(Note: These are not official meeting minutes, by design, so that people in attendance could speak freely. Instead, these are an informal compilation of notes taken during the Drupal Association retreat following Drupalcon San Francisco to give those who could not be in attendance some idea of what happened.). A full summary of the day's account can be found here.

Introduction

The overall agenda for the day was to go over results of the survey, further define/clarify our mission statement, from there derive our 2010 objectives, and finally discuss staffing and some processes around how we can work together to achieve them. No laptops/wifi/phones/etc. were allowed and the meeting ran almost nine hours straight, minus a few short breaks. We began with introductions around the table where we talked about who we were, how long we'd been in the Drupal Association and what we did, and a random fact about ourselves to break the ice a bit.

Agenda

  • Strengths and Weaknesses
  • Mission Statement
  • Trademark
  • 2010 Objectives
  • Staff
  • Processes

In attendance:

  • Khalid Baheyeldin
  • Ronan Berder
  • Dries Buytaert
  • Angela Byron
  • George DeMet
  • Robert Douglass
  • Tiffany Farriss
  • Bill Fitzgerald
  • Fernando Paredes Garcia
  • Larry Garfield
  • Cary Gordon
  • Greg Knaddison
  • Kieran Lal
  • Earl Miles (for a little while)
  • Narayan Newton
  • Jacob Redding
  • Bevan Rudge
  • Laura Scott
  • David Strauss
  • Kristof VanTomme (remotely)
  • Peter Wolanin - Bert Boerland (remotely)
  • Isabell Schulz (remotely)

This list represents members who've been part of the Association since its inception, all the way to most of our newest additions from the GA just a couple of months ago.

Financial Update

Jacob began by providing a financial overview of where the Association was at, year-to-date. We have approximately $836,000 USDin the bank, post-Drupalcon SF. It's important to spend a large chunk of this money not only so that we can accomplish items on our mission statement, but also so that we do not lose our status as a non-profit organization. Some other notes on the finances: Drupalcon Copenhagen is not expected to be a large financial contribution to the Drupal community.

Strengths and Weaknesses

In preparation for the retreat, our facilitator, Charmaine Ess, sent around a survey to the members attending. Questions related to our organization's mission statement, top priorities and responsibilities, a general "gut feel" check on how we're doing, and some thinking around long-term vision. Additionally, each board member had a 30-60 minute follow-up phone call. Charmaine showed the results of the survey: These results were interesting; it showed that most of the Association is roughly on the same page regarding our top priorities, and also that we have some room for improvement. There are disagreements on the details of where we should be focusing, and hammering out those details was the goal of the day.

Mission Statement

Our mission statement dictates our priorities and goals, and feeds into what things should be inside/outside of our purview. Before we could discuss what our objectives for 2010 were, we all had to get on the same page about what our over-arching mission is. For reference, our current mission statement (created by Jacob Redding) is:

"The Drupal Association is dedicated to helping the open source Drupal CMS project flourish. The Drupal Association supports and assists the Drupal community by maintaining the hardware and software infrastructure of drupal.org, protecting the Drupal trademark and GPLed source code of the Drupal project, contributing modules and themes, organizing the semiannual Drupalcon, marketing the Drupal project, and supporting other activities."

We broke into three break-out session groups to discuss and tweak the mission statement. We were to come up with a "purpose statement" (one-sentence summary) and several supporting "business statements" (what we actually do to support our purpose), which is the same format our existing mission statement uses. All three groups were in agreement on several points: * In addition to supporting the Drupal software, our job is also to support the community around the software. * The software running the Drupal.org website clearly falls under our purview, as it supports both. * Infrastructure, legal support, Drupalcons and other events, are all integral parts of supporting these fundamental goals. * "Contributing modules and themes" shouldn't be part of the mission statement; if it happens while we're supporting one of our other goals, then great, but it's not something we should explicitly strive to do.

Trademark

The trademark also came up for discussion around the mission statement. Dries still does, and for the forseeable future plans to continue to, hold onto the Drupal trademark. Before the break-out sessions, we were basically given three choices: a) Take on full responsibility for protecting the trademark b) Share responsibility for this with Dries in some way c) Go completely hands-off and have Dries be 100% responsible for trademark protection. All groups were agreed that b) makes the most sense; we don't feel we should have to take full responsibility without ownership, nor do we think Dries should have to go it alone and pay exorbitant legal fees out of his own pocket. However, there was not consensus on what b) meant, and what increased participation would mean in terms of our responsibility and/or additional benefits the DA would receive in return for taking a larger role.

2010 Objectives

Charmaine then led a session, followed by break-out session, on what our 2010 objectives should be. The entire room was universally agreed that getting the drupal.org redesign done had to be our #1 priority in 2010. On the other priorities, results were a bit mixed. We went into break-out sessions to try and come up with a short list of the top three issues on our collective plates. After the groups re-convened and the results were normalized, here was the short-list of priorities that we need to focus on for 2010: 1. Drupal.org redesign: including supporting infrastructure (dev/staging servers), hiring folks to assist in implementation and support of implementation. 2. Drupalcon: Ensuring Drupalcon Copenhagen and Chicago are successful, executing the remainder of Cary's events plan. 3. Process/Decision-making: One of the biggest hurdles the DA faces is lack of a clear process for enacting change within the organization. One of the critical things we must do this year is both make that process, as well as the decision-making chain of command more transparent. 4. Hiring/Staff: The DA is clearly showing the strain of trying to achieve some of its aims through its own resources, and so we agreed we need to work on hiring to supplement where we are weak. 5. Infrastructure: This includes both normal upkeep, as well as capacity upgrades for the forthcoming Drupal 7.0 release, which will probably double our traffic if previous indicators persist, and assisting with the CVS => Git migration, which is integral to retaining drupal.org as the central development hub for the Drupal community. There was also near universal agreement that this list, and onlythis list, should be what the board focuses on for 2010. This doesn't preclude people from helping in other areas, including legal/trademark things, local events and organizations, etc. but funds and board time will not go to those initiatives until the things on this list are better under control. They can also be priorities for 2011. Also universally agreed was that this list should be combined with much more effective public communication about what's happening within the Association to the outside world. A

Staffing

One of the questions brought forth to the group was whether to hire an "executive director, or "Chief Executive Officer/CEO" type, or an operations manager or "Chief Operating Officer/COO" type of person to help assist the Drupal Association in achieving its goals. CEO: someone more external, whose strengths include having vision and leadership, connections with industry, etc. COO: someone more internal, who focuses on getting organizational structure and processes in place to help an organization be more effective. The group seemed almost universally agreed that we needed a COO-type position first before we could hire a CEO-type position. Sorting out some of our internal issues was listed universally as one of our 2010 priorities, and one of our biggest bottlenecks is not having a clear path for how to achieve things. Jacob Redding will submit a job description for a COO for the Drupal Association early this week.

Processes

This discussion was rushed, but here were some things that were talked about: - Post meeting minute summaries publicly on association.drupal.org after each board meeting, to help increase transparency of the Association. - Schedule monthly "staff" meetings, for getting general day-to-day things done, as well as quarterly board meetings, for actual decision-making. These should be scheduled in advance, so we don't go months without talking as a group. (Jacob) - Hold meetings over a medium other than IRC. - Hold a retreat like this one following each Drupalcon.

Conclusion

The meeting can loosely be summarized as: focus on a few big priorities, improve internal velocity, work on better communication, and hire help to get us there.