At DrupalCon Austin 2014, we officially kicked off the reimagination of Drupal.org with a full-day workshop with Drupal Association staff, Working Groups, select board members and advisors, facilitated by our user experience coach Whitney Hess. In the morning, we did the serious business of defining our objectives, target audiences, metrics for success (KPIs), partners and competitors, and then in the afternoon broke out into teams to brainstorm provisional personas, use case scenarios, and a blue-sky set of features. These are the hypotheses that we will now test in our user research.
As you may have seen, we recently sent out a call for designers. We utilized the process we created last year, but with one twist: this year, instead of hiring one designer to produce both of the 2015 Cons, we are hiring two designers to produce Cons for two years!
Our awesome design partner this year, CTI Digital, has been put through their paces producing all the design for both 2014 DrupalCons in Austin and Amsterdam. While they have done a stellar job, we know this process has proved taxing on their resources, since there was so much cross-over between the deliverables for both cons. Sorry, CTI!
The phrase "audited financial statements" does not usually bring joy to the hearts of children or wake slumbering people from naps. However, if you're me, audited financials are pretty darn exciting. Firstly, I love them because they give us a baseline to measure against year afer year, and I love metrics.
Jonathan Sims is Assistant Professor of Strategy at Babson College. A 2013 PhD graduate from the University of Texas at Austin, he wrote his dissertation on entrepreneurship within Drupal.
You may have noticed that Drupal.org user profiles now let you upload your picture. These will be shown with comments. You can see a preview on the staging site, the HTTP user/password is drupal/drupal: in the issue queue (example) and forum (example). You can log in with your Drupal.org username and password to test more.
There are more improvements to come in the next few weeks. This is the first round of implementation for a design process led by Mark Carver and Bojhan Somers. Read more about the design changes and future work in the issue queue.
Twice a year we get the opportunity to hold our monhtly Drupal Association board meetings live and in-person! We are more than excited to get to Austin to greet old friends and meet many new ones. While we're (mostly) all there, we hope you'll join us for the June board meeting. We'll be in room 10B on the third floor of the Austin convention center at 11:45 am.
The Drupal Association is seeking two creative and innovative design partners to create the web and print designs for the 2015 and 2016 DrupalCon events. We’re looking for people who understand that each DrupalCon is a singular expression of the Drupal community, DrupalCon location, software innovation, and extreme nerdiness, and know how to turn this into compelling designs that are functional, fun, and make people look twice.
Per the 2014 Leadership plan, one of the imperatives for the Drupal Association is making Drupal.org a great tool for the Drupal community, building Drupal adoptions and developer satisfaction. One very important part of a great tool is great user support. The speed and ease with which users can get help when they have a problem greatly affects overall experience.
As with many other things on Drupal.org, historically support has been provided by an amazing group of community volunteers with a little help from the Drupal Association staff. Recently the Drupal Association staff had to step in heavily during a few intense times, such as after the security incident last May, when we reset all user passwords. Association staff answered hundreds of support requests, 24 hours a day, over the week following the incident.
The site is growing and demand for support is growing as well. Luckily so is the Drupal Association’s tech team. As we get more bandwidth, we are planning to do more in terms of user support...
The phrase "audited financial statements" does not usually bring joy to the hearts of children or wake slumbering people from naps. However, if you're me, audited financials are pretty darn exciting. Firstly, I love them because they give us a baseline to measure against year afer year, and I love metrics.
Jonathan Sims is Assistant Professor of Strategy at Babson College. A 2013 PhD graduate from the University of Texas at Austin, he wrote his dissertation on entrepreneurship within Drupal.
Upcoming deployments: improvements to comments
Twice a year we get the opportunity to hold our monhtly Drupal Association board meetings live and in-person! We are more than excited to get to Austin to greet old friends and meet many new ones. While we're (mostly) all there, we hope you'll join us for the June board meeting. We'll be in room 10B on the third floor of the Austin convention center at 11:45 am.
The Drupal Association is seeking two creative and innovative design partners to create the web and print designs for the 2015 and 2016 DrupalCon events. We’re looking for people who understand that each DrupalCon is a singular expression of the Drupal community, DrupalCon location, software innovation, and extreme nerdiness, and know how to turn this into compelling designs that are functional, fun, and make people look twice.
Per the 
