Blogs

Narayan Newton and I gave a talk at Drupalcon on the state of the http://drupal.org infrastructure. Narayan, Gerhard, David, and myself are currently working on a infrastructure budget proposal for the Drupal association. This proposal will give you some insight into the challenges of running Drupal.org and why it is not just another Drupal site. In fact, our use of Drupal as a web application platform for Drupal.org pushes the Drupal project in many directions that lead to innovation.

The Drupal association has been using CiviCRM for a couple of years now. As part of the redesign effort we upgraded the Drupal association site to Drupal 6 and CiviCRM 2.1.

With the help from the Donald Lobo of the CiviCRM team and David Strauss we now have automatic membership renewal notices working in CiviCRM 2.1. With previous versions we had technical difficulties with membership renewal notices and would send renewal reminders out in batches.

For the last several years, Angie Byron (aka webchick) has done an outstanding job coordinating Drupal's participation in the Google Summer of Code program. This year, however, Angie has the additional responsibility of being a core maintainer for Drupal 7.

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.

There were 27 candidates who submitted applications to the Drupal Association, which includes existing members re-applying for board positions in 2009.

Of those, we elected six new members as permanent members, and a board consisting of eight individuals.

February 10 is the deadline to apply to be a permanent member or board member of the Drupal Association.

Compared to last year, there are relatively few applications and even fewer for board positions. Bringing in energetic and visionary new members is an important part of the Association continuing to build strength and capacity.

If you're considering applying, now's the time!

Here are some pointers on why you might apply, how to do so, and what to expect.

As an open source project, Drupal has many strengths. We have strong and diverse technical contributors, a healthy financial ecosystem and a rapidly growing and vibrant community. However, we are not that strong in marketing and there may be an opportunity to change that in 2009.

Marketing can be a bit of mystery to technical people. Traditional marketing practices such as advertising or promotion of poor quality products have earned the discipline distrust. The following video, "A Short History of Marketing" is a good summary.

[Re-posted from Drupal.org]
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 a year ago, so it's election time again!

On February 17 we will elect new Permanent Members (the General Assembly is comprised of all the Permanent Members) and our third Board of Directors (the Board of Directors is appointed by the General Assembly and is responsible for day-to-day operations). All the details can be found in the Drupal Association's Statutes and on the 2009 election website.

In its second year of operation, the pace of the Drupal Association's work has accelerated notably. We (i) extended the drupal.org infrastructure, (ii) raised funds, (iii) helped organize two international Drupal conferences, (iv) resolved many licensing questions, (v) funded several events, and (vi) made the Drupal.org redesign a top priority. Despite the progress made in 2008, we would like to ramp up our professionalism and increase our activity in 2009.