Open Y: A Drupal-Powered Platform for Good

This talk discusses the OpenY platform, a Drupal-based solution developed to enhance digital services for the YMCA across North America. The speaker, Avi from Imagax Media, along with Sarah from YMCA of the North, elaborates on how OpenY aims to create digital equity for various YMCA associations. They explain the core features of the platform, including member data integration, customizable content types, and community-driven development, emphasizing the importance of accessibility and consistent branding. The talk also covers the historical context of YMCA's digital presence and the collaborative effort to streamline digital tools and services, ultimately benefiting YMCA's members and enhancing their experience.

Okay. Uh, thanks for coming everybody. Uh, we are going to be talking about YMCA website services, also known as OpenY, a Drupal powered platform for good. So, um, I'm Avi. Uh, you might remember me from such Drupal events as Midamp, the event organizer working group, Midwest Open Source Alliance. Uh, but today I'm going to talk to you as a technical product consultant from Imagax Media. Uh, yeah.

And this is Sarah. Sir, come talk to the microphone. >> Okay, this one. All right. Hi, I'm Sarah Halby. I'm the AVP of digital products and programs for YMCA of the north, which was one of the founders of Open Y and working with the Y USA team as they've taken it over for YMCA digital services. And I've had the great opportunity to partner with Abby for five

years, six years now. So, >> yeah. >> Yay. >> Okay. So, uh just going to start with a little bit of background. Um, Imageex uh was founded in 2001. We've been a specialized Drupal web agency since 2006, and we're a top ranked agency globally. We offer a full spectrum of digital services. Our team includes 90 plus full-time staff with specializations in UX, UI, SEO, GEO, accessibility, content

strategy, and of course, development. Uh, we're headquartered in Vancouver. We have offices across North America, Latin America, and Europe. So, uh, as Sarah said, Imagex has been a preferred vendor to the YMCA since 2016 when, uh, we were first engaged by the Y North team. Um, uh, to contribute to the first release of the Open Y platform, which is now called YMCA website services. Uh, since 2016,

IMAX has been trusted by over 35 YMCA associations in the US and Canada, to deliver digital strategy and technical solutions to their members. So, uh, today we're going to talk about, um, Open Y, how it got started, the core features, how we put community first, and how YMCA of the North uses Open Y to serve its members, and how you can get involved. So, first up, a

little history about Open Y. Um, so we're going to step back and talk about the YMCA. Uh the YMCA is a huge federated organization that manages 800 associates as part of their national network. There are 2700 physical YMCA branch locations across all 50 states. The programs in over 10,000 communities serving 22 million members and counting. That's just in the Y US in the Y in the USA.

Uh YMCA Canada has a similar structure and reach in Canada. uh each associate uh of the the network could be a standalone branch uh or they could be part of a larger association. Uh YMCA of the North is one organization with over 20 locations in the metro Twin Cities and western Wisconsin area. So uh YMCA of the USA provides significant guidance on branding uh but the implementation

of that branding is up to each individual branch or association. The physical branding is strongly aligned, but the digital strategy is still an ongoing process for every organization. So, as an as an example of this, uh I've I've brought up the Fargo Morehead YMCA. Uh in 1959 to 62, they raised $1.2 million for a new branch. And uh this was the first time over a million dollars

had been donated for any project in the history of Fargo, which is pretty is pretty fun. Uh part of the project was this 18 foot tall neon sign that was installed in 1962 just after the building opened. Uh in 2022 uh the National Y issued new brand guidelines uh that disallowed non-compliant signage uh in order and so in order to preserve this historic sign, the Fargo YMCA

got it listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Uh this the sign is still there today as far as I understand. Um, so you know, obviously, uh, websites kind of don't don't go by those same standards. Uh, and so if you if you contrast those those strict physical brand guidelines to the YMCA's digital presence today, uh, you can see that there's a a pretty broad range.

Uh, we were just having a conversation before the talk about, uh, how one of the folks in the audience uh, has a YMCA that literally doesn't even have a website. Um, so you could go you can go and and look for your local YMCA and you may see it implemented in WordPress or Wix or Squarespace or Jumla um or Drupal. And so part of what we're doing

is trying to provide an opportunity um to to provide some consistent branding across the movement. Uh, one other example of kind of the brand guidance that's u been been given out to the wise um is the is the the the Y brand itself. Uh, the brand graphics guide that uh the Y provides um gives almost 50 pages of documentation about color, font, logo, voice, and tone imagery.

