Blogs

Summary

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.

As part of its efforts to better serve the Drupal project and community, the Drupal Association recently took the step of hiring its first full-time staff member. Longtime Drupal contributor and Association Treasurer Jacob Redding has been retained as the Association's interim General Manager, tasked with the responsibility of setting process in place and making it possible to hire more staff members over time.

Disclaimer

I am a permanent member of the Drupal association, and the director of business development for the association. I do not speak officially for the association, nor do I speak on behalf of the Drupalcon organizing committees. But I do have a blog and I want to have a discussion with the community about smart growth at Drupalcon. (*I've also helped raise approximately a million dollars for the association so they at least listen to me)

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 Drupal association permanent member candidate submissions are due on Monday. Many candidates are applying to be elected as permanent members but I wanted to highlight non-elected members who do a lot to help the Drupal association. This is not an complete list of people who volunteer for the Drupal association, but a sample.

The Drupal Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping the Drupal community with fun­ding, infra­structure, events, promotion and distribution. The current Board of Directors was elected almost a year ago, so it's election time again!

Last week we've had some "fun" with Microsoft's msnbot. They were apparently trying out their new beta and it didn't work that well. It ignored drupal.org's robots.txt and kept crawling 20-40 pages per second. You could call that a denial of sevice attack, drupal.org sure had problems.

We then resolved this by banning the whole subnet from our webservers.

Today neclimdul pointed out to me that the people running CPAN testers have had the same fun as we did and resolved this in the same manner.

If Microsoft keeps doing this it will get cut off from indexing many Open Source projects. One could think it was intentional.

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.

As promised, here is the recorded webinar on SEO for the Drupal.org redesign.