Community-Powered Web Standards: Organized Excellence in Design

Matt Kleve: [Intro music] For October 5th, 2023, it's the Lullabot podcast. Hey everybody, it's the Lullabot podcast, episode 264. I'm Matt Kleve, a senior developer at Lullabot, and today we're talking standards. A fellow Lullabot came home from a conference and said, hey, Matt, you got to get this person on the podcast. And so I did Joyce Peralta, manager of digital communications from McGill University in Montreal. Hi, Joyce. Glad you're here!

Joyce Peralta: Hi, Matt. Nice to meet you. And I'm really glad to be here. Thanks for asking me.

Matt Kleve: I digitally stalked you. It looked like you had been on Drupal.org for 13 years or so, so. Yeah.

Joyce Peralta: Yeah, yeah, it's been a little while. And you know, it's interesting, I, I know when I was at DrupalCon in Pittsburgh this year, there was some talk about the changes that are coming in Drupal and how there's an interest in opening up the Drupal community. You know, focusing on people that are maybe more interested in the business or management aspect of things. And I'm one of those people. I've been on Drupal for 13 years, which is a while, but I've actually only made a few commits. I've worked on Drupal systems for, you know, all this time, but it's not the development side of things that that I've been involved in. So I was really excited to hear about those changes at Drupal Con. Anyways thank you! Thirteen years.

Matt Kleve: And Andrew attended Evolve Drupal. Is that what the conference was called?

Joyce Peralta: Yes, Evolve Drupal in Toronto, which is a related, I guess, to to Drupal North which used to be the Canadian version of, of Drupal Con. There hasn't been a Drupal community event like like this, a wide scale event in Canada since 2018. Which was the last time that I attended the conference. I think it was also in, in Toronto. And so it was really great to have an opportunity to get back together in person have this these experiences, see people that I hadn't seen in five years because I hadn't seen them since I'd been in Toronto and been at an event about Drupal in, in the Toronto area. So yeah, it was really neat, kind of a blast from a bit of a blast from the past, which is fun.

Matt Kleve: That's great. And and so you gave a talk called Building a Community of Practice for Digital Standards, Compliance (It's more fun than you think). Which which I enjoyed like kind of that, you know, this is this is kind of the, the dull and no, it's more fun, right?

Joyce Peralta: It is more fun. Yeah. And I think that that's the, the main you know, focus of, of our strategy is focusing on the more human aspect. I mean, we have all the, the good policy and documentation and resources and training and all that stuff as well. But I feel like part of the success of our initiative is the fact that we try to provide opportunities for our community to come out and learn in more of a social setting about our digital standards, that we talk to them on an ongoing basis in a fun and casual way about our digital standards, and that we encourage them to connect with each other to share ideas you know, learn together and have social experiences. And I think that that is what makes people want to participate and align with our, our standards and be part of our governance structure.

Matt Kleve: So what kind of technology do you have at McGill? That, I guess is over all this stuff?

Joyce Peralta: In terms of our platform? Or in terms of...

Matt Kleve: Yeah. I mean, you're doing a bunch of Drupal, I guess, and...

Joyce Peralta: Yes.

Matt Kleve: ... many other things integrated as well?

Joyce Peralta: It's true. Yes. So we have a multi-site Drupal installation. We're on Drupal seven right now. We're of course, migrating to Drupal nine/ten. And we hope to have that wrapped up soon. We have about a thousand websites in our multi-site installation.

Matt Kleve: Wow. That's huge!