Um, and the details get as specific as like how the pieces of the Y logo can be used in different imagery and how the logo kind of decomposes into its component parts, which is actually pretty cool. Uh, it's a really interesting study of imagery. Uh, there's also this color palette of 15 base colors, a whole bunch of secondary options, logo positioning, fonts, etc. Uh and yet despite

these 50 pages of documentation, uh each individual association has to figure out how to do this on their own. Um yeah, so again, as we as we talk about kind of this national presence, uh the wise also have a lot of features um in their physical locations that are almost universal. Uh and there's a lot of history behind those. So, uh, the YMCA invented the modern swimming

lesson, and almost every Y has a pool. Uh, basketball and volleyball were both standardized the Y. Um, and you know, pretty much every Y has a gym. Uh, most of them do family and children's programs. Most of them have strong community involvement. Uh, but a lot of the features are also highly variable. Um, the Y used to have residential facilities. And in 1940, there were about a

h 100,000 rooms uh residential rooms at YMCA's across the country. That was more than any hotel chain at the time. Uh now, Wise, some Wise still have residential facilities, but the number is is a lot smaller. Uh a handful of YMCA's across the country, including the one uh in the town I grew up, have uh ice skating rinks. Uh you know, but they're like a handful across

the country. Some have esports labs, which is a new thing that's uh that's been coming out. Uh so again you know some of the things are universal and some are are highly specific. Um similar to the physical features uh a lot of the data is federated and a lot of it is scattered across disparate systems. Um one example of the federated data is the nationwide membership program.

uh that provides access uh that provides YMCA members access to more than 2600 association uh locations across the nation including Puerto Rico in this reciprocity agreement that says um if I'm a member of the Chicago YMCA I can go to the Joliet YMCA or you know the San Francisco or the Minneapolis YMCA. Um that uh agreement involves aggregation of millions of records of of member data. Um

that's all done by the uh the YMCF USA uh team. You could talk to Tom about that later if you want. Uh however uh as we were talking about uh member data at specific locations uh is in um you know could be in multiple different data sources that need to be aggregated all together. uh information about classes, programs, uh facility uh management all happens in different places

that need to be made accessible to the Y members. So uh in 2016 when the YMCA of the Twin Cities, which uh is now Y North uh and otherwise began collaborating on a unified digital strategy, they could have come to any number of platforms. There's lots of open source projects in the world. um they wanted a way for the Y movement to build something that could be

easily shared and customized across a hugely disparate network with a lot of similarities. Drupal's open source model allowed that and it created digital equity across the movement enabling wise of all sizes to grow their digital presence. So as I said the evol the the distribution uh kind of evolved from this in 2016 that core team YMCA of the north Seattle Houston western North Carolina and others began

coordinating efforts on basic features and then they quickly formed this organization to guide the distribution called open wide. That core team guided the distribution until 2022 uh when ownership was transferred to YMCA of the USA's digital services team. Uh that's the central IT office um in the national association or in the the national office. Um with that centralization Y USA um contracted with three different partner agencies

IT care for infrastructure, IMEX for product management, strategy and documentation and five jars for development. Uh each of those um agencies contributed their own specializations and we all collaborated together on feature development. Um, so again, we this centralized feature set reduced digital waste and redundancy. Instead of every YMCA having to implement all of these shared features in individually, um, we're able to solve for those digital challenges

and provide accessible digital experiences for the customer and the Uh these features are used by hundreds of Y associations and shared with completely open source code except the single private module that has the licensed font file that we can't distribute. Uh so we have uh YMCAcentric layout builder blocks to enable flexible page building. Uh we have brand compliant WAG doubleA accessible themes. Uh we have deep integration

with commonly used thirdparty APIs. So, Open Y really created this entire other uh digital ecosystem on top on top of Drupal core and contrib. Uh so we've been doing this for 10 years and Drupal's brought consistent brand compliant accessible member experiences to over 180 out of 800 YMCA associations in in the US. This is a map of all of the wise that we know of that are

