Hi everybody. My name is Liana Hawkins. If you don't know me already, I am a mom of two kids in the Voriceville Central School District, so at the elementary school. I have a son, Ellison, who is going into fourth grade in the fall, and I have a daughter Lucy, who is going into first grade in the fall. I am also a science educator. I've been working teaching science programming for over 20 years now. I've worked in different museums, a zoo, and I currently teach kindergarten through fifth grade science at a school in Wyman School. So I'm really excited to be joining you virtually today since we can't be together at the library. I'm just so happy to do this program. And this lesson that we're going to do online is part of a larger series that I usually do called Magic and Mischief. And today we're going to focus on the lesson where we create our own magical creatures. So this is such a fun lesson. It combines science with literature, with crafting, or hand sewing, which are three of my favorite things. I absolutely love all three of those things. And you've probably read a really great book with some type of fantastical creature in it. So whether it was a dragon, or a unicorn, or maybe it was a sea monster, or a gnome, there are all kinds of neat imaginary creatures that show up in some really great books that we've been reading. And they're just really fun. The neat thing about these creatures is that they were invented in the minds of a person. So there's no other place that they came from except your imagination, which is great. You probably, the person who invented it probably just looked at a regular animal and then added something special to it. And that's really what we're going to do today. We're going to work to invent and sew our own magical creatures. And you might be looking at my guy here, my girl here, and you might be wondering, you know, she's cool, right? She's no doubt a great fun project to make. But how is this science? Is this even science? And it actually is science. So scientists study magic powers in animals all the time. The thing is they just don't call them magic powers. They use a different word. So in science, we call these magic powers that we see in animals and the living things around us. We call them adaptations. So an adaptation. An adaptation is anything that an animal has on its body or that it does in order to survive in the wild. And so animals adapt all the time. They're full of adaptations. And some of these adaptations are really neat bordering magic power. For example, if you think about the dog, a bloodhound, people have been using bloodhounds to track missing people for years. And that's because a bloodhound's nose has the ability to smell a scent that is 300 hours old. And it can follow that scent for over 130 miles. Sounds like a magic power to me. My nose can't do that. Or if you're into birds, scientists that study peregrine falcons, those are birds of prey and they dive down on the animals that they're hunting. A peregrine falcon can dive down at over 240 miles an hour. So if you think about that, your car on the interstate or the freeway is probably going 60, 65 miles an hour, peregrine falcon, 240 miles an hour. So that's really, really fast. Sounds like a magic power to me. Or there are some great creatures in the ocean called cuttlefish. And a cuttlefish can change, can camouflage, so it can blend into its background. But it not only changes the color of its skin, it also can change the patterning of its skin using some special chromatophores. Sounds like crazy magic power to me. So again, scientists are already studying these magical powers in real animals every day, we just call them adaptations. And an adaptation is a physical characteristic of an animal's body or a behavior that an animal does that helps it to survive in the wild. So as we invent our own magical creatures, we get to choose what their magic power or adaptation is going to be. And then we get to think about how to physically represent that adaptation on our creature. So for this girl, I decided that her adaptation would be that she could see into the future. And she could tell me all about it, all the exciting and wonderful things that are going to happen in the future. And to represent that, I gave her a really gigantic eye that almost takes up her entire face. So this eye is my way of showing that she can see into the future. All right, are you guys ready to get started? I cannot wait to see what you guys invent and what amazing magical creatures you come up with for our lesson. All right, guys, so we're ready to move on to our next step in making our magical creatures. And that is to design our creature. And this is the really fun part because you get to use your imagination and come up with anything that you want that your creature could look like and what their adaptation or magic power could be. And you might need some inspiration, so you could check out the different shapes of patterns that you have available to you. Or you could look at the different colors of fabric and thread and see if they spark any creative ideas about your creature. Once you have the pattern that you want for the body, we're going to start with the body. You want to go ahead and cut it out. And you just want to use those regular paper scissors. So I chose this pattern that almost looks like a mountain top for the head. And the neat thing is you could turn your pattern this way and the face could be over here. You could make these the legs. I chose to make these mountain tops the top of its head. And I thought it would be fun to have almost three different types of eyes up in the corner.  And I thought I could use those either as like mustache pieces that feed the monster, almost like little mustache arms. And they shovel the food into the mouth. So maybe this creature's adaptation is that he can eat bad guys or bullies.  And you guys can see after I cut out my paper, I just went ahead and sketched on it in pencil to try out ideas. And there's spots where I erased and tried something new. This is a good idea for you to get a rough example of what you're going to do for your creature. Once you have the body, your next step is to cut out the body from the felt. And you're going to use the two larger pieces of felt, probably because that's the only one that the body is going to fit on. And anytime you're doing any type of sewing and you're working with fabric, in this case, our fabric is called felt. It's just a fabric that doesn't fray at the ends. So we get this nice smooth finish even without having to sew the ends in. When you're working with fabric, you always want to position your paper pattern so that you maximize the amount of space. So for example, if I put my pattern right here in the middle, I'm sort of creating smaller pieces of fabric that I can work with. But if I'm really thoughtful about it and I place my pattern in the corner, I still have this other big half to really do something large with. So think about where you want to put your pattern and you're going to lay two pieces of felt on top of each other. And when we do this, this will allow us to cut two identical pieces because we want one piece for the front of the monster and one piece for the back of the monster. Now to do your cutting, you're going to need those special scissors. So scissors that aren't paper scissors, but that are sharp. So some type of sharp adult scissor, if you need a grown-up to help you, you can do that. These are smaller sized sharps that I have and I just keep them at home. They're good for cutting any kind of fabric. But the thing to remember about these is if you use them to cut paper, it dulls the blade. So I really only use it for fabric. You might also, if you have a sharp pair of kitchen shears, be able to use that. And we want to trace the pattern onto our felt. And you can do this a couple of different ways. You could use a Sharpie marker. I used a Sharpie on this one. Just know that if you do that, it leaves the mark of the Sharpie edge and you will be able to kind of see that. On these guys, I don't mind so much because I think that they're fun. The more colors and patterns they have. If you want it to be less visible, you could use a piece of chalk. The chalk will help you to mark right on the felt so that you can see where the pattern is going to be. So see how I've got this nice little chalk line here? You could do it like that and then cut up two pieces. Or if you're feeling really brave, you can take your straight pins and you just push them into the fabric through both layers and then out. And what this does is this helps you to hold your paper pattern on the fabric and you can just cut right around the paper pattern. Just like that. So for this today, I think I'm going to do chalk tracing. So I've already started. I'm going to try to get a line to go all the way around. But again, there's so many ways to do this. So use whatever you have at home. Sharpie, marker, chalk or just use your pins that you got in the kit to hold that paper pattern in place while you trace around. And you just want to go all the way around with your chalk. And you want to be able to lift it up and see that you've got that pattern there. And then you want to cut it out. So again, since you need a front and a back, you're going to lay your two pieces of felt one right on top of the other. And I usually leave my fabric flat. Not fat.  That way I really get a good clean cut. And you go ahead and take these rough cuts off the edges. You want to turn your fabric some more.  And if you wanted a body type that is not available in the patterns, do you think you could make up your own body type? Absolutely. You could just take paper and markers and squiggle out some kind of shape that you think would be good, whether it's like a unicorn shape or just another blobby monster shape, like the ones I have a lot of here. You can come up with any pattern that you think is right for you. And you just want to trim all around the edges. All right. So I've got the body of my monster cut out. And then the nice thing is you can take the edge that has the chalk. You can either rub the chalk off. It'll come off over time. Or you could make this one the inside, the inside of your pattern so it doesn't have those chalk edges. And you might want to go through if you see any like little snags on there. Just smooth it out a little bit. But again, these don't have to be perfect. Kind of the fun is their imperfection. So that is how we cut out the body. And you would repeat that for any of these really fun eyes or teeth or mustaches that you want for your guy. And you would use those smaller pieces of fabric or felt that you got to add some colors to your monster. So go ahead and cut those out and then meet me back here. And we'll move on to the next step. All right, everybody, we're back. And you can see I still have my body cut out. But I went ahead and cut out some of these fun accessory pieces. And you'll notice from my original pattern, my paper pattern, some of the shapes on these guys have changed. So if I take my, I originally had like the idea of these three eyeballs, I switched it up a little. I thought it would be really fun if why would their eyeballs be the same shape as ours for these magical creatures. So I thought maybe these fun peanut almost peanut shaped eyeballs would be good. And I thought in the end I would glue on two little googly eyes in each of the eye holes. So it would look something kind of like this. And then I would still really do that idea of these mustaches that shovel the food right into his mouth, her mouth, his mouth, I haven't decided yet, and the teeth. And I would do maybe like a black line later to do the top that this top line or these tiny dots, these little details are really hard to do with sewing. So go ahead and kind of map out your monster, how you want it. And you want to decide where you're going to start. So I'm going to start with the eyes.  