In 2009, the Drupal Community was pleasantly surprised when http://whitehouse.gov moved to the Drupal platform. Since then, Drupal has made major inroads in the U.S. federal government. Last week they took another step forward in our community by releasing their code on Drupal.org.
We are pleased to tell you that the Drupal Association’s Board of Directors announced today that it has appointed Holly Ross as the new Executive Director to lead the Association into it’s next phase of growth. Holly will assume her role starting February 1, 2013.
Holly joins the DA after 10 years at NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network, which works to help nonprofits use technology to create the change they want to see in the world. NTEN has a similar structure to the DA with a strong community of technologies, which she helped grow from just a handful of individuals to over 60,000 people. NTEN also holds an annual conference, and pulls together resources to support the technology needs of nonprofits around the country.
This is one of the hardest blog posts that I've had to write. Regrettably and with much consternation we have decided to cancel DrupalCon Sao Paulo due to a low level of sponsorship support, fewer than expected session submissions, and higher than expected costs.
Community Board Member elections are just around the corner, have you submitted your nomination yet? Submit today! Nominations close September 16th. We encourage members from all over the world to participate and bring balance of not only geography, but experiences.
Just over two years ago the Drupal Association began a major transformation to better meet the needs of the growing Drupal community. A lot of changes took place including the creation of a 501c3, a new governance structure, new committees, and, a very important step, the hiring of staff. This transformation set the Drupal Association on a path to be able to support the community in ways that were previously impossible. It also set the Association on a trajectory that would have it manage significant portions of community built and community controlled assets including drupal.org, DrupalCon, and the Git repositories that contains hundreds of thousands lines of your code.
Earlier this summer the Drupal Association made the decision to commit heavily to the Conference Organizing Distribution (COD) for all DrupalCons. We’re excited to announce that after a summer of activity in the COD issue queue we have launched five DrupalCon websites on the latest version of COD for Drupal 7.
In 2005 drupal.org was failing. Growing rapidly, the site competed for resources on a shared server and without full-time support it became a target for hackers. Drupal.org may not be what it is today without early support from Sun Microsystems, the financial donations of hundreds of Drupal users, and generous support from Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSUOSL).
DrupalCon would not be the successful conference it is without the amazing website that pulls our community together. Each DrupalCon website is backed by an awesome team of developers that donate hundreds of hours to create an amazing conference website with a robust and rich feature set.
This summer the Drupal Association is tacklng a number of initiatives to make drupal.org awesome and to improve Cod for use at DrupalCon. To help complete these initiatives we're looking for a few good developers to jump in and help out. As an open source project there are many ways you can be a part of the team. Review the projects we're working on and choose the one that's right for you:
We're excited to welcome Tatiana (tvn) as the Association's first Drupal.org project coordinator. Keeping inline with our objective to make Drupal.org an amazing place for developers, site builders and contributors to collaborate we have begun to make investments to support the community.