using Drupal. So find your why on there or uh if you find your why on there, great. If you if you don't see your why on there, you can reach out to them. But uh as I said, there are over 800 associations in the USA. Uh and so that's about 600 YMCA's that don't use Drupal yet. So that's my kind of call to you all that this

is a huge opportunity for Drupal to be able to reach more um more folks out in the community. So next up I'm going to talk about some of the core features that we've developed um to make open Y uh work for So um as I said we we start with the best of Drupal core and contrib to build out uh this distribution. So we have content types

that model many of the um the the the things that I talked about at the physical facilities. So we have location based content types, branch camps and facility pages that break out addresses into geodata fields, amenities into taxonomy terms and hours into custom fields. So we can show people you know what YMCA is open when. We have another set of content types called program, program program, subcategory,

activity class, and session that build this giant hierarchy of data that models data for activity finder, which is our decoupled scheduling app uh that lets members find what's going on at their Y when uh we also have content types that support memberships, uh alerts, and narrative content like articles, events, and more. So next up um is is meta data and schema support. So whether data is going

into social share cards, rich search suggestions or AI scrapers, uh as Dre showed earlier, good data makes for better search results. So schema.org data um is automatically generated for a lot of our pages. Uh we've got local business schema, FAQ page, article schema, they're all supported out of the box. So once you enter the data for a Y, all of that um all of that metadata is

generated behind the scenes with tokens. Much more is contributable is configurable via contrib. Uh and finally, when structured data won't cut it, uh Drupal lets us do more. We've got CK editor 5 out of the box with plugins that give editors flexibility like turning on buttons in the editor uh while maintaining accessibil uh accessibility and basic content structures. Uh we also have web form which lets editors

build rich forms with conditional logic uh signature capture and even post to external systems like Salesforce. Uh I've seen folks at Wise build web forms for every possible thing. Uh some things that they shouldn't be doing with web form. Uh but it's really amazing to you know be able to give folks this tool and say go nuts and uh to see what they do. So finally on

top on top of core not finally I've got a bunch more slides uh on top of cord uh we have um a full set of Drupal powered community honed API integrations. So uh as I said you know the the YMCA's work with dozens of different integration providers. Um and so uh we use Kor's migration system to power bulk imports uh in batches or on chrons. Uh we

have complex connections with JSON web tokens and the key module uh and Symphony's HTTP client uh kind of backs all that. Uh some sites also have full uh SSO which is pretty easy with the simple sample module. Uh we've done multiffactor authentication and password rules and all of that is basically turnkey because of the contrib modules that the Drupal community has provided. Um we just set up

a big complex set of uh password rules based on new um 2025 recommendations and uh you know the hard part of that was figuring out like how to parse the 20page document of password uh regulations into something that we could implement. Once we decided what to implement it was like an hour of turning on the modules and uh exporting the contrip. yeah, we've we've got dozens of

systems that we have to integrate with. Um, and you know, there's there's very little direction on what YMCA should use what systems. And so, every Y that that comes to us uh with a new system may want to um make an integration for it. Uh so uh when a Y uh chooses a vendor um the the agency that's working with that Y uh works to open source

as much of that integration as possible. So the vendor has you know their API docs, we have open Y. We try and kind of build this base of knowledge. Um so every Y that comes in adds to the base of knowledge by open sourcing parts of the integration. Uh I've I've done some new integrations lately uh that have taken weeks and months. Um the first time around

uh like dozens and dozens of emails back and forth with lots of different people um we've been able to get those integrations uh from taking weeks of back and forth on the first try to just a handful of emails and a couple lines of config um because Drupal makes um creating these systems so easy. Uh finally um some of the APIs aren't fast enough for us to

call them directly uh in a decoupled application. Um, sometimes we, you know, use the APIs directly as a as a backend. Um, but other endpoints have strict call limits or just slow. Uh, and so we use migrations to be able to pull this data in, uh, hourly or daily. Uh, and so batching and caching are our friends. All of that's out of the box with Drupal. Uh,

and it does it pretty seamlessly. So whether we're we're calling a third party API directly or pulling in the data um uh with a schedule, we're able to integrate data from a lot of complex systems into a single uh source of truth for members. Uh yeah, so once our data is in Drupal, uh then we've got to show it to people. Uh and we have a robust

suite of decoupled apps that connect members to their goals. Nobody nobody's going to the Y cares about Drupal. They just want to put their kid in a swim lesson or go to camp. Um so activity finder is the tool that helps um members book activities like childcare camps and swim lessons. The registration for those activities happens outside of Drupal. Um but this application that we have in

