In lieu of our normal Association Board meeting wrap up post, we're going to focus this month on the most consequential outcome of the November 13 meeting - the board approval of the 2014 Leadership Plan and Budget. 

I’ve been at the Association for about 9 months now. Before I took the job, I met with several community members to get their take on the Drupal community and the issues it faced. I heard from each person that the community is inspirational, motivational, smart, hilarious, and sometimes shouty. All of these things have proven to be true! I feel a great sense of privilege to work among such a remarkable group of people.

I also heard from each person that Drupal.org, the home of our community, is deeply flawed and in some cases broken. There seemed to be two common themes - the failures of the D7 upgrade process and the failures of the processes we use to make decisions about the site. For those of you who have been deeply and personally engaged in each of these problems, I heard that sometimes it feels so broken that the problems can seem intractable.

Since February, the Association staff and board have done their best to do as much listening as possible, try to unravel the issues, and think through how we can weave everything back together into something that actually works for all of us. With the guidance and support of the board, we have taken some big steps in 2013, including the launch of the Drupal.org Working Groups.

Under their leadership, we are already hard at work on some significant improvements. The Infrastructure Working Group is working with the Software Working Group to give the community local dev environments for Drupal.org. The Content Working Group has worked with volunteers and the Association to establish the Drupal 8 landing page. The Software Working Group is currently soliciting feedback on a plan for direction of the D.O developer tools.

These are good first steps, but it’s clear there’s more work to do, I’m not going to pretend that we have the answers at this point, but one thing seems remarkably clear: Drupal.org is severly under-resourced.

While we still have lots of heavy lifting to do to understand how to fix our processes and prioritize the code changes we need to see, the one thing the Association can do right now is to provide more resources to this critical aspect of our community to at least relieve some of the strain that is placed on volunteers and accelerate positive changes to the site.

To that end, we drafted a leadership plan and budget for 2014 that aims to address this gap, and the board approved these at our November 13th meeting. There are three documents that should be reviewed to understand our current position:

These three documents are three components of the story for 2014. They are long, and complex, so we are organizing a community call to review these and answer questions (see the end of this post). For those of you who want the shorthand version, let me summarize the key points:

  • Our two imperatives for 2014 will be Drupal.org and the Drupal 8 launch. We know that if we do not invest wisely in these areas in 2014, our ability to do anything else in support of the project is severely undermined.
  • In order to make the kinds of improvements the community wants to see for 2014, we need to make a significant investment in staff, help from consultants, and hardware. This investment will require a significant deficit spend for 2014 (~$750,000), which we believe we can offset by 2015.
  • The single biggest Drupal.org expense will be staff. We plan to grow the Drupal.org tech team from approximately 2 full time people now to 9.5 full time people in 2014.
  • All told, this shift in priorities means that Drupal.org will be funded at a similar rate to DrupalCons, with a staffing plan that makes the tech team the largest part of the Association’s total staff. The total spend for Drupal.org in 2014 will be about $1.4 million US.
  • Managing budget like this is inherently risky. To ensure that the board and community are sufficiently informed of our position throughout the year, we will be adding an additional report to our financials that simplifies and makes clear our performance versus our expectations to date. We have also tiered hiring and spending decisions throughout the year so that if our revenue fails to meet our budgeted estimates we can slow down our expenses.
  • Though our imperatives focus on Drupal.org and the Drupal 8 launch, that does not mean that the Association will not be doing any other work. You can still expect two fully-resourced and ever-improving DrupalCons. We will also continue our Community Cultivation Grants and Global Trainings Days.

Overall, I would like to stress that the 2014 Leadership Plan and Budget reflect tremendous optimism. It’s definitely true that we are at a pivotal point in our community. It is also true that our community, and the Association staff, have the talent and will to make the changes we need to make. The vote by the board to accept that this budget is a sign of confidence that together, we can make the changes we need to make on Drupal.org for now and for the future.

As mentioned above, we are hosting a community call on Mon, Dec 2, 2013 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PST (17:00 - 18:00 UTC) to discuss the plan and budget in more detail. We will make a recording available for folks who can’t join us live.

Register for the Call

International time conversions for this webinar:

  • Portland - 09:00AM
  • Chicago - 11:00AM
  • New York - 12:00PM
  • London - 05:00PM
  • UTC - 05:00PM
  • Kyiv 07:00PM
  • Shanghai - 01:00AM
  • Melbourne - 04:00AM

As always, please let me know if you have questions, or share in the comments below.

Flickr photo: Backdoor Survival

Comments

webchick’s picture

Cross-linking https://twitter.com/webchick/status/403400933763059713 for posterity, which has a lively debate underneath it indicating that at least some folks out there are having a hard time understanding why the massive investment in infra + staff is required. So something to highlight in the community call.

holly.ross.drupal’s picture

Tried to answer Bert's questions below. I think a closer look at the budget by program should help. If you look at toal staffing costs growing like that, I can understand why it appears that the DA is getting bloated. If you look at the amount of that growth dedicated to maintaining D.O, which is core mission related work, I think it looks much different. Mostly, I think this is going to be a struggle for common definitions. When we're all talking about the same things the same way, this should get easier. And that only happens when you have the conversation in the community. So hopefully we're on our way!

bertboerland’s picture

It is fine to cheer about "the 3021% increase"  in the budget for hardware hosting drupal.org. However, it is better to read the articles and spreadsheet and put the number in perspective to see the complete picture.

