It's time to enter this year's Knight News Challenge, a contest run by the John S.and James L. Knight Foundation. This contest awards big
money for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news. Last year's winners won awards ranging from $15K to $5 million, and $200,000 was allocated toward projects with a Drupal connection.

So if you have an interest in using Drupal to help revolutionize news delivery, you're encouraged to apply! The deadline is October 15, 2007.

As many of you know, DrupalCon Barcelona takes place in about 30 days! Currently, we have about 50 proposals for presentations and about 300 attendees. Looks like we're in for a blast, eh! :-)

We have a big venue that can host more than 300 people, so it is not too late yet to register. In fact, there is still room for more presentations as well, so I'd like to invite all of you to take part and to submit a presentation. Feel free to use the comments of this post to swap ideas, to request presentations about certain topics, to team up, etc. Best to submit your presentations' abstracts before September 1st as we have to start compiling the final conference program real soon now.

If you've never been to a DrupalCon before -- don't be afraid to present. Everyone is encouraged to participate and all sorts of presentations are welcomed. These can include deeply technical presentations (Drupal 6 menu system internals), fun presentations (A history lesson in Drupal flamewars), tutorial style presentations (How to theme your Drupal site), beginner sessions (An overview of the best Drupal modules), brainstorm sessions (How could we make Drupal easier to use?), best practices (How to use Drupal for a personal blog), panel discussions (How to run a successful Drupal company?), show cases (How we built site ABC for company DEF), meta talks (How to be a successful community manager?), etc. Not all talks have to be about Drupal per se -- you can talk about MySQL, PostgreSQL, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), webservers, jQuery/AJAX, search engine optimizations, PHP, new standards, community management, things we can learn from other projects, emerging web development trends, you name it.

August 25th and 26th will be exciting days for Drupalistas who are able to come to Sankt Augustin, Germany. FrOSCon is approaching and the lineup of speakers and events looks promising. Core committers Gerhard Killesreiter (killes) and Gábor Hojtsy (goba) will be presenting, as well as Károly Négyesi (chx), Konstantin Käfer (kkaefer), myself and many others. Those interested in hacking Drupal code or sharing latest Drupal tips can head to the dedicated Drupal coding room. Be sure to check out the wide range of non-Drupal presentations that the conference offers as well. You can pre-register to win prizes. More info is available on the FrOSCon group page. Hope to see you there!

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that we are all very grateful to the Drupal Association, Development Seed and Lullabot for sponsoring this event. The Drupal Association has donated money to the conference, is making it possible for core committers Gábor and Gerhard to attend, and has supported those who are presenting in the Drupal track by paying for their hotel rooms. This support goes a long way towards running a quality conference for people to enjoy and learn from.

The Drupal Association has been founded about eigth months ago now. After a startup phase, during which the staff members were elected and the Internal Regulations were refined, the Association started to take on some real work to help the Drupal project grow and to support the Drupal community. The Association has been involved - or still is - with projects everyone probably already heard about, such as organizing DrupalCon Barcelona, researching a sound membership model, tackling the drupal.org infrastructure, all communication around the OpenID Bounty, working out a drupal.org advertising programme, handling donations, sponsoring FrOSCon, ...

Apart from these major action points, a lot of smaller stuff is going on behind the scenes as well. The Drupal Association wants you to be informed about what is happening, and welcomes any feedback or suggestions you may have to help Drupal flourish. In addition to the official Association announcements that you can find on the front page of the Drupal Association site we are glad to announce the Drupal Association Planet. Association-related blog posts made by Permanent Members of the Drupal Association will keep you up-to-date about the most recent developments. We are committed to make sure that all relevant comments to these blog posts will reach the Board of Directors or the General Assembly.

Updates

A few updates since the original post was made:

• master/slave has now been implemented, and the site is more responsive.
• A newer tracker patch is now in effect, and should be functionally the same as plain vanilla Drupal 5.x, but with less database load.

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The Drupal association, infrastructure team, and the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) team made several changes to the Drupal.org infrastructure. Some of these changes affect how you use some drupal.org features, so please read below for more information.

Over the last few months, Drupal's web site (drupal.org) has seen explosive growth in the number of users, posts and comments, as the project gets more and more popular. This has put stress on the hosting infrastructure for drupal.org, which is community donated and generously hosted by the OSUOSL.