We held our July Drupal Association Board Meeting last Wednesday. Halfway through the year, we took the opportunity to review our metrics for the year thus far, discuss some possible changes to our governance model, and tackle a couple of housekeeping issues in executive session. If you somehow managed to miss us during the live session, never fear! We've got a recording, the meeting materials, and the minutes available for your perusal, as well as this summary:

DrupalCons

DrupalCon Austin is now behind us, but it's not forgotten! We're thrilled to have helped host an event that was so successful in so many ways. We were able to beat our Portland attendance numbers, though we did fail to meet our stretch goal of 4,000 attendees. At this point, we are sifting through all the registration, financials, and evaluation data to pull together a summary report (with comparisons to Portland) for the August board meeting.

Next up is DrupalCon Amsterdam. Registration for Amsterdam is strong and we're particularly excited that we had a record number of session submission - over 500! The sessions are now set, and we have a great line up, covering some of the most relevant topics for our community. There will be fun as well, of course. What's more fun than a bicycle? Apparently nothing, because many of our attendees are purchasing the bike package as part of their registration! And of course, there's Tour de Drupal. 

DrupalCon Latin America is the first DrupalCon scheduled for 2015. The site is scheduled to be up in mid-August for session submissions. We are also working on determining how we will handle languge and translation at DrupalCon Latin America. Working with the local team, we are discussing options for content translation so that we can serve both English and Spanish speakers. 

Drupal.org

We were able to create a lot of momentum for Drupal.org at DrupalCon Austin. Staff and Working group members conducted several user research interviews for the User Research Project led by Whitney Hess. And, in the weeks following DrupalCon, our staff were able to deploy over 30 patches to Drupal.org that came out of the sprints in Austin. 

In addition, we also recently deployed a CDN service for Drupal.org. The CDN allows us to reduce strain on our infrastructure, increase our security, and most importantly should increase performance for users, especially those outside of the United States. We want to thank Narayan Newton (nnewton) and the rest of the Drupal.org Infrastructure Working Group for their direction and help.

Finally, there is a new way for you to keep on top of change notifications for Drupal.org. We've standardized the reporting and, in addition to posting them online at Drupal.org, you can now subscribe to an email list to receive notifications right in your inbox.

Board Governance

At the June board retreat in Austin, each of the board committees met to discuss current issues. The Governance Committee met with the aim of exploring ideas that would increase the diversity of candidates for our elected candidates, possible term limits for board members, and how to improve committee performance on the board. Based on that conversation, the committee presented several ideas for the board to discuss. No decisions were made at this time, but the Governence Committee did receive good feedback to incorporate into future proposals. 

Next Meeting

Want more board news? Get it live! Join us at one of our upcoming board meetings. 

Flickr photo: Kristen Pol