It's July, and the northern half of the planet is either getting ready for a vacation, on vacation, or digging out of their inbox after a vacation. The Drupal community stops for no one though, and we had the board meeting to prove it on Wednesday. As always, we invite you to peruse the minutes (or look through any of our public meeting materials), but following is a recap of the meeting as well. 

Staff Updates

Our first order of business was to review the staff update to the board. The summary is that, while the security response ate at least a month out of our lives, we seem to be back in business and have been able to acheive quite a few successes in the last month, especially the launch of the D.O governance Working Groups. Under the leadership of our Community Events Manager Stephanie Torres, we're thrilled to share:

• Prague call for content garnered over 300 submissions, surpassing our goal. (You can still submit a Core Conversation!)
• Prague Sponsorship is over 90% of goal, and registration is running ahead of Munich to date. (Get yourself registered!)
• With lots of feedback from the community, we're launching a new webinar series on August 6!

And our new MarComm and Membership Manager Joe Syalor has also been hard at work as well:

• Membership was down for several weeks, but came back online in June and we're catching back with reminders and other messaging. Membership numbers are coming back in line with our plans. We listened to community feedback and membership is now available on a sliding scale, with some nifty gifts when you are able to contribute more. Support the DA and join today!
• The Drupal 8 launch plan is well under way with the Marketing Committee. We'll be presenting a full plan at the August board meeting.

Security Update

In the last month, activity has been fairly quiet, but we've been moving forward on two fronts. First, the DA engaged the security firm Encurve LLC to conduct a security audit. We are expecting to have a draft of that report in the next week or so that we can share publicly after board review. Huge thanks to nnewton, basic, and others on the infrastructure and security teams for helping make that happen. Secondly, we've engaged Tag1 Consulting to implement a few of the non-critical but very important changes that our security and infrastructure volunteers identified during the response. We'll be working on more comprehensive, fine-grained, and better monitored backups, implementing privilege separation between sites, and other housekeeping issues. Most importantly, all this work will be documented for the working groups. 

DrupalCon Portland Wrap Up

We've covered DrupalCon Portland quite a bit on this blog, but we did talk about it some more at the board meeting, this time to share our final financial numbers and some of the lessons learned as we move forward with Prague and Austin planning. Some of the key takeaways from Stephanie Torres' presentation:

• DrupalCon Portland contributed an (unaudited) net revenue of over $970,000 back to the project. 
• Sprint organizers report the largest "Getting Started" sprint ever, bringing  more new contributors to the project.
• Evaluations were really, really good. We revamped the eval this year, so we don't have Year Over Year (or Con over Con) data to share yet.
• As we look forward to future Cons, and especially Austin, we'll be making some changes based on the feedback. A redesigned exhibit hall, improvements to the registration system, and tweaks to content selection are the first few things we'll tackle. We'll also be looking to grow the conference by bringing in new audiences.

Financial Audit

At the beginning of 2013 we hired an accounting firm to conduct our first ever audit of DA finances. The audit is self-imposed (a key part of learning and transparency), and covers calendar year 2012 financials. We adjourned the public meeting to review the audit findings with the auditor and board. We'll be sharing copies of the audited fianncial statements and related documents in a future post, but are very pleased to report that we had a very clean audit. The board approved the audit and our auditors are compiling the final versions of the docs right now.

What's on Your Mind?

I think that about sums up that board meeting, but please share - what questions do you have?  

Flickr photo: spyjournal