News

As part of its efforts to better serve the Drupal project and community, the Drupal Association recently took the step of hiring its first full-time staff member. Longtime Drupal contributor and Association Treasurer Jacob Redding has been retained as the Association's interim General Manager, tasked with the responsibility of setting process in place and making it possible to hire more staff members over time.

Since his election as Association Treasurer last year, Jacob has volunteered countless hours cleaning up and creating new processes around the organization's finances. He has worked tirelessly with banks and accountants in several different countries to manage the Association's paperwork. While serving as General Manager, Jacob will continue on as the Drupal Association Treasurer and as an officer of the organization.

As the Drupal community has grown over the last few years and the Association has taken on more responsibilities, it has become clear to the Board that it is necessary to hire professional staff to help define, create, and manage process for what is otherwise an all-volunteer organization. Part of Jacob's responsibilities will be to put in place an infrastructure that will enable the Association to hire additional staff under a more open and defined process. He will also focus on:

• continuing to streamline the Association's financial processes and workflow;
• working with the General Assembly to clarify statutes and by-laws;
• improving reporting and insight around the Association's membership, advertising and server infrastructure;
• working directly with teams to help accomplish the goals set by the 2009 budget, and help creating budgets for 2010 and beyond;
• working with the General Assembly to determine organization goals, structure, roles and responsibilities to be more representative of similar organizations;
• creating the infrastructure and sustainable revenue program needed to hire staff and a permanent managing director.

Jacob's initial contract as interim General Manager is for six months starting in March of 2010.

The Drupal Association is very pleased to have Jacob on board as its interim General Manager and is excited about the improvements he's already made to the organization's process.

The Drupal Association General Assembly met on March 2 to elect new Permanent Members and select a Board of Directors. The Assembly elected six new Permanent Members from the thirteen valid applications that were received:

• Peter Wolanin (pwolanin)
• George DeMet (gdemet)
• Fernando Paredes Garcia (develCuy)
• Bevan Rudge (Bevan)
• Isabell Schulz (Isabell)
• Ronan Berder (hunvreus)

Following the election of the new Permanent Members, the entire General Assembly (including the newly-elected permanent members) met to select the Association’s Board of Directors. The Assembly voted for each board applicant. The position of President (held by Dries Buytaert) and Treasurer (held by Jacob Redding), were not up for election this term per the Association's statutes.

The following existing board members ran for a position on the board: Angela Byron (webchick), Tiffany Farriss (farriss), Larry Garfield (Crell), Cary Gordon (highermath), Gerhard Killesreiter (killes), and Kieran Lal (Amazon). Permanent member Laura Scott (laura s) also ran for a board position focusing on membership. All were elected.

The Drupal Association thanks everyone who ran for election this year. Look forward to hearing more about the Association’s ongoing initiatives in the coming weeks, and how all members of the community (not just those in the Association's General Assembly) can play a part in helping Drupal flourish!

The Drupal Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping the Drupal community with fun­ding, infra­structure, events, promotion and distribution. The current Board of Directors was elected almost a year ago, so it's election time again!

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) has been one of the most generous organizations to the Drupal project. In mid-2005 they stepped up and offered to host drupal.org at a time when the website was crashing due to insufficient hardware. OSUOSL generously offered rackspace and bandwidth, all of it donated. Since this donation the drupal.org infrastructure has grown from a single server to more than a dozen, traffic has increased exponentially, and overall growth has exploded.