So the front part of your body.  So you want to take your straight pin. And again, you're going to do that thing where you push the pin through both layers.   If you have more little face parts than you have pins, you could pin a few at a time and sew those. And then you could come back and pin others. Another option is if you don't want to pin all of these things and you have like hot glue or Elmer's glue, you could glue them right in place. It will take a little bit longer to dry and your look would be different. But maybe for younger kids, that's an option too. And you could save sewing for just going right around the edge of the monster. This guy, his eye and her necklace were hot glued in place. So it's really up to you. This time I'm going to try to sew it because I got this fun green thread and I thought it would be a nice different accent. So when you're sewing, you want to have maybe 12 inches of thread. The thread that we're using is called embroidery floss. You don't want it to be too long because then it'll get tangled, which means you'll have to keep adding new threads to your needle. But that's okay. So when you're working with your needle, you'll notice there's an opening called the eye. And all you want to do is kind of smooth down the end of your embroidery floss. And you want to push it through the eye of the needle. And you want to pull it so you have a little bit of a tail on this side. And when you're sewing, the yarn is going to really want to come right back out the needle the way that you put it in. So you usually hold your needle kind of pinching on the eye and keeping your yarn in place. For really young kids, or if you're brand new to sewing and you think you need a little help, you could tie a knot on this end around the eye. It just makes it trickier to undo mistakes later. So I'm going to try to just hold that yarn in place with my fingers. And the next step to sewing is we need to put a knot on this far end. And that is so the yarn won't go all the way through the fabric so that something of it will catch. And to get a knot on the end, you want to hold your yarn almost like it's a jump rope. And you want to take the tail end and the needle end and you want to bring them together. So again, there's that jump rope. And you want to hold your tail end on the needle and you're going to wrap once, twice, three times. You could even wrap four times to be safe.  You're going to just take those loops together and you're going to slide them. You'll find that they slide all the way down to the tail end of your yarn. And it will make a knot at the end. So I'm going to cut that off so I can show you that part one more time.  And then you're just going to slide those loops all the way down to the end of your yarn. So you've got your needle threaded and you've got a knot at the end of your yarn and you're ready to start sewing. All right, meet me on the next step, guys. All right, my needle is threaded. There's a knot at the tail end and my accessory pieces, my eyes and mustache and teeth are pinned on there. So I'm ready to start sewing. So for the very first, when you enter your sewing, where you put the needle in first, you want to start at the back of your work. And the reason you want to start at the back is this knot that we made is going to get caught in the fabric as it should and you don't want that knot to show. So if you start on the back, the knot will be on the back and you won't be able to see it. So we're going to start on the reverse side of one of these eyeballs and you're just going to poke your needle through so that you're not too close to the very edge. You maybe have like a quarter of an inch there and you just want to pull your thread all the way through and then see how that knot stops it from continuing through. It's going to hold that thread in place at the back of the work. And then this part is actually fun and easy. We're going to do a basic running stitch and a running stitch is so simple. This is what it looks like in the end. It's just these little, they run these stitches that run along the outside edge of your work. To do it, you have to remember a pattern and that pattern is up, down, up, down, up, down. Pretty sure you guys can get that one. So that first entry was an up. So right now my needle is up and I can remember that that was up because my needle is on the up side of my work versus the downside of my work. So if that was an up, my next move is going to be a down.  There's my first stitch. There's my first stitch. So since I just did a down, my next stitch is going to be an, might take a little bit of time to figure out where you want it to come through, it's going to be an up and then I'm going to go down again.  So again that running stitch pattern is pretty basic. It's up, down, up, down, up, down. You can take that pin out when you you've got a few stitches in place, figure out where you want your needle to pop through again and you're going to go up and then we're going to go down and you'll notice these stitches start to run along the edge of your sewing. Again it's called running stitch, up, down, up, down, up. Now sometimes, especially when you're new at sewing, that last stitch I just did was a down and I should, my next stitch should be an up because my yarn is coming out of the back so the next stitch should be up, sending it to the front again. Every now and then you're going to forget and my last stitch was down and if I did another down, let's see what that would look like, I did another down stitch. I'll notice right away that my thread is not continuing on this pattern that it's wrapping around my work, which I don't want and that's really easy to fix.  There are so many projects that I do where I'm partly through it and I just have to take a break for a long time because I'm frustrated about learning something new or how something is going um so just maybe put it aside for a while and then come back to it. The nice thing about us doing this online is that you can pause and come back anytime that works for you so see these stitches are really starting to hold that eyeball shape in place and you just want to keep going all the way around your eyeball or whatever piece you're sewing on. Keep going in the up, down, up, down, up, down pattern. Another thing that you might do at the beginning is accidentally poke yourself with a needle. That happens to everybody. I try to hold my, let's figure out where I want this guy to come up, try to hold my fabric around the outside edges of the two pieces I'm sewing together so that it doesn't um so that it does not put my hand in the same spot that the needle's gonna go in. So I'm almost all the way around this cool guy's first eyeball. Once you get the hang of it, running stitch is actually pretty quick and if this, if this is easy for you the next step is to really work on what your stitches look like. So when you hand sew, you want your stitches to be as even as possible meaning each stitch is about the same size and length and about the same separation from each other. So I have made it all the way around and the trick to tying off at the end is having your yarn end on the same side that you started. So my knot is on the back side of this and I want my yarn to end on the back side too. And I usually find a spot where I've already sewn into and I push my needle through that stitch and then you'll notice you make a tiny loop there. Once you have that loop you put your needle through that hole and you will tie a knot. And that knot is on the back side of your work so it doesn't even matter if it's a little bumpy like that. And once you've tied your knot you can trim fairly close to your knot. You want to leave a little bit of a tail.  So you want to sew on all of the accessory pieces and again this is not a project you need to rush through take your time or if you know you're getting really impatient with it you can also again go back and glue those pieces on in place but you want to stitch all of your accessories onto your monster or your creature and then meet me back here for the finishing. So you can see from the front of my monster or creature that I've sewn on the different parts that I want in there. So these three eyeballs that are shaped like peanuts these mustache arms and these teeth and this is the wrong side of the work where there's all these knots. And you don't have to worry about this because it's going to be hidden inside the stuffing of the monster. While I have it before we sew it up I want to show you a couple things. I sewed with running stitch the eyes all the way down so they wouldn't move at all but then with these mustache arms I only sewed this tiny part so that this flap could move. So I sewed a circle or an oval here but left the tails open because I thought it kind of gave a little bit to the story about the mustache that would feed the mouth and then for the teeth I only sewed the tops of the teeth on so they can wiggle too. So that's another thing you can think about is where you want your stitches if you want things to lie flat when you sew or if you want a little bit of movement and that's totally up to you. So the next part is sewing our monster together.  You really want them to be as close to perfectly lined up as possible. You can put as many pins in as you want. Try to just think about the different areas that might move or wiggle while you're sewing.  You're going to need to thread your needle again. So you have a couple of choices of thread colors in your kit. Choose whichever one you think might be nice. I really liked this blue. I thought it would kind of go well with the mustache arms and it would look nice against the outside edge and take your thread and you want to cut again about a foot maybe a little bit longer than that. This looks like about a foot and a half of thread and again the longer your thread the easier it is to get tangled. So again we're going to do that basic step. We're going to take our needle and we're going to kind of pinch down or smush together the fibers of one end of the thread and you want to pull it through the eye of your needle so you have a little bit of a two inch tail. And remember we're going to hold our eye and our thread together so that they don't separate. Then you're going to find that tail end and again you're going to go tail to needle so that you have that jump rope shape. Tail to needle. Hold the end of the tail and let's wrap. We're going to wrap once, twice, three times, four times and again you're just going to gently slide those loops all the way down. They slide so easily all the way down to the end of your yarn or your yarn your thread. Again I'm so used to knitting I keep saying yarn. So you've got your knot there and this knot you want to hide it just like when we started sewing we started with the knot on the back side so you wouldn't see it. This time when we're sewing two pieces together we want to start with our knot in between those two pieces. So instead of going to the bottom of both pieces we're actually going to separate the top and the bottom a little bit and tuck that knot inside inside the piece. And then we're going to smush the top and the bottom back together and once we have that we can begin our running stitch. So again the pattern for running stitch is up, down, up, down all along the outside edge and again here's my monster creature from before and we made that nice stitch that running stitch all around the outside edge. So you're going to hold your thread at the needle at the eye and I just did an up and I know this because my thread comes up the upside instead of the downside of my work so now I'm going to do a down. Now the more