For the last few years, we've been recording each of the sessions from the DrupalCons, creating over 100 hours of recordings per event. We've also been uploading each of these recordings to the session listing on the DrupalCon site within a few hours. The result is an archive for each conference that's available to anyone, anytime.
Back in November, a group of folks at DrupalCamp NW decided to ask that question and see what happened. The result? Some prett great answers, and a wonderful video that really captures the community:
In late April 2012 we kicked off a sprint to upgrade Drupal.org to Drupal 7. Over the next months a huge amount of work was done, resulting in about 300 closed issues (not counting bdd team issues). The Project module suite and many other parts of our site were erased of nearly ten years of technical debt brought on by numerous patchwork fixes over the years. In addition, many parts of the new Drupal.org were rebuilt to take advantage of the features and functionality of Drupal 7. A lot of work went into something completely new for Drupal.org - Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) testing infrastructure and suite of tests for the most important parts of Drupal.org, including Git & Project functionality, Solr search, and various sections like Marketplace and Case studies. All told, by the end of 2012 the upgrade was close to completion. But, at this point we exhausted our initial budget. The decision was made to suspend all activities until we could reassess the situation, define a solid path forward, and get budget for the finishing part of upgrade project approved.
Guest blogger John Heaven of comm-press shares his experiences and observations from March's Global Sprint Weekend. Thanks, John!
At comm-press in Hamburg, Germany, we opened up our office on Saturday 9th and Sunday 10th March to make our contribution to the code sprint taking place across the globe. It was unusually wintery weather for March - in the past few days we've seen up to 40cm of snow -- but, nevertheless, 15 people gathered to work down the issue queue, get help from other participants or simply get to know Drupal 8 for the first time.
The mission of the Drupal Association is to foster and support the Drupal Project, the community, and its growth. Our very first task in accomplishing that mission?
1. Maintaining the hardware and software infrastructure of Drupal.org and other community sites.
Drupal.org is the central nervous system for the Drupal Project. It's where you work, where you share, and where you socialize. Everything that happens in the community touches D.O at some point. That's why it's first on the list of ways we serve our mission.
Last year, The Drupal Association launched the Supporting Partner Program. The program was to function as a way to crowdsource funds for strategic community initiatives; namely creating a tech team to improve the community’s home Drupal.org. We are so thankful to the 36 companies who stepped up to support this effort.
It goes without saying that Drupal.org is a big site to manage and requires a lot of resources. Resources are needed not only to maintain the site, but yes...improve it! Drupal.org needs to be upgraded to D7. Developers want better collaboration tools. Site builders want to find the right modules for the job, faster. To tackle this brain-smacking project we needed a team, the D.O Tech Team. But how to fund it?
The only thing that stays the same is that nothing stays the same. That's definitely true for the Drupal Association, and today we had to do a hard thing and say goodbye to two team members, Neil Kent and Marta Betts.
Neil had been with the DA since DrupalCon Chicago and was instrumental in professionalizing the conferences. He's a master of conference logistics, a really fun person to work with, and a darn good guitar player to boot. Marta has helped lead DrupalCon marketing for the past year, provide content writing with monthly newsletters and countless blogs, as well as provide other marketing guidance, including our fledging membership program and starting our first year Global Training Days - all while working part-time.