Joyce Peralta: And that's a big installation. Yeah. And it's been around since 2006. So I on in 2006, the university migrated on to Drupal six. And it's been Drupal ever since. And yeah, a thousand sites, 1500 active site managers right now. So when I talk about these events and, and our our strategy and these community initiatives, we're involving this community of 1500 site managers and the people that either, you know, create content for sites as well, or strategic folks that work in the departments that produce websites. So it's a large installation. And in addition to that, there's of course a lot of integration with other systems. So we have integration with our banner system for example. So a lot of our, you know, bio data we've got a really neat tool that was built by Evolving Web. I don't know if we can about who created a course management tool for us where we have a central database with information about our courses that can be pulled dynamically onto our Drupal websites, and we have a neat distribution events distribution system as well, where you can create events and news locally, but distribute them across sites in the multi-site installation. So, yeah, there's some, some neat things that, that we have going on. So from a web perspective, that's what we've got. For our essentially supported web platform, we have another 500 sites, by the way, that are custom or vendor built, and some of those are Drupal sites. They're just not part of our centrally supported Drupal install. And we involve those community members as well in our events. But for them, they're more personally responsible to make sure that they are complying with all of our standards. We have a lot of checks and balances in our centrally supported CMS to encourage and support people in aligning with our standards make it easier.

Matt Kleve: So having 1500 websites under your umbrella and you know, as many people involved with those websites. I mean, it makes sense that you need to have this set of standards, right? So kind of give me the upper level overview of of what you're trying to enforce? I guess I'm not sure if that's the right word.

Joyce Peralta: Well, we don't like to think of it as enforcing, though, it is an enforcement in a way. And there is a process that was put in place for situations where there's compliance issues. But that process was actually defined by our community. So there's there's a web advisory community or a web advisory committee that we have. It's made up of audience members from across our campus. So we have faculty members, staff, students, researchers and other people in our community who use the W mass, and when we wanted to put a process in place for dealing with compliance issues, we asked the committee to define what the penalties would be if people didn't align with our policies and best practices, and they were the ones. It was really interesting because I feel like they came up with a, a, a penalty process that was way more serious. And, and you know kind of heavy handed than we would have defined ourselves. So if there is a, an issue defined on a website or identified on a website you know, a staff member or a site manager will be informed that there's an issue. If they don't correct the issue, they have to retake the training that we have.

Joyce Peralta: If they don't correct the issue after they've retaken the training, then it's reported to higher ups in the department, and if it's still not addressed, then the issue will go back to the committee and the committee can consider unpublishing the website. So that is what they've come up with as their own governance structure in terms of dealing with compliance issues. And I think that so far it's been pretty effective, but we haven't had to, to initiate it, which has been good. So I, I feel like the, the one main concern that we have in all these situations is if there's a governance issue that's identified that is related to a human rights issue, either some kind of barrier to information that is, you know, making it difficult for someone to study or to work. Then it would become something that we would be you know, very, very serious about. But so far, people have been very accommodating when we've approached them and, and have addressed issues. So but that's, that's more kind of the unfun end of the governance structure.

Matt Kleve: Yeah. Well. Let's, take me through I guess, the standards. I see them on your website. We'll link to them in the, in the show notes.

Joyce Peralta: Great.

Matt Kleve: If just kind of what are we trying to, to get everybody on the same page about, I guess.

Joyce Peralta: Well I'm going to go back actually, to that event that I was...

Matt Kleve: Sure.

Joyce Peralta: ... that we were talking about, the one in Toronto, because the inspiration for the standards actually came from that event. So I was at the Drupal North conference in 2018, and there was a presenter named Hillary Hartley, who is the digital service, I think she's the digital service officer. I probably got that wrong. Maybe we'll need to look that up. But she's with the digital service standard for the government of Ontario, and she was doing a presentation on the Digital Service standard for the government of Ontario. And they have a similar network to the one that we've got. So it's similar in size, similar number of people, similar kind of, you know, large scope. And she was talking about this great, simple list of standards that she had created to make it easy for people to follow our standards, follow the standards of the Ontario government, and ensure that people were creating websites, government websites, that were user friendly and optimized and basically made life easier for people who live and work in Ontario.

Joyce Peralta: And at that, when I saw that presentation, I had this kind of eureka moment where I realized, hey, maybe a good way for us to build our good standards and to have good websites to create good websites for our community, would be to create a user friendly list of our all these policy documents and and best practices and guidelines that we have for people. Because up until that point you know, our, our governance or our policies and, and best practices were kind of in a mess. They were just a jumble of, of documents. And you know, some of the information was in people's heads. So I saw this presentation, I had this moment where I'm like, you know, let's let's take our our standards and make it into this nice, simple list. And we created our, our digital standards. We actually did a benchmarking analysis first and then we created our digital standards. And we now have boiled everything down to this nice list of nine digital standards that we've created for our community. And, yeah, I could. I guess that's I don't know, the digital standards...

