data set so I can select the chart one way I could do that is gonna go to the chart tools up top and then the data that's being selected I'm gonna go into that and so it there's the dancing ants doing their mamba around the data but it moved it jumped over here I'm gonna move it back and I want to take that series of data and edit it and then say you need to change where you do your mamba ants see it starts to go over there again that's not where you want to go I want you to dance around these ones dance around those ones and so I'll say okay and then okay and then okay so now we've got our dancing ants we've got the correct data set okay so now we're just gonna add one more piece of data these are all the data sets but now you've got the CEO the that's that's he makes one million dollars let's just bring it up to one million and you can imagine what's gonna happen that's a hundred thousand no no one million one million okay so now we got to see if our data sets picking up the right data so if I select all my data is it going all the way down it is because I made a table out of it so that one it looks like it's picking up the entire table the maximum looks correct notice our average has now jumped up to 89 354 versus the 71 out 498 so so we have a pretty significant impact on the average from that that that new data set so if I sum everything up here picks up the million here as well and then so here's our new average calculation let's take a look at the table I don't think the table is picking up the new data set if I scroll down it's not picking up that million so now let's change the table and say let's change this one easiest way to do it is I just click on it here and then it shows me the the data and I could just drag that box down to pick up the million and so there it is so now I've got a really kind of messed up histogram because the million is this big outlier and it's trying to pick up a number of boxes that will take in to consideration that that one dollar amount that's way way out so it looks like everything else is in this one box over here now if I try to make my boxes let's let's make this as wide as possible and then I'll try to make my boxes so that it it can pick up more of this stuff let's make it like this and that's one and I'll scroll it in a little bit alright now let's let's let's make it I'm gonna go to my my numbers and then here access and then I'm gonna make the number of bins go way up to like 450 bins right so now you can see now you can see what it's doing here it's got this one line item way over here and everything else is kind of packed on the left hand side let's do like 400 400 bins 400 so then right you got that one line item over there what if I did like 350 350 bins let's do we'll keep it let's let's do the 400 again anyways so so that's so so that's our so that's obviously a problem in that the outliers can have a huge impact on some of our statistical tools so when I'm when I'm using this histogram if I was to remove the outlier or another thing I can do is try to say that anything over a certain amount then I'm gonna say the overflow is anything over like 90,000 was it so now if I bring my bin size back down to automatic then then it's only got two bins that's automatic let's bring it back up to like 10 bins so now you've got something that looks more reasonable but this but this outlier is pulling pulling everything to that outlier right so just to demonstrate that I'm gonna remove that and and we're gonna say that we now have the bins like 450 bins just so we could see the impact of the outlier right so there it is so now now again so some of the issues that we have here are that the the the average is gonna be impacted by that outlier that outlier could even be larger right like what if this was like you know nine million you know then we have the the average jumping up to 243,000 and versus the 71 now notice if I take the median then the median is still is still looking relatively good because it's the one in the middle so that one outlier isn't impacting the median so this is kind of the the let's bring this back to a million so our histogram is back so so this is the kind of what we have to think about which number is most representative for what we are doing and again this is some another place where people will often play when they're trying to be kind of deceptive with numbers right so you got it you got to say well are they are they using the mean or are they using the average in which would be appropriate to use and in this case so if you're looking at if you're looking at like the average height of people and you have a bell shaped distribution of the data then the mean is often quite useful is a good kind of summary number to use if for example however that you have salary data and you have something like this where the CEO is way outside the normal and someone's trying to argue for an increase in their salary or the unions or something are trying to in trying to say that we need an increase in the salary because we're below the average salary well that might be a little bit distorted because because the average salary is taken into consideration these huge outliers that are out that are out there right so you might you know you might say well maybe the outlier people should make less instead of everyone else make it more you know and let unless unless you have the money to you know you it's hard to or or if you're taking home prices for example and when you take the home prices you have you might have a big mansion that's in the neighborhood that might be worth millions of dollars whereas the other homes are somewhere around the the average of the area which like say is a hundred thousand dollars or something well then you you have to you would think that the the median the middle number the average or the middle number in the data set would be more appropriate than the mean because the means going to be skewed by that big outlier or you could say well why don't I take this set of numbers and remove the big outlier take out the CEO salary and then that that middle number the mean number the average