things you have especially pins on the front of your monster there's a always a chance that your thread will kind of get stuck on something just pull it through slowly if you need to or unhook it from anything there's my first stitch. So since I'm ended on the downside now I'm going to push it up and you're going to do the same idea this up, down, up, down running stitch all along the outside edge of your monster. Now you can see why I gave you such bright colors of felt and some contrasting colors of thread. I really like it on these monsters when the details stand out and again for these monsters imperfect is great. The more imperfections the more real they look so don't get too hung up on making everything exactly even or exactly right. Anything that you do here adds character to your monster. So there's my running stitch in that blue going all along this outside edge and you just want to again just like you did with all the other pieces you want to do this running stitch all along the outside. At some point this thread that you're using is going to run out we cut about a foot and a half of thread it's going to run out because this outside edge of your monster is really long. See what I mean about it might get snagged on something just gently unwrap it from around that and continue to sew and that's okay. When you get to about the last two inches of this piece of thread go ahead and tie off and then you're going to put a new thread on and continue right where you left off to keep going around the outside edge of your monster and I'll show you that when I get to a spot where my thread runs out. Okay so I've done my running stitch I started in this corner and I've gone down around my creature across the bottom up the top and around this one peak and then I was kind of running out of thread and I didn't have enough thread to finish so what I did I actually already did it and I had a video of it but I wasn't recording I put my thread to the inside in between these two layers I didn't go all the way through the back for this one I just went to the inside and I tied a knot on the inside stitch there and I just tuck that knot in between that way you'll never see it because once my monster's zone closed that knot just like all these knots at the beginning will be hidden in the inside of that fabric and it was actually a good time to stop anyway because as you're sewing your monster you do not want to go all the way around yet because what you need to do is stuff your monster so in your kit you guys got this polyfill fiberfill stuff you can find it in any stuffed animal or maybe you've seen a dog tear apart a toy and this stuffing came out and you want to take your stuffing and you just want to start putting it in that little pocket the opening you want to use that opening to fill your guy your creature with stuffing before you sew it closed because once you sew it closed there's not going to be a way to get that stuffing in so this is always where you can decide how fluffy you want your creature to be if you want an extra fluffy you could put extra stuffing in there if you like medium fluff it's totally up to you whatever you think would add to the personality of your monster creature unicorn dragon whatever you decided to make let me see if I can get some extra stuffing in here so once you have your stuffing pretty much in place you'll notice that the top and the bottom start to gap apart that's because there's stuffing right in there and you still need them to lay flat so that you can sew closed so what you're going to do is line those edges up and take your straight pin and push it all the way through again use that straight pin to hold those two pieces as close to together on the outside lines as you can it's tricky the more stuffing you put in there so if you find that you need to take some stuffing out to get your two edges to line up go ahead and do that but if you can get it let's tuck that knot on the inside if you can get it to shut go ahead and pin your front to your back and then we just need to finish doing the running stitch along that last little edge of our monster and he's all done so we need to get a new piece of thread to finish and you guys are probably pros at threading your needle by now you want to get your thread there's a little bit stuffing everywhere in that jump rope shape smush the fibers in one end of the thread together so that you can pull it through the needle leave yourself a little tail from the other tail the other end of the loop and do tail end of the yarn to the needle nose to nose hold that tail in with your right hand wrap once twice three times four times and slide that knot all the way to the end so there's my knot and I am ready to finish sewing my monster shut so I'm going to try to tuck this knot on the inside again so just going to go through one piece of fabric and then kind of tuck tuck that little knot in there sometimes they're tricky to hide you can always push it in after the fact or you might need to move that push pin just a little bit to get the knot to hide on the inside and again it's not a big deal and then you can start your running stitch so that up down up down to close your guy up and as you get near the pins you're going to need to pull them out and kind of pinch that fabric together let's tuck that knot in a little bit more pinch that fabric together with your fingers closing closing your monster is all or your creature it's always the trickiest part but it's also the most exciting part because you are almost finished with your amazing creature so get that running stitch going again and I'm just going around the last bit of opening for my creature see how he got kind of caught on that tooth there I'm just going to untangle it gently and I'm coming up this side I might pull this pin out so you'll notice that the straight lines and edges once you get going with your running stitch pattern you're up down up down they go pretty smoothly and pretty quickly but if you choose a pattern with lots of spikes or turns or corners and that's where it can be that's where it can take a little more patience and a little more time to finish your guy the way that you want to my daughter Lucy she is designing her creature this is the template that she chose I think he looks like a rockin dude but when she gets up to this part it is going to take more patience so just think about that you could also think about remember how I did some stitches here but left this part open you could stitch straight across in an arch across the top and leave these little triangles flapping in the wind by KR which would be cute anyway I love this little guy that Lucy put together um so let's see I'm on the back side of my work so I need to do an up stitch I'm getting close to the finish and you'll notice there are these little bits of fiberfill that stick out and that's okay we'll get rid of those once our creature is all the way done take that pin out and our guy is our girl or it who knows what this creature is almost done and as you start to finish um at least the sewing part you might start to imagine what your creature sounds like if it talks at all if it lives with a bunch of other creatures like itself or if it lives alone what kinds of things your creature eats what kinds of things eat your creature and maybe if that adaptation helps it to avoid being eaten or to catch catch food I'm thinking with this guy with his mustache hands that feed his mouth he would be a really good hunter and these flaps would help him to catch food oh I'm almost all the way done so when you get right up here to where you started you're again gonna wanna I'm gonna go through you're gonna want to sew back in through one layer of fabric one layer of felt get a little tricky at the end you want to just sew back through one layer and you want to make a loop by going into one stitch let's see if I can open my loop up so you can see it there's a little there's a little loop there I went through one of the inside stitches and made that loop go through the loop and tie the knot and then what I like to do is just take my needle and I push it in to the middle of my creature so the needle is in between the top and the bottom and I just poke it out somewhere pull it through and that pulls your thread so that it's inside your monster and wherever your thread comes out you just kind of gently push down on your creature and you snip and now that thread is hidden so there I'm going to pull off these extra little fluffy bits of fiberfill I've done the sewing for my creature my running stitch is going all the way around you can kind of reposition let me see what's to show her guy you can reposition your filling on the inside and now you can do what Lucy did at the beginning you could do that on your creature you could take glue glue on the eyeballs where you want them you could take a sharpie marker and add details like I might add the line of the mouth here where the teeth are you might add that and then I think in my original drawing let's see I had some little nostrils some little nose bits there and I used a sharpie because it's permanent and it won't rub off the fabric if you have fabric markers you could do that too you just can't use your regular like coloring markers washable markers so there it is there is my creature my last step is to glue these little eyes on in place I think instead of doing two on each I'm just going to do like one on the top part of that peanut one at the bottom part of this peanut and you just again use Elmer's glue or hot glue if you have it they work the same just hot glue will dry faster and I have finished inventing my magical creature what do you guys think maybe come up with a good name for this one like flipper tea maybe this is a flipper tea or what what does we think moustache moustachio moustachio man all right guys keep selling I can't wait to see your creatures the last step is to write a story about your creature explaining its magical power or its adaptation oh it's mrs brown with the borysville public library and I hope you are having a fantastic summer that you're creating memories and sharing some special times with your family and that you're going outdoors and creating some grand adventures and of course I hope that you're reading this summer and the beauty of summer is that you get to pick whatever you want to read so whatever speaks to your interest you go right ahead and read that I hope that you enjoyed the instructional video from mrs leanna hawkins about the magical creatures doesn't that look like a lot of fun and I'm sure that you're really looking forward to creating your own magical creature what will your magical creature look like how will it be specially adapted to suit the environment in which it lives and remember snap a photo of your wonderful magical creature and send it to me at gale dot brown at the oor pl dot org I would love to see your creatures and I would also love to see the stories that you write about them and we will showcase those to the community so that they can see all of your creativity one of the magical creatures that I love most is a unicorn and this book is hysterical it's called unicorn thinks he's pretty great by bob shea and as you can see goat is looking a little disappointed and sad I don't think he feels that he can live up to the sparkly and magical nature of a unicorn so let's see what happens things are a lot different around here since that unicorn moved in I thought I was pretty cool when I rode my bike to school until that show off went flying by or the time I made marshmallow squares that almost came out right then at the big talent show I was dropping my signature dance moves when he steps up with some serious prancing and wins first prize that's not all oh it gets much much worse check out this great magic trick that I totally invented okay close your eyes keep them closed while your eyes were closed I pulled this quarter out from behind your ear nice right well when I get to school to try it out he's turning stuff into gold I can't follow that dopey unicorn thinks he's so great how can anyone be friends with that guy look at me hey hey I'm unicorn I think I'm so cool well this goat's not buying it great here he comes goat cheese pizza I'm a goat what goats have cheese unicorns don't have cheese may I try also good smeared on a tin can or sprinkled on some garbage these bad boys are cloven it means they're split at the end they let me stand on steep hills or climb to the tops of mountains don't be so hard on yourself just look at your fantastic horn that thing is not just for show all it's good for is pointing I can't play soccer headbutt and it's game over I bet those awesome horns are perfect for soccer I have an idea with your magic and my awesomeness we'd be an unstoppable team bam taste my cloven justic and you've been unicorned nice right I had a feeling we'd be friends love love love this book and you know what I love most about it yes I love all the sparkles and the fun colors the illustrations are hilarious love the characters but I really like that they realized that each of them has something special and together as friends they made a great team so I hope that you continue to read a lot of books this summer and that you enjoy this time with your family and just enjoy the sunshine and playing outdoors and I really look forward to seeing your magical creatures so remember to email them to me have a wonderful wonderful summer and I will see you soon goodbye


