Governance Taskforce Recommendation "Create a Community Strategic Plan"

People want to make a difference but without a strategic plan, our community lacks focus and our efforts fragment. A shared focus will help us centralize resources, efforts, and funding.

What we heard:

Many community members express a strong desire to participate in initiatives that have purpose. This cannot occur without internal change and dedicated resources.

As a large open source community our efforts are distributed, which is both a strength and a weakness. The Drupal community would benefit from greater focus and by unifying our global efforts. Community members need to share their interests and have the tools to prioritize and fund initiatives that best serve the community’s growth and development. Many ideas of this proposal, like training offerings and expanded mentoring, serve as examples of this.

What we recommend:

We recommend that a Community Strategic Plan be created annually, serving as a guidepost for ongoing improvement within the community. The Community Governance Group would be responsible for collaborating with members of the community to formulate this plan.

We recommend that the Community Governance Group be given management of a Community Benefit Fund, distributing grants to create positive impact throughout the Drupal community, guided by the strategic plan. This could be achieved through new fundraising efforts or sharing a portion of DA membership funds.

Many promising ideas have been tried in our community — but scaling ideas is difficult, and individuals often do not have the influence or access to resources to bring them to fruition. The proposed Community Governance Group would establish an open and transparent process that encourages all community members to advance their ideas. The group would help bootstrap and curate ideas for the next strategic plan.