will make more sense for normal for the normal people like if I'm gonna if I'm trying to get a new job somewhere out of out of college or something like that then for me to take the the average of the of the company salary which takes into consideration the the high CEO salaries then that's not going to probably be representative of what I might be making in that organization whereas the median might be a lot more representative of what I might make in the organization or if I was to take out the outliers and look at the average salary without the outliers so again these are when we look at these differences this is a another area where people start to say well statistics is just another way to lie with numbers right but it's not but but when people are deceiving with the numbers they're there what they're doing is just like what they do with words they're choosing intentionally oftentimes the wrong representation that has some truth to it but which is misleading either through omission of the proper data to get the proper perspective or you know or just you know miss misinterpreting the data that has been given so so there's that


How did you get asked by the government to be involved with this investigating UFOs and advanced technologies? Well, in the first place, I didn't. The recruitment process is now slowly changing and we've seen that with the establishment of certain other...


Good morning everybody. My name is Adam Goodman. I chair the board of the Drupal Association. It's nice to welcome you to this board meeting. I would observe that attendance is down apparently when we don't feed people lunch at the same time. And that's perfectly fine. I'm calling us to order. I can't see the slides. Are we going straight to the minutes approval? Yes. By the way, is Ryan here? So Ryan had agreed to take minutes for this meeting. So Suzanne is, thank you for stepping in Suzanne. Where is Ryan? He's going to get trolled. I don't know. I've got to figure it out since he's a major sponsor. Anyway, all right. I do need a motion to approve the minutes from our last public board meeting, which was on April 10th. I motion that we approve the last board meetings from April 10th. Is there a second? All right. No second. Any discussion? All those in favor say aye. Opposed? Okay. So that was the scintillating part of the board meeting because I think it's the only vote we take. I do want to, more importantly, I do want to give a couple of updates from the board retreat that we had this past weekend. This is something that we do twice a year, usually in line with each of the cons here and in the US. First and foremost, I know everybody has been great about welcoming Heather as our new executive director. Heather's been with us now about four months. This was actually Heather's first meeting with the board. So it was absolutely notable for that. I know I speak from my colleagues when we just had a great set of new interactions. Heather's going to bring, I think, a fresh perspective and a new sensibility to the opportunities and potential for the Triple Association and where we could be headed. I think the board is ready to go in that direction and to think about how do we build from the very strong history and foundation that we have to where do we want to go next. We just feel great about your leadership and where you're going to take us and some of your thoughts and we know it's not going to be perfect. We know that we want that forward motion. We want that experimentation and the risk and the change and the growth. We characterize our discussion over the weekend as vigorous and engaged and certainly went longer than was in the time budget, but everybody was great about hanging in there. Just a few topics in terms of what we covered to give people a sense of that. The first is that we did talk, as Dries talked about in the Dries note, and as Heather and Michael Amp talked about, we talked about the Community Recognition Committee and basically went from idea to how do we want to operationalize it in terms of giving a charge to that committee and we asked Mike Lamp who is stepping off of the board to chair that committee for us. I think he's going to do a great job. They're going to come back to us with their thoughts and recommendations. Certainly our hope is that we have something that we can share and help fine tune with people when we all meet in Minneapolis. So we've given them, I think, an ambitious set of work between now and Minneapolis. I would characterize it as this is really about the health and sustainability of the project and the DA and the debts where we want them to be focused. The board certainly is a part of the charter, wants whatever that CRC output is to be fairly easy and simple. We wanted to have really clear benefits for people who are contributing to the community, who are contributing to Drupal, and obviously in terms of helping to sustain the Drupal Association as well. So there needs to be benefits all the way around. Just a few other thoughts from the retreat. We did agree to have a deeper conversation and I think just part of it is about Heather's arrival as well and really doing a review of our strategy and what we want to go next and having a much more in-depth conversation about that. We're going to work on dates before getting together to have that conversation. We also talked about not surprisingly unrelated to the strategy, reorganizing some of the committees and board members you should now have in an email asking you to indicate which trainees you might be most interested in. So I'm going to take a poll to see who's responded. I'm ready. You guys get both. You get extra spotter professor, you get extra credit for your grade. We also talked a little about the importance of reaching outside of the Drupal community. Obviously we don't believe that the work inside of the Drupal community is done. There's always more that we could do. But we have a voice and we really want to make sure that we're using that voice as part of the association to talk about what's going on. By the way, when I talked about the community recognition committee, I