Hey everybody, this is Addison Berry and you're listening to the Osio Labs podcast, the show that explores the question, "how can we create sustainable businesses that care for people and make the world a better place?" Today, it's just going to be me talking in your ear. It's been a little over a year since our last episode was published back in January of 2024. The time since then has been a bit of a rough ride for us at Osio Labs., and, and now, like for many people, there's a lot of uncertainty going forward. So I'm gonna restart things with the podcast a bit by giving a rundown of what's been going on with us and then sort of what's coming up. So just to go back a bit, back in 2023, a year and a half ago, we started to see a pretty serious, steady decline in our revenue. And by the end of 2023 coming into 2024, so about a year ago, we realized that the financial situation had just changed. The market had shifted and we were not going to be making enough revenue to support our expenses. And so that ended up leading us to doing layoffs in February of 2024. And we went from a team of five down to a team of three, which was, obviously very hard on a number of levels. And we really needed to kind of gather the wagons and figure out what we were doing, in terms of like, what is the direction of the company? How are we going to manage with only three people trying to do the work of five people? We ended up having to say "no" to a lot of projects and ideas and interesting things because we simply needed to reprioritize the work that we were doing and figure what we were going to do. Part of that, you know, is the podcast, getting suspended, I guess, as it were, and a number of other things that we were working on, As we sort of settled into those new priorities and found our footing and kind of healed in some ways, I guess, we also started looking at new revenue that we would be able to bring in to help stabilize the company going forward. One of the things that we did, which many people in the Drupal community know, is that we are working on, we have a contract for, creating documentation for the new Drupal CMS project that is out. So that's been great to just, you know, really dive back into the community that we depend on and that we, that we love and that really gives us a lot of hope. Another thing that we did, though, was moving away from the Drupal world specifically, and we ended up running a beta course on leadership training for open source, which is a, it was a live cohort so we had a group of people who joined. It was a great group. There was a lot of really good discussions, and we would have live online meetings every week over a six week period. Anyway, the course was really, it was fun. It was great to engage with people and talk about things that I think are just really important in the world, in general, and then specifically in our open source communities or in volunteer communities. And so, we talked about, like, half of the course was basically about self awareness, because who you are is how you lead. And we looked at things like values and resilience and motivation and things. And then the second half was about community and how all of that internal work plays out when you're interacting with other people, like communication and mistakes and trust, stuff like that. And then we specifically looked at some open source challenges, because working in volunteer communities is a totally different ball of wax in many respects from corporate leadership or, you know, career advancement in that way. And we wanted to create some space to actually address what's, you know, what kind of challenges come up when just dealing with communities, volunteer communities, people who want to come together to accomplish something, but don't have a whole bunch of resources and restrictions that you can find sort of in the business world. So anyway all of that went on and was really good and it, we ended up, towards the end of last year, really feeling like we were doing good and moving forward. Even though there's still a lot of financial uncertainty and, as I said, there's- I think everybody's aware that there's a lot of that for everybody going into 2025. So that brings me to where we are now and what we're looking to do going forward. Of course, we still have our Drupal community and Drupal project work, but the big thing that we're going to be focusing on this year is, since the leadership training was a big success, we want to do more of that So we're planning to launch a new learning community that focuses on self development and leadership for building communities, especially from a volunteer, open source perspective. And initially, it'll be a place to go through like some self paced courses and have a group of like-minded folks to talk about it. So sort of exploring new things, trying new things out, and then having a community to discuss that with in terms of "what does that mean?" How does that impact you? What's the implementation? What's the effect? And then, over time, we're planning to offer things like group coaching calls and live workshops, live cohorts like the course we did last year, book clubs, resources, like, all of that stuff- sort of see as people come together what are the things that the community needs, and then how can we provide that and work on that stuff together. One thing that is going to be a part of this community from the get go is going to be a newsletter that of course talks about these topics and rounds up some good resources and shares that. And that brings me back to this podcast, because for now, this podcast will be the home for the audio recordings of the newsletters. So that way, folks who need or prefer audio can get the same information. And so you can choose whether you want to have it written or if you want to have audio. And that information that we're going to be gathering in the newsletter, I think is also really pertinent to this podcast and then we may also end up having interviews or group discussions like we have in past episodes, but we're just going to sort of see how that unfolds throughout the year. But at the very least, we'll have a regular newsletter audio episodes coming out on this podcast. So the new Osio Labs community will hopefully be launched in the next month or so, and we'll announce it in, you know, all the usual places on the internet as you do. And then the next episode of this podcast will announce the community and how you can get involved with it. And so that will also be like our first newsletter and just also the community will have a, you know, a free access and then you can pay for certain extra things, but we want to make it open and accessible to as many people as possible. So, that's what's in the works. That's what's coming down the pike for us and we're we're excited to really focus on building community, because I think that that is- it's always been really important, I think it's extra, extra important in these times, and people coming together to figure out how to build those communities, what we need within ourselves individually, and how to work with other people is going to be a skill that we need to have as many people engaging with as absolutely possible. So, I look forward to seeing lots of new faces in our community once we launch it, and we will let you know about that in the next episode. Thanks for listening. If you have questions, comments, suggestions about what to cover in the podcast, newsletter, about this new community idea we're talking about, anything in general, you can always find us, on our website at osiolabs. com which is O S I O L A B S And you can contact us through there. And, of course, you can always, subscribe to this podcast to make sure you get the announcements and the newsletters as they come out. Thanks a lot. Have a great week.