It is hard to believe, but we just finished our second-to-last board meeting of the year. The Association has grown and changed so much in 2014 and the November meeting was a great chance to talk about some of those changes and what we are planning for 2015. It was a somewhat short public meeting as we spent the bulk of our time in Executive Session to review the financial statements from the last quarter and the staff's proposed 2015 Leadership Plan and Budget. As always, you can review the minutes, the materials, or the meeting recording to catch up on all the details, and here's a summary for you as well.

Staff Update

DrupalCons: DrupalCon Amstedam is over, and we are now focused on evaluation of the event - reviewing all the session and conference evaluations as well as closing up the financials for the event. We will have an in-depth review of the event at the December board meeting. Next up is DrupalCon Latin America, which is progressing nicely now with sessions accepted and registration open. One final DrupalCon note is that DrupalCon Los Angeles session submissions should open in January, so mark your calendars for that.

Drupal.org: Drupal.org has been our primary imperative at the Association this year. We've spent 2014 building a team and really working to pay off a mountain of accumulated technical debt while also balancing the need to release new features for the community. We are very pleased that, with the working groups and community feedback, we've been able to release a Drupal.org roadmap for 2015. We also released a new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy after extensive edits based on community feedback. We'll continue to respond to questions and ideas about these documents and make notes for future releases. We have also finally been able to deploy and use a suite of over 400 tests on Drupal.org. This is work that was initiated by Melissa Anderson (eliza411) and she was extremely helpful in getting those tests up and running again. We're thrilled to be using this contribution after all this time and are extremely grateful to Melissa.

Community Programs: We just held our final Global Training Days for 2014 with over 80 companies on every continent but Antarctica (c'mon penguins!). This program has continued to evolve with new partnerships and currciulums used this time around, as well as a plethora of great photos and tweets sent our way.

Marketing and Communications: Joe Saylor and our team have been working with the Security team to develop a follow up to the recent security announcement focused on the lessons learned and changes our community has made in response to the situation. It's another great example of an Association and community volunteer partnership.

Licensing Working Group

As we discussed in the August board meeting, some community members have expressed concern over the slow and sometimes inconsistent response to licensing issues on Drupal.org. In response, a volunteer group came together to draft a charter which was published for comment just after DrupalCon Amsterdam. Some of the main points from the charter include:

• All members (chair + 4-5) appointed by the Board

• Scope is limited to licensing of code and other assets on D.O only, not other sites, and not determining WHICH license is used

• Group responds to issues, does not police for issues

• Will maintain the whitelist of allowable assets

The Association board voted to adopt the charter, so our next steps are to recruit members, create a queue for licesning issues, and then provide some legal training for our new Working Group members. If you are interested in participating, you can nominate yourself for the Working Group. We are planning to present a slate of candidates to the board for approval in the January 2015 meeting.

3rd Quarter Financials

Once per quarter, the board discusses the previous quarter's financial statements and then votes to approve and publish them. In the November meeting the board approved the Q3 financials:

• July 2014
• August 2014
• September 2014

I recently wrote a post highlighting how to read our financial statments, but will summarize here for you as well. Generally speaking, we are performing well ahead of our budgeted deficit spend. Though we had planned for a -$750,000 budget for 2014, a combination of slow tech team hiring, savings on Drupal.org contractor expenses, and some better than budgeted revenue means that we will not operate at nearly that level of loss for 2014. Instead the burden of the staffing investment we've made will really be felt in 2015. We'll see more of this and have a larger discussion when we release our budget and leadership plan next month.

As always, please let me know if you have any questions or share your thoughts in the comments.

Flickr phtoo: steffen.r