Alright, welcome everybody.
Um, I guess it's not such a packed room, so I assume I'm kind of preaching to the choir,
which is good because, you know, we're talking mostly about things
that happened over the course of the year.
And actually I, I'm, I'm, I'm kinda hoping that, actually as a follow-up to this talk
on Saturday, we will have maybe a short meeting of everybody that is very interested
in this topic to see how, what we can do maybe for the next year.
Um, so without further ado, let's start briefly.
My name is Lukas Smith.
I work at a web agency in Switzerland.
My twitter handle is @lsmith.
And um, yeah, so let me actually, the talk is one year of the diversity initiative,
but let me start a little bit before that.
So kind of, um, in 2017, I think sometime in spring there was a SymfonyCon or Symfony Live
in San Francisco and there was an all male, white male lineup speaking.
Symfony got called out on Twitter about that.
And uh, and of course there were plenty of very valid excuses why that is the case mostly
because there were only applications, you know,
respondents that were white males that submitted.
And you know, Symfony live in the US.
It's much, much smaller than they are in Europe.
So, you know, it's, a much, much smaller event.
So yeah, it's tricky.
But it kinda - I don't know - somehow that that kind of resonated with me in my head.
And mostly because, um, I, I kinda, um.
So my partner, she is an engineer.
She's not in IT, but since I've been living together with her
and just getting all these daily things that she experienced in her work in a factory,
it kinda made me realize that, that is not enough to just try to be a good guy
and to be passive about these things.
Like I would have to become active to actually work towards change
because the situation was even much worse than I always thought,
like in these, before I heard these stories.
There was another thing also that kind of triggered this,
and kind of in the same timeframe was we had, um, a female apprentice
and she wrote a blog post on our blog about how hard it is for her to go to school and have
to explain every day that even though she is a girl, she is studying computer science, right?
And just like the amount of emotional, you know, weight that was putting on her shoulders
and in fact, in the end she quit, right.
Because it just, you know, she doesn't want to explain every day anymore why she's there.
Right. So, so both of these things combined with, you know, this, you know, when,
when Symfony got called out on Twitter, you know, really, um, I think put it on a map
for me that I need to become active.
And, uh, and then I also started talking with other people in the core team
and we all agreed, yes, we should do something.
We should become more active.
We may need to put this topic on the agenda.
So briefly, just again, this, this talk isn't really about introducing these concepts,
but just briefly so that what we're talking about here, we're talking about diversity
on one end, so, you know, the full range of human differences and making sure that, um, uh,
or, or, you know, that's one thing, but actually the more important
to term is probably inclusion.
Um, and, uh, so that is really...
so once you have these differences
that you actually involve them, that you empower them, right?
That's, that's actually kind of like the step that you want to get at.
So that's, that's kinda what we decided was the scope of, of this initiative.
So I started reading a lot in the summer.
I actually ended up writing a huge blog post.
Um, and at some point I decided I'm not really an expert on this topic at all.
Um, so I needed to get some professional advice on this thing.
So, uh, my wife and I both decided that we think this is important.
So we ended up hiring Sage Sharp to review the blog post.
Um, and, uh, uh, and as you know, during the review I realized that, you know, it,
it goes even much deeper than what I thought, right?
So that, you know, it requires even more education than I thought.
So in the end, the blog post was never published.
But it helped me quite a lot to, to understand many of the topics there.
Um, and so we finally then decided in the core team
that we should create an official diversity initiative.
It was announced at Cluj last year at SymfonyCon.
So, um, so basically now I'm going to talk about everything that happened since.
And so the first thing actually happened at SymfonyCon and,
and that was really also a very, a revelatory experience, right?
So I start to think more about this topic and I see these badges and icons starting to pop up.
So we had on our website, we have the silhouette here.
Um, and uh, and so this was the default silhouette if you didn't upload an avatar.
And, so again, like this was, this was actually the trigger that, that triggered me,
that I thought, "wow, what were you doing" - more this thing was it.
Like we had this, this badge, the first badge you get
when you join the Symfony community was the, "Hey Dude" badge.
And during the award ceremony we had these badges, like, "thx Dude" and things like that.
So these are things that, you know, they've been in the community for years and I thought I was,
you know, a good guy, you know, as I explained earlier and I didn't pick up on it all right.
I didn't, I didn't pick up on it.
And only when I started to actually educate myself, actually invest some, you know,
brain cycles on the topic, I started to notice these things that are so obvious, right.
Um, and, um, so, so yeah, that's one of the first things that we fixed.
