Plus Plus from Palantir.net

Understanding Content Ecosystems

How do you build a variety well-rounded content for your site? And is it all working toward a common goal? If it seems disparate, maybe it's time to look at your content development, writing, and publishing as an ecosystem where all parts – big and small alike – have their place and are working together to support that ecosystem. But how does it work? Marketing and Communications Lead Shawn Smith shares his thoughts and provides a framework in this week's Secret Sauce.
TRANSCRIPT
Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to the Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is a short podcast that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an account manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from Shawn Smith who is going to talk about how content ecosystems can work for you.
Shawn Smith [SS]: Hi I'm Shawn Smith, Marketing and Communications Lead here at Palantir.net. Today I'm going to talk to you about the concept of a content ecosystem, and why it might be the right choice for your team and organization with regard to content creation, publishing, and how it dovetails with your overall marketing strategy.
This is a big topic, of course, so I'm going to do my best to give you a high level overview of how it could work, without getting too far into the weeds. Think of it as a general framework, with which you can begin to understand how you could use it, and also how to think about the development of your content (including but not limited to content verticals).
It also has to deal with your sales and marketing goals, customer personas, and other important considerations, so the assumption going in is that you have some of this articulated.
With that in mind, let's start at the beginning: an ecosystem. In biological terms, an ecosystem is a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment, or, in general use, a complex network or interconnected system.
The important terms here are community, interaction, network or system, and interconnectedness. And health, but we'll get into that later.
I think this concept is particularly useful if you are part of a small marketing team. Here at Palantir, the team is quite small… in other words, it’s just me. I have some help from our account managers, our sales folks, and others. BUT there is a big caveat here regardless of marketing team size, and that is the opportunity for team-sourced content. After all, we have about 25 different people working at different disciplines in the company. 
Given that content publishing is hugely important for a service-based company like Palantir for sales purposes, we *must* have a variety of different content types to attract and keep engaged our various audience types (and ultimately lead them to choosing us for projects, of course).
We create content about the kind work we do, share insights on new technology, details on events at which we're speaking, how our company operates culturally, job openings, our client's projects, and many other types.
And while we work in a variety of disciplines, some, like development and supporting technologies, are quite technical in nature. So we'll use something technical as an example for developing content as part of an effective content ecosystem.
But before we talk about content, let's start with the 20,000 ft view of this content ecosystem framework to understand how it operates: It's important to think holistically, and build upon some sort of overarching goal your organization has.
What is the goal upon which we can build a foundation for our marketing plan and strategy? We value collaboration and transparency both internally and with our clients at Palantir. And with our 20th Anniversary around the corner, we're focusing on allowing our company values to surface throughout the content we generate. That's a great goal to use an anchor.
From there, we think of a supporting theme for the quarter (or any length of time that may work for your organization). This theme could be one of your marketing campaigns.
For example, we know that our strategy services in all their forms are incredibly important for our client projects, and can vastly increase the success rate. We'll use this as our supporting theme for the quarter, focusing on strategy services.
From here, you can get as granular as you wish. I like to then take the quarterly theme, and break it down monthly and overlay with other targets we want to hit due to an event coming up, a conference, client project launching, or some other kind of happening. You can go further down this rabbit hole, too, breaking down by week or even by day should there be a particularly important sales and marketing opportunity coming up.
Now that we have a basic framework, let's get back to content. Earlier we decided to go with something somewhat technical in nature… so how about Drupal 8 as a platform choice for our client projects?
It's a big topic, and can inspire content big and small in nature, and that's perfect because every bit of content in the ecosystem has its place; it could be small and fun and, say, community facing, or technical and epic, or somewhere between.
Now, let's take a look at Drupal 8 as a content generation concept, with strategy as a theme, and collaboration and transparency as our overarching goal. What content can we develop around this?
We could talk about Drupal 8's new features that make it easier for content editors to publish content. That is likely strategically important for our almost all of our clients. But how does this work in Drupal 8? This could be a blog post, a webinar, a downloadable how-to, a podcast, and certainly supported via social channels to point people to this various content.
We could also talk about something much more technical in Drupal 8, like how it has REST baked in, or how it plays nice with a suite of PHP technologies out of the box. The question here then becomes: who are we targeting with this content, and where does it fit into our content ecosystem during this time? More specifically, how does it work with our theme? And further, does it hit our target goals? It could, so long as we tailor that content to do so. REST being baked into Drupal 8, not to mention it playing nice with PHP technologies, provides our clients a variety of interesting ways to surface data and interact with external data sources to offer the kind of content and information their audience wants. So we can talk about that generally, or offer a technical whitepaper. We could host a webinar that explains this in a non-technical way to be more transparent about technology. Any many other content types, all appropriate for our theme, working toward our goals.
The examples could continue, but the important thing is that it sets you up with a framework to both make sense of what content you could publish, but more important WHY you're publishing it. It's also important to make this concept your own. It shouldn't be overly rigid, it’s not prescriptive, nor should it be too soft… instead it should be… well, squishy. After all, stuff is going to come up and you'll have to pivot and scramble to get some sort of content online that may not entirely jive with your theme or goals exactly.
To review:
Establish your company goals, whatever they may be
You then develop a quarterly theme based on some targets or other happenings occurring during that time
You determine your preferred level of granularity, be it monthly, weekly, or even daily
You then create content that both supports your theme and goals, making sure you look at it through these important lenses
Then you make sure you have a variety of content, whether small and fun or technical and epic, or something between
If you're interested in introducing this for your company, and you're in charge of marketing and/or content generation, you'll need to own it and act as the product owner, really. And if you have a team from which content can be developed, their buy-in is going to be key to your success. While this approach may be rooted in generating leads and driving sales, it's also about highlighting all of the things that make your company and your team amazing. Revenue generation is a nice byproduct of that.
If you utilize this method, and make it work for your organization, I'm confident that in time you'll have a healthy content ecosystem. And as an aside, if you use the inbound methodology, this is a fantastic compliment to that as well.
I'll go into greater detail with a downloadable template next month on our blog, so sign up to our newsletter to be informed. In the meantime, thanks for listening, and email me at smith@palantir.net should you want to discuss content ecosystems or other concepts presented today.
AM: For more great tips, follow us on Twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great day!

