Today Noel Hidalgo donated and transferred the domains drupalcamp.org and drupalcamp.com to the Drupal Association. This is a generous donation that will help maintain consistency in our naming conventions, provide a space for drupalcamps to archive camp websites, and solved a critical issue for the Infrastructure team.

2011 was a big year for the Drupal Association. In our first year of staffed operations the Drupal Association was effective in a number of initiatives but didn't meet our expectations in others. It was a year of growth for us, as we learned how to navigate within and support the community and be an organization that is truly reflective of the community we support. Now with a year of learning behind us and a new governance structure we're looking forward to 2012.

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

You are all invited to the Drupal Association's first Town Hall meeting!

The Drupal community is one of the strongest open source communities, involving tens of thousands of developers, themers, administrators, and users connecting with each other every day. In 2006, the Drupal Association was formed by a few community volunteers to support the Drupal community. In mid-2010 I became the Association's first full-time employee and by the end of this year the Association will have three full-time employees. We are growing rapidly and there is quite a lot happening behind the scenes here. Curious what we are up to? Want to learn more? Come join us!

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

You are all invited to the Drupal Association's first Town Hall meeting!

The Drupal community is one of the strongest open source communities, involving tens of thousands of developers, themers, administrators, and users connecting with each other every day. In 2006, the Drupal Association was formed by a few community volunteers to support the Drupal community. In mid-2010 I became the Association's first full-time employee and by the end of this year the Association will have three full-time employees. We are growing rapidly and there is quite a lot happening behind the scenes here. Curious what we are up to? Want to learn more? Come join us!

Back in April, after DrupalCon San Francisco, Kieran Lal wrote a post for this blog with some ideas for how to effectively grow DrupalCons without losing our soul as a community. One of the key items he focused on was improving session quality. As Kieran put it,

"In order to grow Drupalcon, we need to focus on the quality of the main program. Drupal sessions are still wildly hit or miss, both in session quality and session attendance. As a community, we need to take a hard look in the mirror and raise consistency and quality of every Drupalcon session."

These thoughts have been echoed by many other folks within the community, including Mike Anello, Heather James, and Larry Garfield.

As one of the co-chairs of the upcoming DrupalCon Chicago 2011 and a permanent member of the Drupal Association, I’m writing this follow-up post to talk a little bit more about the things that we’re doing that will hopefully help improve session quality, provide more support to DrupalCon presenters, increase attendee satisfaction, and make for an overall better DrupalCon experience for long-time members of the community and newcomers alike.

But first, a little background:
Back in April, after DrupalCon San Francisco, Kieran Lal wrote a post for this blog with some ideas for how to effectively grow DrupalCons without losing our soul as a community. One of the key items he focused on was improving session quality. As Kieran put it,

"In order to grow Drupalcon, we need to focus on the quality of the main program. Drupal sessions are still wildly hit or miss, both in session quality and session attendance. As a community, we need to take a hard look in the mirror and raise consistency and quality of every Drupalcon session."

These thoughts have been echoed by many other folks within the community, including Mike Anello, Heather James, and Larry Garfield.

As one of the co-chairs of the upcoming DrupalCon Chicago 2011 and a permanent member of the Drupal Association, I’m writing this follow-up post to talk a little bit more about the things that we’re doing that will hopefully help improve session quality, provide more support to DrupalCon presenters, increase attendee satisfaction, and make for an overall better DrupalCon experience for long-time members of the community and newcomers alike.

But first, a little background:

Following DrupalCon San Francisco, at the first ever day-long Association workshop, we set about redefining our Mission Statement and Purpose. For more background on the need for this effort, please refer to Angie Byron's excellent report. After the retreat, a working group of five association members was formed to continue the work on the Mission Statement and Purpose. Now, at DrupalCon Copenhagen, the draft has been shared with the rest of the Association, debated, massaged, and today, we'd like to share it with everyone. Your feedback and suggestions are welcome. This text will eventually be voted on and accepted by the Association board. Please read some of the notes that I included following the draft which explain each line and its motivations.
Following DrupalCon San Francisco, at the first ever day-long Association workshop, we set about redefining our Mission Statement and Purpose. For more background on the need for this effort, please refer to Angie Byron's excellent report. After the retreat, a working group of five association members was formed to continue the work on the Mission Statement and Purpose. Now, at DrupalCon Copenhagen, the draft has been shared with the rest of the Association, debated, massaged, and today, we'd like to share it with everyone. Your feedback and suggestions are welcome. This text will eventually be voted on and accepted by the Association board. Please read some of the notes that I included following the draft which explain each line and its motivations.

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 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. OSUOSL handled all of this in stride and even provided the time of student interns to assist with hosting and infrastructure issues.

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.