June 2006

Excerpt from Dries Buytaert's blog post, Drupal road trip to San Francisco:

About six years ago I started working on Drupal. Drupal, at that time, was an experimental platform that helped me explore new web technologies from my student dorm. Contrast this with the present. Today, there are hundreds of people contributing to the project, building and relying on that foundation, and hundreds of thousands of people downloading it. What started as a hobby project is now starting to get on the radar of some of the bigger projects and players ... It is no longer the casual hobby project it used to be.

It is fair to say that Drupal's growth makes for some interesting questions, both for me personally, and for the Drupal community at large. It makes me feel increasingly responsible, and that certainly adds some pressure. How to help run this thing as it continues to grow? Do we need a Drupal Foundation or not? How should I deal with my growing sense of responsibility?

His subsequent trip to San Francisco, during which Dries visited a number of high-profile people in the open source community, revealed that it was necessary to create some kind of centralized body who could help deal with the peripheral issues, such as hosting infrastructure, marketing/promotion, and event planning, in order to allow the Drupal project to remain the organic, healthy project that so many had come to rely on.

For the next several months, Dries Buytaert, Dries Knapen, and Steven Wittens, each long-term contributors to the Drupal project from the beginning, began hours of research, discussions with lawyers and accountants, and so on. From these talks, an initial set of statutes and by-laws for the Drupal Association was born.

September 2006

An association mailing list was created, and a few members from the Drupal community were asked to review and give feedback on the draft of the statutes. The Drupal Association was officially announced publicly during a talk by Dries Buytaert at DrupalCon Brussels in September of 2006. Community members present generated additional ideas and feedback, and additional people joined the mailing list to work on further revising the statutes and by-laws.

October 2006

Members on the Association mailing list were asked to submit their candidacy for Board of Directors, citing specific positions if applicable.

November 2006

Initial Permanent Members of the Association were selected by Dries Buytaert and the other two core Association founders, and these Permanent Members then elected the first Board of Directors.

December 2006

The statutes are approved by the Belgian Commercial Court: the Drupal Association exists! Work begins in earnest on creating and enhancing the Drupal Association site and creating "friendly" versions of the legal documents.

Other activities to solidify the legal and financial existence of the Association continue. Paperwork takes time!