All About Scrums, and Why They’re So Useful

If you've ever worked on a web project at any scale, you may have participated or lead daily scrums. These mini meetings provide regular touch points for projects, and help keep it humming. 
However, those not familiar scrums may have heard the term, but don't exactly understand what they're all about. So why do we have scrums? Are they valuable? If so, what’s the best format them? And what’s the role of a scrum master, anyway? Project Manager Chad Goodrum joins Account Manager Allison Manley and shares his knowledge on the subject.
TRANSCRIPT
Allison Manley [AM]: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is a short podcast, just a few minutes long, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. 
I’m Allison Manley. I’m an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from Chad Goodrum, one of our Project Managers. Chad is going to talk about meetings in the  development world known as scrums.
Chad Goodrum [CG]: Hi, this is Chad Goodrum with Palanatir.net.  I’m a Project Manager here at Palantir. I’d like to talk today a little bit about scrums. We use those every day in a 15-minute standup with the development team, which includes our developers, designers, Product Owners from the client side, project managers, strategists, and other stakeholders inside the Palantir team. 
The format of our scrums take place on video conferences. We find that scrums are more useful when they are face to face. If they can’t be face to face, we find that at least a visual representation or through video conferences work better for us. 
Why do we have scrums? We use scrums daily as a way to look back in 24-hour increments what the team has worked on, what they’re going to be working on, and any issues or blockers they may have. 
What’s the format of a scrum? The format of a scrum is pretty casual. People refer to them as “standups” where people used to stand up together in a 15-minute scrum. But typically what we do is we have a short conversation, and go around the room or the video conference with each individual discussing what they have worked on. So let’s say we have a developer named Jan. Jan will say what she worked on the day before, go over tickets at a high level and discuss what she worked on; she will say what she’s working on today . . . maybe it’s a continuation of those tickets, maybe it is starting something new; and then she will mention any blockers that she may have. These could be feedback from the client, feedback internally, issues with the user story or ticket that she’s working on . . . this gives the team a perspective to take a look at that issue as a whole and give immediate feedback or schedule a later call or conversation to discuss that. It’s a high level conversation that we can have internally to make sure that we are on track every day. 
Some things we use to manage scrums: we have something called a scrum log. Scrum log is a basic document with each team member’s name on there discussing what they’ve done, what they’re going to do, and any blockers they have. A requirement is that it’s filled out prior to the meeting every day. The meetings are going to be at the same time every day for consistency’s sake. 
Another requirement that we have is not being shy or conservative to talk about issues you are having. Sometimes this comes up with the client product owner is on the scrum. But it’s more detrimental not to talk about an issue that you’re having then to talk about it and bring it the attention of everyone on the team.
What’s the role of a “scrum master?” The scrum master is not a stakeholder in the conversation itself. The scrum master is the mediator or moderator. They are the ones who are going to facilitate the conversation. They’re not there to give opinions about the process itself. So the scrum master is going to call the meeting, make sure everyone’s on time, go through the meeting, set up further meetings if there needs to be meetings internally or externally with the client. 
There’s been a lot of talk internally here at Palantir about having product owners on the scrums daily, or not having the product owners on. And there’s been a lot of pros and cons of that. The pros of having the product owner on the scrum with us: it gives them daily visibility into what we’re working on. It’s a transparency at Palantir that we really like to have. That way there are no questions or concerns maybe at the end of a sprint, in two week increments, where they are unaware of what we’ve been working on for two weeks. 
One of the cons that I discussed earlier was about being shy or conservative around the product owner. If someone has an issue maybe with the architecture, or some of the strategy, or some conflicts with the overall process, many times developers (myself included) will tend to be a little shy about bringing those issues up to a product owner. So sometimes we’re not as candid as we could be without the product owner. There’s talk about where being shy or not as candid could actually lower velocity for the team. 
Another concept of scrum is the idea that scrums are self-managing, that there’s not one person that is responsible for the scrum. And by self-managing that means that everyone is accountable for all things. That includes the scrum log being filled out, being on scrum on time, being on video, and being candid about your issues or concerns that you may have on a daily basis. And by self-managing that means everyone on that team has the right, as well as the duty, to speak up if something is not going accordingly . . . whether someone’s late, misses scrums, or a known issue that isn’t discussed. 
Scurms in general at Palantir provide an immense amount of value to the team, to the client, and to the overall success of the project. Without doing daily scrums, it would be very difficult for everyone on the team to know what others are doing on a daily basis. Check-ins once a week are not enough for us to have a consistent, transparent view of the project as it moves forward. When we’re working on any sort of format that’s agile or agile-like, daily standups or daily scrums are imperative to the project’s success. 
AM: Thanks Chad! And thank you all for joining in on this week’s Secret Sauce! For more great tips, follow us on twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great day!