So Javier, um, you know, updated those badges and implemented a new solution for the avatars.
You know, so, so that's, that's, you know, a quite interesting experience, right?
We always say, yeah, but, you know, is it really so bad I have noticed anything, right.
And it's, you know, it's kind of a privilege to be in that situation
that you can say I didn't notice anything because probably
if you really look, you should notice some things.
And of course if you're a part of some underrepresentated group, you do notice them
and they do every day kind of tell you maybe you are not supposed to be here.
Right? And that's not what we want, that's not what inclusion is about.
So some of the first steps we did was we created a Symfony Slack channel.
Actually, maybe we already did that a few days before the SymfonyCon.
So we have a diversity channel on Slack.
I created the GitHub organization underneath the Symfony, or no,
I created a repository underneath the Symfony organization diversity -
where we started to track with tickets that the ideas we had.
And very quickly we had about 30 tickets.
Um, I would say about 10 of them have been completed.
Plenty of them are still open and we open new ones all the time.
But, um, with that we sort of had like the, the initial infrastructure, to get set up.
Um, and uh, um, the other thing that I did was I am, so at Liip, my employer,
we have an education budget, so I decided to actually use my education budget to Sage Sharp
that I would have monthly one hour sessions.
Um, and the idea there was that I could double check some of the things
that are going on that I could ask for advice.
Um, so Sage is just sending me links about things to consider and things like that,
but also it was kind of like a monthly, uh, you know,
challenging me, uh, what we have done, right?
So kind of making sure that I don't forget about this topic.
And that has been a huge help over the course of the year.
Um, I think we've reduced it now two 30 minute sessions.
Um, but yeah, it's a huge help and I think that's actually a very important.
Again, I'm not an expert on this thing at all.
I'm, I'm, I'm a programmer and there are a lot of things that you can do
that are very well intentioned but that are actually harmful.
So for example, the first thing that I thought, okay, I need to educate myself so I'm just going
to walk up on everyone that looks like they could be potentially be part
of some underrepresented group and try to get advice from them.
Right? And that seems quite well-intentioned, you know,
you're trying to get an education from the source, right?
Um, but it is actually a very bad idea because if they are, for example, at a conference,
they're here to learn about Symfony.
They're not here to educate me on things that I can educate myself on probably quite well
because there are a lot of things on the Internet about all these things, right?
So while it may be well intentioned, it actually is not a good idea.
Now, if somebody from an underrepresented group comes up to you and explains things to you,
then listen, do listen, don't dismiss it because it didn't happen to you yet.
But don't expect, you know, people from underrepresented groups to educate yourself.
So these are all these things that, um, uh, yeah, um, you know, this, um,
these exchanges with Sage Sharp have been quite helpful.
Um, and that's something that also, again,
on Saturday when we discussed maybe this is something that we need to bring
to a different format where also maybe some people
from the community can benefit from this kind of exchanges.
Now, of course there was negative feedback when the initiative was launched.
Actually not a whole lot, but there were concerns and I think...
so, you know, the biggest concern was around like who's going
to write the code once everybody has been kicked out.
And... is suddenly a pull request going to get merged just because it's from somebody
that is from an underrepresented group.
Like, are we going to reduce the quality?
And, uh, I think these concerns are, again, these are things that, you know,
I know at least to me, I don't, I don't share those concerns.
But it also is not very useful to just push them away and ignore them.
That being said, at least I haven't, like, like these were concerns beforehand.
I've actually not heard a single person actually point
to a specific case where any of that happened.
So I hope that maybe over the course of a year we've managed to sort of reduce those concerns
by just the mere fact that none of these problems seem to have actually happened
that people were concerned about.
Um, but it's definitely something that keeps popping up here and there.
It came up again also when we then finally implemented the code of conduct,
which I'll talk about in a second.
But one thing I think that, that is very important that,
um, oh, I forgot to click here...
is that it is very naive to think that you can have an open source project
and it's just about code.
Like the second you put a bunch of human beings working on some things,
you immediately have a social dimension and ignoring that just doesn't work.
And I can very much say that.
So I was the release manager for PHP 5.3.
And I don't code C at all.
So I was the release manager for PHP, I don't code C, it was just a social thing,
like trying to get multiple developers to agree to things, um, to decide to finish
that these were all very social things.
They don't revolve around code and there were a lot of people that didn't like each other
that I needed to get to collaborate.
Um, so there's always a social dimension to open source.
