In our March board meeting we took a look at the month of February and all the goodness that the Association and the community have managed to stir up. Spoiler alert: it's a lot. We've got many impressive changes on Drupal.org, some big community events to recap, and elections. If you missed the meeting, no worries! I'm going to recap some main points below, but you can always watch the recording, review the minutes, or check out the meeting materials (or all of the above, because overachiever). Here's what we talked about:

Operational Update

• We have three new staff starting at the Association. We'll have a new post on our blog to introduce them all shortly, but the long and short of it is this: Our DrupalCon team is now at 100% strength again, our marketing team can now get even more great Drupal content out into the universe, and adding a CFO to our team means that we'll be able to position the Association to better tell our financial story and project into the future.
• There is a brand (re)new newsletter going out - the Drupal Newsletter. Those of you who have been in the community for a while may remember that the last issue went out in 2008. We recently resuscitated the newsletter subscriptions functionality on your Drupal.org profile AND partnered with Bob Kepford to bring the Weekly Drop (plus a little extra Association goodness) to you once a week. Not subscribed? Go edit your D.O profile and you can subscribe right there!
• We are moving our dashboards into a publicly viewable/slick-looking location. Up until now we've been sharing our dashboard data as tables in our monthly board update. It was better than not tracking numbers, but did not allow us to share context for our metrics and frankly, tables are really hard for mere humans to parse. We'll be moving all our metrics into SimpleKPI over time, but for now, take a look at the pretty that is the Drupal.org Dashboard.

DrupalCon Latin America

We were thrilled to be in Bogota, Colombia for DrupalCon Latin America in February. Although we are really excited about what we accomplished, it did not happen without several very real bumps in the road. First, our attendance goal was 400, but we only hit 263, and one-third of those came in during the last two weeks. Managing the budget and logistics when attendance was so up in the air was a real challenge, but the DrupalCon team managed to ensure that we beat our budget expectations. There was no negative financial impact for the Association. Most importantly, we learned a lot and saw some great outcomes:

• Many of the sessions offered live translation between English, Spanish, and Portugese. Additionally, the amazing Lingotek donated translation service so that more than 25 of the session recordings are also available in those languages. This experience with multiple languages will help us in future events, as well as with Drupal.org and other resources we help steward.
• We had amazing sprint participation - 38% of attendees stuck around on the final day and battled through a 2-hour internet outage (quite happily, I might add) to make their contributions to the project. Huge thanks to the sprint mentors who helped make the day so successful.
• Overall, we think we saw a huge community lift from the event. We had several candidates from Latin America throw their hat in the ring for a board seat in the elections, and we had an increased participation in Global Training Days by Latin American shops. We hope that means that our Latin American community is more closely connected now and that this participation will carry forward and grow into the future.

Working Group Updates

A lot of the Working Groups focus right now is rethinking how they work. There are three Drupal.org working groups - Infrastructure, Content, and Software. As the Drupal Association staff has grown and taken on some tasks that used to be done by the community, we've had to define how the staff and Working Groups collaborate as we go. The new wrinkle is that there are other Working Groups out there that fall under the Drupal (as opposed to Drupal.org) structure that overlap or relate to the D.O working groups. 

For example, the Content Working Group is currently working on a content strategy to compliment the user persona research we did and inform an iterative reimagination of Drupal.org. Turns out, a significant portion of that strategy relates to the Documentation Working Group. We didn't figure that out until well into the process, and missed the opportunity to get their feedback and incorporate their needs from the outset. It seems obvious in hindsight, but at the time, we were working with the Drupal.org Working Groups only, which was basically our known universe.

To remedy these kinds of issues, we plan to bring many of the Working Groups together in Los Angeles and are trying to map some process that will ensure that all the right players are brought in at the right time, So, charters are being adjusted, more communication is being planned. We know it's been rough at times, but are committed to finding a path forward that works for everyone.

That's all she wrote...

Have questions, ideas, thoughts concerns? Leave 'em in the comments! I would sincerely love to hear from you. Just to know that one person read this post... these take forever to write! :)