UPDATE: We finished off in no time. Thanks to Webchick, MediaDoneRight.

The Drupalcon videos are done being processed, mostly. We need some help watching the first 20 seconds of the videos to figure out which video is which Drupalcon session. If you've got a particular Drupalcon session you missed and really want to see, and your willing to put in a little work, I'll give you links to 5 videos files and you can let me know which Drupalcon sessions they are. We should be able to crowd source this very quickly.

Last week we had a business kick-off meeting for the Drupal.org re-design. The purpose of this meeting was to start two important efforts: establishing business objectives for the re-design, and begin the re-design request for qualifications and request for proposals process.

Drupal.org is many things to many people, and there are a lot of ideas about how to improve the site. The Drupal association has limited cash resources, and limited volunteer resources to implement a re-design so it's important that the association has clear business objectives to help prioritize the scope of this effort. We will focus on hiring firms to deliver design work products such as information architecture, branding, graphic design, visual design, wire frames, and interaction design deliverables. The scope of the re-design will be extensive, covering all *.drupal.org properties, and yet at the same time remain consistent with the Drupal community's method of making small iterative improvements and having open discussions about those changes.

To establish the business goals, we've asked two permanent members of the Drupal association to lead the definition of business objectives. Michael Myers is the founder and CTO of NowPublic, a grassroots journalism Drupal site which raised 13 Million in venture funding. Michael has lead several re-design efforts in his career. Michael routinely works with technologists, designers, and his investors to balance the various needs and accomplish business objectives.

Laura Scott is the president of pingVision, a Drupal consultancy with 19 employees, and she has been deploying websites for customers since 1994. Laura's company recently deployed popsci.com , which won best showcase at Drupalcon Boston. Her company also won 5 Horizon Interactive awards for Popular Science, RedBlueAmerica, and Spectrum magazine. Laura has the experience and expertise to help the association and the community have a successful re-design.

Michael and Laura will be holding a public meeting and soliciting feedback from the community. People who are interested in the business objectives of the redesign should participate in the public re-design group.

Tiffany Farris is the president of Palantir, a Drupal consultancy in Chicago. Tiffany's work has lead her to work with many design firms and has resulted in projects which have won awards including the Software & Information Industry Association Codie award, International Academy of Visual Arts 2006 W³ silver award in cultural institutions category, and a Webby official honoree award. Tiffany will help the association in preparing a request for qualifications, to identify design firms capable of delivering design work products that the Drupal community can implement. She will also lead a request for proposals process so that the Drupal association board of directors can vote to accept a contract with one or more design firms to create the design deliverables that the community will help to implement.

Our discussion focused on deliverables for these new responsibilities. We plan to have an initial draft report on business objectives and RFQ proposal in the next two weeks with a public deliverable in approximately one month.

Our meeting raised many important questions like:
What is Drupal?
How do we make Drupal transparent to site visitors?
How do we avoid failures so common in massive re-design efforts?
How do we use iterative implementation techniques while keeping constraints on design costs?
How do we provide the project management resources necessary to make a re-design effort successful?
What are important activities visitors need to do and how do we make it easy?
How do we create a specific enough re-design proposal to solicit a higher quality response?

We aim to address these questions over the next month, and look forward to working with the community to get this re-design under way.

If you are not an expert site in re-design but would like to help move Drupal.org to Drupal 6 as a first step of the re-design implmentation, you can help by working on these two desired features: Add possibility to retrieve a list of projects, and Make usage statistics visible.

Two weeks ago I attended a joint Web 2.0 (conference) and Web2Open (unconference) two part session on building a social strategy for your business. Web 2.0 and social software luminaries Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff presented a session " how to have a successful social strategy" based on their extensive research and book "Groundswell".

They recommend that in order to lead a successful social strategy you should assume the role of a pragmatist. Pragmatists try to meet the company's goals, usually selling a product, as well as the needs of the community which wants complete access to the company's internal resources. In the case of Drupal.org this means carefully striking a balance between adding any set of modules the community wants on Drupal.org and respecting the time of the half dozen active members of the infrastructure team who are responsible for maintaining Drupal.org software and infrastructure.

