On January 15, 2008 (Drupal's 7 year anniversary), the Drupal Association held its first general assembly. This assembly was an important step towards long-term sustainability: when the Association was first created, a small number of known contributors to the broader Drupal community were chosen to act as voting board members. This assembly marks the first opportunity for any interested member of the Drupal community to apply for a position in the Association, guiding and directing its development over the next year. Almost 60 members of the community submitted applications, and 11 new permanent members were chosen:

• Khalid Baheyeldin has been a member of the Drupal project since 2003. He's contributed dozens of modules to the project and has been an active member of Drupal's infrastructure and security teams. As part of the Drupal Association, Khalid will be focusing on the infrastructure needs of drupal.org and its related sites.
• Addison Berry has made a huge splash since joining the Drupal community a year ago. She contributes modules, teaches Drupal newcomers in the Drupal Dojo, writes documentation for the core Drupal project, helps develop and test core Drupal patches, and is one of the maintainers of the drupal.org web site. She plans to work with the Association to improve the Drupal Dojo and develop other mentoring opportunities.
• Jeff Eaton joined the Drupal community in 2004. He's the maintainer of several popular modules, and an active contributor to the Drupal core project. Jeff will be helping the Association with communications and marketing tasks.
• Larry Garfield has been a Drupal developer since 2005. He has worked on various parts of core, including the theme system and menu system, and maintains a number of contrib modules. His plans for the Drupal Association include clarifying the complex licensing issues that surround Drupal and its code base.
• Greg Knaddison maintains several contributed modules, including the tremendously popular PathAuto module. He's a member of the Drupal security team, a site maintainer for drupal.org, a moderator at groups.drupal.org, and helps organize the Denver/Boulder Drupal Users' Group. He plans to focus on helping others understand the Drupal Association and get involved its day to day operations.
• Michael E. Meyers, whose company has contributed performance and scalability features, QA/Testing infrastructure and automated patch testing. His primary goal is to engage those who haven't been involved in the Drupal community, particularly non developers.
• Narayan Newton has served as Drupal's database administrator for the last year at the Oregon State Open Source Lab, where drupal.org is hosted. As a new member of the Drupal Association, he's excited to continue building Drupal's infrastructure help the site scale as the community grows.
• David Norman is a long-time contributor and maintainer of several modules, and served as a mentor for the Google Summer of Code and Google Highly Open Participation contest. He's been active in the Drupal community for almost seven years! In the Association, he'll be serving as the much-needed Assistant Treasurer.
• Jacob Redding is a contributor to several modules, and has been an active organizer in the New York Drupal community. He now lives in Beijing, China and plans to help with organization of global events within the Drupal Association.
• Nedjo Rogers has been an active contributor to the Drupal project for over 4 years. Within the Association, he'll focus on removing critical project roadblocks for the development community. While the Drupal Association can't direct or dictate development tasks for the Drupal project itself, this development support role is a great match for its mission.
• Laura Scott has been working with Drupal since 2004, designing and developing a myriad of sites. She is a documentation contributor, a drupal.org site maintainer, and manager of the Community group on groups.drupal.org. Her marketing expertise and passion for enabling local community groups will be a huge resource for the Association.

The greatest challenge for the Association was selecting a relatively small group of new permanent members from the many skilled and qualified applicants. All the applicants (and all the members of the Drupal community) also have the opportunity to participate in the vital infrastructure and education projects that the Association is supporting.