If there is any steady measure of the passage of time it may just be the monthly Drupal Association Board Meetings. Another month is behind us, meaning that we 30ish days closer to DrupalCon Austin and all the other work we have planned for the year. While we accomplished a lot in the month of April, we already have our eyes on 2015 and beyond for the Association and we reviewed all of that at the last meeting. As always, you can review the materials, read the minutes, or watch the recording to get up to speed. However, I am happy to provide the condensed version for you here:

Operational Update

Although we're only one quarter of the way into 2014, it's not to early to be thinking about 2015 and beyond. Since coming to the Association over a year ago, the team and I have been working to professionalize our approach to our work, and this includes ensuring that we have a strong sense of what we want to accomplish and how we want to get there. To that end, senior staff met at the end of May to start thinking about our plans for 2015. This work is the first part of creating a leaderhsip plan and budget which we will present for adoption by the board. The board will see some early thoughts and plans in our DrupalCon Austin retreat and you can expect a public conversation about much of our thinking after that. 

We are also thrilled that our new CTO, Josh Mitchell, started in April. The tech team was already on a roll, and their velocity has only continued to increase. In April, we continued to move toward our own virtualiztion machines and to test a CDN. Both shoudl have a tremendous impact on Drupal.org. In addition to a lot of maintenance fixes, we were also able to create a new issue queue for project maintainers. This queue should help us better support maintainers who need help finding a co-maintainer, locate and deal with abandoned projects, etc. I am personally most excited that our team has, with the addition of Lizz Trudeau's time, been able to dramatically increase the number of issues in the queues that are responded to promptly. I hope the community is feeling this improvement in service and benefiting from Lizz's amazing helpfulness.

Board and staff also spent a good amount of time in April working on the Association's values and roles. We are keen to define - with the community - who does what in the Drupal Universe. A group of board and staff members conducted a number of interviews with community members about the challenges facing Drupal and the role of the Association and other community members in meeting those challenges. Now we're ready to hear from even more people: who does what? We invite you to share your opinions in a survey or you can email thoughts to me directly.

DrupalCon Latin America

We are thrilled that DrupalCon Latin America will be landing in Bogota on 10-12 February 2015. We've been working very carefully with the local community to ensure that we can deliver a DrupalCon-worthy event that will excite and energize people from all over Latin America. The program will be slightly smaller - two days of sessions and a sprint - and will allow us to deliver an event that is professional, at a price point that makes sense for Latin America. Things are progressing smoothly so far and we hope to see you there!

Update from the CTO

We also shared an update from our new CTO, Josh Mitchell. With just a few weeks under his belt, Josh has managed to put together some great thinking about how the Drupal Association tech team can shift its thinking and focus to better support Drupal.org. Right now, Josh is focused on helping the tech team shift its thinking from tackling the next thing in the issue queue to small projects of prioritized issues. Although the tech team has always been very active, this will help us acheive more impact with our work. Josh also shared a great diagram, illustrating the enormity and complexity of what, exactly, the tech team is trying to manage. We all know that Drupal.org is more than a single site, but this really helps put it into prespective:

At-Large Community Board Elections

in our final order of business, we discussed the latest news in At-Large Elections. We recently modified the election process to elect one candidate each year to a two-year term. This way, elected members get more time to integrate with the rest of the board and make the contributions they were elected to make. Along with that change, we decided to shift the election timing from Septemeber to February/March of each year. This switch allows us to elect a new member well in advance of the North American DrupalCon so that the new member can attend an in-person meeting quickly. This means that our next election will be held in Feb/March of 2015.

Additionally, we are pleased that the mechanics of elections will not likely have to change this time around. This allows us to focus on two strategic issues for the elections - candidate diversity and voter turnout. If you have thoughts in either area, please feel free to share.