By holly.ross.drupal on

During the last Drupal Association meeting, the board approved the 2015 Leadership Plan and Budget. We are very pleased to make the related documents available to you in their entirety:

However, these documents can be a lot to parse on their own, so let me provide some context and summary here in this post as well.

In short…

With a full engineering team and a bigger staff overall, 2015 presents more opportunities for the Association to directly impact the community. There are still far more projects and services that we could pursue than we can pursue, so we will use a couple of strategies in our work that will help us find the right approaches quickly and in collaboration with the community. Can we do everything that needs to get done? No. But we can and will do more in 2015.

2015 Imperatives

As mentioned above, there are plenty of things we can be doing in 2015 to serve the community. Because we can’t do them all, we’ve identified three areas that are imperatives - if we succeed in these areas, we’ve set ourselves up to grow and do more for the community in the future. Our three imperatives are:

  • Drupal.org: We spent most of 2014 focused on paying off technical debt, making the site and services more portable while improving performance and stability. In 2015, we plan to make many more visible changes, aligned with the roadmap (https://www.drupal.org/roadmap) that was developed with community input and published last month. Drupal.org is the heart of our community and we have a heavy lift to make it the useful tool it could be and to help the tools on Drupal.org better reflect our comunity processes and values. If we do this well, we will see a more engaged and growing community of developers and contributors.
  • Drupal 8 Release: We know you want Drupal 8 to be released just as much as we do. Additionally, there is a lot of opportunity during a product release that we want to take advantage of with the community. We’ll be looking to capitalize on the release to gain positive attention for the project that will result in more market share for Drupal and a growing developer community.
  • Operationalizing Revenue Programs: We’re still in a situation where most of the revenue we use to fund Drupal.org support and development, Community Cultivation Grants, and our other programs comes from the DrupalCons. Having a single major source of revenue is risky for any organization, but it also means that we are limited in terms of what we can do to improve upon or change DrupalCon formats. We are working on diversifying our revenue streams, with several new products introduced in 2014. In 2015, we need to operationalize and grow these revenue streams.

What does this mean?

That’s the work we want to focus on in 2015, but how will we do it all? The Leadership Plan and Budget lay this out in pretty complex detail, so here is a summary of our thinking and what this all represents:

  • You may recall that our original 2014 budget predicted a $750,000 deficit spend so that we could focus on building out a technical team to support our primary imperative - Drupal.org. As it turns out, we were unable to hire that team as quickly as we had hoped and we also did not utilize as much money for contractors on Drupal.org as anticipated (because it’s tough to manage contractors when you don’t have the staff). The result is that we will have a much smaller deficit in 2014.
  • It also means that we still have a lot of work to do on Drupal.org and 2015 is the year that we will actual feel the financial impact of all those engineering hires. Additionally, we need to invest in our revenue team to build out our funding streams so we can sustain the team long-term.
  • Another investment we need to make is in Drupal 8. Not only do we want to support the release, we want to help ensure that the release happens as quickly as possible. Working with the Drupal 8 branch maintainers we are developing a grants program modeled after the Community Cultivation Grants to help fund Drupal 8 development. As with the CCG program, the program is a true partnership with the community. Our role will be to provide the funds (up to $125,000) and logistical support. The branch maintainers will evaluate the proposals. We’ll have more details ready to be released next week, so stay tuned!
  • Continuing the shift we began in 2014, the Drupal.org investment in 2015 will be over $1 million - on par with the DrupalCons in terms of total expense. The bulk of this expense is in staffing, but we will make some small investments in hardware and services and a larger investment to develop a design system that will complement the user research and content strategy to fuel an iterative redesign.
  • When you put it all together, we are expecting another deficit spend, primarily to address the investments that were delayed in 2014. Though we did not have a third DrupalCon in 2014 and we did not make any new investments in revenue related staff until the fourth quarter of the year, we will still have managed to grow our gross revenue over 2013 by several hundred thousand dollars. This gives us great confidence that we can make up this deficit and support a revenue neutral or positive budget for 2016.

A word on strategy

In 2015 we’re going to tackle everything we took on in 2014 and then some. Defining our imperatives helps us understand what work to focus on, but defining our strategies allows us to understand how we will do our work and ensure that it aligns with our values.

We have two main strategies for 2015: work with and highlight community contribution and treat every project as an opportunity to run a small, fast experiment. Our best work is done in partnership with the community. A great example is testbots. In 2014, the Association took on the upkeep of the primary testbot infrastructure so that community volunteers can focus their time on a new, more modern implementation. In all of our work, we will find the right ways to leverage and celebrate these kinds of partnerships.

We also know that in a community this large and complex, giant, comprehensive projects rarely succeed. No one can anticipate every need or use case, and no individual or small group can engineer the “right” solution for every facet. Our teams will instead break big projects down into small components and test solutions, from new ideas for Cons to new UX components. We’ll implement, gather data, and iterate - repeatedly.

Join us for more conversation

The Association staff and board are very excited about the potential this budget represents for progress in areas that matter most to all of us in the Drupal community. We invite you to join us for a community webcast on 18 December at 8am Pacific (that's 11am Eastern and 4pm in London) to discuss the plan in more detail. We’ll also make a recording available for anyone who can’t join us live.

Join the Webcast