Drupal provides a consistent robust discovery experience. often we can't control the um the front end that the the the the vendor has. Sarah could probably attest to um but uh with Drupal we can build a consistent experience for members. Um this activity finder was built with Vue uh and it can either fetch data from solar that's getting indexed by Drupal or it can hit a third party

API directly. Another app that we have uh is the membership calculator which provides an uh interactive membership wizard with location and pricing options to attract members. So data for this is either entered manually or pulled in from an API. Um some associations have hundreds of variations of membership options which can differ across locations. I've seen these spreadsheets. It's it's it's a lot of data to say, you

know, what age are you? How many people are in your family? what kind of financial support do you need? What location are you going to? Um, all of that data has to, you know, first just kind of be mapped to business rules and then kind of be entered into the system to be able to be parsible by members. So this app is also built with Vue uh

and you know basically a little form API magic behind the scenes and Ajax and uh you can go through a couple steps to choose your location, choose your family size, choose your um your membership options. Uh we also have a custom site alerts functionality. This is you know timely information that displays in a thin banner across the site uh you know in the header or the footer.

It's used for holidays uh construction emergency responses. the number of times we've we've had wise have to um post emergency responses and basically not need any input from us, just been able to post sites post uh alerts um up on their site is uh you know it's it's really nice to not have to um to to let the wise do what they need in those urgent situations.

Um this is built with React. Um there's a custom route that serves the alert data. Uh this also means that they can be consumed by other front-end services. Uh so whether it's an out-of-the-box theme or uh an app um you know those those different systems can all consume uh these alerts that uh that wise are posting. Uh so next up in 2022 the distribution moved to layout

builder. This was a huge change. Um the core team analyzed hundreds of thousands of instances of hundreds of block and paragraph types from dozens of clients to develop a new page building experience. We uh we dumped out, you know, data from from we we took a bunch of the databases from a number of the clients and ran a script and built this gigantic spreadsheet uh to understand,

you know, how all of the wise that we that we knew about were using all of these different paragraph types, whether they were ones that came with the distribution originally or whether they built their own. We aggregated all of this data together and narrowed the list down to about 20 block types to rebuild. The designs were based on the standard Bootstrap design patterns um with customized YMCA

content and branding. Now, content editors can change the color scheme and many other design elements at a content type level, a page level, or a block level. Uh and they can still keep all of that within brand guidelines and WAG doubleA accessibility. Um all of that's built on top of Bootstrap styles, layout builder blocks, and the Bootstrap layout builder contrib modules. And it makes use of heavy

heavy use of CSS variables too. This is a lot of fun to build and take that color wheel that I showed earlier and be able to see it implemented in real time. So there's even more coming to the distribution in 2026. Uh some of the things on the road map are HTMX support, Drupal canvas support, migrations from layout builder to canvas, converting custom modules to recipes, Drupal

12 support, and AI structures that uh that produce better uh GEO. >> What's GEO? >> It's generative engine optimization. >> It's generative engine optimization. So it's the >> AI. Is that like the same thing as AI or AEIO? >> A yes, it's it's basically a IO. >> Yes. >> Um, >> sometimes Y. >> What's that? >> A E I O U and sometimes Y. >> A E

