This is my first full week in the Executive Director post at the Drupal Association. I've been thrilled to get to know so many of you over the last month while I prepared to take on this role, and our conversations have reinforced the number one thing I was most excited about when considering the role: the Drupal Doacracy. Those are not empty words for this community - you mean it!
The D.O stats alone tell a very compelling story about the community - over 3,000 code commits and 8,000 issue comments this week alone. And that doesn't begin to tell the full story. Many more of you are working on documentation, training, Core Office Hours, camps, blogs and podcasts, and countless other ways to support and enrich the Drupal community. You all are the heart and soul of Drupal, from the core contributer to the first time site builder.
The many ways you engage with the project also underscores the great diversity of the community. Some of you eat code for breakfast. Others, well, don't. We all come to Drupal for different reasons, with different expectations, but always with the intent to make something awesome, whether that's a better site for your organization, or a better Drupal module.
The job of the Drupal Association is to support all of you in your work - whatever that work is - to advance the project. That's my job. I'm here to make sure the DA gets you what you need to make your Drupal experience a success.
How are we going to do that?
First, we're going to have to do a lot of listening. Your voices need to be at the center of all our decisions. Of course, it's worth noting that the Drupal community has a lot of voices. You're a very diverse group, which makes the project stronger in the long run, but makes desicion making harder in the short-term. It is inevitable that the DA will make choices that some of you disagree with. But you have my promise that those decisions won't take place without considering all of our options. We're going to renew our commitment to listening, while also trying to create the processes and systems that allow us to make decisions and move forward efficiently.
But Drupal is not a listen-acracy. It's about making stuff happen. So this is also a time for getting stuff done. For 2013, the Drupal Association Board and the staff have defined several priorities that we will pursue realted to the Drupal community:
- Clearly defined roles for Staff, Community and Board
- Consistent Community Communications
- Continue Global Training Days
- Develop a Global Leadership Program
- Work with the Marketing Committee to support the D8 launch
- Develop Marketing plan and execute
- Drive D.O improvements in accordance with the Governance Plan
- Develop Comprehensive 3-year plan for DrupalCon
Comments
hi holly, that's a nice introductory post I have to say.
helping with, evaluating and improving the community processes on drupal.org is definitely a top priority from my point of view: tsevenson’s recent blog post contains some ideas regarding enhancing the UX process. also the issue queue could work more efficient if we had tools like voting. I understand that the d.o relaunch on d7 has stalled a bit but that it's on the way. So from that point it would be great to go and improve things that have already been talked about a lot in the prairie initiative but that are difficult to implement without consensus and a clear plan to action.
Helping and encouraging local communities is really important. Thanks again DA for sponsoring our Drupal Austria Roadshow last year! The cancelation of drupalcon Latin america was sad but I'm very confident about Drupal Picchu 2014.
That's some ideas from my side. Also worth noting that i like the fact that pcambra and mortondk have been elected. Looking forward to a communicative DA.
regards dasjo