A social strategy should have clear business objectives. For over a year now, there have been active discussions about what a Drupal.org redesign should accomplish in the redesign group. The association is recruiting community and Drupal association leaders who are taking the responsibility of creating those business objectives. The leaders will be able to focus exclusively on the role of defining objectives and ensuring they are met. While those objectives have not been finalized yet, let's pick a few that are reasonable. First, a Drupal.org social strategy should make it easier to learn about Drupal. Second, Drupal.org should make it easier to contribute to the Drupal project. Third, Drupal.org should allow for income from association memberships and highly focused advertising revenue to help fund Drupal association activities like a re-design of Drupal.org. If you have some ideas about objectives for a social strategy, be sure to share them in the Drupal.org redesign group.

Charlene and Josh recommended we use their People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology approach to frame a Drupal.org social strategy. For the Drupal.org redesign we've completed three significant People activities. First, we conducted a set of 10 interviews of Drupal.org users. Then we surveyed 1200 Drupal users about what they want to see improved on Drupal.org. Finally, we developed some personas to describe the different types of Drupal.org users. We are assembling a team of people to work on Objectives.

We've not yet spent a lot of time formally discussing our Strategy for how a re-design will change the relationship with users on Drupal.org. The Drupal community has often taken a very conservative approach to empowering users on Drupal.org. For example, we frequently leave technical barriers in place and restrict permissions so that spammers, and even legitimate businesses can not cross-promote Drupal and their business. We need further discussions on how empowering the community might change the workload of Drupal.org maintainers and how we can deal with it.

From a Technology standpoint, our choice is pretty clear, we should upgrade Drupal.org to Drupal 6 and allow for more capabilities to be handed out to maintainers. Currently, feature development on Drupal.org is restricted to half dozen maintainers who are responsible for maintaining the code. With the content listing Views module, page layout Panels module, and web form building Content Creation Kit module the 93 site maintainers don't need to install extra modules to help meet some of our objectives. This added flexibility will also help to produce better marketing landing pages.

The last step in building a successful social strategy for Drupal.org is to line up our backers. Who are these backers? First, they are the 9 members of the board of directors of the Drupal association who vote in association board meetings. Second, they are the general assembly of the Drupal association, comprised of the 26 members, who have already made a symbolic vote to make the redesign of Drupal.org the number one priority for 2008. The general assembly of the Drupal association will meet and approve a budget to fund a redesign of Drupal.org. Third, our backers include the 500 paid members of the Drupal association. Fourth, we need to line up advertisers who can help generate revenue by placing ads in limited areas of Drupal.org such as the handbooks, hosting, and paid services or jobs sections of Drupal.org web properties. This means we need to reach out to the 76 hosting companies that have posted in the Drupal.org hosting forums and see if the are interested in advertising on Drupal.org. We need to reach out to the almost 2000 people who provide Drupal services through hundreds of companies and see if they are interested in advertising on Drupal.org. Fifth, we will need to conduct a targeted fund raising campaign to help pay for the redesign. Sixth, we need to solicit and recruit a capable set of design firms who will choose to take on this project in a long term partnership. Seventh, we need to generate agreement with the infrastructure team, and maintainers who will be doing a lot of volunteer work to make the re-design happen. Finally, we are going to need to get the support of the Drupal community and ensure they are supportive of a re-design.

If you are interested in learning more about developing a social strategy for your business, read Groundswell. If you are interested in participating in the development of a social strategy for Drupal.org, join the redesign group, and look for an upcoming meeting between the redesign group and Charlene and Josh who have agreed to meet with us when we are ready.

Yesterday the Drupal association added it's 500th paid member. 350 individuals paid 22 Euros for an individual membership and 150 organizations paid 73 Euros for an organizational membership. In total the association has received $21 448.45 from paid memberships. This revenue has allowed us to help operate events such as Drupalcon Barcelona, and Drupalcon Boston. It has also covered hardware purchases, RAM upgrades, and support contracts for those purchases. This financial support has allowed us to get ahead of Drupal.org's growth curve and ensure we have the infrastructure in place to meet a growing demand.

The Drupal association has prepared and reached initial agreement for a 2008 Budget, which will be voted on in an upcoming meeting. Part of that budget will be an allocation towards a re-design of Drupal.org. If you would like to be part of the re-design of Druapl.org you can participate by sharing your ideas in the Drupal.org redesign group. You can also request to become a Drupal.org webmaster or participate in the Drupal.org infrastructure list.

If you would like to become a paid member of the Drupal association, you can purchase a membership here.