So I'm going to be going over our strategic roadmap today, and as I get started I want to give a little bit of context setting for where we're coming from. This year has been an incredible year of change for the Drupal Association. Besides hiring a CTO, we've been busy hiring an engineering team. We've been doing tons of infrastructure improvements. We've been removing lots and lots of technical debt from a website that is essentially a 13-year-old website that's, to our knowledge, the longest continuously running Drupal website. It's huge in its complexity. It's been upgraded in place every time, which there's very few Drupal websites that have done that. They usually do a migration path at some point. That's just really a huge amount of technical debt to work through, and also to understand because there's a lot of complexity there that we've had to get our team up to speed off. We've had a lot of quick wins that we've focused on. I'm going to go over a few of those. I'm going to talk a little bit about the user research study that we did starting back at DrupalCon Austin that went through the summer and kind of the outcome from it. Also the working group ideas, ideation, and prioritization process that we went through that helped us decide on the initiatives for this coming year. So first, growing a Drupal.org team, if you can believe it, October 2013 we had two staff, both were contract that were maintaining Drupal.org with the community. And that was it in terms of full-time effort on Drupal.org. All the other effort was completely volunteer driven. We hired a technology manager for the Drupal Association in October of last year. He also did some work on association.drupal.org and on the DrupalCon sites to help kind of support that. And then we started going fully into a hiring mode. Starting with an infrastructure lead, Rudy Gagar, and hiring in some technical support for Drupal.org. Liz has been key in actually responding to a lot of the support requests that come in on Drupal.org and helping make sure that we triage what's coming in and attack the right things. So then I started, my first day was actually the end of March. And as you can see, we very quickly ramped up the team. We now go to 11.5. That's 1.5 louder than 10, and yes, that is a reference to SpinalTab. So I want to really quickly reiterate the thanks to the supporting partners. Without these people, we don't have funds. These companies have all contributed at a very high level to make sure that Drupal as a product is successful. They've helped us buy the servers in hardware, obviously the dedicated engineering team. They're helping us increase Drupal adoption through marketing Drupal. And they're just making a lot happen for the community. So again, thank you. I want to talk a little bit about some of those wins that this team that we've been building have been able to accomplish. And this is while getting used to the new environment, while learning about the system. We've launched a CDN. So we now deliver from the edge all around the world. We've launched APIs. We have a Rust API that's available for Drupal.org at this point. If you're interested, please check it out. We launched semantic versioning and removed some other Drupal 8 release blockers, which was really critical to getting a Drupal 8 beta out the door. We've been doing a lot of work to improve our quest to reduce spam on Drupal.org and the subsites. I know that sounds like not a very glamorous thing, but it's actually something that's really important to making sure that Drupal.org stays very stable. It's also not something that's very glamorous. So it doesn't tend to be something that volunteers are going to jump in and like dig into the deeper aspects of. So it's been really important to have paid staff to jump in and take on those tasks that really, it's hard to jump in as a volunteer and do it a few hours a week. It's something where you need to have kind of dedicated people that are focused on it at all times. We've also been doing some cool things in terms of trying to improve the new user experience. We've done some bakery customizations.  We've been increasing our use of mollum on some of our subsites, which has allowed us to do a little bit better job of spam detection on, say, like a Drupal.con site or sites like the association.drupal.org. And we're really changing the steps behind what it means to trust a user. And part of that is I'm going to go into it in a little bit more detail whenever I talk about our account creation initiative. So some other big wins that we've had, we've launched a lot of sites. Drupal.con Austin, Drupal.con Amsterdam, Drupal Jobs. For those of you who aren't familiar with that, we now have a job board that is available to the community. So if you're an employer looking for someone to hire or if you're looking to be hired, please go to Drupal Jobs, give it a look. We've launched Drupal.con Latin America. We have a Drupal store that is now available so that you can buy Drupal gear online. We've upgraded quite a few sites, too. API.drupal.org is on Drupal 7 now. Localize.drupal.org we're in the process of. And groups.drupal.org we're in the planning stages with. And I'll talk about that in a little bit more detail as well. Some of the other wins is we've really worked to become more enterprise in the way that we support Drupal. And particularly Drupal.org. We've done a really good job of documenting what we have, which really, there wasn't a comprehensive list of, this is the sites that make up the Drupal ecosystem. We've enabled change notifications within the team. So we're actually sending out a weekly notification on Thursdays around noon Pacific, where we basically tell everybody what we're planning to change the following week. And that's been really important to making Drupal.org more stable, making sure that people know what's coming next. On our team we've introduced an agile project management process. We're using a kind of a combination of Scrum and Kanban for the different teams to make sure that we are addressing what we need to address and also being very iterative in our approach to building Drupal.org. As part of that, we've introduced a product planning and lifecycle. It's really about looking at all the sub-sites of Drupal.org and figuring out where they're at in their lifecycle. Are they something that is just being introduced? Are they growing? Are they mature? Are they something that we actually need to start looking at retiring? And that's been really important because there's actually a lot to the Drupal ecosystem for us to keep track of. We started tracking time, which I know sounds like a small thing, but it allows us to do a better job of reporting back to the community where we're spending our time. We just started that in the October timeframe. And we've really tried to improve the way we support Drupal.org. There's less open issues. Answers to those issues are happening more quickly. We've also opened up two new channels for support. If you don't have a Drupal.org account so you can't submit to the issue queues, or if you're having a problem logging into your Drupal.org account, you can email help at Drupal.org. And that goes through our Zendesk account. We are also responding to support requests on Twitter. So it's really kind of changed the way that we're able to be responsive to the Drupal community. When I talked about that inventory of here's everything that exists in the Drupal world, we've really tried to break down here are all the sites that we're supporting. And as you can see, the Drupal ecosystem, all the sub-sites that make up Drupal.org is pretty extensive. If you look at the, in addition to that, if you look at the community supported things, so these are things that the team don't directly touch, but are built off of the systems that run in the Drupal.org ecosphere. We have to be really careful when we make changes, we could be affecting something that is downstream. And so we want to be aware of that. And we also want to give notifications of that. So we've worked hard to make sure that we know what we have and also how it might affect others. So I want to go a little bit into the user research that we started in the June timeframe with DrupalCon Austin. We had Whitney Hesse come in as a consultant and she worked with us, the content working group, the software working group, and the infrastructure working group. We did some onsite workshops to kind of talk through what is it that we want to do with Drupal.org? What are the objectives for Drupal.org? We conducted over 30 user interviews, many of them were in person at DrupalCon Austin. Part of them were remote over Google Hangouts or conference calls in the following weeks. The participants included people who were kind of all over the spectrum. We're working right now on actually pulling together some survey information that we're going to be including in the early next year. And we hope to get a little bit more comprehensive global input because we definitely got North America, South America, and Europe covered. We would love to get some more input from our users in Asia and our users in Africa because we think that there's that global impact of Drupal is huge. Out of that user research, we really came to an approach looking at personas that says that the primary persona, the way people come to Drupal.org, is in a state of increasing skills. So you come into Drupal.org as a newcomer. You progress to a learner. You progress from there to skilled. And at this point, you're usually making some of your income off of Drupal. You then can progress to expert or master. And as you can see by the pyramid, basically, there's a larger number of newcomers. And it increasingly or decreasingly represents the number of users in our community as you get closer and closer to the top. So there's much fewer masters than there are newcomers to Drupal. Some of the key things that we're going to be focusing on are that kind of learner, skilled, and expert. These are the 3% that we have published on Drupal.org. Learners really are trying to get through the website. And it's easy to go from newcomer to learner, but