verbally didn't point out there is a link for how you can learn more and how you can identify if this is something that you would like a process that you would like to participate in. We obviously are going to put together the committee from people who nominate themselves or who are nominated by others and that's key to this process. Lastly, there are a number of welcomes and thank yous. Let me do the welcomes first if I have it in the right order. We go where you go. All right. It's good to be the chair. All right. So I want to start by welcoming our newest members. First is Grace Francisco and you can read a little bit more about Grace. We also have four and a half new board members. I'll get to the half in just a second. I also want to welcome Leslie Flynn who is here. Leslie is one of our two community elected board members. And many of you may remember Leslie from the just extraordinary recognition for extraordinary service that she received in terms of earning the Erin Lynn board award last year. So I was just so thrilled that the community self fit to appoint you. We're really excited to have you. Now I've lost track of my order. Leslie was with us this weekend but was not able to stay for the con and again her background is up there. I think she's going to be really bring us along with Grace just to really some additional outside perspective. And that's one of the balance points that we absolutely want to have on the board. Switching to some folks with sort of more of an internal perspective is Owen Lansbury. So Owen's over here. And as you all know Owen and his team have been just huge contributors to the project over the years. He also brings a voice from a different continent and speak the same language sometimes. It's all about the accent. Exactly. So we want to welcome Owen and sort of the half partly because he's not here so I'm giving him a clue. Ryan who was the community elected board member. It's not sort of an automatic or you know even typical thing but Ryan and I think everybody knows Ryan again. Just the extraordinary contributions that he and his firm has made to Drupal over the years. It just kind of made sense I think as a part of that voice to have him continue on the board. But shift from being a community elected person to a board appointed person. So those are the welcomes. There are three really important thank yous. This is and I think that we certainly said that over the weekend and I think we all feel it as a part of the board. In addition to Heather's arrival and the arrival of the new board members this really is a transition point for us as a board in a very positive way. Again solid foundation to be headed. And three people are stepping off of the board after just extraordinary service. The first is Mike Lamb. Many of you again know Mike. He's with Pfizer and again he's going to join. So we didn't let him go exactly. Yes he's off the board but he's chairing this very important committee for us. It was our board secretary for many years and just was a calm, cool and collected and broad thinking presence. And I will certainly miss seeing him in the room. Any bill led our nominating committee. And it's one of those things that takes and it's one of parts of the process. Take an extraordinary amount of time and thoughtfulness and board nominations is one of those. We have a good problem and that there are a lot of people who would like to be on our board. And thinking about sort of the current composition and where we want the board to go and how we bring in those outside voices. And how we continue to raise the profile of the people who were appointing and all of those things. It just takes a lot of thoughtfulness and a lot of time and frankly a lot of meeting with people. And he contributed that. The other thing that she really did was a wreck when she came on the board was a sort of voice of the customer exercise for us. Which again gave us some new input and some new data in terms of thinking about who have we historically been listening to and who are we not listening to. And how do we hear those new voices and I want to thank any for that. And last is Jacob Redding. So Jacob many of you know was a volunteer with Drupal beginning in I think it was 1898. And then about 1906 or 1907 was on the staff of the Drupal Association. Then he wisely went away for a few years and we even more wisely brought him back as a board member. And so when we think about sort of massive transitions certainly Jacob stepping off the board is one of those pieces. He was our treasurer certainly from my tenure. It was after Tiffany, right? You picked it up from Tiffany Harris. Yeah, I think that's right. And those of you who know me know that financial argument is not my strength area. It never will be. So I called Jacob and said it'd be great if you could be the treasurer. You need to know that I operate on a very simple green, green, yellow red light system. And if you could just keep an eye on that. And we were still digging out and trying to improve the financial condition. And Jacob, your work and the work of that committee with Badi and others has really got us to the much healthier position that we're in today. And I know that's just your recent contribution but I really want to call that out. Because it's again from a foundation perspective has set us up very nicely to where we want to go next. So that's my updates. I'm now going to turn it over to you Heather. I'll say thank you Jacob. And Heather the floor is yours. So Jacob when I got to make a brief stop at Seattle Drupal Con as part of the executive search process gave me the insiders tour of Seattle. And so we spent what I think was a couple hours walking around Seattle and getting the lay of the land. And so it was a combo learn everything about Drupal that's in his head, which I think would take two years. But also just you made it a very, very fun welcome into the Drupal community for me along with everyone else on the board. So thank you and Jacob you'll be much missed. Okay, so what are we up to and what am I thinking? So this is the one slide version of that. Hopefully what