We had our last board meeting of the year on Wednesday, 11 December 2013. Although the agenda had only three items, we covered a really broad array of topics, from working group plans for 2014 to some more metrics from DrupalCon Prague. As always, you can peruse the notes, listen to the recording (I remembered to record it this time!), or just check out this post with my summary of the key discussion points. Additionally, you can always find the public board materials in this public Google Drive. Here’s that summary:

Drupal.org Staffing Ramp Up

Although not an agenda item, one theme in all the discussions we had is our preparation for a significant investment in Drupal.org staffing in 2014. We outline more detailed thoughts in the 2014 Leadership Plan and Budget, but in short, we’re looking to increase our ability to provide better performance and more reliability for Drupal.org while also empowering the community to create more of the changes they want to see on the site. We are currently looking to hire a CTO to lead this work for the Association, as well as another developer to work with Drumm. The bit we’re most excited about? We’re thrilled to announce that Rudy Grigar (basic) will be joining us on staff starting in January. Rudy is one of our talented Infrastructure Team volunteers, and as a staff member we know he’s going to be able to finally implement a lot of the improvements we are always dreaming about because he’ll be able to focus on Drupal.org full time.

DrupalCon Prague: We Must Be Doing Something Right!

In 2014, you’ll see a lot more real data from the Association about our programs and services so you can see for yourself the impact that our work is having. In addition to the Success Metrics we identified in the Leadership Plan, each team at the Association is developing a dashboard that tracks the key metrics for their work so that can use data, and not just anecdotal stories, to make better decisions about how to run our programs. The events team has already started collecting historical data about DrupalCons and we found some interesting things comparing Prague to Munich:

Attribute Prague Munich
Registrations 1,830 1,780
Countries in attendance 57 53
Advanced Content 54 Intermediate
12 Advanced
40 Intermediate
8 Advanced
Rated sessions as valuable 93% 75%
Overall satisfaction 79% 84%

So we made some good strides in content for Prague, but we certainly want to do some research into the decline in overall satisfaction (I’m guessing it’s got some coffee and wifi correlations). We’ll have more DrupalCon numbers to share with you as we get our dashboards developed.

Drupal.org Updates

We also had a lot to share regarding Drupal.org. First, thanks to some amazing herding by volunteers like Melissa Anderson, and thanks to some heavy lifting by volunteers like Derek Wright, we’ve been able to address a lot of the performance related issues that surfaced after the Drupal 7 upgrade last month. Packaging is almost entirely fixed, for example. The big issue on our plates right now is the text search. Drumm is *this close* to getting this solved. We still have plenty of major issues left to address, but we’re picking up steam.

Also on the D7 cleanup list are UX improvements to the issue queue changes that were made. Tatiana and Bojhan have been working on mockups based on community feedback and will have them available for testing in the next day or two. Once testing and feedback have been received, implementing the code changes should not b a significant challenge. So we think we’ll have newer and more improved issue queues very shortly.

Additionally, the Drupal.org Software Working Group is in the middle of some amazing work to develop a leadership team for the developer tools on Drupal.org. First, there was a great discussion about how a leadership team should be structured and we’re expecting a draft charter for a leadership team any moment now.

Working Group Updates (Which are also Drupal.org!)

We also got updates from the Software Working GroupContent Working Group, and Infrastructure Working Group. Each update outlines the work accomplished in 2013 and what’s on the docket for 2014. Some highlights from the 2014 plans include:

  • A dedicated virtualization cluster that will allow us to enable full control over our dev and staging environments
  • Introducing automated monitoring and scheduled audits
  • Deploying a Drupal.org changes tool that will, initially, expose upcoming deployment schedules to the community
  • Ideation for additional software development on Drupal.org
  • Persona-based landing pages
  • Audit and assessment of Drupal.org content
  • Develop content strategy

Those are just a few of the ambitious goal of the Working Groups. During the meeting, Dries suggested that we integrate the relevant metrics from the leadership plan (and maybe some more) into the quarterly updates from the working groups, and there was general agreement that we would do that.

The End

So there are my highlights from the board meeting. What questions do you have?