it's much harder to go from learner to skilled. Because learners are coming into Drupal.org with very little language to help them describe their experience. We have a lot of jargon. We have a lot of new terms that they have to pick up on whenever they start using Drupal. At Skilled, they're really getting to the point that they can do a lot with Drupal. One of the biggest pain points for skilled users is that frustration of finding a module. So they're trying to find the right thing to help them build a solution for their customer or for their organization. And that's an area where they can do a lot, but they definitely have some pain points that are directly around that. How do I build what's next? When you get to the level of experts, this is where we start seeing a lot of code contribution. And they really understand the Drupal system well. They can build modules. They can contribute. Many of the experts are in that space where they're beginning to look at contributing to core. And we really wanna support that effort by the expert. If we were looking at the most important transition on Drupal.org, it's that transition from learner to skilled, because if we can grow learners into skilled Drupal users, we're increasing the size and impact of the Drupal community. And we see that as one of the key areas to focus on. I think whenever you look at the initiatives that we have, that's the area that we've really spent the most effort with. We're certainly doing things for experts and masters. We're certainly adding content for newcomers. But in terms of features on Drupal.org, we're gonna be focused on moving people from learner to skilled. Josh, I have a question really quick. Sure. Is localized Drupal.org supported by the Drupal Association? I'll go into that in a little bit more detail a little bit later on. But the short answer is we host it. We certainly push the code to it. So whenever there's a code deployment, that goes through our team. But most of the work is actually at this point done by volunteers in the community. And one of my asks today is going to be getting in contact with the people who are a part of the localized project because they need some help in doing the upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 and removing some blockers there. And it localizes critical to the eventual Drupal 8 release because localizes how we translate Drupal into other languages so that people can use Drupal in their native language. Perfect. I think that answered the question. Thank you. Excellent. So one of the reasons why we're building for learners is we don't really need to build for masters. We don't need to build from the top of the pyramid because they already know how to work around all the issues on Drupal.org. And when I say issues, I don't mean issues in the issue queue. I mean issues as in all the little problems on Drupal.org that we've all gotten used to over the years. We're certainly gonna be getting rid of those. But whenever we're looking at the biggest bang for our buckets, definitely helping that learner become skilled. We are going to have newcomer content that is focused on kind of the marketing of Drupal. This is gonna be for the people in the organization that can make the decision to move to Drupal, whether that be the CEO or the developer or the designer that's saying, hey, this is the direction we should go. We should move to open source because it's the right thing to do. And so when we work for newcomers, when we build things for newcomers, it's usually gonna be from a marketing bent and it's gonna be giving them the tools to convince others that Drupal is the right way to go. So all of that user research had to be turned into a plan. And this is where I'm really gonna go into kind of the details of how we made the decisions of what comes next. So first of all, we have the working groups. For those of you who are not familiar with the working group structure, we have working groups that are focused on Drupal.org. And those are the Drupal.org content working group, the Drupal.org software working group, and the Drupal.org infrastructure working group. Each of these working groups are a mixture of volunteers and staff that are focused on helping decide the future of Drupal.org. They're collecting all the information from the community and they're processing that and they're turning it into something that's actionable for the team to execute on. We've done ideation, particularly with the software working group for several years now. We've come back with a lot of themes year over year that were pretty much the same. The same features were being requested year after year. And really what we were seeing is that it was difficult to get volunteers to jump in and tackle these really meaty problems that we're going to take weeks of implementation because whenever you're donating time to Drupal.org, you just don't have months to give. You have 10 hours here or maybe two weeks there, but it's not a sustained six month effort. So we knew we were going to have to bring in either contractors or staff to do some of this work. And the working groups were aware of that. It was really about getting that next step going where we had someone to help coordinate that. And that's why building up the engineering team has been so critical. Out of the working groups, we really came up with this notion that there are three major objectives for Drupal.org. And this came out of a lot of the Austin user research workshop work that we did and then some honing that we did in the July timeframe. But the three objectives, which are all ranked number one on this slide, that's a, I just caught a typo. So I'm very happy about that. Be the home of the Drupal community. Actually, these all should be ranked number one. Be the home of the Drupal community. The central source of relevant information, answers, collaboration, education, and talent. So really being where the community comes to do all of those things. We want to provide a learnable efficient tool set that helps coordinate the advancement of the Drupal ecosystem. So making it easy to jump in and use Drupal, making it easy to jump in and contribute to Drupal. That's one of the big areas there. We also want to encourage people to develop themselves. Their Drupal proficiency, their careers, and build human connections over time. And I think this one really ties into a lot of the profile work I'll be talking about in just a few minutes. So when we looked at all the long list of things that we could do, we really had to spend some time prioritizing our efforts. There are over 16 production Drupal websites in that Drupal.org ecosystem. There's nearly as many production services that are integrated between those sites. Things like search, updates.drupal.org, our FTP subsystem, like all of those things contribute to that larger ecosystem of sites and are all services that the community are using. Between all those systems, we push over 20 terabytes of data per month through Drupal.org. And that's a really phenomenal number to think about. 20 terabytes, that's how much collaboration and community is happening in that space. And that's pretty significant. It also costs a bit of money and that's where, again, having the Drupal Association be able to pay those bills thanks to the support of sponsors and members, that's been one of the key bits that we've had, those supporting partners are critical. With so many things to work on, it's easy for us to lose focus on a particular set of things that need our attention. And this is where the prioritizing the efforts, it's not saying that we're not going to take care of the support things that pop up that are critical to keeping the site running. But we are going to say, here are the initiatives that this team can focus on and that's what we're gonna stay focused on. Because if we try to do everything, we won't do anything as well as we need to. And that was a real, we heard that time and again, as we were going through the prioritization process from folks, they were like, this is so good to be able to say, these are the things we're gonna focus on. And because we can't focus on everything, those volunteer teams that can jump in and help focus for a short time on something that maybe isn't in our wheelhouse right now, those are so critical because that still moves for those areas. Having the 11.5 staff helps, but it's the volunteers that are going to get those smaller initiatives, those community initiatives moving forward. And working groups, one of the big things that we've said over and over is they're helping us keep the focus. They're helping us stay focused on the things that we said we were going to do and keeping us accountable. So first we prioritized by objectives. And next we prioritized by the persona and revenue. And you're seeing kind of a little bit of a chart up there where we started scoring all the various projects across our objectives. And this is a tool we've been using that's been really, really helpful. It's a tool to get to consensus where consensus is hard to get to. And out of that with the software working group, the software working group took requests from the content working group, from the infrastructure working group, from our tools teams that have been set up that report to the software working group. Also from the documentation, the documentation working group, the technology working group, which are working groups that report directly up to Drees as a part of that governance structure. Took requests from all of them and then we prioritized them across our matrix. And we really came up with a top 10 list that looks something like this. But we weren't done yet. Because what we realized is as we went through the user research and the personas, we ended up with a little bit of a different spin on here's a set of prioritization to focus on. There was a lot of overlap between the two though and that was something exciting to see because it meant that essentially the same things were important to most people. After we got done looking at that overlap, it allowed us to take and basically break all of our work down into four areas that we were going to focus on. We have things that will help us continue to fund Drupal.org. We have sustaining support and maintenance. We have community initiatives and then we have board and working group priorities. And so by having those four areas that we're going to kind of outline here are the projects that we can actually tackle on those areas. So in terms of funding more great work, we're gonna spend some time continuing to improve Drupal jobs. We're doing work to make sure that the supporting partners benefits that we offer are the best that they possibly can be so that our supporting partners continue to give at that level. We're gonna be doing work on the DrupalCon websites because it's critical for us to have that big community gathering several times a year. And that's work that we have to do to make sure that that happens. We're gonna spend a little bit of time on Drupal Store but we've actually made the choice to keep that as simple as possible so that it just provides the gear that people wanna be able to pick up that says Drupal on it so that they can help support Drupal but we're not gonna be spending a lot of time building a store because that's not our key focus at the moment. We also have an opportunity going forward to do more with advertising and marketing on Drupal.org to make sure that we're basically making it a self-sustaining system. Long term, we wanna make sure that Drupal.org is healthy and well-funded and one of the ways that we can do that is by diversifying where the funds come from. So we spend a little bit of time on funding Drupal.org and then the next area which is a much bigger chunk of our time is the sustaining