we've got our eye on in the coming year is not too dissimilar from what's important to you as well. We do try to align those things, but some of this will resonate what Adam already talked about. And some of these things are what we're working on internally at the D18. One of the things I heard very clearly coming in is that we do a very good job speaking to each other in the channels where we already exist. And where there's a huge need is for the rest of the world to know about Drupal and to embrace Drupal and to see it as an important part of technology. So we're really thinking through where should we be where we can have that voice show thought leadership and help everyone else know the magic of Drupal that we know. So that's a huge focus area from us. It's going to be heavily leaning on the marketing side. So we have hired a new marketing director. She came in a couple months ago and a lot of what that vision is is setting up a strategic plan around how we make that happen. So you'll be hearing a lot more of that in the coming months. Really focusing on relationship building in particular with our supporting partners and our key stakeholders had a great supporting partner session yesterday. And what really came up and some of you were in there is, you know, we really have a need to align closely with a lot of communities, but that end user community is one of them. So how do we support our supporting partners, right? Many of whom are agencies and that's a key focus area for us. And we came up with some good things out of our session yesterday that we're going to put into action. But I think it's even more aligning the people that drive Drupal and the Drupal Association and how we can better work together so that we're all meeting those goals. Adam already spoke to this, but what was on our list from the very beginning was, you know, those mechanisms to recognize and reward volunteers. And so while there will be the mechanical component of capturing contributions, there's also a marketing and communications component of highlighting those that work within the project. So what's really important to me is that we're making very visible, whether it is through social media or blogs or however we can do it, highlight those of you, the people behind Drupal and the power of it. So individuals, companies, anything we can do to better showcase all of you. Another session we had yesterday was around local associations and they have a huge need as they are growing to be able to look at scaling, recruiting volunteers and how all of that can align with the Drupal Association. So we're working on what the structures look like for us to be able to provide from a kind of a shared services model. There are things that are critical for local associations and events to do in their administration. Right and where we want to put the power of volunteers are in the things that we're not on the ground to be able to do. So what we're working together to do is make sure that we let you do what you do best and then we better find where we can support from the DA angle. Membership, so thank you to everyone. Raise your hand if your member sticker is on. Yes. Yay. Okay. So you may have noticed some increased activity at our DA booth here at Drupal Con Europe where we're really pushing the power of DA membership. And so we're committed not only to bringing you into the membership family but also creating meaningful membership programs. Right. So right now it is thank you for being a member. You're funding our work. We also want to find out what are meaningful benefits that we can bring to you as members and layer those into your membership program as individuals and as organizations. So that's another big initiative that we're working on this year into next year. I already talked a little bit about local camps and associations. It really is looking at how do we lay the groundwork so all of that happens a little bit easier. And then we we launched the diversity and inclusion conversation heavily in Seattle. We continue to look at that and fold it into what we do. But what we don't have at the DA that we're working on now is a real strategic plan behind what that means. So where are those focus areas? What are the focus areas within diversity and inclusion that are meaningful from a Drupal perspective? And how do we start to not only talk about it more and recognize it more but actually start to move the needle? So I'd be remiss if I don't take every opportunity under the sun to recognize my team. Some of whom are here. So Tim, Ryan and Neil were brave enough to join us today. I think everyone else has been put to work at our booth, which is why they're not here today. But this this is a really special team of people that are putting all this together. And when you have that moment of why can't they do the 18,000 things on the list and why are they only doing the 100? Just keep this number in mind and understand that we we're working to scale as well. We are we're walking the walk when it comes to getting outside of the Drupal bubble to an at least outside of our DA bubble. So I got to attend my first Drupal camp a few months ago at Drupal Camp Atlanta. And so we're also committed to how can we get to spend more time with you from a local perspective and not just at Drupalcon. So if you've got a local event happening, make sure it's on Drupal.com so that we know it. And if there's something special happening, you need some special content from us or anything like that, reach out and let us know. Outside the Drupal bubble, Tim and I were attended by invitation to the Google CMS Leadership Summit. Google did pay for us to attend. So thank you, Google. So we got to spend some time with CMS leaders in general. But I think the most meaningful conversation we had and Tim agree is we got to have an open source roundtable with our peers. And what was probably not what's surprising and not surprising at the same time as when we talked about what are our biggest issues, they're all the same in general, right? So we're all facing the same challenges. What was clear to me is I need to do a good