Agenda

  • financial update
  • infrastructure update
  • Drupal.org
  • redesign DrupalCon
  • DC DrupalCon and O'reilly Trademark

Attendance

  • Bert Boerland
  • Dries Buytaert
  • Angela Byron
  • Larry Garfield
  • Gerhard Killesreiter
  • Kieran Lal

Absent were Dries Knapen (known in advance), Jeff Eaton (came in later), and Jacob Redding.

FINANCIAL UPDATE

Dries Knapen is traveling today, so he sent a financial update to the mailing list on November 13. The executive summary is that we have 60.550 € in the bank, but that we have 24.590 € in expenses coming up. After deducting those, we have 27.142 € left. There is still money owed to us from Drupalcon Boston and Drupalcon Szeged, and still money we must wire to DrupalCon DC. One or more companies whose sponsorships are outstanding might not yet have received an invoice for their DrupalCon Szeged sponsorship, and we'll need to follow-up on that. Kieran has volunteered to follow up with the outstanding sponsorships.

Infrastructure update

Dries enquired whether our infrastructure status was okay for the next 3-6 months. Gerhard replied that we are okay for 3 at least, depending on what's required to implement the Drupal.org redesign. Narayan wants us to move to another disk storage solution (rather than NFS) and will write up a proposal for consideration during a future meeting. We also likely need more RAM in the database slave. Gerhard asked for a vote authorizing the purchase of 8GB of RAM for this server (approx. $1500 USD). Bert pointed out that since the minutes at https://association.drupal.org/node/222 reflect that a decision was reached by the board that "members of the Board of Directors can spend 40% of the amount calculated in the attached proposal for an action per month with a maximum of 2000 euros without prior acknowledgement or vote of the board," it was deemed a vote was unnecessary. Kieran stated that there have been a number of outages, and while steps are being taken to improve things, we still are lacking resources at OSUOSL equivalent to Naryan when he interned there. Gerhard responded that OSU doesn't want us to have access to a chunk of time from a single student, but rather would let us buy a virtual student's time which will then be split among several real students.

Drupal.org Redesign

Tiffany has a proposal from Mark Boulton for a "phase 2 engagement with Mark Boulton and Leisa". She would like to have the opportunity to present that proposal to the Drupal Association and to answer any questions that we might have. Tiffany believes that the proposed continuation throughout the actual implementation would benefit the community and ensure the continued success of the redesign project. This proposal combined with the current contract meet the originally allocated budget, so Dries recommends that we consider the proposal. Tiffany recommends that we do this in early December.

Drupalcon DC

Since Jacob was not in attendance to give an update, Dries opened the floor to ask if anyone had any red flags regarding Drupalcon DC. None were raised.

Drupalcon and O'Reilly

The Drupal Association still hasn't made a decision on this item, and we need to identify the next steps as well as get a sense of our current preferences. Therefore, Dries proposes that we cast some quick, informal votes to get Jacob some data to go with. Dries reminded us to vote with our "Community Ambassador" hats (representing the community), not our with our own personal views. All permanent members were invited to give feedback.

INFORMAL VOTE #1 Express your preference about what should be the _maximum_ ticket price for a DrupalCon ticket. a) 300 USD b) 400 USD c) 500 USD d) 600 USD e) 700 USD f) I don't care / something else There was no clear consensus on this question; responses ranged all over the map, the most popular option being f) because of misgivings about the vote. The floor was then opened for discussion.

INFORMAL VOTE #2 Should the Association have full control about location/venue/time? a) Yes b) No + I don't care This was a unanimous b), with the caveat that it would be nice to be able to exert some influence over this decision. An answer of b) here likely means that Drupalcon NA would happen in San Francisco every year, where the rest of O'Reilly's events happen. INFORMAL VOTE #3How important is it that the conference websites run Drupal?

a) Critical

b) Important, but I'd optimize for ticket price first and I'm willing to have a non-Drupal site if it makes the conference cheaper

c) Not really important + I don't care

b) won this round by a wide margin, with a) in second place. It likely depends on exactly how much cheaper it makes the conference, but the consensus was clearly that whatever keeps the tickets cheaper is what we should do.

Bert voiced a preference for having a partnership instead of client / vendor, where the community can make a site and O'Reilly can do what they are best at. Suggested next steps: * Make a generic, no-name blog post to get community feedback as soon as possible, as soon as we know it won't scare off ORA and we have some further idea of what ORA would offer as a package.  The sooner we open the discussion up, the better, especially if we are expecting people to propose 2010 North America Drupalcon in early 2009.

* Get a concrete proposal from O'Reilly with actual price points, etc. that we can vote on next meeting. We don't have enough specific information to vote at the current time.

Drupal Trademark

SFLC has been slow in getting back to us. Dries received a revised version of them a number of weeks ago, but it did not adequately address the comments and concerns from the community. As such, Dries is pursuing this with his Belgian lawyer instead. He promised to provide feedback on the policy by the end of next week, but it might take additional iterations. Dries plans to have a second, and hopefully last draft, of the trademark policy up on g.d.o//legal within 2-3 days. Dries has also tasked his Belgian lawyer to extend Drupal trademark to more European countries, which should be in process within the next 2-3 weeks. If all goes well, both the trademark policy and the additional trademarks should be in place by the end of the year. Angela Byron asked how requests for trademark permission were going to be handled, and what the current status is of those requests that were in "limbo." Dries pointed out that these were the very same questions that SFLC has not gotten back to us on, and he will be exploring with his lawyer over the next 3-4 weeks.

U.S. Incorporation

Dries has decided to table this vote, because there are too many different opinions and too many open questions. We can't make a meaningful decision based on the information we have now. This issue needs a "champion" -- someone to take the lead, and try to sort through a number of the open questions before we have another look at our options. If said "champion" needs a budget to work with, he/she can request one, and we'll take a vote on that. Dries also offered to possibly (help) champion this after the Drupal trademark is taken care of (e.g. in 3-4 weeks).

VOTE #1 Should Larry Garfeild (Director of Legal) investigate partnering with Software Freedom Conservancy with the intent of presenting a plan to the board to be voted on at a later date.

(PASSED5 yes, 0 no, 0 abstain)

Larry Garified that such a plan could include a division of the SFC and the DA present in the US, or even subsuming the DA into SFC, or something else. Larry also asked if someone was willing to step forward to do the same sort of research on other options for a formal US presence?  (501c3, a trade org, etc.) While both Kieran and Dries Buytaert offered some assitance, neither could "champion" this issue. Will discuss further on the mailing list.

Store Proposals

The Drupal Association has received three proposals for doing an e-commerce store with Drupal merchandise for Drupal.org.

Elections

Drupal Association elections are coming up. Dries will setup an application submission system like last year.  Comments or feedback about last year's process should be brought up on the mailing list. Everyone's term except for Angela's expires. As president, Dries also had a two year term but that is also about to expire. The meeting closed with a round of happy birthday to Dries in IRC. :)