Summary

As the Drupal project and community have grown rapidly over the past few years, the mission and responsibilities of the Drupal Association have changed as well. To ensure that the Association continues to effectively meet the needs of the Drupal community and project, and to plan its efforts for the coming year, nearly all permanent members of the Association met after DrupalCon San Francisco for a day-long retreat.

Topics discussed included:

• an overview of the DA's budget and resources
• an exploration of the DA's mission and responsibilities
• defining the DA's top priorities for the coming year
• defining the organization's staffing needs
• improving the DA's decision-making processes and communication both internally and with the wider community

Coming out of this retreat, the Association identified five areas that it will focus on in 2010. The DA will work on other initiatives as well, but these items were deemed to be the ones that had the highest priority:

• Completing the implementation of the Drupal.org redesign
• Continuing to build a sustainable model for DrupalCons
• Improving internal processes and decision-making
• Hiring permanent staff to help the DA better execute on its initatives
• Improving the technical infrastructure of drupal.org

Below you can find an in-depth explanation of the process.

Background

The Friday following Drupalcon San Francisco, 23 Drupal Association members (some European members forced to join remotely due to angry volcanoes), including 8 of 9 board members, participated in a day-long workshop to focus on improving our efficacy as an organization. This workshop was led by a facilitator, Charmaine Ess of Partners in Scale, who has almost 20 years of international non-profit and for-profit experience, specializing in organizational strategic planning and operational efficiencies. The overall goal of the retreat was to get all members on the same page regarding our over-arching mission as an organization, from there extrapolate specific issues to focus on in 2010, and then to come up with strategy on how to achieve our aims.

Preparation

Prior to the retreat, a survey was sent to all Drupal Association General Assembly members, as ambassadors to the larger Drupal community, to get a general "feeling" for how people perceive the current state of affairs. This survey was filled out by 29 Drupal Association members, and consisted of 27 questions, focused around four main sections:

• Questions on the Mission
• Questions on 2010 Objectives
• Questions on Association Goals and Individual Goals
• Questions on DA Vision and Staffing

Additionally, supplementary phone interviews were conducted with all 9 board members.

Charmaine's overall finding was that we were all remarkably on the same page. And also, that we have some things to work on. ;)

Strengths/Opportunities

In terms of the Drupal Association's main strengths, all were in agreement that both Drupalcons and Drupal.org's infrastructure were the two things that we do well. We have been able to help grow Drupalcon from a 40-person event in Antwerp in 2005 to a 3000+ person event in San Francisco last week. These events are key for our contributors to get together face-to-face and collaborate together on difficult problems that then propel the Drupal software forward for the next several months and years. We've also spent money so that our hardware infrastructure could scale during this same time as our community has doubled in size five times since 2005. This is critical not only for providing access to the Drupal software and add-ons, but also for providing a space for end-users to seek assistance, contributors to innovate on new code and squash bugs, working and geographical groups to meet together and drive forward various initiatives.

However, everything isn't rose-coloured...

• The majority (58%) said that the Drupal Association has not been able to achieve its goals.
• The majority (69%) said that they as an individual within the Drupal Association have not been able to achieve their goals.
• The majority (61%) said that the Drupal Association does not have a positive reputation in the Drupal community.

Several issues needing work were highlighted:

General issues include the still not-yet-launched Drupal.org redesign, poor internal and external communication, and ambiguity around the Drupal Association's role in defending the Drupal trademark. Related to structure and process are items such as lack of clear roles and responsibilities between board members and permanent members, and the Drupal Association in relation to the larger community. Due to the volunteer-driven nature of our organization, and the fact that there is an overall lack of experience in running non-profits among the permanent members of the Drupal Association, we struggle with things such as unclear decision-making processes. Technology is also a barrier, since a lot of people aren't comfortable communicating over IRC. And finally, our overall reputation suffers, because we've traditionally been poor at communicating what's going on, so we can come across as secretive, with a lack of visibility as to what the community's money is being spent on.

While this may paint a bleak picture, in some respects it's also hopeful; it means that we're all on the same page about what our challenges are, and the urgency with which they need to be addressed. Additionally, this same feedback, as well as feedback throughout the survey, mirrors comments that I've seen directed to the Drupal Association from the larger Drupal community.