job of connecting and collaborating with my peers in open source so that we can better learn from each other. So they see Drupal as a leader in many, many ways. So there was a lot of pride in the room when Tim and I were there because we got to talk about what we do great. But there are things we can all learn from and this contribution recognition piece is huge. So I think what will likely happen is the next time we land at the summit, once we've run through the initiative that we're talking about, is open source is going to be looking at us to be a leader in this. And when we talk about opportunities for thought leadership, I think this is one of those we should take advantage of. We've also gone to some other events. One in particular was a Portland Partners in Diversity event. So we're also trying to go to non-technology events where Drupal can be part of the conversation. You'll see some of the people in the room that are also at this table, so Midwest Drupal Summit. We also had a presence at Drupal GovCon and we actually hosted a smaller version of our executive summit at that event. So that was another way for us to not only connect with developers and marketers, but also to connect with those end user executives that I know everybody's interested in getting hold of. Speaking of membership, hopefully on social media, you saw our membership campaign. This is going to be an ongoing campaign. So if you'd like to participate, you can reach out to us and we'll feature you on social media. You can see some of the summaries of things where people said I'm a Drupal member because. So we are thrilled about our community. We want to highlight you more and this is just one way we can do that. So I mentioned the Drupal Executive Summit we did at GovCon. We've actually have done three so far. We're doing a fourth in Minneapolis. So if this is something that's interesting to you, please reach out. This is a way we're reaching into CTO, CIO, CMO audiences as well. I mentioned it pre-dries note, but one thing that was really exciting was launching the official charter for the event organizers working group. I think this is going to do a lot for us in organizing local events so that we are sharing best practices, learning from each other, not recreating the wheel because there are great things happening across the globe when it comes to local events. And we need to make sure we talk to each other and share all of that great expertise. These are the camps that were represented on the organizers working group and wanted to highlight that there was global participation so that we had various input. So DrupalCon Amsterdam, we are here. So this is just a quick overview of who's attending DrupalCon Amsterdam. The last number I heard was just under 1,500 people. So that is that's good turnout for resurrecting DrupalCon Europe. As you can see, these are the top 10 countries represented. Fingers brag accordingly. And then you can look at, yes, Germany and Netherlands are up there. But it's nice. It's definitely important that we have a presence in Europe and thank you Europe for giving us a little bit of time to figure it out. And we're thrilled to have been able to implement this new version. I'm wondering why Belgium is not at the top of the list. Can you comment on this? My country is letting me down. And that's the snippet on Twitter. It's funny that you say this because for many years I would say Belgium was ahead of the Netherlands. And it was always kind of like, you know, the fun. Wait this for a couple of minutes and we win. That is true. You can massage the data and make it work. So because it is a new format and we're all learning things in conjunction with our event partnership with Quoney, I wanted to make sure one that you were able to give feedback on individual sessions, which you can do through the app. There is a debrief bot this afternoon here at Drupal Khan so that you can have some live discussion around your feedback. And if you're not able to make it to that event, you can participate in our online survey. We would very much like to get your feedback. We're taking our notes. We need your notes so that we can get this even better for next time. And I know we have not officially announced a session yet, but we are feverishly working toward being able to do that. And we're committed to making this work in Drupal Khan Europe again. So we do have, if you don't want to wait a year to come hang out with us, you can visit us at Drupal Khan in Minneapolis. Just a quick quick look at what the week of events looks like. It is a full five days with that fifth day being the contribution opportunities. One thing I wanted to point out. So what we always, you know, we always try to learn lessons and make every Drupal Khan better. And one thing that we're doing in Minneapolis is increasing our community involvement. So we opened up the training call for proposals as an open call instead of invitation only, which it has been in the past. So that's giving a nice diverse pool of training sessions. Our program committee has traditionally been about 20 people. And this year we very purposely reached out in the community and it's around 70 members of the community that are participating in the program committee for Minneapolis, which I think is just a great improvement. And that's going to lead to even better thought leadership and even more perspectives on what that content looks like. And if you are thinking to yourself right now, gee, I really want to be involved because that looks fun. You can. So we have a link here. If you don't have a chance to take a picture to use later, you can find us at the DA booth, but we will find ways to get you involved. We still need speaker and session team members. We still need leaders for various tracks. And of course we need speakers. So speaker call for proposals is still open. So there's still an opportunity for you to get your content in as well. When does that close? December. December 10th. Yeah. So we hope to see some of you in Minneapolis. And at this time I'd like to bring Tim to the stage. To talk about Drupal.org. Yeah, so as you all know, a large part of the mission of the Drupal Association, of course, is uniting the community to build, promote and secure Drupal.  