The Drupal Association General Assembly met on March 2 to elect new Permanent Members and select a Board of Directors. The Assembly elected six new Permanent Members from the thirteen valid applications that were received:

• Peter Wolanin (pwolanin)
• George DeMet (gdemet)
• Fernando Paredes Garcia (develCuy)
• Bevan Rudge (Bevan)
• Isabell Schulz (Isabell)
• Ronan Berder (hunvreus)

Following the election of the new Permanent Members, the entire General Assembly (including the newly-elected permanent members) met to select the Association’s Board of Directors. The Assembly voted for each board applicant. The position of President (held by Dries Buytaert) and Treasurer (held by Jacob Redding), were not up for election this term per the Association's statutes.

The following existing board members ran for a position on the board: Angela Byron (webchick), Tiffany Farriss (farriss), Larry Garfield (Crell), Cary Gordon (highermath), Gerhard Killesreiter (killes), and Kieran Lal (Amazon). Permanent member Laura Scott (laura s) also ran for a board position focusing on membership. All were elected.

The Drupal Association thanks everyone who ran for election this year. Look forward to hearing more about the Association’s ongoing initiatives in the coming weeks, and how all members of the community (not just those in the Association's General Assembly) can play a part in helping Drupal flourish!

The Drupal association permanent member candidate submissions are due on Monday. Many candidates are applying to be elected as permanent members but I wanted to highlight non-elected members who do a lot to help the Drupal association. This is not an complete list of people who volunteer for the Drupal association, but a sample.

Last week we've had some "fun" with Microsoft's msnbot. They were apparently trying out their new beta and it didn't work that well. It ignored drupal.org's robots.txt and kept crawling 20-40 pages per second. You could call that a denial of sevice attack, drupal.org sure had problems.

We then resolved this by banning the whole subnet from our webservers.

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) has been one of the most generous organizations to the Drupal project. In mid-2005 they stepped up and offered to host drupal.org at a time when the website was crashing due to insufficient hardware. OSUOSL generously offered rackspace and bandwidth, all of it donated. Since this donation the drupal.org infrastructure has grown from a single server to more than a dozen, traffic has increased exponentially, and overall growth has exploded.

As promised, here is the recorded webinar on SEO for the Drupal.org redesign.

Last year, the Drupal Association hired Mark Boulton Design, with financial support from the community, to work with the Drupal community and re-design Drupal.org. The final design deliverable is the Drupal.org website style guide.

Webinar to educate implementers about drupal.org SEO

Next Wednesday, Dec 9th, at 12PM EST we will be hosting a webinar to help educate the re-design implementers on Drupal.org SEO techniques. All interested members of the Drupal community are welcome to register and attend the webinar.

We received word that people were unable to log into this webinar. We have recorded the webinar and will be posting it shortly for feedback

For the last year the Drupal.org redesign has progressed quietly and steadily. Almost 200 people have participated in the redesign by commenting, discussing, reviewing, testing, designing, theming, or writing code to get it done. We have had 6 re-design sprints (2 in Europe and 4 in the US) and built significant infrastructure to get the redesign development and staging ready for the community to make the final push. We are now asking Drupal consulting shops to step forward and help us implement one section of the redesign.

One of the biggest challenges in working in a large community like the Drupal community is removing bottlenecks. All too often the community can seem to come to a grinding halt on just one issue that can only be managed by one person. On Monday Dries gave a presentation at MIT and talked about how some of the Drupal community’s biggest problems have helped create some of our best solutions. In particular, he cited how our drupal.org server melt down in 2005 lead to the creation of the Drupal association to proactively manage and plan for our infrastructure growth.

The Drupal Association has used some of the money that it acquired thanks to the Drupal community and its sponsors to buy more computing power for the infrastructure that all services of drupal.org are hosted on.