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 project will have a booth at Hostingcon, August 10-12th, in Washington, DC. This is the second year we will be at hostingcon meeting with members of the Drupal community and talking to hosting providers. The booth will be staffed by Eric Mandel, from Blackmesh hosting, members of the DC Drupal community, and Drupal hosting providers.

I received word this morning that the Drupal Association has been awarded a booth in the .org pavilion. The Bay Area has a strong Drupal community and we anticipate have a good cross section of support from the local community to help staff the booth. But if you are planning to be at Open Source world, or you would like to help staff the booth, please feel free to sign-up to staff the Drupal booth.

A few weeks ago a community member raised concern on the consulting list about turn over in the Drupal association, or rather the lack of it. Since this information is often public, but hard to track down, I thought I'd shed some light.

Ten people have rotated on and off the board of the Drupal
association. Only four original board members are still present.
The board has two new members as of 2009 for the Drupal association, who were not previously permanent members of the association: Tiffany Farriss and Cary Gordon.

Narayan Newton and I gave a talk at Drupalcon on the state of the http://drupal.org infrastructure. Narayan, Gerhard, David, and myself are currently working on a infrastructure budget proposal for the Drupal association. This proposal will give you some insight into the challenges of running Drupal.org and why it is not just another Drupal site. In fact, our use of Drupal as a web application platform for Drupal.org pushes the Drupal project in many directions that lead to innovation.

The Drupal association has been using CiviCRM for a couple of years now. As part of the redesign effort we upgraded the Drupal association site to Drupal 6 and CiviCRM 2.1.

With the help from the Donald Lobo of the CiviCRM team and David Strauss we now have automatic membership renewal notices working in CiviCRM 2.1. With previous versions we had technical difficulties with membership renewal notices and would send renewal reminders out in batches.

As an open source project, Drupal has many strengths. We have strong and diverse technical contributors, a healthy financial ecosystem and a rapidly growing and vibrant community. However, we are not that strong in marketing and there may be an opportunity to change that in 2009.

Marketing can be a bit of mystery to technical people. Traditional marketing practices such as advertising or promotion of poor quality products have earned the discipline distrust. The following video, "A Short History of Marketing" is a good summary.

A few hours ago Timothy Geithner was sworn in as the Treasury Secretary for the United States of America. Among his many duties he will oversee the Internal Revenue Service which oversees arcane sections of the tax policy such as granting 501(c)(3), non-profit, status. Over the last several years the IRS has quietly been denying non-profit status to open source projects.

[Re-posted from Drupal.org]
The Drupal Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping the Drupal community with fun­ding, infra­structure, events, promotion and distribution. The current Board of Directors was elected a year ago, so it's election time again!

On February 17 we will elect new Permanent Members (the General Assembly is comprised of all the Permanent Members) and our third Board of Directors (the Board of Directors is appointed by the General Assembly and is responsible for day-to-day operations). All the details can be found in the Drupal Association's Statutes and on the 2009 election website.

In its second year of operation, the pace of the Drupal Association's work has accelerated notably. We (i) extended the drupal.org infrastructure, (ii) raised funds, (iii) helped organize two international Drupal conferences, (iv) resolved many licensing questions, (v) funded several events, and (vi) made the Drupal.org redesign a top priority. Despite the progress made in 2008, we would like to ramp up our professionalism and increase our activity in 2009.

The Drupal project has been doing user experience work for several years but the pace has really picked up in 2008. This year alone we've have already completed two studies, both for Drupal 6.

Over the last week Leisa Reichelt, from Mark Boulton design has continued her user experience studies with iteration four of the redesigned Drupal.org site. In testing iteration four here's what the team from Mark Boulton design found.