So I just want to talk a little bit about some of the work that we've been doing and the work that we do in general. One of the just things I'd like to highlight really quickly, and you may have seen this slide briefly go by in the preamble to the Drees note as well, is that Drupal.org is increasingly part of the service infrastructure that supports Drupal as a product. So, you know, many years ago, 10 years ago, Drupal was something that you could sort of use by itself. It wasn't dependent on kind of web-driven services, but now every year a new bubble goes up on this list of something that Drupal.org provides that direct integration back to the product, whether it was updates at the beginning, things like security advisories, the composer endpoint, the localization services. And we expect more year over year, and Drupal.org will continue to be sort of an essential part of Drupal as the software, not just as a support infrastructure. And I think that's something we'd love for everybody to keep in mind and help collaborate with us on as we work to make Drupal even better going forward. Quick comments, yeah, I was going to say. So, you know, we're in my project. I will say that the collaboration between the Drupal project and the core committers and the Drupal association is all time high. Like it's never been this good. Like all the things you mentioned, they're happening, we're seeing, we're getting the support from the Drupal association to make things better. You mentioned all of the initiatives, but it's obviously a big thank you and huge credit to you, Tim, and Ryan, and Neil, and hiding there at least for me. And I'm sure other people as well, but thanks for all the hard work. It's been night and day actually compared to just a couple of years ago. Awesome. And so another of the initiatives that I think everybody was hopefully thrilled to see during the, during the Drees Now. When they finally saw it. Yeah. Once the video began playing was this collaboration with the European Commission to work on this automatic updates initiative. And that's an example of those services where the process of packaging, the update packages, assigning them securely, delivering them to Drupal sites is all infrastructure that takes place on Drupal.org So this initiative was kind of a dual experiment and a successful one on two fronts in that it's a new way for us to collaborate and support Drupal as software. But it was also a new and very significant collaboration with the European Commission as, you know, a large governmental organization here in Europe recognizing the value of Drupal. And, you know, they use it internally on almost all of the EU sites and properties. Right. It's important to them. But the fact that we've been able to reach out and get them involved and have them become good citizens and participants in our community is tremendous. And we want to look for those opportunities in other places to multiply the impact that our small team can have on the Drupal project. So we are seeking more sponsors for more phasers of that initiative. So I'm going to give that shout out again because I'd love to get more people involved for more organizations, whether you're supporting partners, whether you're end users, whether you have connections to other government organizations that are heavily reliant on Drupal, hint hint Australian government. And maybe you want to have some participation in this. So those are just some quick updates. I think we can move to sort of a Q&A session. We've got about 15-14 minutes for questions for the board at large or for us as the engineering team. You can line up with the microphone please so that we can get everything on the recording. Alternately, we can pass it around if the board members have any comments that you'd like to add. Great first one. So where's the big blue group lead gone? No, the inflatable has a puncture, I'm afraid. But we'll certainly get that arranged. Tim at the last group, can you talk about pull requests? Oh, yes. Yeah, so I should talk about that a little bit more. So Neil has been working quite a bit on the next sort of elements of GitLab integration and sort of prototyping what it's going to take to turn that on. We're hoping to do that actually very soon. So we had some dependencies on the GitLab team itself that I mentioned at previous events. I probably shouldn't get too technical, but they did full clones of every repository every time you made a fork. That meant that if we had a fork open for every core issue, it would be 200 terabytes of disk space just for core. So we needed them to fix that and do object deduplication. And they released that in their 12.0.0 release just a month or two ago. So since then we've been getting that ready and right now we're just in the process of integrating it into the UI. So Neil has a development site that we're working on that actually has the full, there's a button to create the fork and you can kind of see that. So we're going to put that together and then probably pass it around a bit for UX review to make sure that that's going to work well for everybody's workflow. It should be coming soon. Next six months. I hope less, yeah. Can I have it? It's only really quick on that. Can you grab the mic? So for those people who don't know, I work for Accenture review really quick. We have 500,000 employees worldwide, very big organization. And recently I was talking with our head of DevOps who was working on certain things and no joke in like a big Slack channel that we have. He was asking other sort of leaders like, does anybody know of a large migration to GitLab? It's something like maybe 10,000 branches. That's not very many. So he needs some examples for like our enterprise clients, but we're way beyond that. Yeah, 40,000 projects by a lot of branches. So yeah, we're doing things way above what they're doing. More questions for the board or perhaps for me? So I know that one of the reasons that we left Europe for a year was