Um, now, um, yeah, so one thing that, that also, we did very early on that we started
to have discussions on Slack about how we communicate with each other.
Um, for example, there was a lot of cursing going on - not really necessarily at people,
but it seemed kind of like it wasn't really helping the communication.
And so we had a fair amount of discussions around that and I think, you know,
this was before we had a code of conduct there were, I think for awhile we had a bot
that that reminded people not to curse.
Of course people, you know, it's very easy to hack around that, you know,
you just replace some characters and suddenly you can still curse.
But I think overall I think these discussions, while some, some really flared up
and became quite heated, I think none of them really derailed into something really bad.
And I think, overall, the experience has improved.
I don't really have any KPI's I can show you, but I get the sense that it has improved.
Then the other things we did was to improve symfony.com itself.
And, for example, we have, we built this tool for doing automated checks on websites
to check for accessibility issues.
So I set that up just because I already had a setup at Liip for that.
And so quite a lot of improvements were done there.
And that's, I think also a very good example.
So if we improve the contrast on the website or the font size and things like that or you know,
ensure that that colors are not such a key part, it might help make the site readable
for some people, but it also makes the site more readable for everyone else.
Right. Um, so it's a win for everyone.
The win might be bigger for some people, but there is no drawback.
Right. So that's a lot also what the diversity initiative did.
Like we did a lot of things.
Actually I've forgotten on the previous slide,
we also introduced the #thankyou and the #victory channel.
And it's just also again to just create a more positive atmosphere.
And I just love that channel.
Like it's, it's like if I need a few good moments, like I go to the Symfony Slack and look
at that and scroll up or something like that.
And it's, and it's kinda like, it creates this positive relationship to the project
that I think is helpful to everyone, right.
And hopefully it will make it more welcoming for, for new people to come in,
potentially from underrepresented groups, but, you know, just everyone, right?
And it makes it easier for them to celebrate their first real victories
and get recognized for that.
And other things we did on the Symfony website was, um, we created a little guide, um, to help,
um, how to do feedback during a code review.
Like how to phrase things in a way that, you know, the other side isn't put down.
Because you're just trying to find a better technology solution, right?
You don't need to make it about the person.
So it's just, you know, some advice on how to do that.
So Sebastian did and it was really awesome.
Uh, David, he went over, wrote a little script and went over the website just
to remove some of the belittling language.
Like, Oh, "this is very easy just to x", right?
And you know, if you're a beginner and it's not easy for you, you already feel small
and you, you, you want to leave, right?
So doing these kinds of things, and again, this is not that it helps the specific group,
it kind of should help everyone, but it might make us more welcoming, in general.
Then the other thing, and that was probably the thing that took the most effort,
we created a code of conduct and we also created the CARE team.
And I mean in terms of code of conduct.
So Egidijus actually just before SymfonyCon last year, you already created the pull request
to add a code of conduct to Symfony.
And we had lots of discussions afterwards and not necessarily so much about the code
of conduct itself, but more about how to actually, like, if there is a problem,
if somebody noticed something, how do we do the reporting and how do we make sure
that we actually follow-up on the reports in a way that uh,
you know, really addresses those concerns.
And so we, we, we studied a lot.
Because there are a lot of really good code of conduct that you can just drop in,
but there are not that many reporting process.
So we spent quite a lot of time researching that, we had several meetings virtually, with,
Michelle and Egidijus and Tobias and Nicolas
and several other people discussing this back and forth.
We also benefited again, quite a lot from the expertise from Sage Sharp and we finally put,
you know, put it all together, I think sometime in late spring.
And I, and I, what I really also wanted to emphasize then is that we need to make sure
that the people in this CARE team
that are receiving these reports are really well prepared.
So we ended up doing a donation drive to get extra professional training from Sage Sharp
so that these people are ready to, to, um, to deal with these reports.
And that was actually already the first little test.
Like, is somebody in the community going to sponsor this?
In the end it was actually very quickly that we got three companies sponsoring,
so we had enough money to pay for the training.
And yeah, and I think that's, that's something that's very important
that we don't just blunder ourselves forward, that we really,
we look for professional expertise where it is available.
And yeah, I think that's also one important thing.
Like, a lot of the concerns that were raised about code of conduct was that -
and they're always about the worst-case scenario,
like somebody will get kicked out of the community.
And, I don't know the details of, of the reports that have happened this year.
I do know that there have been some.
Nobody has been expelled, um, as far as I know.
And I think many of the things that that may happen, are miscommunications,
cultural differences and things like that, that you might not be aware of.