I O U inside the Y. >> Very nice. Very nice. >> Uh, okay. So, um, so, so again, as I've kind of reiterated, um, we've done all of this work, um, in a in a community first way. So, as with many franchise-based nonprofits, um, there's not very much competition among regions, the Chicago Y and the the Minneapolis Y don't compete for members. Um, the the swim and

gym memberships uh, at the Y are often competing with the national commercial gyms. So cooperation among the whole Y movement is really important. Uh some associations are huge and some are tiny. Uh smaller Y's can benefit from the economies of scale the larger associations are able to bring to the table. And again just like the way um the Drupal community builds contrib modules um the the YMCA

community needs drive innovation in the in the distribution. Uh associations build features when they need them and then they share those features out to the community. For instance, there have been a number of themes developed by associations over the years. You can see the list list of some of them up here. Uh it started in in 2017 with a bootstrap based paragraphs components. Uh and that evolved

through the current layout builder designs and the small Y template that we have available today. Uh virtual Y was kind of my initiation to the to the YMCA project. Uh it was a co response that uh was developed by worth in 2020 uh that allowed wise to develop their own virtual classes and share videos with others in a kind of gated content system. Uh the content was

behind a member login uh that again had to interact with any number of different CRM. Uh but that let let the YMCA's keep their virtual doors open while their physical locations were closed. Uh this was all built out and distributed open source. uh but it was also run as a SAS platform by Y USA and at the peak of COVID and and distributing this it was used

by over 200 associations. Uh also the documentation for the project has evolved similarly similarly uh there was initially a PDF manual that was developed by YMC at Brandywine. Uh that was improved and ported to Discourse forums by Middle Tennessee. And then we rebuilt all that again, migrated it to Hugo uh with markdown files and a static site generator. That was done with uh Y USA um in

collaboration with image X. Uh we wouldn't be able to kind of help everybody without uh strong community support as well. So uh we've had a broad depth over the years of of community support options. everything from formal to casual. Uh there's been open documentation. There had been uh monthly virtual community meetings. A lot of the meetings and tutorials are uploaded to YouTube and so they're they're big

uh their playlists of me talking about how to use layout builder on YouTube. Um there's a message board uh in the past and now a slack channel for discussion. Uh and there's also collaboration between supporting agencies. Um, we often share uh work in progress code before it's released. Sometimes if I'm develop developing a feature that doesn't need to go back into the core codebase, I'll still put

it up as a as a you know PRMR um that doesn't get merged back in just so folks can see kind of what we're doing. Uh and also all of this is promoted on uh the Y internets and marketing communities as well. So now I'm going to turn it over to Sarah to talk a little bit about how Y North has implemented some of these tools. >>

All right, excuse me. Well, thanks everybody for being here today. Um, Open Y has been something that's been near and dear to my heart working at YMCA of the North. Um, working and partnering with Yusa, the Imageex team. Um we also partner with five jars and previously we partnered with IT care and so really immersed in this entire ecosystem and what it means for not just our

association though that's really important to us but how do we really start to bring digital equity for good across the entire movement. Um, we're fortunate enough to be one of the larger YMCA associations and we also know that that's not true for so many other associations and contributing back what we're building so that other folks can really utilize our expertise and what we've invested um just expands

our reach so much further to help support communities across the country. And so, um, what you ask YMCA how big they are, they'll define it in 20 different ways. So, we're either the second largest YMCA or the fifth largest YMCA, pick your poison, in terms of what that means. Um, but we've been around longer than the state of Minnesota. YMCA has been around for 170 years. The

Y in the USA, this is the 175th anniversary. I want to say YMCA overall is like 180 something. So, it's a a really long-standing international organization and what that means really depends on where you grew up and where you first interacted with the Y. Um, we have 20 branch locations from extremely metro locations to more rural spaces. We have nine day camps, eight overnight camps spread throughout

the the um state as well as western Wisconsin. And we're also the largest child care provider in the state of Minnesota and the largest youth employer in the state of Minnesota. And so when we say a YMCA, many people focus on the swim and gym aspect of that, but the breadth and depth of what the Y has to offer is significantly more vast, which makes it really

hard then to promote on the different verticals that we're a part of. Not only do we have to compete with swimming gyms, but also other child care providers, as social services sites, as um youth sports spaces, you know, the list goes on and on and on u when it comes to a YMCA. And so, you know, that really um like I said, it that makes it hard

to promote what we're doing. It makes it hard to support from a technology perspective. it. We have more stakeholders than you can count um both internally and externally and we really need systems and partners that help understand how do we see each of those kind of verticals independently but then how do they also work together. And so we really have had to build any number of tools

um and partner with the open Y community to take that codebase and then um in our case highly customize it because of just the size of our YMCA and how many different spaces that we serve. And so kind of three of the tools that we'll be going over today, our membership builder, which is based off the membership calculator that Avi um mentioned earlier today, bus stop maps