really a financial decision. I'm super interested in knowing how this shift to using a vendor that we're using has affected that bottom line. Yeah. So the good news is the way that we've structured the partnership is dramatically different than what we've ever done before. And quite frankly different than we do in North America. So the upside is there was we did not own the financial risk of the expense side of running the event. So it's more structured like a license agreement. What that does is allow us to do the things we do well. The community pieces get everybody together, but it doesn't have such an impact on our financials that we had to not do it. So Adam, I don't know if you want to say anything else about it, the reason that we're committed to getting your feedback and getting this just right from a partnership perspective is not only does it allow us to keep coming back to Europe and not have the financial risk. The idea ultimately is that we scale. So there are other parts of the world we need to be in and this is the only partnership construct that will allow us to do that effectively. That's what I was going to add is our hope is that this experiment turns into something that we can scale to other geographies around the world and figure out how to make work. I think we're all aware, certainly as a board, we want to be more present in more places and in an in-person way, not just in a virtual way. Because we know that we need the two to really have a very healthy community. So yes, we need to figure out how to do this right and part of doing it right to your point is how do we scale it in a way that we can do over and over again, not just in the same geography, but in different geographies. And part of that is we know that what a conference would look like here is obviously going to be different than what a conference would look like in India, for example. And we want to be able to account for that as well. So it's not just let's figure out a cookie cutter. It's let's figure out a model that works, but still allow for the authenticity and the flexibility of the community and the voice in that. And therefore, wherever that conference would attract. For what it's worth, I think that this experiment worked pretty well. That's great feedback. Just to speak on the global scaling piece, one of the reasons that Quoney ended up being the partner of choice is that they have a global present. Global presence with local teams. So all of all of these places that we want to go, they have the ability already built into their system to accommodate that. So we're not taking a local team and trying to grow at the same time. We've got we've got somebody who's got that structure in place. Are there any, can you talk a little bit more about your plans to collaborate with other open source projects to communicate the value of open source? So I don't know that it's anything specific right now other than we need to do it. As about as far as the plan has gotten, but I think part of that means while it's important to have me at Drupal events, it's just as important to have me in non Drupal events. And we need to make sure that that is that's in the schedule and in the planning and in the budget. And when I think about it, we think about how do we scale that effort? So it's not just does the staff need to be places, but we even talked about board as Drupal leaders being in other places. Ambassadors of the Drupal community being in other places so that we can truly scale that effort. So we're building out the plan of kind of what that looks like and where their strategic collaborations. But some of that we won't know until we get there and have conversations and see who wants to who wants to come hang out with us too. But I think the first step is we've got to go and we got to meet him and we've got to have the conversations. And I think it's everything from your typical open source communities to we had a conversation yesterday with Facebook open source. Right. So we've got to be thinking about all the different ways that we work together. And in almost every conversation there is something that we have in common that we want to collaborate on. So so far so far it's been a good experiment. We just need the time and bandwidth and scaling mechanism to do more of it. So if you're interested in being part of this Drupal community that helps us get out and about and evangelize Drupal in some non-traditional areas please let me know. Easily our biggest constraint is not on anything that we do whether it's inside or outside of the community is frankly just time and financial resources. And we have just enough funding to do exactly what we are doing right now. So any new activity that we take on and there's a long list of things that we as a board really want to be able to do. We have to figure out sort of in a nice way how are we going to pay for it in terms of the staff or volunteers and helping those volunteers stay organized or other financial commitments that are required in order to make that happen. And as I think about Drupal we've got big ambitions. We've got big goals and we want to do it all. We really do. We just got to figure out how do we how do we support it in a way that is sustainable. And Maria and George are fighting over the chance to go to the mine. I was surprised by the pricing for Minneapolis tickets. I know we've done some experiments in the last few years and has a long time in Drupal that pays his own way because I'm an independent contractor. The pricing now is egregious. I had an e-mail exchange with hoping that you can consider ways to make it more affordable for people that aren't being sponsored, aren't being paid by big corporations. We've gone from three days to two days or four days to three days however you calculate it. So the price per day has gone up a bit. Can we speak to it? We did a pricing study a couple of years ago and looked at, and I don't have the specifics off the top of my head, but what we looked at was basically where are our peers at and where are we at. And to say that we were below the mean would be an understatement. And I