We had our first face-to-face meeting on Friday regarding the formation of a foundation to support the further growth of Drupal. Creating a foundation is a major undertaking, and requires a lot of work and organization to pull everything together. Some of the most important aspects are to look at the needs and goals of such a foundation, and specifically how it can serve the Drupal community as a whole.

We had a round table discussion about needs and goals, with everyone sharing their point of view. It was good to see over a dozen people passionate about evangelizing and supporting Drupal. I think Kaliya (also known as Identity Woman) is almost convinced that we're not as scary as reported. She gave a brief overview of some innovative sites that she has worked on, and we're all looking forward to some more success stories.

Some examples of needs include:

• ability to accept and give out funds
• hold assets (e.g. servers and other hardware)
• bookkeeping to track funds and how they are spent

A selection of the group's thoughts on goals for the Drupal foundation:

• attract more users and developers
• provide server infrastructure for related projects
• manage IP (trademarks, copyrights, licensing, etc.)
• fund developer meetups

Chris Messina (factoryjoe) is working with Mitch Kapor and other organizations to see about the feasibility of creating an umbrella organization that can provide services and support to multiple open source projects. Unfortunately, this is something that will take several months to evolve. Chris is representing the Drupal community in discussing this, and the needs of the Drupal foundation will help design what such an organization might look like. He will be reporting back to us over time. Oh, and by the way, Chris's new company is Flock -- a social browser based on Firefox.

Kieran Lal (Amazon), who is CivicSpace's development manager, had a more pragmatic view. The Drupal community has figured out how to get money, we've got a great ecosystem that can come up with solutions on the fly. With free hosting from OSL and a great set of server infrastructure, we're fine as we are now.

Dries shared that there are minor expenses like domain names, but the major expense is the time spent in maintaining the Drupal.org website and related infrastructure, somewhere in the range of 8 hours per week -- another great goal would be to fund a position to do these tasks so that they don't all fall on Dries, Steven, and others.

Those are very brief summaries of the range of items discussed. Everyone agreed that doing further work on organizing and growing our community are important tasks that need to be focused on, but is not something that can or should be rushed. In fact, the very minimal requirements today only include a checking account to manage Drupal funds.

An attendance list and the raw notes will be published over the next week, along with the option to participate in the planning for a Drupal foundation.

We'll also have more posts to make about the outcomes of DrupalCon. To touch on a few things, we'll likely see the creation of a new mailing list dedicated to Drupal consultants. As mentioned on my Bryght blog, Doug Kaye from IT Conversations has volunteered to work towards coming up with a best practices guide/working group dedicated to the creation of multi sites with shared user databases and various techniques to create hub and sub-site architectures of Drupal sites.

Also, the next major Drupal event will take place in Amsterdam in mid-October, along side O'Reilly's Euro OSCON. As with Portland, we'll be sure to schedule events in and around OSCON to make sure that people can attend and share information about Drupal without having to attend Euro OSCON. You can see who's attending through the Amsterdam 2005 profile filter -- make sure to check your own profile page if we're going to see you there.

Of course, there are many OSCON presentations worth attending, including Drupal's own Károly Négyesi (chx) talking about the Drupal API: An Advanced Web Application Framework. You can register at Euro OSCON before August 29th and get early bird pricing.

Keep an eye on the events page for further information.