because summer programming is a huge um revenue driver for us is also it means our biggest book of business. We swell by like three times the amount of employees and four times the amount of folks that we serve in the just the summertime alone. Um, and then purchasing and scheduling for our personal training and small group training spaces where it just gets super complicated because there are

hundreds upon hundreds of products that we need to simplify for our customers to be able to purchase and schedule. And so the first one in membership builder um this really helps us allow to prospect both new new members nurture warm leads and it helps members guide through all of the different permutations of how do you sign up for a Y. You know, we have a we work

with a lot of folks in which English is not their first language, in which they're trying to navigate complicated situations where they need financial support for not just membership, but across swim lessons and child care and they're trying to pull together multiple funding sources that so that they can support their families. So, we really need to have simple tools that allow them to self-service when they're ready

to interact with our Y and not be dependent on our um our in-house teams. At the same time, we didn't need to make the administration really easy for our operations teams so they can really focus on the inperson experience of serving our members. And so, Membership Builder really allows us to do that to allow folks to self-service. It also has a really seamless integration with Traction Recre

and Salesforce which are our CRM providers so that it um makes all of our data really simple and clean um once we get onto our team side and we don't create an administrative headache for our um Salesforce administrative So, uh bus stop maps, summer child care, summer camps, sports, it's a competitive event. Um, this was known as previously as our Taylor Swift moment or the Hunger Games,

take your pick, where it literally brought down aspects of our site for four years in a row because there's so many people trying to get into right at 7 a.m. to get the child care that they need because there's such a need in the community and there's not enough support for families across the board. So, everybody's trying to get in at 7 a.m. and four years ago

took down our Drupal site um that we were able to get fixed within the year, but then continued to be a problem for our CRM provider until this year. And so, um along with that comes just a ton an influx of information coming into our customer service center. They're answering hundreds of calls and texts and Facebook messages and you know, pick any method of trying to communicate.

pigeon, you know, carrier pigeon, people at the front desk stopping by, can you help me get my kid into summer camp today, right? Um that they just needed some space to be able to help um navigate what they need to know. And that includes things like bus stops and before and after school care. So, we developed um this tool to help parents see what's closest to me.

Maybe I don't care what camp my kids goes to. I just need somewhere that I know my kid is going to be safe and have a good time and want to keep going to this summer. What's closest to me? How do I get them there? I do I need care from not just from 9 to 2 because who has those working hours? Um but before and after

care within that. And so this tool really allows both parents to help self-service and kind of figure out what they need prior to registration, but then it also helps support our our customer service center as parents are calling in to faster find those connection points to say, "Hey, you want to go to Camp St. Croy and this is a bus stop that's 2 miles from your house

and they have before and after school care and here's the direct links to be able to register. Like here's how you get through that experience without tearing your hair out. Um, and we're trying to do that for nine different day camps, 17 branch locations that are each supporting eight sports. So, somebody do the math on that. It's a lot. Uh, right. The permutations are kind of endless.

And so, and that's just day camps and summer sports, not to mention summer child care or overnight camps or family camps. And so, you can really have a full summer just at the YMCA. But navigating that space is really challenging for families to be able to figure out well what's the benefit of going to Camp Warren versus going to Camp Adah Hobby. That means nothing to families

that don't aren't experienced with either of those places. And then our last space is around personal and small group training subscriptions and schedules. And so it's some of our most impactful um offerings especially for our senior population. The YMC really supports cradle to grave like six weeks old until folks celebrate their 100th birthday with us. And so we need to have offerings that can expand the breadth

and depth of all those different customer experiences. Personal and small group training is a space that we often interact with our senior population or our forever well and um technology can be a challenge and so we have to really be able to utilize tools like Drupal to take immense amounts of data and simplify it. And so just using the tables feature, we were able to take again

hundreds of permutations of different personal training schedules and small group training um spaces. Everything from, you know, you think of the kind of the traditional fitness offerings of Pilates, but then WMC of the North, we really think of about it as whole person well-being. So, we offer sound bath and community acupuncture and massage and um a number of different spaces that are more unique to our association,