Mission/Vision

The first step in clearing up some of these issues is to get clarity and consensus on what exactly the Drupal Association's mission is, and we broke into three groups to brainstorm on this topic. The goal is to answer three questions:

• Why do you exist?
• What do you do?
• Whom do you serve?

Our current mission statement is the following:

"The Drupal Association is dedicated to helping the open source Drupal CMS project flourish. The Drupal Association supports and assists the Drupal community by maintaining the hardware and software infrastructure of Drupal.org, protecting the Drupal trademark and GPLed source code of the Drupal project, contributing modules and themes, organizing the semiannual Drupalcon, marketing the Drupal project, and supporting other activities."

Overall, there was:

• complete agreement that maintaining infrastructure and Drupalcon was key to our mission.
• strong agreement that the Drupal Association should also be growing the Drupal community and marketing the Drupal project.
• strong agreement that we should NOT focus on contributing modules and themes as part of our mission (though great if it happens as a result of achieving our other aims)
• conflicting opinions as to whether or not trademark protection and "other supporting activities" should be included.

Summary of comments:

Each working group arrived at a slightly different revised mission statement, but all had the same basic tenets: The Drupal Association is responsible for the facilitating both the Drupal software and the Drupal community; we need to provide a legal framework not limited just to trademark; Drupal events including Drupalcons and "sprints" fall within our purview; and we are responsible for all infrastructure from the baseline network and server hardware to the modules and themes that run on *.drupal.org. Robert Douglass is leading a working group to collate these results and finalize the mission statement.

Take-away tag-line for Drupal: "Come for the software, stay for the community." ;)

Trademark

The trademark in particular raised some concerns, since Dries Buytaert is the sole owner of the trademark, and many were conflicted about protecting the trademark being part of our stated mission since the Drupal Association does not own or have any authority/empowerment over the trademark usage. Despite this, the Drupal Association is still viewed as the "go-to" place for any trademark dispute resolutions. We were asked in the break-out groups to choose between three options:

1. DA enforces TM and copyright issues (via an agreement with Dries for the Association to be officially empowered to defend the TM)
2. DA works with Dries to enforce the TM and stands by with funds (and then reword the Mission statement to write that “The DA aims to support efforts to protect the TM”
3. DA does nothing with the TM and redirects all infringements to Dries

All members were in agreement that neither the first option nor the third option were acceptable; we don't want Dries to have to single-handedly enforce the trademark himself at his own personal cost, but yet we are not comfortable taking full enforcement responsibility without some sort of empowerment/ownership trade-off. Figuring out exactly what the second option looks like needs to be slated for a follow-up discussion.

2010 Objectives

When asked to name the two most pressing issues in 2010, almost everyone agreed that completing the Drupal.org redesign, increasing efficiency of internal communications, and Drupalcons were high in the list. Additional issues included providing additional revenue streams, hiring professional staff, increasing communication and transparency, and infrastructure expansion.

In terms of taking our 2009 objectives and ranking them in importance for 2010, there was broad consensus on Drupalcons, Infrastructure, Drupal.org redesign, and growing the Drupal community. More mixed were those who thought marketing, recruiting new Drupal developers, Drupalcamp sponsorships, Trademark/Legal, or the Drupal Store were priorities.

We were asked to break into groups and come up with a top list of things to focus on in 2010:

• Drupal.org redesign: There was universal agreement in the room that the Drupal.org redesign had to be given our top priority this year. This will help instill confidence back in the Drupal Association, and will provide better tools for our community, as well as a number of additional marketing and fund-raising opportunities.
• Drupalcons: Continuing to execute on Cary Gordon's events plan, in 2010 we'll hold Drupalcon Copenhagen 2010, make preparations for Drupalcon Chicago 2011, as well as preliminary steps for European 2011 Drupalcon.
• Improving internal process/decision-making: One of the biggest hurdles the Drupal Association faces is lack of a clear process for enacting change within the organization. One of the critical things we must do this year is both make that process, as well as the decision-making chain of command, more transparent.
• Hiring/Staff: The Drupal Association is clearly showing the strain of trying to achieve some of its aims through its own volunteer-driven resources, and so we agreed we need to work on hiring to supplement where we are weak. Additionally, this point covers general ambiguity about board member vs. non-board General Assembly member, the "permanentness" of permanent members, and generally figuring out where we all fit into the leadership structure.
• Infrastructure: This includes both normal upkeep, as well as capacity upgrades for the forthcoming Drupal 7.0 release, which will probably double our traffic if previous indicators persist. Additionally, this includes assisting with the CVS => Git migration, which is integral to retaining drupal.org as the central development hub for the Drupal community.