know when we changed pricing, I'm not even sure we hit the mean but I could be wrong. We got closer? Yeah, we got closer to it. And the other piece of this, and I'm sensitive to your comment, is we do have a scholarship program because we still want to obviously be open and accessible and create opportunity, but we also wanted to recognize frankly the reality that, and I appreciate what you said. But we also know the vast majority of our attendees are people who are sponsored by a company or an organization that has the resources. And I really want to tie this back to my previous comment, which is we are committed to being open. We are committed to being diverse. We are committed to offering more benefits and more opportunities for people to participate in the Drupal community. And all of that takes resources. And that's important. We've got to find a way, and it's not sort of how do we max, we don't sit in the room and think, how can we squeeze every penny out of somebody so we can get their money. That's not what the conversation is about, and I want to be very clear about that. We really are trying to think about how do we, how can we do the things that we as a community know we want to be able to do. And to help grow and sustain Drupal. Again, people point to us, as Heather said, with, you know, wow, it's incredible that you guys are doing this, this, this, and this. And at the same time as people inside the community, we think to ourselves, yeah, but we still want to do this, this, this and this. The scholarships are really good. Like, that's a super, super, super program to have available. The scholarships are terrific, and I'm really super-weighted to get folks who are, you know, less able to attend the events, to be able to attend the events.  There's somebody else who needs it way more than I do, and I totally hear what he's saying is being an independent contractor and still being really expensive. Sure. And so I'm going to put on, I don't want to have a long dialogue on this, but I'm going to put on my, I'm a professor hat for just a moment, because this is something that we absolutely see in higher ed, where people will say, there's somebody more deserving than me, so I'm not going to even bother or apply. That's where the mistake happens. In the nicest possible way, that's not that student's or your decision, and you never apply. Ask the worst thing that happens is you get, you know, a no, and I think we can figure out, we'd rather have you be there and figure out how to make that happen. Can I add to this? So as a board member, so the discussion has been a lot about contribution credits, as an example, and the DEA today gives sponsored, so partners, 10% discount, if you are a partner of the Triple Association of the Prizes, and I think that we have an opportunity, especially in this case, and what you're mentioning, to actually use a contribution system if that would be reflecting on the contributions to actually do some kind of a discount system out of it. Just saying that as a board member, that I think that that's to be something that we should be looking at. So I would love to see that maybe happening. Well, and I think that feeds into what I mentioned with looking at membership, not just organizationally, but individual. Those are the things that we're trying to tackle. So I've been collaborating with the last group of cons of it on the program, and I feel like we are making good progress, especially also with the collaboration with Gwani, but like every year I have the feeling like we're starting from scratch again, so somehow all the knowledge gets lost, and all the good learnings that we have kind of dropped, and then we start like really late, and then kind of, yeah, I'm wondering if it's maybe the kind of collaboration tools that are a bit dated. I see a lot of good progress being made on triple.org, but overall I'm not yet convinced if we really solve all of our collaboration problems fast enough to be like effectively collaborating as the community that we're growing. Yeah, I think a particular area of collaboration tools that needs more attention. We have a lot of good tools for individual issue collaboration, documentation collaboration. We lack a lot around the formal tooling for initiative collaboration. There's sort of like landing pages for it, and then people set up their Slack channels and things like that, but those are the kinds of like project management oriented things that we're still missing, and that could apply to cons to volunteer opportunities, but also to the software. Yeah, so I want to add to this, thank you so much for being part of the advisory board, and I feel it because Imra and you and we were doing this. So one of the things that I want to actually say and give compliments to the DA staff, because you actually stepped in really well in the last months to help us to get things done, and there were issues like recording. That was not part of the original deal with Gwani, and we just somehow missed that. So what happened there is that the German Drupal Association came and said, we are going to take care of the live streaming, so they sent a person here, from the left over from the budget from last year, to come and do the live streaming of Drees Note, and also Pantheon sent Kenneth Dahl here to actually develop the recording that we are having here. So also like we should thank them for stepping up and actually taking care of that, but you're totally right, we should have figured this out many months ago, and solved it earlier and not be in less minutes there. I would say that we should do a retrospective of this together with the DA, maybe after two weeks or tomorrow.  Adam, I'll let you officially close out the meeting. Thank you all for coming. Do we do a motion to adjourn? We're going to do a motion to adjourn just in case we need to. So is there a motion to adjourn the meeting? Did we approve the meeting minutes? Yes, we did. If you show up on time, you know all of the things you're doing. It was just a long time ago. Is there a motion to adjourn? Second. Okay, we are adjourned. Thank you all very much.