And I think that's very important when you're reading the code of conduct and you're looking
at things that, that are stated there that are unwanted...
or there is a lot of grayness, in there.
Right? And this is not a legal document.
We don't have a police, we don't have lawyers.
We don't have judges or anything like that.
That is beyond the scope of what the code of conduct can really cover.
What we're trying to ensure is that there is a process to deal with specific situations
and these situations can just be, just be aware that this person,
based on the code of conduct has the right to say, I don't want this to happen to me.
And then the expectation is that this person that did that listens to that
and adjusts their behavior, moves on and everything is fine.
Right? But if that person keeps that behavioral pattern, then yes,
maybe at some point there might be some escalation
in the way that it is being dealt with.
But in many situations it's just like, listen, learn, move on.
That's it.
Right. That's all what the code of conduct is doing.
It's just setting up a process for these kinds of feedbacks to happen.
Now of course, if something really, really bad happens, then we also have a process in place.
But in many cases also if something really bad is happening, then maybe you know,
it's not something that the CARE team should actually be responsible for.
Finally addressing, they should maybe involve the police or someone else.
But also, they should have - and this is also something that is maybe non-obvious -
is that "how" to actually, so the person that reported the issue - that,
that very severe issue - that they are asked: "do you want the police to be involved"
and things like that that you have maybe also some alternative ways to get them help.
Right? And these are the things that require some expertise,
that require some preparation to be ready when it happens.
Because when happens, we need to be able to act very quickly and decisively.
Um, so another thing that happened actually in the summer,
I was getting a little bit depressed.
I thought that things weren't really moving anymore.
And so the momentum was gone.
Like everybody was maybe patting themselves on the shoulder that we have a code of conduct.
We have a CARE team and everybody was starting to lean back a little bit I felt.
And then sometime in late summer, Joni from the Dutch PHP conference contacted me and said,
she's working on, she wants to build a guide for herself,
but also for other conference organizers on how to improve diversity and inclusion.
And, and she heard that I might be doing something in that direction as well.
And I said, yeah, we have a ticket where lots of people have dumped links
about useful information, but we never got around to actually create some,
an actual usable guide out of it.
And she took those links and probably a bunch of links she had on her own.
And like a week or two she came back with this amazing document,
where she really summarized all, like tons of key issues with links
to additional details and things like that.
And, so this is put up, I made the short link up at the top
because the full link is rather long - it's underneath there.
So it's https://github.com/DutchPHPConference /conference-diversity-and-inclusion/blob/ma
ster/Guideline.md.
And so it's full of tips.
It's probably not a complete guide yet.
We'll, we'll, continue to expand it.
One thing that we also want to do and the guide is to highlight a little bit more,
which of the different topics require money?
And potentially a little bit of scale.
How much money?
And also which of the things are, require time or, or very little time.
So that people that go over this can very quickly identify things
that they can probably very quickly implement.
And, but they also can see if they, if they can, can somehow manage to do additional things that,
you know, these are additional things that they can work on.
But also we look at things, how to potentially get money to be able to finance such things
like potentially adding a little optional thing people can put on the ticket price, uh,
when they buy a conference ticket, to create a budget to enable you to do certain things,
which, you know, um, you know, the companies that are paying the tickets,
it probably doesn't really matter that much if the ticket is 20 Euros more or less.
And so it could be a very easy thing.
So lots of ideas like that.
So at this event here, some of the things have been implemented, not all of them, um,
obviously, um, so in some of the things maybe we need to improve a little bit.
So we have the scholarship program.
Um, so that's cool.
We now, previously it was always that it was actually required that the name that you used
when you registered for the, for the conference needs to match your photo id
and that is then also printed on, on, on these badges - I don't know, I put my badge somewhere.
Um, and so as a first step to, to make it easier for people that are, you know,
that have a different name that they prefer to use, we now make at least possible
that we use the Symfony Connect name rather than, um, the legal, or photo id name.
And you know, these things maybe, maybe you shouldn't, shouldn't even require that,
maybe it should be a write-in field or something like that.
So these might require some logistics like check-in,
and as you notice, check-in is already quite slow.
So we need to think about how to make those processes maybe more efficient.
But you know, that's the first step.
And we also have pronoun stickers at the goody desk.
Again, this is the first step.
I intentionally, I actually wanted to blog about this before the conference
to explain a little bit what the idea behind it is.
But essentially, while, you know, the, the standard in society for a long time has been,
you will allocate a gender at birth - you're either a "he" or "she" and end of story.
