We held our most recent monthly board meeting last Wednesday, 20 August and we had a lot of news to report and a big agenda to cover. You can review the materials or check out the recording. 

As the year continues to progress, our momentum as a team continues to build. We're accomplishing more and more with the community, which is fantastic to see. That said, it's also been a challenging year. This is the first year we have attempted to systematically measure the impact of our work. On the one hand, it's been wonderful to start to accumulate a baseline of data we can measure against for the future. On the other hand, the data is also a little all over the place. In some cases, we had very little to go on when setting the goals, which means that we aimed way too high or low. In other places, we have some areas of real concern to address. 

Here the topics we tackled on Wednesday:

Drupal.org Improvments

Overall, we've begun to see some significant improvements to the stability and performance of Drupal.org. Although many of our metrics related to performance are still in the red for the year, the last few months have seen significant improvements in page load times, etc. In short, things ARE getting better. Additionally, as the tech team has begun to gel under new CTO Josh Mitchell's leadership, they have begun to rapidly turn out great work on the feature side of Drupal.org. We've tackled a remarkable number of issues in just the last few months:

• Implemented user pictures on Drupal.org profiles
• Conducted 30 User Research interviews and began developing personas for a skill acquisition model of user design (more to come from the DCWG)
• Implemented RESTws API for Drupal.org
• Implemented Semantic Versioning for Drupal 8
• Added Supporting Organizations field on projects (entity reference to an organization with an explanation field - we need to promote this change as it was part of the overall efforts to give credit to organizations)
• Took over maintenance of the PIFT and PFFR testbots so that the community could continue with improvements to a modern, best-practice alternative
• Updated the Bakery module to allow us to better integrate with subsites like Drupal Jobs
• Responded to spam on several subsites where the basic Mollom configurations were overwhelmed by human spammers
• Responded to and deployed several security release updates including the recent XMLRPC response where we teamed up with WordPress
• Launched a new landing page on Drupal.org for designers and front-end developers
• Automated process for publishing supporting partners on Drupal.org

Although Drupal.org is chock full of data, this is an area where we had very little longitudinal or granular data to guide our goal setting. Combined with our slow hiring cycle, we've had a tough time really making a dent in some of our red numbers, but we ARE making progress and most importantly will know so much more for next year than we did for this year. 

DrupalCons

We shared a very in-depth review of DrupalCon Austin at this board meeting, as well as trends for Amsterdam. The long and short is that we had, in almost every way, a very successful DrupalCon in Texas. We were able to compare evaluation, finance, and attendance numbers to Portland and show our year over year trends, which was very helpful. While there is a lot to be happy about, we also have reason for concern. While DrupalCons have sustained growth year over year since their beginning, Texas was basically flat compared to Portland in terms of attendees. Looking ahead at the Amsterdam numbers, we're also finding that we may be at or slightly below our Prague numbers. 

There are many reason we could be seeing a plateauing of these numbers. It could be a natural by product of where we are in the product development cycle. No Drupal 8 and a really mature Drupal 7 product means there is less to talk about and learn. It may be that our demographics are shifting and the Con is not needing their needs. It may be a combination of many things. 

What we DO know is that we need to get to the bottom of the issue so that we can adjust our strategy accordingly. After Amsterdam, you will see a survey from the Association to help understand your DrupalCon motivations. So whether you've always gone to DrupalCon or have never entertained the notion, we will want to hear from you.

Licensing Issues on Drupal.org

I've heard from lots of volunteers on Drupal.org recently that our policies for enforcing GPL v2 licensing on Drupal.org have been problematic. In short, there are too many issues, those issues are reported inconsistently, and volunteers are not trained on our licensing issues and apply remediation to those issues inconsistently. It's a pretty typical story - great volunteers getting stuck in an escalating situation. 

To help mitigate these issues, I pulled together a call with folks who had been working on these issues for advice about how we can help fix the process. The advice of the group is to form a Licensing team (like the Security Team), that receives training from the Association's lawyers and works together to resolve licensing issues quickly and consistently. We would create a separate queue for licensing issues and get this off the plates of the webmasters queue volunteers (where most issues end up now). 

The board agreed that this woudl be the logical next step and a meeting has been scheduled for September 9th to begin work on a charter for the group.  We'll share more details as we have them.

Quarterly Financials

Finally, in executive session we reviewed and approved the financials for the second quarter of 2014. Here they are:

• April 2014 Financial Statements
• May 2014 Financial Statements
• June 2014 Financial Statements

Next Meeting

The next board meeting was scheduled for 17 September 2014. However, given the proximity to the 3 October board meeting at DrupalCon Amsterdam, the board decided to cancel that meeting. Remember though, you can always review the minutes and meeting materials in the public GDrive. 

Flickr photo: xjm