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We all know that the Drupal Association and DrupalCon Sponsors give back to the community through scholarships, and by providing camps a fiscal structure and necessities like insurance, but it's great to hear about DrupalCon being able to give back more.

The Drupal Association is pleased to announce a new pilot grant program that seeks to transform, support, and educate Drupal communities around the world. Through a limited number of Drupal Community Cultivation Grants, we are seeking to support current and future organizers and leaders of DrupalCamps, Drupal Meetups, Drupal Sprints, and other creative projects who are spreading information within the Drupal community and educating individuals outside the community about Drupal.

The 2013 DrupalCon North American Selection Committee is looking for input from the Drupal community to help select the location for DrupalCon North America in 2013 (and beyond).

Straw poll
As we did last year, we’re releasing a “straw poll” intended to gauge community interest in various cities. This list is not intended to be exhaustive, and community members are welcome to suggest alternative options.

You can make your voice heard by going to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/drupalconpoll now!

The poll takes less than five minutes to complete, and we’ll be accepting responses through June 19, 2011 in all timezones (deadline is 11:59pm Hawaiian Standard Time Standard Time or UTC -10 hours). Everyone is welcome and encouraged to complete this quick survey.

City Nominations

Drupal Association membership just got a little sweeter. The Drupal Association is now proud to offer its members discounts to some well-known retailers and service providers like Acquia, ActiveState, Varnish Software, and Zend. We're partnering with these companies in order to provide the people who support us something nice.

If you were wondering about the North American DrupalCon selection process for 2013, wonder no more! The Drupal Association has assembled a committee to make a recommendation for the board's consideration and the committee is excited to kick off the community engagement process next week on June 1.

This committee will:

• Draft communications for *.Drupal.org for North American DrupalCons Selection
• Promote, monitor, support, and review the community engagement process
• Review and assess the Event Manager report
• Make a recommendation for a DrupalCon 2013 location to the Drupal Association Board including a proposed event chairperson in the selected city. The board will be updated on the committee’s progress at each board meeting.

The members of the committee are:

• Jeff Eaton (General Assembly)
• Betsy Ensley (Community-at-large)
• Tiffany Farriss (Board)
• Emma Jane Hogbin (Community-at-large)

I am very excited to announce that the Drupal Association and DrupalCon have hired two great folks to work on our worldwide team; Paul Suway and Isabell Schulz. These two amazing folks will help our growing team continue to refine the DrupalCon and Drupal Association member experience and put in the solid foundation for a strong Association. The Drupal project is growing and we're building out a great team to support this amazing community!

Please help me welcome Paul to the Drupal Association and Isabell to the DrupalCon team!

This isn't exactly news, but I was always assuming that Drupal people are a bit more honest and reliable. Turns out that I am pretty naïve.

As you know, we have these fancy download stats, thanks to a lot of people's work. On occassion, there are some troubles with them, and then Brandon looks at them in detail. Today, we blocked an IP which was requesting updates very often and with a lot of different keys. Either somebody's Drupal site is broken in a bad way, or somebody was trying to tweak the stats. We can't decide this based on the data we have, but if you find you don't get updates anymore, you probably should check your setup.

The real bummer was however, when Brandon started to specifically look for requests that were only out to game the stats for certain modules.

He found a module that reported several thousand sites using it, where almost all of the reports came from the same IP address.

So, you have been wondering what the overall effect of the git migration was on drupal.org's performance but didn't dare to ask?

Here's the answer: I don't really know.

The reason for this is that at the same time we made two other changes: all the CVS related URLs were temporarily disabled and the issue statistics pages for each project were restricted to logged in users.

The map on the home page of Drupal.org is one of the most-noticed new features. It started with the prototype, which was just that— a Flash-based idea for what might go there. During implementation, we had to figure out what exactly it would be and how it would work.

First, we needed to know where people were. Drupal.org has the advantage of an audience who is more-likely to be using modern browsers, and we don’t need everyone’s location. I decided we should use the new Geolocation API, but didn’t find any existing modules. I wrote a small HTML5 user geolocation module to add a share location option to your profile page. For privacy, it is opt-in and rounded to the nearest 0.1 longitude/latitude. Over 5,000 have shared their location, less than 1% of active Drupal.org users, but still looks impressive on a map:

Drupal schwag.. Drupal schwag.. delicious Drupal schwag. Personally I've been dying to get my hands on some awesome Drupal Shirts from Morten.dk or those cute Druplicons from the Peru folks or a woven knit hat like Webchick's! And I've always been curious to learn about the latest Drupal books and browse them all in one place... a place like DrupalCon!