Everything You Need to Know About DrupalCon New Orleans

DrupalCon is just a few weeks away in New Orleans, so this time around our Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by our CEO and Founder George DeMet, Drupal veteran and PHP guru Larry "Crell" Garfield, and Senior Front-End Developer Lauren Byrwa. They share thoughts about the conference generally, what they're excited about specifically, and what they're expected from the Driesnote, among other topics.
TRANSCRIPT
Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to On the Air with Palantir, a podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s April 2016, and this is episode #4.
I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager at Palantir, and today we are going to give a preview of what to expect from the upcoming DrupalCon in New Orleans which is taking place May 9th through the 13th. The website is drupalcon.org if you want to see more. I’m a newbie to DrupalCon — this will be my very first one — so I gathered a bunch of my seasoned colleagues here at Palantir who have attended in the past to get their thoughts on the upcoming conference.
I am here with three of my fabulous colleagues that are going to be attending DrupalCon with me. So I have Lauren Byrwa, who’s one of our senior front-end developers.
Lauren Byrwa [LB]: Hi!
AM: George DeMet, founder and CEO.
George DeMet [GD]: Hello.
AM: And Larry Garfield, Senior Architect and Community Lead. How are you?
Larry Garfield [LG]: Hello, world.
AM: So what we’re doing here is basically a preview of DrupalCon. DrupalCon is coming up in a couple of weeks, in New Orleans, which is very exciting. How many DrupalCons is this for
each of you?
LG: I think this will be #21.
AM: Out of how many? How many have there been?
LG: Maybe 25? I’m a staple at this point [laughs].
GD: It’s a good question. Not as many as you, Larry, but probably, if I had to guess, between 15 and 20.
LB: I’m actually only at #2 for Cons. So not a whole lot compared to these guys.
AM: I’m a complete newbie, so we’ll get to that later — what I can expect — but before we get to what most people or new people can expect from DrupalCon, or what DrupalCon is about — we know that Drupal was started by Dries Buytaert. Did I pronounce that right?
LG: Close enough for an American [laughs]. 
AM: What is the correct pronunciation, please?
LG: Well, I’m an American too. ‘Drees Boy-thart’ I think is closer, but don’t quote me on that. Dries, feel free to correct us.
AM: I’m sure he will later [laughs]. So what is DrupalCon about?
LG: DrupalCon is the summit of the community. It is the largest Drupal in-person event in the world by a very wide margin. It’s a place for the whole community of whatever stripe to gather and discuss, learn, teach, plan, work, play, drink, and several other things along the same lines. A lot of conferences are very developer-centric or very business-centric, or very whatever. DrupalCon is — these days, DrupalCon is a Web conference with a Drupal angle to it. There’s sessions for back-end developers, there’s sessions for front-end developers, there’s sessions for project managers, there’s sessions for content strategists, there’s sessions for business owners — whatever you do, if it involves Drupal or the Web in some way, there’s at least a couple of sessions that are worth going to for you.
GD: I would agree, and I would say that even if you don’t do Drupal or you’re not someone who’s really immersed in the technology or the community, it’s still a conference with really great value. You can get a lot out of it, and I think particularly for folks who are new to DrupalCon, it’s a really great way to get immediately connected with the community. And it’s often a very overwhelming way. We’re a very friendly and welcoming community, sometimes overly so.
LB: I would like to think of DrupalCon as our family reunion, for all Drupalers. We’re there to learn, we’re there to share, but mostly we’re there to collaborate. And that can happen in sessions, that can happen at happy hour,that can happen anywhere. But it’s a great way to get plugged into the community. 
AM: So I am a newbie, as I said — this will be my first. So what should I expect from DrupalCon? Am I just going to walk in and be completely overwhelmed at first?
GD: Yes.
AM: [laughs].
LB: I think at my first DrupalCon — overwhelmed? Yes, definitely expect to be overwhelmed no matter what. But feel comfortable, feel welcomed. Everybody is excited for newcomers. Everyone is excited to get to know you, to hear your ideas. So stand up and talk, and listen, and ask questions. And go up to people that intimidate you, and tell them that you’re a huge fan and that you work with their tools every day and that you like what you saw in this blog post. And they’ll be flattered and want to know what you think and why or why not you agree or disagree. But talk to everybody. Talk to them on Twitter, talk to them in person, talk to them at bars — everything you can do to soak up as much information as possible. That’s always my number one. 
LG: The main thing you should expect at DrupalCon is 3000 introverts playing extroverts, who really want to talk to you and teach you things because that’s what they do. And if you’re up for talking to people you’ve only heard of, or never heard of, and just learning from every person you run across, you’ll do just fine.
GD: And I think — so when we’re at our booth, every year without fail I’ll be standing there and someone will just kind of come up to me, and they’ll have The Look in their eyes. It’s very clear that this is their first time, they’re feeling very overwhelmed. And it’s really funny, this happens every time, they’ll make eye contact, come over to the booth, pull out their program guide, and be like, where do I go? And there’s so many different things you can do and places you can go and sessions you can experience, and it really is about — I think for folks who are going, it’s really taking a look at the sessions, figuring out ‘what do I want to get out of this event’, and focusing on that. And if you are getting overwhelmed, just find a friendly face, and they’ll more than likely be able to help you out and point you in the right direction – ‘oh yeah, I know the person doing that session, they’re awesome, go to that session if you want to learn about this, so-and-so is like the world’s expert on that’. All kinds of opportunities to just soak everything in, and learn what you can. It’s a really fun, really intense time.
AM: Great, I’m really looking forward to it. So every year Dries gives a keynote. And it’s fairly spectacular, I’ve seen a bunch of them on YouTube. They’re very involved. So what are you anticipating this year from the Driesnote, as he calls it?
LG: I have no idea what Dries is planning. I think the best keynote he’s given in recent years was in Amsterdam, where he was talking about actual practical changes to our process. That’s where he introduced the plan for putting credits on the site, which got implemented later. And I think that’s been a great thing to encourage contributions from companies and clients and commercial organizations, which we absolutely need. 
I’d like to see something inward-looking. By that point Drupal 8.1 will have just come out, and that’ll be the first time we’ve done that type of release in, I think, ever in Drupal. So I suspect he’ll be talking about that and the implications of being able to evolve the system more smoothly than in the past. That’s my prediction, such as it is.
[this was cut from the original recording due to audio issues, but is left intact for the transcript]
GD: I’m hoping that Dries will take this opportunity to talk a little bit more about what the vision and future direction of Drupal is going to be, not just from a technical standpoint but really from an — answering the question, why does Drupal exist? What we’ve seen over the last few years, particularly as we’ve been through the Drupal 8 cycle, is that Drupal has changed and evolved tremendously. And at the same time the kinds of people that use Drupal, and the ways that they are using it, have changed tremendously. And I think that a lot of folks in the community have moved along with those shifts, but others might be feeling a little left behind, like they’re not really sure. Maybe if you’re somebody that’s joined Drupal at a point in the past, and you’ve had a particular motivation for doing so, the project and the community may be very different now. I think as we go through that change and that evolution, having a shared understanding and grounding in what our shared values are as a Drupal community and a project would be really cool to hear from Dries.
LB: I would say we’re actually at a place right now where we don’t entirely know what’s next for Drupal. We’re not waiting on D8 any more — there’s a whole slew of things out there. And so I agree that the future of Drupal is going to be a big topic. I think in addition to that, this is our good chance and this is Dries’ good chance to really press on contribution, and to recruit people. 
A lot of our hardcore developers that helped build D8 are feeling a little burnt out. They too are celebrating the release, but in addition to that, they’re feeling a little burnt out after years and years of press to get it there. So I think contribution is going to be a really big topic this year — trying to figure out how to get people involved and how to get new blood in the system and new 
ideas. To really push us towards that future, that’s going to be important.
AM: That’s a lot to cover in one keynote [laughs]. 
GD: The expectations are always incredibly high for these things. And it’s really often almost too much to ask, that one person will be able to cover this much in an hour or an hour and 15 minutes. One thing I’ve seen is that sometimes, when Dries delivers, he really delivers in a really great way. But I also know that it’s really hard to do that. So hopefully everything will click in place. I’m looking forward to it.
AM: Me too. So what are the big talking points in Drupal right now? Obviously I can assume Drupal 8. What else do you think will be the big things?
LB: A big focus of this year’s DrupalCon is actually a lot of the front-end frameworks and performance. Like we said earlier, it’s really kind of a dev conference with Drupal in the background. So we’re really trying to branch out as a community and accept some of the other new things going on in tech right now, and I know that’s going to be a big press this year.
LG: There’s a whole lot of sessions on the front-end frameworks, like Lauren was saying, and around the discussions around, should Drupal have a front-end framework baked into it, like Angular or Ember? Or should we do something along those lines with our own components? Or should we ignore all of that? Or should we, whatever? So there’s actually a new track for this con called Horizons that has — pie-in-the-sky ideas. That’s kind of the point of that track. So we actually have the project lead of Angular talking. We have the project lead of Ember talking. 
And there’s a number of other sessions along similar lines. We’ve got a core conversation that was originally supposed to be a moderated fight between people who wanted a front-end framework and people who didn’t. I think it’s turned into — those people have already fought and have a plan now, and what’s that plan, but we’ll see. Definitely, the front end and JavaScript are big talking points. 
Another core conversation, as Lauren was talking about, is burnout. We have two, maybe three, sessions on time management and burning yourself out and managing volunteers, and what happens when people leave Drupal and how can we learn from the people who have. People will always come and go from any project, but how do we do that in the most graceful fashion, so that it’s good for those people and good for the project. That’s another talk we have there. And then of course, continuing the ‘get off the island’ angle, we have a Symfony track, as we’ve had the last couple of years. We have a dedicated PHP track — that’s non-Drupal-specific PHP that
we actually collaborated with Php[architect] on. I was one of the track chairs for that. It’s the first time we’ve had it in North America — we’ve had it in Europe. And then the Horizons track includes a lot of big ideas outside of Drupal, so there’s a lot of, what new stuff outside of the Drupal experience should we be looking at and taking stuff from.
LB: In addition to what Larry was saying, there’s a new spotlight on mental health in the tech industry, and this is going to be a big issue. You’re starting to see real sessions on mental health and taking care of yourself as a developer. But I also think it’s going to be a hot-button issue for BOFs, and you’re going to see a lot of talking about it outside of sessions as well, and how to cope with this environment.
AM: OK, wait a minute. Can we define “BOF”?
LB: My apologies, it’s an acronym for “birds of a feather”. It’s a group talk where people of like-minded ideas or having the same interests get together and have a conversation about it, as opposed to somebody getting up and presenting about a topic. It’s a more casual and close way to discuss some of the issues that are popular.
GD: And so one of the other hats I wear in the Drupal community is serving on the Community Working Group. And I know that we’ve been talking internally about a lot of the challenges we’ve seen, experiencing burnout, and trying to improve — trying to provide more communication tools and resources, particularly for folks in the core development community. So I’m really happy to see an increased focus on that, not just at this DrupalCon but at the last couple of DrupalCons. I think we’re going to have more and more, hopefully more structured, programs and resources, so that people can contribute in a way that is sustainable in the long run.
The other kind of big topic or trend that I’m seeing is — I think there’s a little bit of a question or tension, that ties into a lot of the technical questions, about the extent to which Drupal is a product and Drupal is a software platform. If you think about it in terms of Legos, is it a big box of a whole bunch of Legos that you can put together in any kind of different shape or form to create whatever you want, or is it more kind of a Lego construction kit that’s got all the tools you need to build a truck or a boat or whatever. And the extent to which we move in one direction and make Drupal more of a polished product — does that undermine our ability to be incredibly flexible? And so there’s questions like, do we have a decoupled front end? How do we approach questions like content workflow and management and all that stuff, and how much is that prescribed by the system? These are all really important questions that we’re going to have to, as a community, come to some sort of agreement or consensus on as we move forward.
LG: As a side note, on the mental health front, our third keynote for Thursday is from Michael Schmid, a long-time Drupaler. He’s talking on brain health and mental health and so forth. It’s definitely an area worth the time it’s being given, which is considerable and as it should be. 
AM: Great — I definitely want to get to some of the sessions that you’re excited about. So there are 13 tracks total in DrupalCon this year. Some of them are new, as you mentioned earlier, and they cover quite a range of topics. So there is something for everybody. I am not an engineer myself, but there is plenty for me to absorb at this conference [laughs], because the tracks are so varied. And I haven’t counted how many sessions there are in total, spread across those 13 tracks.
LG: I think it’s 131 or something like that.