but help folks kind of navigate what does that what does well look well well-being look like beyond your your kind of your traditional swim and gym. And so, um, we were really able to then take all that data, make it really simple for folks to purchase, you know, packages and like four, eight, 12week offerings and then be able to schedule based on what are they most interested

in right now, what feels good to them and helps their well-being journey that isn't so restricted and doesn't require them to call in and sign up with their individual trainer or their individual uh, small group host. And so um we again these are just a few of the things that Y North has to think about in terms of the complexity of what we have to offer. Um

and Drupal has offered us enough scalability and flexibility that we can keep growing hopefully for another 170 years serving the state of Minnesota and western Wisconsin. Um and just really helping support families wherever they are in their life stage and journey. So with that, I think I'm handing it back to you. >> Okay. Um, so how can you get involved in OpenY? You can try it yourself.

It's all open source. It's all there except for the fonts. Uh, so you can go to sandboxes.y.org. Uh, that's where you can test out an open Y site from the front end. There's a ton of demo content on there. So you can literally pull up a brand new OpenY site and see how it works. Uh you can also spin up a Drupal uh an OpenY site yourself

on Drupal Forge. If you go to drupalforge.orgtemplatey, uh that's a full site install that gives you admin credentials and a full um full build. They're probably Drupalforge sessions going on here this week. Um check it out. And again, if you just want to look at the code, uh it's there. You can go to ds-docs.wy.org. org/ community. That'll get you a list of all of the kind of

repo links. Uh you can also check it out on GitHub. It's yloud yusa is the uh is the organization. And we're also on drupal.org. Um drupal.org projectopenyecosystem. So some of the stuff's on GitHub, some of the stuff's on drupal.org. Don't ask me to explain uh why. Uh anyway, uh we're open to questions if folks have them. You mentioned a font file. >> Yeah. >> Is that then

just a dependency in composer then since I I've noticed that you have a GitHub repo for >> Yeah. So, >> uh yes. So, the font file uh the question was about the font file. Um there's a specific font called cache that uh that the YUSA um chose as the the the custom font. Um there's a license with like monotype that says you know it can be used

by any yosa but not publicly distributed. So um we basically made a a private repo with um with those fonts and like the CSS file to include them. Uh and so that's just you know distributed to known organizations who are working on sites. So you can it's uh it basically just comes in as a custom module uh that folks can turn on. So you can use the

whole distribution without that. It's just doesn't have the the official font files. And some of the stuff is on Drew in on on GitHub because of kind of historical dependency stuff, composer packaging rules from a long time ago. It's complicated. We've been moving most of the stuff to drupal.org, but some of the kind of um main integration points are still on GitHub. Uh yeah. >> Um I

just have two questions. First, is there a headquarters? Is there like a corporate headquarters somewhere at? >> Yeah. So the question was is there a corporate headquarters? Uh yeah. So um the YMCA national office is actually located right here in Chicago. Uh there's a there's an office down on Wacker. >> Yeah. Um Yeah. And so Yeah. And then the other the other part um at the very

beginning you were talking about the brain guidance and you said that they had over 50 pages of brand guidance >> um are you going to try to get that into the context control center that Dre talked about this afternoon? >> Oh the question was uh will we be getting the brand guidance into the context control center? That's a great addition to our road map. Thank you. >>

Yeah, we'll uh we'll get it in there. Maybe we'll talk to the right people We'll work on it in contrib. Uh, no, that's a really great idea though. Being able to kind of set some of these voice and tone guidelines um within the new AI ecosystem could be a huge bo and I think um Teresa was talking about the kind of taking our expertise and like building

that into the existing into the systems that we're building and I think that could be a great way that you know having all of this this huge depth of uh >> I'm gonna Sorry. Yeah, I get one more. Patrick, do you have something? >> Um, I just want to say, you know, once you go down that road, then you're like, you're not telling their individual wives, hey,

go make your own website with this thing. You're telling them, hey, here's a here's an assistant that will make the website for you, >> right? >> easier for them. >> Yeah. Yeah. the the statement was with all of that we could build uh we could build an assistant that could you know theoretically generate uh simple websites for YMCA's out of the box. Um yeah, that's a that's

