Another month, another Drupal Association Board Board Meeting! Huge thanks to the community members who showed up in the meeting and on IRC to participate. We are very lucky to have so many active and passionate community members who help shape the direction of the Association. This month we tackled several meaty topics, made a big announcement, and more. As usual, you can peruse the meeting materials, listen to the recording, and read the meeting minutes. Or, you can just check out this blog post summary.

Some of the highlights include: 

Operational Updates

We continue to work on our dashboard, and we are still reporting some Year To Date (YTD) goals that are not quite accurate. For many of the goals, we took the annual goal and divided by 12 to find out what the monthly goal should be. However, our work is not linear, so these goals are not representative and sometimes reflect numbers that are lower than they should be, or higher than they should be. Staff are meeting in March to address these and get some more accurate goals to measure against in future months. 

Otherwise, February was a busy month for the Association. We made a number of strides on Drupal.org, including provisioning consultants to address backlinks to commits and to scope a project to implement semantic versioning, which is a hard blocker for Drupal 8.  Other staff are focused on DruplCon Austin, which saw really strong session submission numbers and registrations that are increasing daily. Right now, we're on pace to meet DrupalCon Portland registration numbers, and we are pushing to increase that and meet our 4,000 registrants goal. 

Working Group Updates

Governance for Drupal.org has been making more strides in the last couple of months. At this board meeting, Working Group chairs presented their progress:

  • Drupal.org Software Working Group: 2 teams were appointed in the last quarter, including a Developer Tools Leadership team and a Community Tools Leadership team. Both teams are now meeting regularly and are making recommendations for the Software Working Group to implement. Communication and Translation tools are up next. These teams should help surface issues more quickly and drive more change on the site. In the next quarter, get ready to share your big ideas via the community ideation process the DSWG is cooking up.
  • Drupal.org Content Working Group: The DCWG was focused on the last quarter in preparing an RFQ for user research and persona development for Drupal.org. This is a necessary first step in a reinvention of Drupal.org, work that we plan to undertake more fully in 2015. This research will help us better understand who is currently using Drupal.org and what is working (and not) for them. The DCWG is also tackling the Drupal.org Privacy Policy and Terms of Service and will share those with the community in the next quarter for feedback and discussion.
  • Drupal.org Infrastructure Working Group: There are a lot of changes queued up by the DIWG in the first quarter. In coordination with Rudy Grigar (basic), the Association's DevOps Engineer, we've been preparing moving off the shared Ganetti cluster at OSU/OSL and onto our own OpenStack installation. This will give us better performance and allows us to more easily make development environments available to Drupal.org volunteers. Additionally, the DIWG has researched and is about to select a CDN vendor which should help improve page load times across the site. We expect both projects to move to testing and (hopfeully) completion in the next quarter. In the next quarter the DIWG will also be working more closely with Jeremy Thorson to understand the Testbot infrastructure and explore opportunities to provide more and better support to Jeremy and Randy Fay's heroic volunteer efforts.

Community Elections

Two seats on the Drupal Association Board are desgnated as At-Large seats, meaning that they are filled by community-elected representatives. These at-large seats have had 1-year terms and we have elected two representatives each year. Feedback from our at-large and other directors has indicated that a one-year term does not allow the representative to fully participate in the board experience. It takes several months to start to mesh with the other board members and contribute.

The Elections Committee, chaired by Donna Benjamin (herself a former At-Large Director) recommended to the board that we extend At-Large terms to two years, and stagger elections so that we are electing one director to a two-year term each year. Making this change would require extending an exiting At-Large Director's term by 1 year (it was suggested that the newest At-Large director, Matthew Saunders, have his term extended) and changing the bylaws to reflect this change.

Additionally, the committee recommended moving elections from the fall time frame to February of each year. This would afford us time to start new terms at the May/June North American DrupalCon retreat. An in-person board meeting is extrememly helpful for building the team dynamic and accelerating onboarding.

The board voted to amend the bylaws and accept these changes. 

CTO Hiring Update

We'll be scheduling a more complete announcement shortly, but are very pleased that we found a fantastic candidate to fill the role of CTO here at the Association. Joshua Mitchell will join our staff on March 31 and dive right into work with the community to make Drupal.org shine - our primary imperative this year. Look for more details on teh Association blog on March 19.

Board Terms Extended

During Executive Session, the board voted to extend the terms of two current board members: Angie Byron and Danese Cooper. Angie's terms was extended two years (at her request), and Danese's for another full three-year term. 

I think that's just about all the news that's fit to print from the March board meeting, but please do let me know if you have questions or thoughts!

Flickr photo: charlessc

Comments

mherchel’s picture

The linked Google docs are not public :)

holly.ross.drupal’s picture

Sorry about that. The docs were in the publicly shared folder, and the sharing screen indicated that they were visible to anyone on the web, but no actual sharing setting had been selected. I went in an updated all the docs. You should be good to access them now.