Matt Kleve: When I read those nine standards, I, they feel more like core values to me. And they're, they're general statements that that kind of set the tone for, for what you want to do. It's not necessarily a, you know, use this kind of markup or whatever, but it's, it's it's general ideas that oversee what you're trying to accomplish. Right?

Joyce Peralta: That's it. Exactly. So it's interesting because when we teach, we have a digital standards training course that everyone at the university is mandated to take if they're going to get access to use our systems or have a website on one of our central, centrally supported servers. And when we do these training sessions, we give them an overview of the digital standards and we take them through the nine points, one at a time. And when we do that, that that training course at the end, we ask people, okay, how many how many standards does McGill have? And some people say nine. You know, the nine points that we have in our digital standards. But really beneath this is the many other policies and procedures and best practices that we have. So, you know, some people will say, oh, you have hundreds or thousands. So, yes, this this is a list of nine high level concepts that people that we want people to be educated on and that we want people to begin learning more about. So when they become part of our community, they take our digital standards course, they learn about these nine points, and then we're hoping that they're going to take that initial amount of information that we give them and learn, want to learn more about all of these areas. So for example, with our first standard, "be user focused", there's of course a lot of messaging related to the user be being user focused, that speaks to following user experience design methodology and learning about how to do user experience research and understanding how to get a really good idea of what your audience requirements are. So. So you're right, it is kind of very high level concept, but we're hoping that this will be a starting point and an introduction, and then people will be inspired to become part of our community and learn more and become experts in all of these areas.

Matt Kleve: Yeah. When you drill down into each of these standards you have a page on your website that has a whole lot more details and further references of things you should know about that kind of enforce this greater ideal, it sounds like, right?

Joyce Peralta: That's right, yes. So in addition to having, you know, the resource and the pages with the further information, we also have these events that I'm taught that I spoke about earlier, where we encourage people to come out and learn about various messages and announcements and initiatives that we are that we have related to all of these areas. We actually have one coming up next week. I'm really excited about it. It's related to the Make Sites Accessible standard, which is actually going to change. We're renaming that soon to Make Sites Inclusive. And we have an event next week. Right now at McGill, we have indigenous awareness weeks happening which is organized by our indigenous initiatives department at the university. And it's two weeks of cultural events and activities and different types of opportunities for the McGill community to engage with the broader indigenous community and the indigenous community at McGill. So we have this event that's coming up where we're going to be looking at best practices following best practices related to EDI. And I think in the States we say EDI, but am I right in understanding that in the States, it's mostly DEI? I think diversity...

Matt Kleve: DEI is what I would. Yeah. What I would be familiar with. Yeah.

Joyce Peralta: Yes. Yeah. So in Canada, I don't know why we flip it. I guess we like to put our own little spin on things, but we say EDI so we are going to have an event, and I'm really excited about it. We've got quite a good number of people registered from our community. We are doing it in collaboration with our equity team. And it's going to start with a panel discussion where the last EDI event we had with our community, we asked folks to vote on an EDI related book that they wanted to read. So the the book that we that we identified was our book club book was the equity myth, racialization, racial racialization and indigeneity in higher education. So we're going to read that. Then we're going to have a panel discussion with people from our equity department about what the book means in terms of how lessons learned and how how we should be building our websites and and what the lessons in the equity myth, the book, the Equity Myth suggest or say to us in terms of how we could be building our websites differently. And then we're going to have some breakout room discussions about taxonomy for websites related to race and indigeneity. And we'll also have a conversation about creating land acknowledgements for websites. So not just taking a land acknowledgement and slapping it on your website, but creating or writing a land acknowledgement that reflects the work that your department is doing and on a personal level, can speak about how what your department does is connected to the land acknowledgement and the the commitment that your university has made in regard to acknowledging and respecting indigenous peoples.

