In the first board meeting of 2015, we hit the pause button and looked back on 2014. With all the numbers in and so many projects completed, we wanted to evaluate our success (and our misses) with the board and with you. We feel really good about what we accomplished with the rest of the community. To me, it's doubly impressive because the Association spent so much of last year growing like crazy. We started the year with just about 13 staff and ended the year with 27. We're still small, but doubling your staff is never an easy endeavor. So to go through that kind of change, and to also get some much other good stuff done seems pretty remarkable to me. As always, you can check out the notes, the materials, and the recording, or peruse my summary of the meeting here.


Operational update


I think I can safely say that the theme of 2014 was “Let’s see what we learn from this!” We started the year with a Leadership Plan that outlined some important goals and strategies. We also defined key metrics we would track to help us understand if we were making progress on those goals. This was the first time the organization had this kind of framework to not only get a lot of stuff done, but to understand if that stuff was fulfilling its purpose.

The plan helped us identify lots of things to experiment with, and throughout the year we learned a lot about our plan itself. Metrics didn’t always point to the outcomes we thought they did. Some goals that we set were impossible to meet because of outside influences. But having the plan - that was important. It forced us to think about our work before, during, and after every project. So where did all our experiments take us? A lot of places. Here is a short, incomplete, and grossly over-simplified list of what we accomplished in 2014:

• We set the proper frame. We developed a vision statement, revamped the mission statement, and created a values statement for the Association.
• We rebranded, developing new logos for the Association and our programs that reflect our maturity as an organization.
• We diversified our revenue, by a lot. Introducing new programs and services we were able to make a dent in the ration of Con related revenue to non-Con revenue. This is important for the financial health of the Association, but also because if Cons are our primary source of revenue, we can’t innovate and evolve them with as much courage for fear of undermining our total revenue.
• Speaking of DrupalCons, we held two really big ones. Lots of things went right - they are well run, with great speakers and great community. We also collected a lot of data about the Cons and identified lots of places to work on for 2015 and beyond. (We promise we heard you about the food in Amsterdam!)
• The marketing team is creating lots of technical marketing and other branded content that is starting to get great traction in the field. Resources like “Managing Media in Drupal” allow us to showcase the best that Drupal has to offer, regardless of version.
• The launch of Drupal Jobs was a big milestone for us. We had not launched a product before, and were thrilled to get something out there that the community has repeatedly asked for. It’s still new, and we’re still learning, but we are overall very excited about the steady growth that we have seen.
• Testbots is an area I have heard about on a weekly basis since I started at the Association. In 2014 we were able to forge a great partnership with the testbed volunteers. The Association is now managing the ongoing operation of the existing testbed infrastructure while the volunteers get to work on the next generation. We’ve seen massive improvements in performance as a result - wait times have dropped from almost 120 minutes to about 20 minutes on average. During the recent Global Sprint Weekend, we went from our usual 4 AWS instances to 20!
• Drupal.org profiles have also seen a tremendous change in 2014. Again, thanks to the work of some amazing volunteers, we were able to introduce small targeted changes frequently, beginning with profile pictures. The work is not done and there are more changes to come, but profiles are becoming better and better online resumes and community connectors for the community.
• We managed to be our projected deficit spend for the year. This sets us up well for 2015

I would like to point out that I am extremely proud of the Association staff who endured a lot of growing pains while churning out really good, quality work. In addition to being awesome at what they do, they are hilarious and smart. I owe the a huge debt of gratitude. HOWEVER, all of the bullet points above represent a significant contribution from the volunteers in the community as well. We don’t do our work alone, and we are so grateful to the hundreds of you who have prototyped, tested, coded, documented, trained, mentored, and made puns. Your leadership in the community is noticed and appreciated. Our greatest hope is that we are making your Drupal life a little better.

Marketing Team 2015 Update

The marketing team built a very solid base in 2014 and is prepared to declare 2015 the year of content. Here are a few key initiatives that you can expect this year:

• More branded content, better presentation. We’re going to turn Drupal.org into the best site out there to discover all you can do with Drupal. We’re currently developing a content strategy that will help us discover all the great content that already exists, but gets lost in the one million+ nodes on the site. Then we can combine that with the great technical content we are also crafting to create more resource centers covering everything from media to search in Drupal.
• A Drupal.org blog. We are in the middle of a content strategy process led by staff with the Content Working Group and Forum One Communications. It’s clear that we need a better channel to expose the folks who want Drupal news, but who aren’t ready to drink from the firehose that is Drupal Planet. The blog will allow us to reach those folks, and we hope we can use it to highlight the best writing about Drupal that is already being produced.
• Drupal newsletter. In 2008, we stopped sending a regular Drupal newsletter to the tens of thousands of subscribers on Drupal.org. We’re bringing that back in 2015, with a model similar to that of the blog - the best community content. This newsletter will differ from the Association newsletter in that all the content will be focused on Drupal itself.
• A challenge will be localization - translating content for our global audience. With the release of Drupal 8 nearing, and its emphasis on localization, we want to meet this need. We’ll be working on strategies to make translation happen on key content.

Of course, there is more to the update than this summary, so I encourage you to check out the presentation.

And then we ran out of time

We were also scheduled to vote on a slate of candidates for the newly formed Licensing Working Group. Unfortunately, we ran out of time. The Executive Committee of the board will be discussing next week to see if we can vote electronically on this topic.

Thanks for a great 2014. Here’s to an even better 2015

Again, thank you for the support, the work, the encouragement, the ideas, and even the complaints. All of it makes us better as an organization, and we hope that when we’re better, Drupal is better. 


Flickr Photo: DianaConnolly101