AM: Wow. So there’s a lot of information being shared. So outside of the Palantir-led sessions, because we are leading three — which we’ll cover in a bit — which sessions are you most excited about, aside from the ones you’ve already mentioned?
LG: I’d say I’m most looking forward to the core conversations on burnout and on community management, and on how do we keep this process sustainable? Because the way we went about Drupal 8 is not sustainable. That level of work was necessary for the project, but that kind of surge mentality of, throw warm bodies at it and work extra hard to make sure it gets done, is not a good way of developing software, open source or not. I’m looking forward to the discussions that are already slated around, how do we not do that? How do we make Drupal successful, or more successful, and how do we make our people more successful while respecting the fact that people still have lives and limits, and people have families? We don’t want to inadvertently pressure people to sacrifice those. No one consciously likes to do that, but there’s unconscious pressure at a lot of times. So how do we counteract that in a healthy fashion? Topic-wise, that’s probably what I’m most looking forward to, probably followed by some of the front-end framework discussions.
LB: As a front-end developer, I’m interested in some of the config management in D8, some of the front-end frameworks, I’ll definitely be at those. But outside of that I’m also really looking 
forward to the content strategy and UX things — D8 accessibility, content strategy and popular culture, some of these look really interesting. I know there’s also one on lessons from WordPress that I think is going to be really great as well. I think there’s a lot of great sessions regardless of what you’re specifically interested in. 
GD: Unfortunately, one of the things about being someone in my position is that I don’t really get to go to sessions very much [laughs]. I actually have not looked too much at the program schedule yet.
AM: But you will, of course [laughs].
GD: I will, certainly. And I will pick out a few sessions and put them on my calendar and will intend to go to them, and then inevitably something else will pull me away and I’ll end up watching the recording after the fact.
AM: But luckily they are all recorded.
GD: They are all recorded. And they’ve gotten really good at making sure that the session recordings are up usually within a day or two of when they’re recorded, which is a very impressive logistical feat. So I’m really happy with that. And in addition to Michael Schmid, or Schnitzels — that’s his nickname — and his keynote, I’m very much looking forward to, and I hope I don’t destroy her name here or we can correct it in post-production, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, who’s doing a keynote on content and design. I’ve read a lot of her stuff and I’m really excited to hear what she’s going to have to say for the Drupal community. One of the great things over the past few years is that we’ve really started thinking more about design as a project, which is really important and really challenging for an open source project – to really come together and prioritize not just what the software does but how people interact with it.
LG: That’s something that we’ve been seeing not just in the visual design aspect. We have a session in the PHP track that I’m really looking forward to, called “Your API is a UI”. The idea is that code should be designed with the same kind of thought you put into user experience for someone pushing buttons — it also needs to go into how someone is writing code. And that’s something that the community is starting to get their head around in the last couple of years. So
I’m really excited for that session and others like it, that push that concept.
AM: Well, let’s talk about the ones that Palantir is leading. We have three. One is “PHP 7: The New New PHP”.
LG: I talk about new stuff [laughs]. This is a talk that I’ve given at a few PHP conferences – it’s not Drupal-specific at all, it’s in the PHP track. PHP 7 was released last fall, right after Drupal 8 was – its release date was actually pushed back because of Drupal, we kept finding bugs. But for the developers and sysadmins in the room, if you have not tried out PHP 7, you really need to. It’s got a ton of really nice new features which I talk about in the session, and it’s twice as fast. And I’m not just showing marketing numbers – there are companies that have said they’ve shut down half their servers by switching to PHP 7. It is dramatically faster. Drupal 8 requires PHP 5 or later, and I would say, within six months if you’re not running Drupal 8 on PHP 7 – you’re doing it wrong. You’re leaving money on the table, you’re hindering your own developers. So come to the session. I’ll tell you all the reasons why as a developer you really, really want to be using PHP 7 right now.
AM: Really, really!
LG: Really, really, really [laughs]!
AM: So your second session is “D8 Module Acceleration Program”. 
LG: And this isn’t a normal track session, this is actually in the Business Showcase. It’s a panel that Acquia is putting together. Acquia, as some of our listeners know, has been funding a program called MAP — Module Acceleration Program — which is basically, hey, Drupal 8 is out, what about contrib, let’s put some actual money behind getting the major contrib modules up and running on Drupal 8. And Palantir has been partnered with them, as have a number of other
companies. Acquia has provided some funding, and Palantir is working at a reduced rate because we’re doing community work, essentially. My main work for the last few months has been the Workbench moderation module for Drupal 8, as well as the multi-version Workspace deploy suite which I’m collaborating on with some other developers at Pfizer. So the idea is there’s a panel of people who have been working as part of this program, saying, okay, what is it, why is it, what are the benefits of it, what does it mean for contributing to open source. Teaser: contributing to open source is a viable and important part of any business that’s using it, and it is a worthwhile investment. Now you can come to the session to hear the details of that.
AM: Cool. So the last session is George’s session, “Finding Your Purpose as a Drupal Agency”.
GD: Yes, so I’m going to be doing a session in the Business track. It’s a little bit, for those who might have seen the session I did for DrupalCon Barcelona last fall, it’s a little bit of a sequel to that session. Essentially what I’m going to be talking about are some of the challenges. Last year was a fairly challenging time for a lot of companies in the Drupal ecosystem. Everyone was kind of waiting for Drupal 8 to come out — a lot of folks were holding off on starting new projects because of that, and so I’m going to talk a little about that. I’m reaching out to some other folks, some other companies in the Drupal ecosystem, hoping to get them to share some of their perspectives as well. 
But then I’ll be talking about how, particularly during challenging times but during any time in general, the value of defining your purpose as an agency — your vision, your values, and how those things really come together and enable you to really have kind of a focus for where you’re taking your company. And not just how you run your agency, but also why — which I think is a question that doesn’t get asked often enough. So I’m really looking forward to that. For people that might be interested, it’s not just for folks that run Drupal companies. If you are involved in or interested in any way about how companies are run, and even — I’m not going to be talking that much about Drupal in particular, so I think it will be really valuable for folks, obviously even non-technical. And one of the things I do with my talks is a lot of analogies, so I’ll probably have some pretty entertaining analogies for folks.
AM: Great. Well, as Lauren touched on, beyond the sessions DrupalCon is also about the social life, and the socializing, and the community around it. So what am I to expect as a newbie, going to my very first one, after the daily sessions are over?
LB: Expect to be overwhelmed. Expect to be bombarded. And expect a little debauchery. I think you’ll be entertained, to say the least, but everybody is very friendly, everybody wants to buy
you a drink and hear your thoughts. And everybody wants to argue. So be willing to defend your ideas, because it will come. And you might change your mind and you might change somebody else’s, but that’s the glory in all of it. And I’ve found a lot more meaning comes from the conversations outside of the sessions than sometimes during them. So I always encourage especially first-time Drupalers or first-time Con-goers, don’t stop after the sessions. Go to the after-stuff, even if you don’t drink, even if you just want to sit there and have water and talk to
people, or have a Coke. It doesn’t have to be about the drinking, and it’s a really great place to socialize and share ideas.
AM: I understand that in the past there’s been things like trivia night, or karaoke, or just meeting at ping-pong [laughs].
GD: Well, in fact there is a trivia night on Thursday, and we are sponsoring it, as we have for the last couple of DrupalCons. And for me at least, it’s one of the highlights of the whole event. The key is, try to find a table with people who have been around the community a little while. But the
questions can be all over the place, and sometimes they even give credit for having someone who’s at their first DrupalCon at your table.
AM: So what, you get something like frequent flier miles for your very first one? [laughs]. 
LG: It varies by year, but I think your team gets a bonus point for every person at your table who’s at their first DrupalCon. If it’s your first time at a DrupalCon, that makes you a valuable commodity, so show up anyway [laughs].
AM: I should wear a sign.
LG: And I think there’s actually a penalty if someone on your team is a core committer. So don’t
always go for the table with all of the lead developers because you get a penalty for having them on your team. I’m not a core committer so I have no penalty one way or another.
GD: The trivia night is on Thursday night, and I think a lot of folks may be tempted to leave early because Thursday is the last day of sessions, but definitely stick around for trivia night on
Thursday. And stick around for the sprints on Friday as well. Folks are generally fairly tired by that point, but sometimes being tired at that place really lets you focus [laughs] on getting cool stuff done. And it’s not just code, it’s all sorts of things. There’s documentation sprints, we’ll often do some community work as well — all sorts of things going on even after the sessions are over.
LB: Definitely, it’s an exhausting week and it’s a long one. But those sprints at the end, those make the difference, and that’s how you really get involved and how you really learn stuff. So don’t ever think that, oh, I’m not an engineer, or, I don’t know how to do this. Because if you
show up, we will find a job for you.
LG: There’s a number of people at sprints every year whose job is, it’s just part of sprints, to mentor people in getting started. Get your dev environment set up, figure out where to find issues to work on, figure out if you want to do code or documentation or usability testing or whatever else you’re going to do — whatever you’re interested in doing, there’s a use for it, and someone who can hold your hand along the way to get involved in it. So, yeah DrupalCon doesn’t end on Thursday, DrupalCon ends on Saturday.
AM: That’s a long conference. It is. Sunday to Saturday, pretty much.
LG: It is, but for all of that, it’s one of the cheapest conferences around for that length of time. It’s definitely worth the value of going.
AM: So then let’s delve into the exhibition space and the vendor space. What can attendees expect from going into the vendor room, besides being thrown a whole lot of swag? Pencils, buttons, tattoos, all sorts of things [laughs].
LB: So there’s the swag, which is always wonderful. And you will find some very cool and unique swag, depending on what booths you’re at. But what I think is funny, having worked a booth before, is you’ll see vendors kind of use it as bait. They’ll watch you walk by and they’ll
watch you want it but not want to talk to people, because, like Larry said earlier, we’re all introverts. We’re just pretending for the week. And so they’ll kind of bait you with it, and they’ll get you to talk. And they’ll start with something small and introductory, and you might find yourself connecting with people you didn’t expect.
LG: People are generally not too pushy about it, most of the time. But yeah, tech conferences are where introverts go to cosplay extroverts.
GD: So as somebody who’s been to a lot of different conferences, and seen a lot of different exhibition spaces and exhibit halls and vendor booths and all that stuff — I really love the DrupalCon exhibit hall because it’s a lot more down-to-earth. It’s a lot less sales-y than most other conferences out there. You definitely have folks who will put a little flair on their booth or have some wacky promotion or something like that, but it doesn’t feel forced as it does at many other kinds of conferences. You really can, as Lauren said, just go up to people and have a conversation. And most of the time they’ll be happy to talk to you and not just to convert the sale.
AM: So of course I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that we’re going to have a booth and we’re going to be luring people in with our swag as well [laughs].
LG: Come to our booth! Say hi! We’ve got swag!
AM: That’s right [laughs]. Come to our booth, there’s going to be about seven or eight of us this year, and we’re going to be booth number 222. Come visit! And the website for DrupalCon is…
LG: http://www.drupalcon.org . That will redirect you to what the actual URL is. 
AM: Perfect.
LG: One final note. On Tuesday, you go to the pre-note. That’s not even a question. You go to the pre-note. Everyone goes to the pre-note.
GD: The pre-note is kind of a tradition that’s sprung up over the last five or six years or so. It’s the presentation that occurs before the keynote on Tuesday. And it’s generally put together by the same group of people. It’s intended for people who have never been to DrupalCon before, but it’s enjoyable by everyone, and they go to great lengths to make it incredibly enjoyable. So in the past, there was one that was all themed around Disney musicals — they’re very often tied into the culture of the location where DrupalCon is being held. Occasionally in the past we have even seen Larry up on stage [laughs] singing and dancing…
AM: And wearing inappropriate things [laughs].
LG: Those things were very appropriate given the character I was playing.
AM: Fair enough, fair enough [laughs].
LG: Without giving too much away — this year is more musical numbers, and I’m sure there will be shenanigans [laughs]. We’re still working on it as we speak, but expect shenanigans. You want to be at the pre-note. It’s worth waking up early for.
AM: Early? How early is it?
LG: It’s before the keynote on Tuesday, so it’s at 8 am. And it’s worth being up and at the conference center for.
AM: Good, I look forward to it. Thank you all for joining me. I’m looking forward to my first DrupalCon, thanks so much.
LB: Thanks for joining us, and you can find us at DrupalCon.
GD: Thank you. See you in New Orleans.
LG: See you in New Orleans. Let’s have some fun! And learn stuff [laughs].
AM: Thank you so much for listening. If you want to hear more episodes of On the Air with Palantir, make sure to subscribe on our website at palantir.net. There you can also read our blog and see our work! Each of these episodes is also available on iTunes. And of course you can also follow us on Twitter at @palantir. See you at DrupalCon New Orleans!

