February may be the shortest month of the year, but it's certainly been one of the busiest for the Drupal Association, so I apologize for taking more than a week to get this summary post up! What's been keeping us so busy? Our first ever DrupalCon in Latin America and the Drupal Association At-Large Board elections. Both of these events have been huge positive milestones for the Association, and have involved dozens of volunteers from around the globe. In the middle of all that, we managed to sneak in a board meeting on 18 February. If you missed it, you can listen to the recording, read the notes, and peruse the materials. Or feel free to skim this summary!

Operational Update

• We have a big initiative internally at the Association to reevaluate the metrics we use to illustrate the success of our work. We are also looking at ways to better display these metrics so that you can see more context. So over the next few months, you'll see the metrics in the dashboared shift and change. Just a bit of a heads up, and let us know if you have any feedback along the way.
• The February board packet covered our January metrics, and things look pretty good one month into the year. We are especially pleased that the Engineering team has been able to bring site performance to our goal levels. 
• The Engineering Team also took several big steps towards key areas of the Drupal.org roadmap in January. Step 1 of the roadmap is better Account Creation and Login, and several key issues were closed out.
• The DrupalCon Team and Engineering worked together to launch events.drupal.org in January as well. This shift means that Con sites are all on the same platform now. We no longer have to launch a site from scratch for each Con, which helps make Cons much easier to manage. Most importantly, we've been able to introduce key new features in reegistration for our community. Excited? Go ahead and register now! You can check out the new features yourself!
• We are really lucky to work with the tireless Drupal 8 Branch Maintainers on the Drupal 8 Accelerate program. The program is picking up steam with a number of grants made and completed already. The next big grant will fund a Drupal CI (testbot) srpint in Portland at the end of March.

Content Strategy Update

Last year, the Content Working Group began a process of building a larger strategy for a reimagination of Drupal.org. Our first work was focused on User Research, and completed that work in the fall, publishing the developed personas. The next phase has focused on developing a content strategy. With over 1.2 MILLION pieces of content on Drupal.org, a strategy for dealing with that content is going to be pretty darn important. You can check out the presentation, as well as the post that's currently one of those pieces of content on Drupal.org.

Drupal.org Advertising Strategy

Finding new revenue streams is vitally important to the Association. For the entire history of the Drupal Association, DrupalCons have been the primary way we have funded other community work. We want to do more to serve our mission: uniting a global open source community to build and promote Drupal. If we're going to do that, we need new revenue streams. The bonus? If we can find new funding sources, it takes the pressure off of DrupalCons to perform financially, which means we can make choices for those events that might not fuel the financial bottom line, but make the events better for the community. 

So how are we doing it? New programs like Drupal Jobs have launched. We are also introducing advertising on Drupal.org and to Drupal.org visitors. We working to develop advertising products that are meaningful for advertisers (enough traffic, good clicks) and also deliver value to our community. We've drawn a few clear lines - we won't advertise on issue queues, for example, and will focus on users who are not logged into the site. We'll also be developing a variety of programs so that small shops can participate alongside bigger firms. 

For all the details, check out the presentation.

The End

Thanks so much for checking in on this board meeting and, as always, please let me know if you have any questions or thoughts.