support and maintenance. Now this is how we keep Drupal.org performant and secure. We're all about making sure that our uptime is great, that page response is great. We're supporting the old test spots infrastructure so every time there's a major sprint at a big Drupal event, we're spinning up more test spots so it can handle the load. We're doing support for our users which I talked about a little bit earlier with Liz jumping in the queues and Tatiana and Neil and others being able to respond to the issue queues and email support more quickly. We've improved our automated testing infrastructure so we now have a lot of behavior-driven design, a behavior-driven design approach for using Behat, we're using Mink to make sure that we have reliable deployment processes. We've also been doing a lot to maximize hardware. I'm very excited that we have some new database servers that are gonna be coming online soon that should give us this huge performance boost in the area of database performance. Very beastly machines that we're installing over at the open source labs in Corvallis as a part of our infrastructure to make sure that it's as performant as it can be. Part of the sustaining support maintenance is really about that infrastructure, that baseline that we put everything on because whether it's being used by our own staff or by volunteers who are jumping in to contribute to development, that work is kind of critical to keeping us moving forward. The next area that I wanna talk a little bit about is community initiatives and these are areas where we're not going to focus staff but we will support with staff if we can find community members who will jump in and help out. We have a great team working on localize.drupal.org. They're moving it forward in a really positive way. People like Gabor and Sebastian who are jumping in and making sure that localize.drupal.org is getting ready for an upgrade to Drupal 7 that it has all the blockers out of the way from Drupal 8 standpoint so that we know that we've got the ability to localize Drupal 8. We also have some great support in test bots. We've got a team that are looking at next generation test bots right now. I just got an update on it yesterday. It's so exciting the work that they're doing. Really getting that test bot infrastructure to a repeatable process so that Drupal code can be tested whenever it's submitted on Drupal.org. They're doing such a great job on that. My team doesn't have to spend a lot of time focusing on it but we're there so that whenever it gets ready to start being implemented we can jump in and spin up the servers and do that infrastructure support at that level. So that's been, those are two really good examples where the community initiative is just taking and running with it. Another good example is the two factor authentication. There's several people from the security working group that are working on this right now. That team is looking at two factor authentication for Drupal.org trying to make it more secure for particularly administrative users of Drupal.org because the level of access that they have, we wanna make sure that it's as secure as possible. Some areas where we don't necessarily have someone in the community running the initiative just yet is around QA and support system. That came up in our user research. That came up in our software working group prioritization. The issue that we run into there is we don't have a great way forward with it so we would love to get some community involvement. Some people who would be willing to kind of lead that initiative and run with it. So a QA and support system, if that's something that you believe really strongly that Drupal.org should provide, please contact me. I would love to get you connected with the working groups and get that initiative started at this point. And an initiative that we'll start up at a later time is the reviews and ratings for projects. As you'll see in our initiatives that the staff has focused on, we really wanna improve search of projects. And at some point we're going to have a rating system that are maybe a huge community to wish to rate and calculate where a project should rank.  We're definitely looking to set the program right now to get some people who volunteer for that. So I'm gonna go into a little bit of detail about the things that the engineering team that we've built up is going to be focused on over the next few months. These seven initiatives are the ones that we will spend the majority of our time on and really focus on. And more about this can be found on Drupal.org slash roadmap. I'm gonna mention that URL several more times because it's really where I want people to go to keep track of the initiatives that we're working on and so that they can also get involved in commenting on the issues and helping those issues move forward towards completion as quickly as possible. So let me dive into each of these in a little bit more detail. First of all, better account creation and login. So it's never a priority to have great login until it breaks and an example of login and account creation breaking is when you get overwhelmed by spam. Back in July, we had a pretty significant spammer attack. The team jumped in, we figured out some solutions. We got rid of the spam that was showing up. I believe the July one was related to association.drupal.org. We were able to get the spam off of there. The content wasn't there anymore. We thought we had it under control and then in September, we saw it happen again and this time it was associated with a Drupal consite. And the reality is, in neither case, was it a case where there was oversight where we failed to look for something. It was a case where it was just something that had never really been tackled comprehensively as a part of a Drupal.org process. So as we were doing Drupal jobs and we knew we needed to be able to launch it with a really solid workflow that would prevent spam, we started looking at this better account creation and log in process and this workflow flow that we're looking at establishing is gonna make it a lot easier on newcomers who are coming to the site and learners who are maybe just getting started with Drupal. We don't want spammers to love us. We want spammers to hate how hard it is to create content on Drupal.org. And we want users, real people that we trust to love how easy it is to create content on Drupal.org. And that's a process that's important, but more importantly is that we start engaging users and this user engagement workflow that we're gonna be putting together is really gonna be about getting people who have signed up for an account at some point, getting them information about Drupal on a regular basis and also making it really easy to move to the next stage where they're contributing content, maybe commenting on issues, maybe contributing their first code and then rewarding them for that process. We think this is really important to improving Drupal.org. It's also a key area for us to approach from a security standpoint because if it's easy for a spammer to create an account, it's easy for anybody that we might not want to have an account to jump in and create Havoc. So this user engagement process is gonna allow us to identify the people that are potential contributors and really help engage them and move them up that path. A little bit is organization and user profile improvements. I wanna give a little shout out to Danny Ordon and actually the screenshots that you see here where we've got some comps are based on Danny's work and then they were tweaked a little bit for the DrupalCon Amsterdam presentation. They were given a little bit of a kind of combined UI by Kevin O'Leary. And the thing that you'll see in all of these is that we really are moving towards giving better credit to contributors in our community. These are some of the things that we heard in user research. We heard that we wanted to know what contributor, what contributor knows about a particular area. Where is their expertise? We don't wanna know how long they've been around. We wanna know how connected they are with other members of the community. We wanna show the community our own skills and expertise on our profiles. And we want to show the community too when they can trust an answer that is being provided as a part of an issue queue or when they can trust a code that is being submitted as a part of an issue queue. And one of the ways that you get to that trust is by showing people the history of things that you've done well. And this really ties to the idea of improving these profiles both for users and the organizations that they belong to so that we can give them the proper credit about how they're helping to grow Drupal and make it move forward. This is a slide that kind of shows a sample company. A little shout out to Lullabot here. They're one of our supporting partners and they're also a great company to work with. They have a lot to offer. A lot of our companies that are involved in Drupal have a lot to offer. And we don't do a really good job of highlighting those contributions. So what we'd like to get to is the idea that we have some shared iconography that shows the things that they're involved in that gives them point totals. We're kind of building on the idea that there's a lot of different ways to contribute whether that be through providing training or whether that be through providing funds directly to the Drupal Association to help fund Drupal.org hosting and staff that are working. Whether that be contributing code, all of those are valid contributions that we want to bubble up in these organization profiles. We also want to bubble those up in the user profiles. And in fact, the user profiles, this is the key area that makes an open source project successful. It shows the things that they've done to make the community grow. And whether that's code contribution or in the case of Danny, like an example is she's done a lot of UX and design contribution and we want to be able to highlight that as a valuable thing as well. And so we're excited about some of these changes. These may not be the exact way that these pages will lay out in the end, but it's a little bit of an idea of what we want to move towards. Organizations are key to our growth. Individuals that power the big organizations that are in the small organizations that represent the Drupal community, they're the ones that are helping us move Drupal core forward and they're the ones who are giving us contributed modules that are key to building solutions on Drupal. So we really want to highlight that. And what we're looking at is ways to tie organizations and their users to each other and allowing a user to contribute, a maintainer to give credit to that contribution and for the user giving the contribution to be able to give credit to the organizations. So it kind of ties together that web of the three touch points that represent a major contribution. Another initiative for this coming year is gonna be responsive redesign of Drupal.org. Now there's two parts to this. One area is the work that was done at Zegged and the Dev Days and also more recently the QAN testing that occurred at Bad Camp and that was all around the responsive blue cheese theme that is being used on Drupal.org is the main theme. We are really close. We have a code review process that we're going through right now. We're hoping to be able to launch that by the end of the year and we will have initially responsive version of Drupal.org. We're very excited about this. The ability to get to this great content on mobile devices, on tablets. That's step one and then step two is a more comprehensive redesign that is being led by the Drupal.org content working group. It started with the user research where we got our user personas. We're in the process