Why Strategy Reports Matter

Account Manager Allison Manley is joined today by... well, herself! She shares valuable insights on building effective Strategy Reports –  the document we generate at the end of the discovery and strategy phase of any project that includes the summary of our work, methodology, KPIs, competitive analysis, personas, usability test results, and much more – for your project. In short, they're very important.
Related: How to Build a Strong Project Foundation with Practical Personas by Carl Martens
TRANSCRIPT
AM: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. As always, this is a quick podcast, just a few minutes long, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. 
I’m Allison Manley. I’m an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from . . . . me! Haha! Today I’m going to talk about Strategy Reports, which is a report that we at Palantir generate at the end of the discovery and strategy phase of any project.
Some agencies refer to these as Creative Briefs, particularly if you’re in design or advertising. And they are essentially the same thing: it’s a report that summarizes all the research and findings uncovered from the discovery and strategy work done at the beginning of a project. It outlines the goals of the project, and then gives recommendations moving forward for the remainder of the project. They can be just a few pages long, or even 100 pages long depending on the depth and detail of the research. 
Some items that could be included in a Strategy Report are the following: 
A summary of the work, and the methodology used;A definition of strategic goals and recommended paths forward, with supporting metrics and data to help drive internal change management; Any Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for measuring project success;Competitive analysis;Documentation of content management needs, governance and workflows;A review of any existing content strategies to recommend how to best manage content moving forward;Assuming of course you’re doing a website, ideas in which the content can be marketed and expanded beyond the web site into additional campaigns;A content migration strategy outlining how content will be moved that will include initial recommendations on time and resources required, and how to minimize the SEO impact;Any results from usability tests or surveys created during the initial phases;Any persona development created from the uncovered research;And it could even include a project schedule with milestones for strategic objectives or completion of work throughout the remainder of the process.
So as you can see, they can include a lot of really valuable information, or as little as you need depending on your project. 
Strategic Reports are terrific for a number of reasons. First, they lay the groundwork for the entire team. That could include marketing and communications folks, designers, stakeholders, developers, etc. The report makes sure the entire team knows exactly what the roadmap is for the project going forward, and lays a strong foundation as to how that roadmap was developed. It informs the next phases of wireframing, developing the information architecture, creating designs, and through development as all those people on the team know exactly why they are making each decision along the way when they are creating the final product. 
Second, it’s a fantastic reference in case you get lost during the process. It’s really easy on long projects in particular as scope expands, or changes, or new team members come on or off a project, to lose focus on what you’re building in the first place. So when the team starts to feel like it’s straying off the path in any way, go back to that Strategy Report and review the overall goals and why you got there to help you focus back on what’s necessary to complete the project. I wrote a blog post recently called You Don’t Want Fries With That that talks about this particular reason why upfront strategy is so critical to any project. 
Lastly, and this reason is more pragmatic, a summary report simply justifies a lot of the upfront research and offers peace of mind! Building discovery time into a project is critical to completing any job thoughtfully. But a stakeholder on the client end may wonder what they’re getting for their money, and they’ll want to see something tangible to justify that expense. A website is an expensive proposition, no doubt, and usually the most critical and visible marketing piece an organization produces. So of course a stakeholder might get concerned if several weeks of research and testing are happening, but they don’t see anything tangible until they see designs or wireframes much later. So summarizing all the initial work into a Strategy Report gives them peace of mind that progress is being made, as well as setting up the rest of the project beautifully for success. 
That’s why I love Strategy Reports so much for every project.
Thank you all for listening to this week’s Secret Sauce! For more great tips, follow us on twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great day!