Matt Kleve: We probably jumped jumped ahead in asking this, but you have this set of standards, but it sounds like they're never really done. There's, there's constant revision and and making sure that you're, you know, continuing to do the right thing for all of your sites. Right?

Joyce Peralta: It's true. Yes. So every year we do. So so if you've looked through these standards, you might have sensed that we don't create all of the policy documents related to the standards. For example the privacy and security requirements are created within our by our InfoSec team in IT, our information security team and IT, our legal department is involved in that as well. Be Consistent; there's standards in there related to visual identity that are created by our marketing department. We also have Make Sites Accessible as some of our equity team members help us create that content for those sites. So these standards are the are is kind of a boiled down version or a user friendly version of all that documentation. And we meet with the policy holders in the various departments across McGill on a yearly basis to review the standards and make sure they're kept up to date. And I feel like that's also part of the success of this initiative, because it's people that use it can have faith in the in the fact that it's current. And that it's it's accurate. These aren't messages that have, you know, were created six years ago and have never been reviewed. We review them on an ongoing basis. So yeah, they're always, always in flux as things change, as the government introduces new policy and new regulation as best practices evolve. They're they're always changing.

Matt Kleve: We're talking with Joyce Peralta from McGill University about their standards that they have to keep all of their hundreds of websites continuing to be exactly what they want them to be. Coming up right after this, we are going to step through the standards real quick and talk a little bit about any struggles that they might have come across implementing this process on the Lullabot Podcast.

[Intro music]

Matt Kleve: Welcome back to the Lullabot Podcast, we're talking with Joyce Peralta from McGill University. Digital Standards, so what is the best thing that you've had come from this idea of, like, enforcing digital standards across this, this large group of websites that you're overseeing?

Joyce Peralta: Well, I think that's part of the title is the fun of it. And I think that's very unexpected.

Matt Kleve: I was going to get there. When do we get to the fun part?

Joyce Peralta: [Laughing]

Matt Kleve: Like what is the fun you see in this?

Joyce Peralta: It's all fun!

Matt Kleve: No I'm sure like yeah, okay.

Joyce Peralta: [Laughing] So I, I feel like the fun part is the, the community aspect of it, the and I guess most of what I've been talking about so far has been the policy and how we create the policy and how we support it. But and I've talked a little bit about the events. It's really at the events and through the interactions that we see in the community. So at the events, they're not just presentations where we we talk at people. We actually have conversations. They're interactive. People come out, our community is really keen to participate in discussion and to support each other. And I think that that's where the fun part comes in, because we're still having discussions about policy and best practice, but we're having them in a social environment where people are engaged and interested and interacting with each other. And we also have message boards as well where, you know, at the start, I think we participated a lot more and, you know, engaged in the conversations, and we still do. But I see more and more the community are supporting each other. They go in to the message boards, they answer each other's questions, they suggest ideas, inspire each other. And I think that's where the the fun of it comes in is those things. And some of the events that we have, for example, we we did a conference, a PSC web conference where we got institution wide access for everyone and had viewing party opportunities. Those are fun experiences as well. So, so yeah, those aspects of it are where the fun come in. And that was the biggest surprise for me. We didn't intend to do that at the start. At first we thought, oh, we'll just create the resources, we'll have the training courses, we'll do all the governance framework. And then it was the community that's that started to ask us more and more for these, these kind of interactive, fun experiences and fun opportunities and opportunities to engage. And, and that's, that's how it evolved into our community of practice.

Matt Kleve: And you've had the opportunity to to speak a few times, kind of about the things that you've been doing, right? You mentioned to me Pittsburgh as well?

Joyce Peralta: Pittsburgh is as well. One of the things that I really love about this presentation is I attend both developer conferences and the communications and marketing type conferences, and it resonates with both, both communities, which is really neat. There are some things that I'll focus on a little bit differently, and different questions that I get asked if I'll do it at a more developer type conference, then at more of a marketing type conference. But basically it's the same messaging and the same the same content. So so it's kind of neat.