First let me thank almost 500 people who've purchased a Drupal association membership. Your support makes it possible to hold Drupal events like Drupalcon North America, Europe, and soon hopefully a Drupalcon Asia. It's also allowing us to purchase the hardware we need to run Drupal.org and help prepare for a redesign.

There's been a backlog in processing memberships and we are working to fix this problem. Let me give you a bit of a technical explanation and then explain what we are doing to fix this.

When a person purchases a Drupal association membership, they may use up to five different email addresses when communicating with us.

1) When they apply for the membership the will use their personal email. For example: kieran at acquia.com.

2) When they pay for their organization membership they will use their companies paypal account say payment at acquia.com. In some cases, it may be the most convenient PayPal account, usually their spouses. Spouse at gmail.com

At this point if they have successfully paid for their membership then they will have a new contact record in the associations contact relationship manager, CiviCRM. If CiviCRM receives notification from PayPal that the payment was successful, then CiviCRM will automatically process a one year membership starting at the time of payment. If CiviCRM does not receive notification, then your membership is left pending. On March 27, 2008 payment notification stopped working and we are left with a backlog of 58 memberships that we have to manually verify. In total we have a backlog of 295 pending payments, most of which will be people who either chose not to complete payment or who are spammers.

3) Next people will want to update their information in the membership directory. They can do this by creating an account at http://association.drupal.org. This introduces two possibilities, they can create an account with their drupal.org login or they can create a new account. Let's assume they use they kieran@drupal.org as their login. We now have three separate email addresses that need to be resolved: CiviCRM contact, Payment email, and Drupal.org user account.

4) If they create a new account, and most do there's a good chance they will use yet another email. If for example, they purchased an organizational membership they might want the account to use info at acquia.com or support at acquia.com. Once again, we've likely got three emails to resolve: contact record, payment email, and the company email.

5) If you contact the association to help you resolve why your membership isn't showing up chances are, you are going to use yet another email, probably a personal email like say kieran.lal at personal.com. Or you might use highschoolnickname-graduateyear@gmail.com. That also makes it fun to try and map who you are to the existing three email addresses we have for you.

These five are the base cases. There are other edge cases involving multiple memberships, multiple user accounts, and multiple payment methods.

You might ask, why are we having these problems, you've seen membership processing done more effectively elsewhere. There are three underlying problems. First, we want your support and it's easier to let you pay for a membership first, and then work with you to resolve your email roulette problems after you purchased your membership. Right now about 50% of people who who fill out their personal details in the membership application don't complete payment. I don't want to add even more barriers.

Second, we need to build out our infrastructure to support OpenID. This means we need to support Chad and Derek to finish porting the Project module to Drupal 6, by helping Earl finish Views for Drupal 6, which project module now depends on. When Drupal.org upgrades to Drupal 6 we will have OpenID. Then we have to ensure Narayan has the infrastructure he needs to install and run an OpenID server. He's already added an SSL certificate so that administrators can log in securely to: drupal.org, association.drupal.org, drupalcon.org, infrastructure.drupal.org, security.drupal.org, testing.drupal.org.

Third we are using open source software to manage our contacts. We use open source software because we believe in the principles of open source, and that by using software and contributing back feedback we are helping to improve it for other organizations. We also don't have to pay for the software, and we can use the most effective payment engine which allows us to keep more of the money from members. While some membership software services will charge as much as 14% to process a paid membership, we only pay around 3% for fee processing. We are currently using CiviCRM 1.8. CiviCRM 1.9 mostly had mail upgrades which we didn't need. CiviCRM 2.0.2 is out and it will help to do a better job of merging these five potential email addresses, and removing duplicate contact records.

Raising money for a non-profit is hard work. But supporting the Drupal project is a very rewarding experience. If you've got 5 hours to help, I'll gladly take some volunteers and train you on how you can help us catch up on membership backlog. This will help to free me up so I can work on the underlying issues of upgrading Drupal.org to Drupal 6, getting CiviCRM 1.8 upgraded to CiviCRM 2.0, and working on user experience improvements for the Drupal.org redesign.

Kieran Lal
Drupal association board member - Fund raising

Aspiring Drupalcon organizers may be interested in understanding what went into organizing the conference content and coordinating volunteers. We've stripped the emails and private information from the Boston 2008 group so you can now take a look at one part of the organizing effort.
If you attended Drupalcon Boston you can now Click Here to take survey. If you like to provide feedback, we've created a wiki page for you to suggest improvements. We just request that you review the information in the group so that your suggestions are constructive and well informed.