What to Consider Before Talking to a Strategic Partner

Today Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by Alex Brandt our Sales and Operations Coordinator who walks you through the top four most important things you should consider before starting up a conversation with your next strategic vendor partner. Considering these things first will set you up for a higher rate of success in finding the best vendor fit for your project.Transcript
AM: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is a quick podcast, just a few minutes long, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. 
I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from Alex Brandt. Alex works on our Sales team and fields a lot of our new business inquiries, so she has some thoughts on how to best prepare yourself for your next web project. 
AB: Hi, I’m Alex Brandt and I’m Palantir’s Sales and Operations Coordinator. Are you in the planning stages of a new web project? Today I’m going to walk you through the four important things you need to consider before you’re ready to start up a conversation with your next strategic partner.
First, what kind of internal resources do you have? Are you a web team of one, or do you have a few developers who are just looking for some guidance? Maybe your design team is looking for a development partner who can implement their designs. Whatever the case may be, knowing what kind of internal resources are available can help your strategic partner frame the scope of your project to be most successful, while staying within the constraints of your timeline and budget. 
Second, who else will be involved in the decision making process? Do you need to get anyone else on board with the project before you can get started? Do you need to get board approval or stakeholder buy-in? This is important to know, because there’s nothing more frustrating than being really excited and ready to start a project, and then realizing there is a long formal process you need to follow for selecting a partner agency. Also, the agency you’re hoping to work with might be able to provide you with some tools that can help you frame your argument for why the project is important.
Third, what deadlines are driving the project? If your website is your prime lead capturing tool and you have a major conference you are sponsoring at the end of the year, you’re going to want to make sure your new website has launched by then so you can hit your marketing goals. Alternatively, if you are a large university, you want to make sure your website is functioning properly by the time prospective students are clicking through your course catalogue. Another thing you might need to consider in regard to timeline is that you may need to split your project into different chunks of time to span multiple fiscal years.
This brings us to the final question you should be able to answer: what kind of budget are you working with? I know, your first inclination is to say “we have no idea, we’re asking around to figure this out,” but, if I were to throw out a budget in the range of $1 million, you might think that is way more than you were thinking and if I were to throw out a budget of $1,000 that might be way less than you were thinking. 
So what’s the rough number you have in your head? Maybe this project is the largest rebranding effort for your institution in the last ten years, and you have a budget of $500k set aside for its undertaking. Perhaps you are just looking to fix some things that are broken or make your website responsive, and you have a budget closer to a high five-figure range. Whether your budget is expansive or modest, having a rough idea of this number will help your strategic partner scope out a project that will be successful and hit your goals.
To sum things up, here’s a quick checklist of questions you should ask yourself when planning a new project:
What kind of internal resources do you have?Who else will need to be involved in the decision making process?What’s driving your deadline for launch?What is your budget?
So, do you think you’re ready to start a project? Let’s talk!
AM: Thank you Alex, and thank you all for listening to this week’s Secret Sauce! For more great tips, follow us on twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great day!

Establish Effective Benchmarks for your Website

AM: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is a super short podcast, just a few minutes every week, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. 
I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from one of our Web Strategists Joe Allen Black, who has some ideas on how to measure Key Performance Indicators, also known as KPIs. 
JAB: I wake up every day and put a little black tracker called a FitBit on my belt. It’s quite tiny, with a little screen and white numbers on it that syncs up to an app on my phone. As I take steps each day, the little tracker keeps count of how far I’ve gone and compares my numbers to the number of steps my friends have taken as well.
My goal each day is 10,000 steps — which is easy on the day I run a big race, but it can be seemingly impossible during a day when I’m crunching numbers in a spreadsheet on the couch.
For me, the 10,000 steps is a daily KPI, or Key Performance Indicator. It’s a guidepost for me to achieving my daily fitness goals.
So, what’s the whole point of this story? It’s really to get you thinking about tracking and setting up benchmarks on your websites. You can do this in your real life — thinking about the number of steps you take like I do, or hours of sleep you get each night — or on your site when you’re thinking about why you have your site and the types of things that are really bringing in your revenue.
If you’re a new site, you should make sure you’re adding a tracking system to your site. For free you can use Google Analytics, which many of our clients use. At first, it’s a little daunting when you open it up, but don’t worry after popping in a few times, it definitely becomes a little friendlier.
Of the dozens of types of numbers your tracking system is capturing, you’re going to want to just to key in on just a few for overall health of your site. We’re going to call these your Key Performance Indicators.
What your KPIs are will differ depending on your industry. The numbers will generally fall into just a few categories:
The first one’s conversions: Conversions are the actions you want your visitors to take when they use your site. In some ways you can think of this as what will make money for your site, or what will keep you going. A couple examples of these can include:
On an education website, this can be the number of people who register for a course. The payment they make ultimately is a top way the education site is making its revenue.
On a site like Palantir’s, we’re all about finding new customers and connecting with people who are looking for our services. A main conversion on our site is people filling out a contact form so our sales team can start working with them on a deal.
A news site might be focusing on increasing the number of pageviews, since the ads on those pages are what makes the money.
We then start looking at a bucket that I like to call micro-conversions, which is a fancy way of tracking the things that lead to people taking conversions, but they’re not really quite there yet. The other day I added some items to my Amazon Wishlist, I didn’t really buy anything, I didn’t spend any money, but I’m really getting close to making that conversion. I’m definitely leading toward doing that soon, so I’m making a micro-conversion at that point. Other industries may see this as users taking part in live chats, or filling out a form get an ebook or something of that nature.
Last, but certainly not least, I recommend some overall site health tracking metrics. For commerce sites or sales sites, these numbers don’t necessarily lead to an immediate sale. However, these health numbers lead to knowing if there are problems or opportunities.
Tracking page views per session across devices and browsers is the number one I like to look at. If I am regularly tracking how how people use my site on mobile versus desktop, I can quickly see if there’s any problems for mobile users if I change something on my site . . . if I see those mobile numbers go really down, for example.
Bounce rate is another one we look at: Bounces are the number of times people go to a page and then leave without taking another measurable action. If I see a giant fluctuation in that, it could mean I need to reassess some recent choices, or examine why some people to see why users aren’t sticking around on my pages.
I also like to recommend looking at the types of content people are leaving the site from. If see my exit rate on my blogs for instance going really high, I might have a problem I should address over there. If it’s really low on my sales page, I might have an even bigger problem.
As you begin a redesign, it’s important to really think about what those KPIs are from the start. Before a design or development process really begins in earnest, it’s important to explicitly state what those KPIs are and then optimize your site for them.
For example, if you’re a hospital, maybe one of your KPIs could be growing the number of people who make an appointment. In that case, as you design your homepage, or your content, or anything else, it’s important to think about how you can give clear paths to making an appointment on each of those experiences.
Most sites we work with will have 1 to 3 main actions or conversions they want users to take. The sites may have 5-to-10 other actions that they are curious about but those are those micro-conversions, or things that are less important to the overall bottom line.
If you’re someone using Google Analytics, which many of our clients do, you want to set Google Analytics to track those conversions so you know how many visitors are doing what you hoped they would.
It’s a good idea to keep a regular scoreboard of these KPIs so you can constantly look back to see if you’re growing at the rate that you want to, and you can correct if you aren’t. 
You can also include the site health metrics, too, so you can find out where you are having those problems, or where you have reasons to celebrate across the board.
Here at Palantir, we like to document and discuss these goals right off the bat with our clients, so we can make sure we are hitting the right points early and throughout the project. We bring this discussion into each subsequent decision about the website from what features should be included, or not included, and even to what type of navigation we’re going to include.
After a site launches, we want to make sure our customers have that same experience I talked about earlier with my FitBit — they have a simple benchmark that lets them know if they’re hitting their goal.
Thank you.
AM: Thank you Joe, and that’s it for today’s Secret Sauce. For more information on how to measure analytics for your site, check out Joe’s blog post from last year all about what metrics to check before a redesign. And the address for our site is Palantir.net. You can also follow us on twitter @palantir to always see what we’re up to. Have a great day!