Matt Kleve: Do you get different questions from the two groups?

Joyce Peralta: Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I do.

Matt Kleve: I'm imagining they would come at it from two different, completely different perspectives.

Joyce Peralta: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And in not in ways maybe that you'd think. So when I do it at developer conferences, you know, it's not always just a higher ed folks in the room. You know, it's a chance for me, I think, to engage with external providers and companies who support us in higher ed. So there's often questions about you know just general, how do you how do you learn more, you know, what kind of opportunities are there for folks to be more involved and interested or engaged and knowledgeable about our standards? Because when we're working with companies, if we know they're going to follow our standards, we'll promote them in the community. As you know, our preferred vendors. So questions in areas like that and and from a marketing perspective, of course, we always get you know, people that are interested and asking questions about how to do something similar in their own institutions so that they can better control quality of their web spaces.

Matt Kleve: Do you have any recommendations for somebody who wants to do this in their own organization?

Joyce Peralta: Yes. So we've been approached by a few universities in I have, over the past few years of universities that are interested in, in doing similar or implementing similar frameworks in their own institutions. And it's it's as a starting point for us, we worked on cultivating a relationship with the different departments and getting buy in from the different departments who maintain the policies and documentation because it has to be a partnership. You need to, to be able to work together, to be able to produce the resource amd you're going to need, their ongoing participation to ensure that there's going to be, that you're going to get help keeping it up to date. So that's the first just doing a, you know, a creating relationships with these different departments, doing an audit of all of the the policy and best practice and documentation that you have. And then for us, the next step was doing a benchmarking analysis and looking at other institutions, other universities who have similar, similar resources. So the government of the UK, by the way, has the, the the OG version of this document. So if you look at the the Gov.uk site for digital standards, you can see the original version. The the American government also has a version. Canadian government of course has one. And then there's a few universities across the world that have them. So, you know, thinking about which ones, which standards are relevant for you and, and how do you want to start in terms of creating a nice digital standards document for your community.

Matt Kleve: So being a big part of an open source community, are these standards Licensed in some way that somebody could adopt them for themselves or?

Joyce Peralta: Not formally. But we I mean, we don't see I don't see this document personally and I don't think we we have stopped anybody from from treating this as an open source document that people can, can take. I mean, we've certainly taken best practices and, and, you know, ideas from other folks' sites and, and used that as inspiration and, and I hope other people would do the same.

Matt Kleve: Let's step through the nine of them real quick, if you don't mind. Just to kind of get a high level overview. I'll, I'll name the, the three word or two word, four word, the short version. And if you could just give me a sentence or two about what, what what you're trying to achieve here. So the first, Be User Focused.

Joyce Peralta: So this one of course there's a reason why it comes first, and that's because we want to put our users first and at the center of every decision that we make when we're building websites. And there's two reasons there. One, you know, just recognizing that your audience member should be first, but also that you're avoiding making decisions based on your own assumptions of what should be on the site. And, you know, I think in higher ed, we come across these discussions where we encounter people that feel they have ideas about what the best solution is from their own point of view. So we want to avoid that behavior as well. So it's one of my favorites.

Matt Kleve: Support Decisions with Data.

Joyce Peralta: So this one's related to Be User Focused. And it's the idea that you should be when you're making decisions, using data that you've collected to base those decisions on. And it should be current data. And also that you're, you know, keeping an eye on your, for example, your statistics on an ongoing basis, that you are regularly conducting qualitative audits on your websites and making decisions based on data and not assumptions again.

Matt Kleve: I love that because I'm in so many client meetings where it's like, I think our users are finding this particular thing by clicking here and then clicking here. It's like, how do you know that? Like I would love to see the data. Be Consistent, number three.

Joyce Peralta: Be consistent. So this one is related, of course, to the idea that we need to follow a consistent look and feel and provide a consistent experience for audience members. That's a feedback that we hear from our audience members a lot, is that they don't like navigating throughout our websites and our services and having a completely different look and feel and, you know, a different navigation. So being as consistent as possible. It also includes information about making sure you are using content at its at from its source, rather than duplicating it on your website. So rather than taking admissions information that's already on our undergraduate admissions website or our admissions website and re-, you know, creating it on your site, that you should just link to the original source information.