right now of finalizing a content strategy selection. We're selecting a vendor to help us with that process and they're gonna be helping us with the content strategy really figuring out what content types we're missing on Drupal.org and also an improvement of the information architecture because I'm sure all of you out there have at one time or another had that moment where you're like I know I've seen it on Drupal but I don't know how to find it. I'm just gonna go search in Google. There's just not a good path to get to certain content on Drupal.org and we wanna improve that with an overall information architecture overhaul. And we're gonna be working on with the content working group is establishing a design library and a design system that is a pattern that can be used across all the Drupal.org sites and that set of patterns will really make it easier to use Drupal.org and we see that as a key area that we need to improve in the coming months. Responsive also because we live in a community that frankly we need to go bigger as well as go smaller because a lot of our developers are sitting there with two maybe three monitors they're doing their work. When they're in the issue queues we need to give them full advantage of the real estate but maybe when they're on a mobile device and they're looking for just enough information there we give them a little bit different experience. So we need to be responsive across the spectrum the really big screens all the way down to the really small screens and we see that as kind of a huge next step and where we take the responsive redesign. Another one that is out there that has actually seen a lot of traction since DrupalCon Amsterdam is the work that we wanna do towards the get an issue workflow. It's a concept called issue workspaces. Ryan Aslet from our team did a great presentation remotely to DrupalCon Amsterdam with some key contributors in this area and there was a lot of excited response to it. So I'm gonna go into it in a little bit more detail so folks can get a sense of what it is and see if they wanna jump into the conversation and help contribute. A lot of people have compared our get situation right now to this epic battle with GitHub and I don't really see it that way but just for fun we had Lee who's on our marketing team she's our content writer. She has OctoKitty and DrupalCon fighting with lightsabers on a cloud and I think that sums up our get an issue workflow needs is that we need to battle this out with lightsabers. Not really. The conversation though has always fallen back to this idea of we need pull requests or we need to fix get or we just need to migrate and none of that is particularly simple. Many of the contributors on Drupal.org don't feel that pull requests is implemented on GitHub would work for the current workflow that we have in the issue queues. They recognize that a better workflow would help build proficiency in new contributors and they all recognize that it works kinda but it could be a whole lot better. Our options, our status quo it's not really an option. Moving to GitHub, switching to a new internal software tool or we could modernize the Drupal.org workflow and we've heard this over and over again and there's if you go to Drupal.org slash roadmap we've actually linked to some of these conversations that have happened before. They're great conversations. They all kind of get to this stuck point of yeah, but and I think we found a way that allows us to get past that. We have to integrate with GitHub at some point but just migrating to GitHub would be a huge project. User accounts right now would not be compatible. They wouldn't directly tie between the two. The workflow change would also slow down Drupal 8 development which is something that none of us wanna see happen. So we need to look at figuring out ways to do the integrations directly with Drupal.org and one of the big bits that we have on Drupal.org that a lot of other open source projects don't have that's kind of our secret sauce is we have the canonical repositories for all of our modules and themes on Drupal.org and we provide updates.drupal.org which allows every Drupal site to kind of call home and see if there's a new version available and that particular feature is kind of our secret sauce that makes Drupal really successful. There's many other ingredients to that secret sauce but that's one of the key ingredients that I think makes Drupal.org particularly successful. We can do an improvement. We can fundamentally change the way our issue queues work now that we have a dedicated team to spend some time implementing this. The approach that we are suggesting that we've done a lot of work and research around is a concept called issue workspaces. It uses a new feature that's gonna require us to upgrade our version of get to a little bit newer version that has a new feature called get namespaces. Get namespaces are very similar to the idea of per issue repositories and it's gonna allow us to do issue queues that have kind of full get integration. So right now our patch process relies on someone going through a get process outside of our issue queues to create a patch file. They then upload that patch file to the issue queues and then a maintainer can download that patch file and apply it to their get branch and work from there. We'd really like to simplify that whole process so that maintainers and contributors are working from get to get rather than working from get to patch to get. And to do that we're gonna have to make some changes to the issue queues that allow that integration to happen but once we do it's gonna open up a lot of possibilities such as inline editing and other great features that I think is gonna increase the total number of potential contributors to Drupal.org. So we're very excited about this. We're doing the kind of preliminary study on what tweaks and upgrades we need to do to get the blockers out of the way so that we can begin full force work on this area. A couple of big bonuses to this approach is it's not gonna break the current patch process. We can basically create a commit on the backside whenever somebody uploads a patch. And that means that people who have a workflow that they're very familiar with and that's how they've contributed for years. We don't have to change that. But what it does do is it allows us to give better tools for particularly people who don't want to use that old process or who are used to the simpler processes of like say the GitHub process or running their own private repositories. It's also more easily integrated with our user and organization credits that we wanna implement. So when we were talking about the profiles and be able to say that a contributor gave something we'll have that integrated into the issue queues so that we're storing that real time and we're able to give that credit pretty much real time as soon as the maintainer says yes, this was helpful we can pass that back to that person's user profile and we can pass that on to an organization profile and let it change those metrics that we're using to display how much and how frequently someone is involved in the community. A little example of what this might look like is you basically trigger the creation of an issue workspace. Someone might see some text cleanup they wanna do they can do it with an inline edit that person then pulls it back into what they were working on. They kind of work through going back and forth. You guys didn't need to see my calendar, apologies. Going back and forth with other people who are going to help out with this particular project. Maybe code gets committed in that doesn't get accepted. Maybe some additional inline edits are made but when it gets down to the end we wanna make it so that basically that maintainer can push a button and it brings in that contribution with the whole chain of credits to the people that were involved and then commits it into the branch that was involved. This is a real life example of a progression instead of it being get polls and rebasing head and that sort of thing this was all done with patch files but this example shows a workflow that could work that would move us towards something that could be done directly in the get space which we think will kind of accelerate the process at which developers can work. It'll make it a lot more efficient. It also makes it a lot cleaner and easier on maintainers to pull things in whenever they see that it's ready to go. It's worth noting that every time one of these things has a commit to that issue workspace we're also running that commit against test bots getting back results on that as appropriate so that we can see oh yeah this doesn't break or cause regressions to the code that's being contributed. So it's a really exciting way to approach what has been the great get problem up till now. One of our other initiatives is gonna be making Drupal.org search more usable and related to that and it's one of the other initiatives on the list is improving the tools to find and select projects. So we've heard in user research that people really want to find the information quick. They wanna see what modules may be available to build a particular feature. They wanna figure out if the module is worth using. Is it maintained? Is it going through, has it been abandoned? Is one of the things that people would love to be able to see as it relates to modules? We need to be able to show that information more readily on Drupal.org. And it's not rocket surgery. We can do this. We can do a better solar settings or maybe look at some alternative search engine systems like Elasta search. We can do search displays that show just what you need and really kind of hone in on just the right information at just the right time so that Drupal.org search is usable as opposed to always having to go to Google. We can add facets that are a little bit more contextual that are more performant than the filters that we have on the module search pages right now. We can also make organizations and users searchable. And I think this is something that people have been dying to have for a long time, because maybe you know somebody's Drupal.org username, but you cannot track them down on Drupal.org because there's no great way to search for a user unless you know the hidden search page. And that's something I think we can really make better. It ties into all the other initiatives that we're working on in terms of making it easier to contribute, making it easier to see who's contributed and making it easier to select the right stuff to build the project that you need. Around selecting projects, one of the things we've heard over and over again is that notion of ratings. And while we have not gotten to the point that we can say definitively, we haven't had enough community input to say definitively where it's whether it's five star or whether it's just flag favorite modules. There are ways for us to go through and rate our database and really help bubble up information about which modules are the right module for your purpose. Right now, we do sort modules whenever you get the search results on the module search page or on the theme search page. We sort them by, are they the most used? So if they've been calling back to updates.drupal.org, we rank them accordingly. But there's so much more information that might be valuable and that's not particularly useful for like maybe edge cases where it's not as frequently used case for a Drupal site, but it's certainly something that Drupal does really well and we don't bubble up the information that needs to be there. Good example is there are way more sites that use Drupal as a publishing system than sites that use Drupal as a commerce system but Drupal is an excellent commerce system. So being able to bubble up the modules that are actually being really well maintained, if somebody does a search that's tied to a commerce related term and being able to show that so that people can select the right module, that's a key thing that we can do with Drupal.org. There's been initiatives about this before. There was the Prairie Initiative. We've got improved project pages out of that and the project listings are a little bit better as well. There was the Projects Quality Initiative and there's some things that we have the data now from these previous initiatives that are being pulled into some of the project pages. We just aren't necessarily using it as a part of our search results. And there was also an initiative about highlighting projects that follow best practices.  