Why Codes of Conduct Matter

AM: Hi again everyone, and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick piece of advice to help your business run smoother. 
I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from one of the Founders of Palantir, George DeMet, who is going to address the need for having a code of conduct at your organization or event.
GD: Hi, my name is George DeMet, and I’m the founder and CEO of Palantir.net. Today, I’m going to be talking about codes of conduct and how they can help make communities, organizations, and events more inclusive.
First, a little bit of background. I’m currently the acting chair of the Drupal Community Working Group, whose mission is to uphold the Drupal Code of Conduct in order to maintain a friendly and welcoming community for the Drupal project. In the past, I have also helped write codes of conduct for open source community events, including DrupalCon, and have provided consultation and guidance to organizations and groups who are looking to adopt codes of conduct for themselves.
In its simplest form, a code of conduct is a policy used by an organization to establish the standards for behavior and appropriate conduct when interacting with others in a defined space like a conference, workplace, project, or event venue. Almost any venue that serves the public, such a theater, museum, sports arena, or ice skating rink, has a code of conduct posted that sets expectations for people so that they don’t engage in unsafe behavior that interferes with the ability of others to enjoy that space.
In the context of technology communities, codes of conduct fill a similar function, helping to create inclusive spaces where people can feel safe and welcome to contribute. Unfortunately, what we’ve seen all too frequently is that even as more and more people are participating in open source and other technology communities, the number of incidents of harassment has also increased. Technology communities in general, and open source projects in particular, frequently suffer from a lack of diversity, with low participation rates by women, people of color, and other marginalized populations who are frequently the targets of harassing behavior.
A well-written and implemented code of conduct can help address those issues by making it clear that communities value openness and diversity, and are committed to providing an inclusive space that is free from harassment and where all kinds of people can contribute in a professional manner. 
Just having a code of conduct won’t get rid of every issue, but making sure that everyone underst ands the values of your community and the ground rules for interacting with others makes a huge difference. A good code of conduct will have the impact of making it easier for everyone to participate in your community.
So, how do you go about drafting a code of conduct? Fortunately, there’s a ton of great resources out there that provide a great foundation that you can build upon to meet the needs of your organization or community. Don’t worry, we’ll provide links to all of these in the description of this episode, as well as on our website at palantir.net.
For conferences and other events looking for a good anti-harassment policy, the Ada Initiative’s Conference Code of Conduct is a great example for others to use. What it does well is make it clear that harassment will not be tolerated at the event, provides examples of what kinds of behaviors constitute harassment and tells folks how they can let event staff or organizers know if they feel they’ve been subjected to harassing behavior. 
The code of conduct that we use at Palantir for meetups and other events that we host is based heavily on the Ada Initiative code, with some additional language borrowed from the code of conduct used by the Drupal Association for DrupalCons and other events. 
It’s very important that everyone who attends your event be aware that you have a code of conduct and be able to easily access it. That means that in addition to having it posted on your event website, you should also have a printed copy on display at the event itself, usually near the entrance or event registration desk, and if you have a printed program guide, it should be included in there as well. It’s also a really good idea to mention the code of conduct at the beginning of your event or during an opening plenary session and point out who to talk to if someone has something to report.
Which brings us to the question of enforcement. One mistake a lot of events make is adopting a code of conduct, but not creating sufficient mechanisms to enforce it. In some cases, where the behavior in question is endangering the physical safety of another attendee or breaking the law, the answer is obvious: event staff needs to immediately remove the perpetrator from the premises and call the cops if necessary. Often though, the answers aren’t always that clear-cut, and it’s important that your event staff or the person in charge of enforcing the code of conduct knows how to handle the situation.
Ideally, you want to have multiple people who are empowered to handle code of conduct reports, and you need to have those people fully understand and appreciate the responsibility they have, as well as be folks who attendees can feel safe talking to and can trust to handle their reports with discretion. 
Now a community code of conduct operates on most of the same principles as an event code of conduct. While an event code is largely designed to govern in-person interactions at a conference, meetup, or other event, a community code of conduct helps set the standards for conduct when it comes to the way we collaborate and communicate with others.  I believe a community code of conduct should be built around and reinforce the shared values of the community in question. 
In my work with the Drupal Community Working Group, a lot of the issues that we deal with are not harassment issues, but conflicts between people who are really frustrated with one thing or another and end up lashing out at each other in negative and unproductive ways. In those cases, we usually find ourselves in less of an enforcement role and more of a mediator role. One of the core tenets of our community code of conduct that is we treat each other with respect, even when when we disagree, and often just reminding people of that can be enough to alleviate the situation.
Sometimes however, you do end up with a situation that requires a greater level of intervention, and that’s where it’s really important to have a good conflict resolution policy and process. In the Drupal community, we encourage people to work things out between themselves whenever possible, asking for help from others as needed. We think this approach helps give people more control over the outcome of their dispute and is more likely to lead to a lasting resolution. 
If that’s not possible though, folks can escalate to the Community Working Group, and we’ll do  what we can to help resolve the situation. We are very clear, though, that under no circumstances is bullying or harassment tolerated within our community, no matter how long you’ve been in the community or how many contributions you’ve made. 
In addition to the resources we provide on the Drupal Community Working Group pages, another good place to check out is the Django project code of conduct, which has also been adopted by the jQuery Foundation and others. The Contributor Covenant and the Citizen Code of Conduct are also fantastic starting points for community codes of conduct that are used by a wide variety of projects and communities.
There’s been a lot of discussion and debate about codes of conduct in various open source communities lately, and there’s been a lot of misinformation floating around out there. What I can tell you based on my experience is that no matter what kind of community you’re involved with, having a well-written and enforced code of conduct helps create a more level playing field for participation and an environment that helps encourage contribution and involvement that you would not get otherwise. 
Thanks!
AM: That’s the end of this week’s Secret Sauce. For more great tips or links to some resources regarding a code of conduct, please check out the transcription of this podcast on our website at Palantir.net. You can also follow us on twitter at Palantir. Have a great day!Resources:
Ada Initiative Conference Code of Conduct: 
http://confcodeofconduct.com/
Palantir.net Code of Conduct: 
https://www.palantir.net/code-of-conduct
Drupal Community Working Group:
https://www.drupal.org/governance/community-working-group 
Django Code of Conduct:
https://www.djangoproject.com/conduct/ 
Contributor Covenant:
http://contributor-covenant.org/ 
Citizen Code of Conduct:
http://citizencodeofconduct.org/ 
Codes of Conduct 101 + FAQ
http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/codes-of-conduct-101-faq

