On January 15, 2008 (Drupal's 7 year anniversary), the Drupal Association held its first general assembly. This assembly was an important step towards long-term sustainability: when the Association was first created, a small number of known contributors to the broader Drupal community were chosen to act as voting board members. This assembly marks the first opportunity for any interested member of the Drupal community to apply for a position in the Association, guiding and directing its development over the next year.
This Drupalcon represents two big advancements for Drupalcon.
Larger capacity. The last two Drupalcons have sold out, capped at 450 people. Depending on final arrangements we may be able to handle 700 at this event.
Community expansion. Drupalcon is being held at the same time/place as AIIM International Exposition & Conference, the largest content management technology conference in North America. Though technically independent of each other, the Boston team is working to arrange some cross-event access. The goal: introduce Drupal to thousands of potential new Drupalers.
On January 15th, the Drupal Association will elect its second Board of Directors. As a result, we are looking for people that want to become either a Permanent Member or a member of the Board of Directors, and that can provide leadership and experience to expand the reach of the Drupal Association and its activities.
If you are interested, you can submit your application by following the instructions on drupal.org. The deadline for submitting your candidacy is January 10th, 2008. The General Assembly will vote on the applications on January 15th, 2008 at 20:00 CET.
Please be sure to read the statutes / internal regulations for more information about the different memberships, the responsibilities and the election process.
With your financial support the Association helps the Drupal community by supplying hardware for the Drupal.org infrastructure and financially supporting the Drupal conferences, such as Drupalcon Barcelona. If you become a member for one year, you are encouraged to pick a badge from the badges page that reflects your status. Please make a local copy and display your membership status on your site. These badges were designed by Roy Scholten who handed the copyright of them to the Drupal Association. So grab your wallet and become a member and show it on your site!
The Drupal association is pleased to announce that Sun Microsystems has made a second hardware donation, a SunFire X4200 (picture) ,to support the Drupal.org infrastructure. Sun has been active in the Drupal community and recently gave presentations at DrupalCon Barcelona, and BADCamp - both events were sponsored by Sun. At the DrupalCon Barcelona conference, Scott Mattoon attended the scaling the Drupal.org infrastructure session (pdf). Once Sun learned of our challenges in scaling Drupal.org they were eager to help again.
For the Drupal community's participation in the Google Summer of Code program, Google donated $10,000 USD to the Drupal Association earlier this week. This amount represents 10% of the $100,000 USD allocated to Drupal's Summer of Code students. We'd like to sincerely thank Google for this tremendous contribution, which will be used to fund infrastructure improvements and to sponsor Drupal events (among other things).
As part of our ongoing efforts to support the Drupal.org infrastructure, the Drupal Association has further bulked up our hardware resources with 10 GB of RAM and a new master database server. These improvements will help us deal with the exponential growth curve the Drupal community has been experiencing, and help us prepare for the anticipated growth due to Drupal 6.
Hagen Graf recently donated 700 EUR to the Drupal Association. This money comes from a German Drupal 5 training video that he made together with Video2brain. For every copy they sold, 1.25 EUR was set aside for the Drupal Association.
The Drupal association is pleased to announce that 