Matt Kleve: It's a whole lot easier to maintain that way for sure.

Joyce Peralta: It is.

Matt Kleve: Make Sites Accessible. That one sounds fairly straightforward for a higher ed site, right?

Joyce Peralta: Yeah. It is, it is, but this one is evolving into our Make Sites Inclusive area. So it'll have more information about gender, gender neutral language, uh, you know taking into consideration different EDI aspects or DEI aspects of your site. In addition to, of course, accessibility.

Matt Kleve: Be Thorough in Your Process, or I suppose in Canada it would be the process, right?

Joyce Peralta: [Laughing] No process I say process.

Matt Kleve: Oh, okay.

Joyce Peralta: Pro-cess. Hmm, interesting.

Matt Kleve: I always hear pro-cess from my Canadian friends.

Joyce Peralta: Pro-cess. Maybe there's a different I think I say it both ways. Anyways so Be Thorough in Your Process. This is making sure you're taking all the steps you need to take in order to thoroughly research your project, plan and design it, launch it, and then evaluate it on an ongoing basis. So you don't just, you know, quickly throw together a plan, launch a website, and then never evaluate it, that you are following all the steps that you should take.

Matt Kleve: Less is More.

Joyce Peralta: Less is More! This is my absolute favorite standard, and I think it's the one where we have the most area or opportunity for improvement on our websites. Because I think over time, our sites have become bloated with information. We're just constantly adding more and more detail and thinking about more initiatives and things to add. And we never take the time to think carefully about what needs to be removed. And things need to be removed all the time. So as a result, we have these huge websites, and we have audience members who tell us that they're overwhelmed by the amount of information they're bombarded by every day. So yeah, less is more is a big one. And we have a big push right now going on where we're encouraging people to really pair their sites back and really be thorough about removing unnecessary content.

Matt Kleve: I've been a part of a migration effort where one of the standards is to remove a large or a percentage of the content which is...

Joyce Peralta: Ah!

Matt Kleve: ... kind of exciting because...

Joyce Peralta: That is!

Matt Kleve: ... less is more, can can really mean a lot and.

Joyce Peralta: Yeah.

Matt Kleve: Definitely paring down to to make your your content useful is is good.

Joyce Peralta: We have recently launched two websites where we reduced one site by 90%.

Matt Kleve: Wow!

Joyce Peralta: Yeah!

Matt Kleve: I would think I was thinking it was only like 30 or something is what we were being asked to do, but 90, that's a lot.

Joyce Peralta: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Well you think about over time, all of the like articles and events and all of those. Yeah. All that information. It doesn't need to live forever.

Matt Kleve: Yeah I mean there's, there's definitely stuff that is no longer important and can come off the site.

Joyce Peralta: That's it.

Matt Kleve: But it's gone from the historical record. I mean, people are grasping on to it, right?

Joyce Peralta: Well, part of that we we just started working with the, the libraries who have access to a a fancy version of the Wayback Machine. So we are going to be launching, hopefully soon, an archiving service. Right now we're just doing offline archives, but we want to. I don't know if you are familiar. I can't remember what it's called, Archive It, that's what it's called. And it's a service for you can, you know how when you go to the Wayback Machine, you can ask it to archive a web page?

Matt Kleve: Mm-hmm.

Joyce Peralta: With the Archive It service, you could actually get it, get asked the Wayback Machine to archive a collection of content. So that's what we are hoping will give us a way to archive our content and then reassure people that it doesn't have to go away forever. We're going to archive it in Archive It, and then we can remove it from your website.

Matt Kleve: Okay. That's good. Protect Websites and User's Data.

Joyce Peralta: Yeah. I think this is the the OG standard because it's the one that I think from a, from an IT perspective we've all been aware of for, for many years, there's there's really high I think requirements for, for Canadian sites to protect in terms of protection of data. So it's a big one. And it includes things like, you know, not collecting credit card information on you know.