a huge idea that could be super cool. >> Um all right, two-part question for >> you mentioned you mentioned self-service having you know having that map. I'm curious how you guys have integrated AI to maybe enhance self-service and then what other channels maybe you're exploring this goes kind of beyond your book. What other channels maybe like SMS or how are you kind of meeting the community with

those self-service options? >> Yeah, so the question was how are we using AI to help folks self-service um specifically in the website and then how are we going beyond um the website to help folks self-service and things like SMS etc. So, um, right now we have not integrated, um, a ton of AI on our site. We are working with, um, one of our other partners in pulling

together, um, a a pilot for an agent to help support there. We're kind of in the knowledge gathering phase. And again, like I think our website is it was 2,000 pages in counting. Um, and that's still has a lot of information about WISE that are not listed there. And so we're kind of in the knowledge gathering phase of that work. Um but there, you know, I think

there's a ton of opportunity as we look um some of the the things that were presented in the keynote today, right, in terms of helping our operators who are definitely not technologists and even our marketing team who previously found Drupal overwhelming and weren't interested in working in the system. And so I think there's a ton of opportunity for us to be able to help them streamline some

work and have it be continuous rather than well we'll update this page whenever registration comes around and see you next year, right? Like that's not how our programs grow and breathe and we need the our um really all of our ecosystems to be able to accurately reflect what's going on today and not just a one-time update once a year. um we do have some mess capabilities with

our our members. Some of the struggles there is that we um as a nonprofit have to be judicious in terms of where we invest in our um partners and um having multilingual capabilities is a strong consideration for us in the Twin Cities. While English is the predominant language, um Somali, Mong, Spanish, Russian are to name a few are some of the spaces that we don't have enough

internal support for translation services. And you know, as we continue to grow as we have to we want to be considerate about making sure that we're utilizing tools that have multilingual capabilities and um ones that we can trust. Um and that's um particularly challenging with some of the languages in which written languages are not um like that they have been uh developed pretty recently in terms of

historic standards. And so um we do um we work within EOS within our ecosystem. We also partner with um hire logic as part of our marketing platform and that integrates both within Drupal and then um also within Salesforce and so that between that bright pattern um mail gun a couple of those spaces that we're looking into continue capabilities um but we also have to manage that with

we have small administrative teams and there's always a greater need and then there are folks to help bring that eco ecosystem to life. >> That's a whole lot of uh services that I don't even know about. >> Hey, >> nice. Uh any other questions? >> Yeah, got one back. >> That you guys. >> Sure. Uh the question was about uh converting modules to recipes. Uh I think

we're still kind of exploring what that looks like. Um a lot of the initial um you know we started this in 2016. A lot of the initial kind of structure of the modules um was built in uh features like features module uh and so some of those are still in that. So the initial install kind of does a lot of work. Um the initial install takes a

long time uh of a site. You know, I've I think it's gotten faster with D11, but uh takes like 15 minutes or something. Uh so I think a lot of that is just taking a lot of the predefined content types and features that we have features with a lowercase F and uh making the process of getting an initial site faster. >> Yeah. because we do have like

there's a whole different talk about uh distributions versus recipes uh that I have some feelings on but uh we've worked really hard with the distribution to be able to keep pushing updates to wise and keep pushing features. So we very much don't want this to be a oneanddone like you install Drupal and now you have a site. Um, you know, as I said, there's been various different

um different folks that have been pushing the project forward over the decade of its time. Uh, and throughout all of that, we've been able to have sites running for I six, seven years. >> With, you know, um, the same kind of initial install and been able to both develop their own custom features and bring in features from the kind of core codebase. So, you know, we want

to be able to kind of continue that ongoing maintenance and feature development. Um, so there's a balance between using Drupal's way of getting the initial site up and being able to kind of push new features um to existing Yeah. Does that help? >> Cool. But we we're not totally convinced on the path there yet. It's recipes that we want to get in somehow. Cool. Um, well, thank

you all for your time. Uh, I appreciate you all being here. Um, this is our contact information. There's also a feedback form up here. Please scan that QR code now. Take your phones out, scan that QR code. Uh, let us know what you thought. Even if you just give us five stars, that's helpful. Uh, but really tell us uh tell us how you feel. Uh, we want

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