Last Wednesday we held our October Board Meeting, with a pretty quiet public agenda. 'Tis the season for developing 2014 budgets and workplans, so we spent most of our meeting time in Executive session covering those topics. Once approved, of course, we will share with you. But until then, here are few of the issues we covered that you should know about. Feel free to read on here, or to review the notes from the meeting. Remember that all our public board meeting materials for 2013 are avilable in a public Google Drive folder.

Drupal 7 Launch on D.O

We were very pleased to announce that the Drupal.org D7 upgrade is finally coming to an end. We've scheduled a launch date for October 31, if we are able to close out all issues by October 28 (and that looks to be on track as of today). We know that you all have waited far too long to reach this point and are pleased to finally close this out and begin the process of making improvements to our developer tools. We are as excited as you are to focus on the future of Drupal.org!

Thank you so much for all the patience you've displayed throughout this process. I also want to extend a huge thanks to Drumm, Tatiana, and the many many contractors and volunteers who poured their hearts into this project. We also owe the supporting partners a debt of gratitude for the funding and support as well. 

Staff Updates

The main focus of much of our work right now is planning for 2014 and beyond. We're incorporating board feedback in our 2014 leadership plan, KPIs and budget for approval by the board in November. We're excited to share the details with the community once it's approved. Our 2013 KPIs are looking fantastic - we're meeting all our revenue goals for the year. Membership has continued to be fairly erratic, but our recent membership campaign has begun to drive numbers back up. The good news is that while the number of members has been falling short of our goal, our revenue has been on track. We also have great news from Prague - a record 1,836 tickets sold for Prague. You can review the full staff report to get all the details.

Q2 Financials Approved

In executive session, the finance committee shared the Q2 financials with the full board who voted to approve them. You can review the June, July, and August 2013 financials. You may note that we're running ahead of projected revenue and behind projected expenses, meaning that we're in a significantly better budget position that we had planned. The increase in revenue is due largely to beating our DrupalCon ticket and sponsorship sales projections. The expense side is a little messier - as a newer organization, we're still learning the patterns and models we can use to project expenses. We see a lot of variance on the expense side due mostly to this educated guessing in the 2013 budget. However, the largest variation is in staffing. That's because we delayed hiring two positions here to help offset the additional costs incurred in responding to June's security issues.

As always, I invite any questions you may have, and look forward to chatting with you! 

Flickr photo: josefjer