We have examples of issues and conversations that have gone back to Drupal.org version four where people have been asking for those sorts of things but we haven't had the people to jump in and knock out these fairly significant engineering tasks. And now we have a staff to jump in and do this and so we're really excited to tackle this in the coming months. Another area where we're gonna have initiative is a upgrade of groups.drupal.org. It's still on Drupal 6. And this is one of the tools that is used by the community to find events, to join local user groups. It's a way a lot of people communicate around initiatives and ideas without really creating an issue to start that process. It gets a lot less traffic than Drupal.org in terms of total traffic. But if we upgrade it and we improve it, we can actually make it kind of a hub for some of the ongoing work in the community. And that's something that we see as being critical. We still need to decide a path for the migration. We're working right now to set up some times for meetings with maintainers and community to figure out what path for migration is gonna be best. And we also, while we're doing that migration, we're gonna take the opportunity to make it much more integrated with Drupal.org. So if you've gone to a DrupalCon and we know that because it's on your Drupal.org profile, we can pass that information onto your groups.drupal.org profile and maybe deliver information to you that is contextual because of that. If we know that you are a member of the Drupal Association, we can pass that on to your Drupal.org profile. If we know you've contributed to the following modules, we can pass that on to your groups.drupal.org profile or link back to your Drupal.org profile as appropriate so that people can see, oh, this person, they have a lot of clout and a lot of respect because they've done all of these great contributions. So maybe that lends credence to the words that they're saying over in the groups.drupal.org space. So being able to tie together that information about contribution, about credit, about commitment to the community and tying all that in between groups.drupal.org and drupal.org. So obviously this is a huge list of things. I've gone over a lot but if you want to go into a little bit more detail on all of these, you can go to drupal.org slash roadmap. This will link you to each of the initiatives. We have an issue tag that we're applying to issues that are tied to an initiative. You can go in there, begin looking at the initiatives, track on the issues that follow the issues that are of interest to you. Please join in and help contribute to this because we need the feedback. We need to know that we're going down the right path with some of these decisions. And we want to move as quickly as we can and the best way we can do that is by having people contribute in the issues right now. So I want to make a quick call out. I know that Lauren is going to talk about how there's a couple surveys coming to you. The 2014 Drupal Community Survey, which I believe is going to be available through the end of the year. If you get an opportunity, you're going to get the email if you attended this webcast. Please fill that out. That's really important information for us. It helps us rate how well we're doing with developers. It helps us make sure that we're building the right tools for you. It gives us a lot of great feedback about the state of the Drupal community. So please take a moment and fill out that survey. It's huge for us. And I also want to do one more shout out for the things that are coming up. We've got DrupalCon Latin America. That's just around the bend in February. We've got the Global Training Days that are this weekend. So if you get an opportunity and you know somebody who needs to participate in the Global Training Days, please have them do so. And we're going to try to increase the number of webcasts related to Drupal.org in the coming months. So be on the lookout for Drupal.org webcasts, but we're also doing a lot of great community webcasts and a lot of webcasts that are focused on ways that companies and organizations that are using Drupal are doing it in really exciting and new ways. So please take a look at the webcast and see what's coming up next. Great, thanks, Josh. I have one quick question before we finish up. Okay. Will you be publishing lessons learned from enhancing Drupal.org that Drupal administrators can use? For example, enhanced account creation and login? Definitely. Everything that we do in that space, we tend to have issues created on Drupal.org that are kind of our community conversation going back and forth on what we're doing and how we're doing it. So there will definitely be information there. And then we're also working right now on our own documentation as it relates to what we have on Drupal.org and we've got a sub-site that we're setting up that's gonna have our change notifications and upcoming changes and also documentation of how things are configured and we're gonna be doing that on infrastructure.drupal.org in the coming year. So we're gonna have a sub-site that's basically dedicated to explaining how we've done what we've done. Some of that information is already on Drupal.org so it's definitely something that you can dig into, but as we are doing these new changes, we're definitely gonna be doing it out in the open in the public so that others can learn from it. Great, thanks so much. I think that is all of our questions that we have today. I just wanted to thank Josh so much for taking us through a really great experience and showing us what's gonna come down the pike for Drupal.org and all of the wonderful things that our tech team are doing in the office. So much appreciated. Obviously we can't do it without them and our volunteers. So thank you. Just as a last minute reminder, we encourage you to look into our organization and individual memberships. These also help fund our scholarships, grants and servers and you can find out more information at association.drupal.org slash membership and often there are promotions within that to sometimes get a free training or extra perks. So keep an eye out for that as well. Just as a reminder, additionally, there'll be a survey at the end of this webcast, just four or five questions about the actual webcast so we can improve the experience for everyone and also this will be recorded and sent out to you via email in a couple of days. So if you miss something or you know that someone wants to also listen in, we'll have that recorded for you as well. So thank you everyone for joining us and we hope we will hear from you on another webcast. Thanks Josh. Thanks Lauren.


What's up, y'all? It's your girl, Kenzie here from Layton Sports Cards, and I'm ripping a personal for Jeffrey H. We've got two 2023 Bowman baseball jumbo boxes. Alrighty, Jeff. Good luck. Here we go. Again, just a reminder, no paper. They shipped out of this. You'll get your chrome, your hips, and any numbered paper. We have a Drew Jones go on the Invicta! Wow. Wow. I'll bag that one, too. My goodness. I want a heater, y'all.  But then I saw it was thick, and Invictas usually aren't auto. And I was like, oh, kind of bummed. And then I turned it around. I was like, wait, it is an auto. That's awesome. Did you like the sound bit, Ramar? I was hoping you were still here. I played it for you. Hopefully it's working. I can't tell. Working it up. I love go. Just in case it's not. Spotlights. Got Lunar Glow first, Luis Rodriguez. Next auto up, we've got Guardian's Refractor, first of 499, of Diane Frias. Diane Frias. Adley, rookie of the year. Collier, chrome first. Got Blue Shimmer first of Justin Henry Molloy to 150. Braves. De La Cruz, Oscar Colas. Jose Ramos. Young, Drew Jones Prospects. Dustin Harris. We're looking for one more auto here. And it's going to be Angels, a Joe Stewart based first auto. Rahassel, Chloe Mayo. Spotlight for the Yankees, Roger Arias. We're in Annie Page's. Last pack, box one. Got Purple Border first of Jefferson Rojas to 199. All right, I'll do it for the first box. Number two here, Jeff. Let's see if we can top that, Drew Jones. Man, it's going to be hard. That was good. Here we go. Curtis Needmunoz, Holliday, top 100. We have for the Cubs. It's going to be Speckle to 299. Pedro Ramirez, Carlos Jorge on the way rave to 399. Two-in-a-minute. Gorman, Meja, Jordan Waller, Apollo Chrome, Priester. We've seen an auto yet, right? Yeah, that one. We've got Spotlight for the Mariners, Limzardo Montez, Loller. Lunar Glow first, Matt Mervis, Cubs, Adele Amador. Next auto, we've got for the Mariners, base first auto, Robert Perez, Jr. Miguel Vargas, Frickita, your favorites. Cross, Daniel Pierre. Warm Prospects, E. Rob Regas. We've got Sky Blue to 499. Jose Ramirez, Netto. Henderson Jackson, Holliday Prospects. Montez, Crom. We've got Fuchsia first of Jorge Ruiz, the 399. Or 199, sorry, Angels. Last auto, we have Angels. Blue, Crater to 150. Jorge Ruiz. Go with that Fuchsia, we just pulled Robert Hassel. Goumont, Rocker. Spotlight, Rookie, Corbin Carroll, D-Bucks. Stela Cruz, Prospects. Drew Jones-Crom first, Artega.  Grisham. Got Purples first, Hector Rodriguez to 250. Reds. Chica Berry. And Justin Foscue. Alrighty, congrats again, Jeff, on the Gold Invicta to 50. Drew Jones. Big hit there for you. We'll get this right out to you. Thanks so much.


The Easter promise is that sorrow will turn into joy. The tomb is found empty. What is broken will be whole again, and life, not death, endures. When we come face to face with what seems like an ending and relentless injustice, poverty and violence and ecological harm, when we see death and fear in the lives of our neighbors in Pimachikamak in the Philippines, it's hard to hold on to that promise. That's why we have each other. Churches and communities and movements. When we can't see the Easter promise for the tears, the anger, the pain, we can find confidence in another's hope. Bearing sorrow, nurturing faith and hope are communal tasks. That's why we need each other. Not long ago I listened to a group of children. Imagine a just and equitable Canada. In essays, in poems, in art, they showed their vision of a Canada reconciled. And their confidence in our future is contagious. Despite all they face, Kairos Global Partners can exude that same confidence. SEBA, our partner in Guatemala, has organized 70 community consultations where thousands of people have determined their future, claimed their future. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, our partner works with victims of gender violence, witnessing to hope by training them to be advocates for women's rights. When I can't bear the sorrow, I believe somehow we can. When I can't find hope I can trust in others' visions. Holding sorrow, witnessing hope to one another is how we keep going. It's how we build communities of resilience and transformation that are true to God's dream of justice. This Easter, as we declare Christ risen, let us be grateful for our companions in hope and struggle. Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia.