The IT Dashboard is a management tool for the United States federal government CIOs to use in overseeing their IT spending. To support transparency and open government initiatives, Federal decision makers also chose to make the IT Dashboard available to the general public. In the IT Dashboard, members of the public can view the same data about performance that government officials use.

With only a few days to DrupalCon Chicago, what better time to launch our traditional battle plan discussion. It is time for us to start talking about Drupal 8. If you plan to work on something, or if you are going to contribute to Drupal in one way or another, please share your "personal battle plan" in the comments. A "personal battle plan" is a summary or itemized list of things you are going to work on during the next 12 months or so.

In today's global society, online collaboration has gained tremendous importance as businesses look for ways to share ideas and collaborate easily. Open Atrium is a powerful and flexible Drupal installation that provides intranet solutions to businesses and organizations for sharing ideas. It is used to create intranets where co-workers or teams can collaborate easily.

Neil Drumm (drumm) has been an active contributor to Drupal for over 7 years. He has attended every DrupalCon, often as a presenter. Besides contributing to many Drupal modules and other projects, Neil can be found working as:

• Lead architect for drupal.org, hired by the Drupal Association
• Maintainer of api.drupal.org
• The (recently retired) Drupal 5 maintainer
• A member of the Drupal Association General Assembly
• A member of the Security team

In addition, Neil is whip-smart and great to work with. He has a lot of friends and fans in the Drupal community (he even has a Twitter-based impersonator)!

Drupal.org will have approximately 12 hours of scheduled downtime, Thursday, February 24, 23:00 UTC (3PM PST, 6PM EST). We will be performing the CVS to Git migration. This is the most comprehensive and extensive change to Drupal.org in recent history - perhaps ever, therefore, the Infrastructure & Git Migration teams need an adequate time buffer to perform the migration, verify the data, and check for and resolve any issues.

What does “downtime” mean?

The following parts of the *.drupal.org will be inaccessible for the duration of the migration:

• The main drupal.org website, including all download pages, issue queues, forums, and search.
• Write access to cvs.drupal.org.
• Account creation on any of the Drupal.org sub-sites, including groups.drupal.org, api.drupal.org, and chicago2011.drupal.org.

Almost exactly one year ago today, the Drupal community reached consensus to migrate our version control system from CVS to Git. Today, the Git migration team is extremely pleased to announce that we are officially open for community testing in advance of our proposed launch date, February 17 February 24! Just in time for DrupalCon Chicago!

All of our work is hosted at http://git-dev.drupal.org/, our staging environment for the CVS -> Git migration! Here's how YOU can help test.

Important: READ ME FIRST!

Because during this pre-launch period we're also going to be doing performance optimization and integrating new code to fix bugs, here are some important things to be aware of:

• Watch a screencast explaining how the new infrastructure works.
• Testing will only be open during certain hours of the day. The Git Migration Community Testing Wiki contains the current status of the system as well as rebuild schedules, and a calendar which tells the times during which testing is open. When testing is open, you'll see an Apache password prompt (which prevents Google from indexing the site) that looks something like this:
  
• To log in to http://git-dev.drupal.org/, you must first reset your password.. This is a basic security precaution for our development sites. You can do this from the Request new password page. You’ll need to do this anytime git-dev has been rebuilt.
  
• All users, including current CVS account holders, need to agree to terms of use in order to obtain Git access. There are instructions for doing this at http://drupal.org/node/1047190. You'll also need to do this any time the server is rebuilt. Note: Click on the "Logged in as username" link to see the choices below.
  
• The server will be rebuilt every two days. Each time that happens, you'll lose any projects and code changes you made, and also need to repeat the "reset password" and "agree to git terms" steps again in order to continue testing.
• If you find problems, please log them against the Git Migration Community Testing issue queue. Make sure whatever you're reporting doesn't show up in our list of known issues first. One of our team members will receive reports and then push them into the correct issue queue, if necessary. There is also a #drupal-gitsupport channel on irc.freenode.net for new Git users (and experienced Git users who want to help make the transition as smooth as possible :)).

Got all that? Great. Here's what you can do on our new shiny Git architecture.