Many people don't, not fall or, feel that they fall in this very binary approach.
Um, and so they might prefer other pronouns like they or even some others.
So, uh, it's, it's a good way to not assume the pronouns
when you're talking to someone from the first time.
Right. And those pronouns stickers would make it easier rather than having the first piece
of your conversation being: "What pronoun do you want to use?",
you can look at the pronoun stickers and you know, and you can directly jump
to the actual interesting content that you want to talk about.
So right now we have this pronoun stickers with he, she, they, again,
maybe it will be nicer that we would make it write-in.
Um, but I do want to encourage everyone, even if you think, well, I'm, I associated with he
or she and it's very obvious and it's very simple and has never been a problem.
Still use those stickers, normalize the use of pronouns stickers.
That makes it easier for the people that do not fall in the classical assignments of the past.
So we did that.
We also introduced the quiet room for people to use if they just want,
if they sometimes need some space of quietness.
But also if somebody needs it for maybe for prayer or something like that.
So we introduced the quiet room as well.
Um, and you know, just the fact that the topic
of diversity is mentioned during the open session I think is already a step as well.
Um, then, um, another topic a is we.
So many other things that I talked about so far,
they're very much about making the community more welcoming, right?
And safer.
But of course, part of what we wanted to achieve is also to grow the community.
And again, you know, growing the community, everyone is welcome, right?
But there's of course some, some places where we are, you know, obviously underrepresented.
Um, and there are many dimensions to this.
One of the most obvious and most talked about his gender.
And there we are clearly not at the point where we can say that we have actual representation
of how many women they are on the planet versus how many men.
But there are plenty of other dimensions that are very important as well.
So for example, right now we are very strong in Europe.
There's some presence in, in the North America.
But, you know, in other continents we're very underrepresented.
Um, and so it's very, uh, you know, it's great that now, for example,
Fabien is going to Vietnam and to India for some meetups there and trying
to jumpstart those local communities.
There's discussions about conferences potentially
in South America, potentially in Africa.
Um, and these are of course very, very, very important things to grow the community because,
so for example, if you're in Africa, then, you know,
coming to Europe is actually quite challenging.
You know, you need a visa and so on.
So in fact, actually one of the three scholarships we gave away was
from someone from Nigeria.
And since we, we took too long to put out the scholarship program in the end
when we finally gave the confirmation to that person,
they couldn't get a visa in time to come here.
So even though it would have been paid for, it wasn't possible for them to attend.
So we instead, we just made the promise that for next year, um, they'll,
they'll get that scholarship so that they can apply for the visa in time.
So that's, that's great.
Um, so I mentioned the scholarship program already.
We also, or API Platform, sponsored Rails Girls Summer of Code.
Um, they also offered to mentor.
Uh, in the end, unfortunately they weren't picked as a mentor.
But, what I got from Kevin was actually by the mere fact that we were on the website,
there were some contributions coming in just from that.
So some students that saw API Platform mentioned
on the website then started contributing to API Platform.
And that, and that's obviously great.
And the other thing I mentioned is the event organization guide,
which I hope will be something that more and more Symfony events, PHP events, etc,
will start using, um, and, you know, just as inspiration for things to do.
Now. in many ways, we're kind of following the lead of Django.
Django, actually, they, they have quite a significant effort around DjangoGirls,
which is similar to Ruby Girls, um, with the intention of bringing in new people
and giving them a little bit of a crash course on the framework.
Um, and that's also something that we discussed over the course of the year.
I'm still hoping that we can maybe get that set up.
Um, and, but they started in 2014 with that.
And, you know, just, you know, uh, from, from what I've seen from the Django Foundation team,
it's not like they are now radically diverse.
Like it's, it's, it just doesn't happen within even three years of a very,
or four years of a very concerted effort that suddenly everything is, you know,
diverse and inclusion is done and all these things.
So I'm in many ways I think, I mean, I don't really have any numbers right now
and maybe that's also something that we should start collecting,
but I don't think that we now have done any, any really significant changes to any KPI
that you could think of, um, in terms of actual numbers of representation.
What I can say, however, is there have been several people
that have personally approached me and said they now feel safe to be in this community,
where previously they were unsure.
And in many ways I think we've already achieved a lot if we retain, sort of,
the people that are here and that they don't get pushed out.
So like, the story of the apprentice that I mentioned that she got pushed out, right?
If we can get to that point that we're
at least don't push these people out, we've already achieved a lot.