Effective Presentation Strategies

Larry "Crell" Garfield speaks at conferences a lot. And with all of these speaking engagements comes a vast amount of knowledge on what works and what doesn't. He shares his top tips and tricks to get the most out of delivering your presentations at conferences and camps – and to ensure your audience is completely engaged and sings your praises during and after.Transcript
AM: Hi and welcome back to this week’s Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run a little bit better. 
I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from Larry Garfield, who is sharing his thoughts on how to give a fantastic presentation at your next conference. 
LG: Hi, this is Larry Garfield, Senior Architect and Community Lead with Palantir.net, and today I’m going to be talking about presenting at conferences. 
I present at a lot of conferences. It’s part of what I do, [and] I enjoy it. It’s part of a service to the community, I think. I enjoy the teaching process, and I try to encourage other people to as well, because it’s a great opportunity for the presenter to learn. If you’re interested in presenting at a conference — whether it’s at a Drupal event, a PHP event, an industry event, doesn’t matter — there are a couple of guidelines to keep in mind when formulating a talk you want to give. 
First and foremost, it needs to be a topic you care about. If you are bored with the topic, the audience will be bored with the topic too. No presenter can make a topic they are bored about interesting. So start with a topic that excites you, that you’re interested in talking about, that you’re interested in sharing knowledge about. The mindset you want to be in when presenting is, “I know this really cool thing. I understand this really cool concept, and I want you to share it with me.” I want the audience to get as excited as I am. That’s a good baseline for presenting.
It helps if it’s something you’ve learned recently. That way it’s fresh in your mind, and just like writing documentation, you still understand the component pieces of it, you haven’t fully internalized whatever the topic is. I actually find it much more difficult to speak on topics where I’m an expert than topics where I’m an intermediate because once you fully internalize a subject, it’s harder to break it down and explain it to a novice. So something you’ve learned just recently can be very helpful.
It can also be helpful to expect to learn as part of the talk. Good example here: one of my more popular presentations is on functional programming in PHP. When I first pitched that talk, I only had a slight idea of what I was talking about, to be perfectly honest! I had some understanding of the concepts, I had some understanding on how to apply them. But forcing myself to structure my own thoughts, forcing myself to look at it and say, “ok I get this, now how would I teach this to someone else?” really helped me to internalize a lot of the concepts that I cover in that talk. 
Also bear in mind who your audience is going to be. Often times you can’t really predict that, but what audience do you want to have? Do you want to have a room full of developers? That’s fine. Do you want to have a room full of site owners and admins? That’s fine. Do you want to have a room full of business people? That’s fine. But think about who you want to be speaking to, and then target not just your presentation, but your description, your session submission, for that audience. That will help get the right people in the room.
So now you’ve got a session that you know you want to do, you’ve got a topic you’re excited about, that you’re going to learn about . . . you know you’re going to learn in the process. Now how do we put together the presentation itself? There are a lot of different ways of doing that, a lot of different advice you’ll see. The most important, I find, is know upfront what narrative structure you want to have. Is that going to be a chronological story? It might be. Is it going to be just chapters, where essentially your entire presentation is four or five bullet points to expand on at length, That’s fine, I’ve given those. Are you going to build up to a point? That’s fine. None of these are wrong, but know which one you want to take. Are you going to make a point and then build on it to make a next point, and build on it to make a next point? Or are you going to just have, hey, here’s eight points [and] we’re going to go through them in order?
One thing I do see some presenters do is the classic, “here’s what we’re going to talk about, now I’m talking about it, and here’s what we just talked about it.” I actually find in most cases that comes off more stilted than helpful. Certainly the concept of setting the stage for a presentation is helpful, and having a closure and conclusion is helpful. But making that so explicit and formal actually comes off very stilted and very clumsy. 
One of the best examples here is having a framing story. I saw a presentation just recently where the presenter was talking about the process of debugging in code and started off with a story of this bug that he had in a system he was working on at one point that noone could figure it out, but it was a fun story. It got people engaged, it gave people something to think about it. Then he went through the process of debugging and tools for debugging and ways of thinking through a problem to figure out where the problem might be. And then he closed with, “and here’s what the actual bug was.” And it turned out to be one of those bugs that once you see it you’re like, “oh my god! How did we let that happen?” But people can relate to it! But it’s not just, “and here’s what we talked about.” Having a connection with the audience both at the beginning and at the end of the talk is crucially important. You want them to have a reason to listen. Hook them in early with your narrative structure and they’ll stay with you for the rest of the talk. 
Good luck!
AM: Thank you Larry. That’s the end of this week’s Secret Sauce! For more great tips, follow us on twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great day.

Increasing Performance for Your Website

In this episode, On the Air With Palantir host and Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by one of our magnificent engineers Joe Purcell. He gives a thorough yet entirely accessible definition of performance, why it matters, and what you can do to increase it. This episode is valuable for anyone in the midst of a web project, about to start a new project, and, of course, developers working on the web in any capacity.
We'll be back next Tuesday with another episode of the Secret Sauce, but for now subscribe to all of our episodes over on iTunes.

Explaining the Panels module

Welcome to this week’s Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run a little bit better. Today’s advice comes from one of our colleagues at Pantheon. Steve Persch is an Agency and Community Engineer at Pantheon and former Palantir team member, and he’s sharing his thoughts on using the Panels module in Drupal.Transcript
SP: Hi, I’m Steve Persch. Today I’m going to be talking about Panels Module in Drupal. 
So I use Panels Module because I think of it as a really direct way of doing style guide driven development, which is a topic that’s getting discussed a lot in the Drupal community these days. Style guide driven development is the idea that development is directed by a style guide understanding of how a site is put together. What I mean by that is components like global headers, global footers, the styling of teasers, the styling of common article header elements is a really accessible way for clients, for stakeholders to conceptualize the visual understanding of a site. 
So if you’re starting at that point with a style guide and you’re working in Drupal, it can be difficult to make Drupal match the markup that’s present in the style guide. A lot of Drupal developers like to complain about the CSS classes, the excessive wrapping divs that come from Drupal, and there’s this pain point of “how do we get Drupal to print the markup that we want.”
At DrupalCon Los Angeles I did a presentation called Rendering HTML with Drupal: Past, Present and Future. Anyway, in that I described how in earlier versions of Drupal it was really common to just take whatever markup you get from Drupal and write CSS against that. It may have too many divs, too many classes . . . it doesn’t matter, just write CSS against it. As we move towards this world where where we’re doing more style guide driven development, we generally don’t want the markup that comes out of Drupal by default.
Here’s where Panels Module comes in. Panels Module, I think, is a great mapping layer between Drupal’s internal understanding of elements like nodes, like headers and blocks, and that style guide understanding. So Panels has this concept called the Layout PlugIn. The Layout PlugIn is that mapping layer between a Drupal template file and the style guide design component. So you may have a Layout PlugIn called Global Header, and that’s your global header design component. You can then use that Global Header layout plugin at all these different layers of Panels.
There are four main layers of Panels that I like to use. There’s the Mini-Panels Layer, which is analogous to core’s block system. A mini-panel is basically an individual block, so you make an individual block, and that’s your site header. You can look at that mini panel and you can see this uses the global header design component and that becomes a mapping layer between . . . all right, we had this understanding of a design component called a global header, and we had to plug in all this Drupal data like search forms, like menus . . . Panels is a user interface that lets you insert all of that Drupal data into a template that you can still think of as an independent design component.
Doing that in traditional Drupal is really hard conceptually because in a more traditional Drupal build, the header might just be a conglomeration of things in the global template file, your page.tpl file. And it’s hard to keep track of where does this design component start and stop? Is there even a single representation of the header, or is it just a mix of menus that are thrown into the global template? 
So with Mini-Panels you can encapsulate blocks. With the Panelizer level, you can encapsulate view modes. Panelier is essentially an alternative user interface on top of Core’s view modes. So in Drupal Core you have the ability to say, “this article teaser is going to display these fields in this order, drag and drop . . . cool. I’d still like to have that mapping layer too. Well, our style guide says article teasers are really illustrated list items, our style guide calls them illustrated list items. So we can map in Panelizer from the Drupal concept article teaser to the style guide concept illustrated list item.
The next layer up is the Page Manager level. This is basically: what is this page? If you have a page that’s your taxonomy term listing page . . . you’ve got a vocabulary of musical genres . . . you’re going to have a page that is genres/jazz. What happens on that page? If you just have Drupal Core, that page is going to be nothing but a list of all nodes tagged in jazz. But your style guide says jazz needs to show this design component, it’s a complex design component. It shows the most popular albums in jazz, it shows these songs, it shows artists, it shows all these different things and we have a name for that component. At the Page Manager level you can map the Drupal concept of jazz page to the style guide concept of whatever is the name of that design component . . . maybe you call it genre landing page. So that’s our third layer, the “what is this page” layer.
Finally there’s the global layer [Panels Everywhere], where you do things that in Core that you would otherwise do with the Core blocks system. We’ve got a global header, we’ve got a globar footer, maybe we have a global sidebar . . . panels everywhere lets you control that global template and use all the Panels UI niceness to line up your variables to say, “actually on this page we have no global header and footer whatsoever, we have just this one element. On this other page we have a variation that says we use a mini-header.” Panels Everywhere is a way of more deterministically saying how those variants shake out, whereas in Drupal Core all of your core blocks are responsible in and of themselves for figuring out, “do I show up on this page?” With Panels Everywhere you can say on a given URL, on a given pattern this is our global template, this is our global design component. 
That’s why I like Panels. If you want to know more, check out the Palantir blog. I’ve basically given a summary here. There’s one blog post explaining Panels that runs down these four concepts, these four main modules, and then there’s another follow-up blog post called “Why I Use Panels” that digs a little deeper into the concept of mapping between Drupal data and a style guide or independent representation of design.
AM: Thank you Steve. That’s the end of this week’s Secret Sauce! For more great tips, follow us on twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Enjoy your day.