(Economical) Server concerns restricts our interaction.

The situation being as it is, then a team should work towards sponsors that can take care of the payment/cover the costs "directly". I cannot see any reason why that should not be possible. There are so many options, which is why I think there should be a small team focusing on this. No need to wait for the foundation to be established, which obviously will take some time.

We could for example have a discussion to outline what such a team should be doing, then make "an official Drupal statement" in the forum and front page, searching for volunteers with the appropriate skills and network for the job.

The Drupal community is facing a very special situation this year. Starting last year, the global developments regarding business models, open source, etc., is raising the attention and interests for Drupal, resulting in higher activity level and new challenges.

This poses a unique opportunity to firmly position Drupal as one of the CMS leaders. To leverage this, strategies must be reviewed and renewed. This means change. For the better.

If we manage the most important strategic issues well in this phase in particular, we can now get a serious boost in funding.

But this situation does not last forever, and others are on the move. Plus, it is not done in a week, it takes a serious effort.

As I dont know exactly what the situation is within the decision-making circle of Drupallers, I am merely asking for feedback on what the situation and the available human resources are just now.

Do we have enough marketing and funding professionals here? Do we know about them, who they are? Should we have a poll to invite to a focused forum discussion?

Suggested To do's:
* establish two new forums and teams: Funding and Marketing
* find/recruit professional and dedicated team players and team leaders.
* give clear mandate to the teams
* each team should then make action plans, which should be debated and finally approved according to the mandate.
(* off-topic: the foundation preparations should have a separate forum/team)
* each of these teams should document their plans and progress in separate book sections, and organise their work as project tasks with due dates etc.

We may have to actively recruit more from outside, and would need a plan and a dedicated and professional team for this.

I think it is important to let programmers focus on programming, marketing professionals on marketing and those with the right network and experience handle funding.

Having busy programmers - even if they have competence on the mentioned areas - in charge of non-programmer tasks such as funding and marketing, may affect both parts of the total work negatively. It has clear risks of both slowing things down and loosing opportunities.

It is a bit strange though, that such "obvious" activity boosters are still not in place - in well coded form - after now several years of development. It is a matter of priorities, as everything else. I am generally impressed and pleased with the priorities of the drupal community. But such glaring issues dont make sense to me.

I just know myself how much more I would have interacted if I could mark threads for later follow-up. What am I to do now - make up a comment on an interesting node just to get it into my track listing? There are just loads of threads I would like to follow-up on and later perhaps write a longer post about than what I have time to when I first see it. As the system works now, they are simply lost. Search have not helped much in finding them back so far.

Another desired feature that would affect contributions is an easy way to tip another drupal user about a thread I think he/she might be interested in.