And if we can then maybe create some word of mouth that this is actually a great place to be
if you want to be in IT and you're part of an underrepresented group, this is a great place
to be then yes, maybe at some point we can grow the numbers.
The other thing that I think is very important, I think every community that does pay attention
to this topic makes it easier for the next one.
Because there's a lot of experience that is, you know, written down like we can,
like one of the ideas of course with putting up, maybe having a Symfony training program is,
we can go to what the DjangoGirls people have done.
We can go what Ruby Girls people have done and we can learn from them.
Right? So we are now in the PHP community, I think to some degree leaders on this topic
and um, that's something that we're proud of.
But also we should also help carry that to the other communities.
And I think once, you know, all open source communities start to make this a priority,
it will become much easier for everyone to get,
or to ensure that people don't leave these communities, that they stay around
and that maybe new people come in as well.
So what's next?
Again, I think that's something we should discuss on Saturday.
So at the Hackathon, I would say let's start meeting at 10 in the hackathon space.
Um, and uh, yeah, it would be really happy to see all of you and maybe some more there.
And, some things that I currently I'm looking into, I've been talking to Jill Binder,
she's been very active in the WordCamp community, so Wordpress
and doing speaker, speaker mentoring.
So she, so she basically has a training program to help people become speakers,
which she's trying to, you know, move out of just the Wordpress space
and to professionalize a little bit.
So that's one topic I'm looking into.
And to me, like obviously, I'm in many ways like, okay, so if we, you know, we get,
we get great diversity on speaker line ups, then we will not get called
out anymore for non-diverse speaker lineups.
That's not the goal.
Right. But, you know, but I think having more speakers
and having more diverse speakers I think is a very good way of showing people
that it is possible to get recognized in the community regardless
of what your background is or what you identify as.
So I think it is a great way to very quickly communicate that this is a safe place,
a welcoming place, if we have a more diverse speaker lineup.
Another topic I, I'm hoping that we can maybe address on Saturday is that maybe we need
to formalize a little bit more the, the diversity initiatives.
Like right now I basically have this title given by Fabien, but maybe it would be good
that we have somebody that says "I'm going to focus on speaker mentoring."
Another person: "I'm going to focus on improving events",
in terms of diversity inclusion and things like that.
Also, right now we're missing a process for how we deal with the donations.
Like we don't have a decision process how we actually use the money that we get donated.
So we, we urgently need that in order that we can publish it and be transparent
about what we're doing there and also prevent conflicts around that topic.
So here I, I wrote, I started writing down special thanks.
Um, and I, I already missed a bunch.
So, for example, Timo, he's been helping me quite a lot in making my,
the words that I write actually readable.
And Hamza has been helping a lot and bringing a lot of perspective into things.
And, and yeah, a bunch of others.
So again, the good news is we have over a hundred people in diversity channel,
so it is something that people pay attention to.
I'm sure of 100 people, there may be quite a number of people there that are in there
because they're still critical of what is happening and they want to pay attention.
I very welcome that and I want to get their feedback as early as possible
because we don't want to steamroll people.
We want to take everyone in along the ride, so to say.
Um, yeah, so many people have been, been super instrumental in, in,
in different topics that have been pushing forward.
And I'm very grateful to them.
So last thing was already mentioned in the, in a bunch of places.
If you can, it will be great if you can consider donating.
Maybe also your employer can donate.
This was also very much a feel-good moment.
So we started the donation drive I think in early November and by the end
of November we already had over three and a half thousand dollars collected,
which I think given the amount of money that people make
with Symfony is probably, you know, very, very small.
But, but, you know, last year when I had the first discussion with Fabian about doing
such donation drives, we were both concerned: so how would it look
if we do this and nobody donates?
And so, so in that way, I think that that's already quite cool.
But yeah, if we want to be professional about this,
then we will need some financial support here and there.
So it's great if people can continue donating.
And yeah, so there have been plenty of donations from companies.
So SymfonyCasts, Liip donated, Symfony, Blackfire, JoliCode, SensioLabs,
and so far they all donated, which is awesome.
But I think what's even more awesome, we had a lot of people, individuals donating as well,
including one person even donating $50 a month, which is great.
Like I understand not everybody can afford it, but if you can,
it's great, if you can consider donating.
And again, as I mentioned before, let's meet at a 10 hour at the hackathon space on Saturday
and see how we can move this forward.
If somebody has to leave early, we can also try to see the Wifi here is pretty good,
so we could also have a video conference for people that want to join remotely.
Um, yeah. And with that, thank you for listening.