There was pretty broad consensus to explicitly limit the priorities of the Drupal Association in 2010 to only the things on this list. In the past, we have tried to be too ambitious, and take on too many things with not enough resources to carry them out. By focusing on a few small but important priorities, as well as building out our internal processes and hiring to supplement where we're weak, it's our hope that we can regain our footing and gradually focus on more expansive and ambitious goals in 2011 and beyond.

Interestingly, even though marketing was initially listed as a high priority, it ended up getting dropped from our "top 5." We all generally felt that the Drupal community itself does a wonderful job of marketing the Drupal project, and our efforts are better focused on lower-level details that only we can do, to enable the community to keep kicking butt.

Staffing

There was overwhemling agreement (93%) that hiring help to run the organization was critical to our success:

When asked to choose between a "executive director" role (focus on being an industry advocate, raising funds, finding donors, strategizing new conferences) or an "operations manager" role (focus more on the day to day of assisting in the smooth running and execution of the Association), both the survey (64%) and general feeling in the room was that an operations manager made more sense, at this point in time. The idea is that we should get our own house in order before trying to do any kind of major outreach as an organization.

There was also strong support for hiring someone to act in roles such as conference manager and fundraiser. In practice, it means we will likely be looking for a COO who can wear many hats. :) Jacob Redding, who is currently acting in this capacity for the Drupal Association, is going to handle putting together a job description for this person.

Improving Processes

Within the survey there were several areas identified as sub-optimal processes leading to us being less effective as an organization. These included lack of a schedule for board meetings and the requirement to hold meetings on IRC, unclear roles and responsibilities which leads to feelings of lack of support and lack of "ownership", unclear lines of authority (relying too much on 'do-ocracy' rather than delegation, lack of clarity on Drupal Association's purview vs. the Drupal community's purview), and communication problems both internally and externally.

We were nearing the end of the day, so this section got cut a bit short, but here were some agreed-upon next steps in terms of processes:

• Pursue alternate technologies (phone, Skype, Adobe Connect, etc.) than IRC to hold board meetings (maintaining accessibility for various technology/language barriers being a key requirement)
• Schedule both quarterly board meetings and monthly "staff" meetings in advance, so months don't lapse by without some "face time" together
• Hold a retreat similar to this following every Drupalcon to re-align goals and priorities, possibly with more frequent "in-person" meetings for executive staff.
• Post public summaries of all board meetings to keep the community informed on what's happening.

The plan is to hire a COO with expertise in building out non-profit decision-making infrastructure to help us address the larger and more fundamental process issues that have been identified.

Why are we here?

The final question in the survey posed the question, "Why did I join the Drupal Association?" I thought it was very uplifting to read that we're all (or at least 79%+) by and large here for the same reasons: we want to see the Drupal project grow as a whole, we agree with the values of open source, and we want to impact the overall direction/work of the Drupal Association. It's my sincere hope that coming back from this retreat, we can all tap into that same passion that brought us here in the first place, and work together to get the Drupal Association performing at a level that we can all be proud of.

Overall, this experience has left me personally feeling very recharged and hopeful about my role in the Drupal Association again, and I've seen several comments to the same effect from others. Huge thanks to Jacob Redding and David Strauss for helping to make this happen, and to Charmaine Ess for doing a heroic job herding a very unruly and opinionated bunch of cats. :) And I hope that this public summary can help us turn over a new leaf with our relationship with the larger Drupal community: we're hearing your feedback and are taking actions to address it.