Matt Kleve: Good idea, yeah.

Joyce Peralta: Yeah, exactly. Things like that, that you could be held liable. I don't know if it's the same in the States, but if you create a web form that collects credit card information, it's not the institution who's going to be held liable. You personally will be held liable in Canada or can be held liable for that.

Matt Kleve: I guess being an American, I just assume everyone's getting sued.

Joyce Peralta: [Laughing] I guess. Yeah.

Matt Kleve: Yeah.

Joyce Peralta: There's a there's always an opportunity to sue in every situation. Right? In the States.

Matt Kleve: So a part of that is also get get the heck off of Drupal seven. Right?

Joyce Peralta: Yes. Yeah. Now,

Matt Kleve: And I'm sure we'll be doing more shows in the future about other things that are upgrading, but it's quite, the quite the process to get off of Drupal seven and and move to modern Drupal. And there's a lot of people going through that at this point, that's for sure.

Joyce Peralta: Yes. Yeah. And we are. That's actually one of the the extra messages that we're adding on to this "clean up your website" campaign is get your, get your webforms off of your site.

Matt Kleve: Okay. Build, Evaluate, Revise. Sounds like a life cycle to me.

Joyce Peralta: It is like a life cycle. And I feel like it's also agile without saying agile. So it's a, you know, an idea that you, you just build the best possible tool that you can with the current data that you have and you continue to do that on a regular, ongoing basis. So. So, yeah, it's a good one.

Matt Kleve: Collaborate and Share.

Joyce Peralta: Collaborate and Share. So this the last two that we just talked about Build, Evaluate and Revise and Collaborate and Share are two of the standards we're going to kind of beef up this year because I think it's there's a lot of opportunity and I think untapped potential to really make our, our community of practice into, you know, a community that supports each other and works together. And it's they're related to these two standards. So Collaborate and Share, we're already starting to do that a little bit in the way that we share ideas and and help each other out. But you know, in terms of like for example, all this great user research that we're doing in all the different departments, how can we better I think share that, share those takeaways and, and, and make sure that they're being applied across the university when there are things that could be useful for everyone, so.

Matt Kleve: If you have 1500 people that are inside of Drupal at some point, that's a pretty large community. If they were all to get together, that would be, you know, the third biggest DrupalCon in the world.

Joyce Peralta: I think I think there are bigger installations, though, when I go to DrupalCon, I hear about bigger ones.

Matt Kleve: Sure. Yeah. But like, that's still, that's that's a significant community. They're not all Drupal developers, but being users, I think there's a lot of sharing that can go on as far as like, this doesn't work. Can we fix that? You know, hopefully that that collaboration can be healthy and improve everything, including Drupal?

Joyce Peralta: Absolutely, yes. And that's a great connection that I like to highlight in my presentation, this idea that I think part of the reason we've been able to establish a community of practice for our digital standards compliance is because our platform is part of a community of practice. Drupal is an open source community, is is a community of practice. So it's a good base, I think, for us to to build our, our internal community on. And also, if you're thinking about doing a digital standards community of practice like model in your own university, you already know what it is to participate in a community of practice. So, you know, you go to DrupalCons, you go to Drupal events, you don't have to do those things, but you want to do those things because you're excited and interested and want to be part of the Drupal community. So that whole passion and and interest, that's what you want to create in your your university environment or college environment related to your digital standards.

Matt Kleve: Very good. Is there anything more you'd like to add as we point toward wrapping this up?

Joyce Peralta: Oh just that I hope to connect with people about their digital standards. You know, our governance framework initiatives and would love to hear from people, I'm on LinkedIn. You can connect with me at uh I think it's just Joyce.Peralta is my LinkedIn URL. So I hope to to hear from folks.

Matt Kleve: Well, very good. I guess to mirror Less is More. I think that's it. Thanks. Thanks for your time today I appreciate it.

Joyce Peralta: Thanks, Matt. Nice to meet you and hope to hear from you again.

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