Last month we held our last board meeting of 2015, where we shared our recap of the Drupal 8 launch and then adjourned to the executive session. As always, you can review the materials, minutes, and recording of the meeting, but I would like to dive more deeply into some of the board business than was discussed.

Board meetings in 2016

For the last several years, we have held monthly public board meetings and taken great pains to ensure that anyone can attend or at least review materials and recordings. The purpose of these meetings has been two-fold: to conduct board business, and to inform the community because we value transparency. For a time, these two needs aligned very closely. As the Association was building its internal capacity and increasing our operational effectiveness, it made sense for us to report a lot of detail to the board as much of their focus was operational.

Now that our staff has grown and our operations have solidified, there is less need for the board to step into operations. The board is naturally shifting to more strategic topics. For example, rather than discussing in which city a DrupalCon should be held, the board is discussing which kinds of audiences we need at future DrupalCons to better grow the project. Strategic discussions have a longer time frame, and they just don't need to happen as frequently as operational conversations. So, we are going to scale back the board meetings to five times per year: remote in March, at DrupalCon North America, remote in July, at DrupalCon Europe, and remote in November.

Though we are reducing the number of board meetings that are held each year, we remain committed to the community value of transparency. Our teams here inside the Association will continue to produce monthly updates on their progress. Previously, these were documented in the monthly board packet. In the future, these updates will be shared via the Association blog, which is then also republished on Drupal Planet. We will also continue the practice of making all board meeting materials available to everyone, whether or not they can attend the board meeting in person.

As always, we welcome your questions and your concerns, whether you want to share them with our staff directly, via twitter, or even by snail mail (if you're into that sort of thing).

Board term renewals

In between meetings we also used email to confirm the re-election of several board seats. Congratulations and thank you to:

• Dries Buytaert (dries)
• Donna Benjamin (kattekrab)
• Sameer Verma (sameer.verma)

If you'd like, you can read about all the board members and their terms.

Flickr photo: Chris Messina