Late last year, the Drupal Association announced a targeted fundraising campaign to build a fund to tackle the challenge of improving Drupal.org. Special T-shirts were offered in conjunction with Drupal Association membership, with net proceeds of those shirts set-aside for the sole purpose of improving the website at the heart of our community.
Thank You!
Thanks to your generous help, we raised over US$12,000! But we also raised awareness about the importance of Drupal.org. When the board of the association met in December they made improving Drupal.org the number one objective for 2012, and set aside additional budget to help make that happen.
A lot has happened since November 2011. Here's a quick summary of pointers to more information for those of you curious to know. To keep up to date, join the Drupal.org Improvements group and follow @drupal_org on Twitter.
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.
Now that the Drupal.org redesign is underway, Neil Drumm is currently collecting suggestions for what a revamped Drupal Association website might look like.
Angela Byron is collecting feedback and opinions from the Drupal community at http://webchick.net/node/58. Please post comments/opinions!
On Tuesday, February 17, 2009, the Drupal Association General Assembly held its third election. The Drupal Association elected both new permanent members to the Drupal Association, and a new Board of Directors.
For the Drupal community's participation in the Google Summer of Code program, Google donated $10,000 USD to the Drupal Association earlier this week. This amount represents 10% of the $100,000 USD allocated to Drupal's Summer of Code students. We'd like to sincerely thank Google for this tremendous contribution, which will be used to fund infrastructure improvements and to sponsor Drupal events (among other things).
As part of our ongoing efforts to support the Drupal.org infrastructure, the Drupal Association has further bulked up our hardware resources with 10 GB of RAM and a new master database server. These improvements will help us deal with the exponential growth curve the Drupal community has been experiencing, and help us prepare for the anticipated growth due to Drupal 6.
There's a discussion on drupal.org at the moment at http://drupal.org/node/160239 where we're collecting feedback about local Drupal user groups, what works, what doesn't work, and so on. Part of this discussion also revolves around how the Drupal Association can help facilitate local user groups and organizing local events. Please contribute to the discussion and let us know how we can help!