 

The investment the DA made in 2013 for the infrastructure alone was 4.166 dollars. This is 4,33% of the $96.00 legal budget. Or in another perspective, all travel cost (flight, lodging and meals) of the DA are 26 times the amount spend on hardware for the d.o environment. More perspective? The DA spend more on stamps (!) then on hardware for the Drupal websites in 2013.

 

Another problem one can see reading the data?
For 2013 for every dollar a member donated to the DA 19 cents went to costs for staff (wages, taxes etc), office expenses and traveling (travel, lodging, eating) of DA members. For 2014 the budget shows that for every dollar donated, the staff wages, office expenses and travel costs make up to 44 cents, twice as much. 44 cents of every dollar donated is spent on the staff.

 

So the problem is not that the DA does a huge investment ($130.000) on infra in 2014, that is more then welcome. The problems are that the DA spend not enough in the past and the biggest problem is that the costs of raising the money is growing much faster than the money to be spend. A very dangerous trend. Especially combined with a huge projected loss for the foreseeable future, over 1.300.00 American dollars.

 

Having said that, I very much welcome the openness of the DA and the data presented. It is indeed true -as stated in the program- that "we [the DA] can use our financial documents to tell a more compelling story about the Association" And I very much welcome the huge investment, from hardware to the new roles to the Drupal Association. From  a junior developer to the infrastructure manager and the CTO.  All more than needed and welcome.

 

I have a lot of questions reading the data. I tried to sum these questions here and do welcome and encourage others to ask questions (or give answers) as well. Some of the questions raised are mere comments ending with a question mark and can be answered in this thread, no need to spend time in the conference call on answering this. Some of them go deeper and might be more relevant to tackle in the conf call. I labeled those questions according to my own understanding, with a bold "Q".

  • With regards to the long term goal of the DA "Grow Drupal from 3% to 10% of the Web"

According to the site the document is referring to (w3techs.com) the percentage used in November 2013 is 1,9% The DA however projects that by the end of this year, just over one month, it will be 2,3%. A year later the goal is to put this number on 2,5. While according to the same site, the percentage measured this way has been declining declining month by month ever  since dec 2012, see http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all . So apart from the fact that 2.3 is not going to happen in december 2013, it makes it very unlikely that by this measurement of data in 2014 Drupal will hit 2.5%. Note that there are many ways to measure the marketshare of a CMS and hence many sites that do so, all with different numbers. Acoording to a well respected and known site ( http://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Drupal) depeding on what you count as baseline, the Drupal market share is is between 3.8 and 0,4 percent.
My questions are:
Why is the DA project 2,3 percent for the end of this year  where 1,9% is going to "truth"?
Whys is it the long term goals of the DA to let Drupal market share from <i>from</i> 3 to 10 percent while according to the DA it is not even 3 percent now?
Why did the DA choose the relative percentage  and why did the DA choose the arbitrary 10%?
Q: Do you agree that it is wrong for an organisation like the DA to have a goal with hard (cardinal) data ("10%") mixed up with a very soft (beyond nominal) timeline like "long term"?

  • *With regards to the goals "Grow Community Leadership Globally" and "expanding our support for Community efforts around the globe" combined with the data from the spreadhseet.

For 2014 there are only numbers for a DrupalCon in North America (historically: the USA) and Europa.
Q: What activities is the DA planning for the worldwide community?

  • With regards to "Drupal Association exemplifies a well-run organization with healthy finances"

The DA has a projected net loss of $100,000 for 2013 and and a budgeted non inflation corrected loss of $750,781 for 2014, $ 118,769 for 2015 and $ 327,527 for 2016.  From this years and the forseeable future, 1 milkon 300.000 dollars loss. While this souns bad, it is not as bad as one would think without knowing the reserve the DA has. The ammount is almost  the same amount as the DA has in cash (https://association.drupal.org/files/2012%20Drupal%20Association%20finan...). So for a NfP a healthy investment in the future…

Or isnt it?
There is nothing wrong with spending money, investing it if one has the money and one should by law aim for a healthy break even as is the case for a 503(c)(1). However, the trend is to spend more money on staff wages and expenses like declarations for traveling and the likes. When in 3 years time the budget should be near zero, there might be a problem if the income stays at the projected level and the costs should be cut with 100's of thousands of euros. This might mean letting go of staff and cutting down on luxury the organisation has become used to. Not a nice projection of the future for all people involved and for the DA itself nor the commnunity, cutting money costs money  that could have been spend on better causes and comes with frustrations
Q: Does the DA agree on the fact that it is not healthy for any organisation to have a projected loss for the foreseeable future and what will the DA do to make sure costs and income are inline?
Q: Does the DA agree on the fact that the percentage of the money spend on wages, travel and office expenses should be under 25% and what will the DA do to make this happen?

Note:
It feels strange to me that the projected loss this year (with 11/12th behind us) feels like a guess (100.000) yet the projected loss for the future (for example 2016) has a false sense of certainty with a number like 327.527. Could you explain why this was done?

  • With regards to the goal "Grow Non-Con Revenue to $1 million" as a strategic goals per board meeting

It is good for the organisation and hence the broader community to have multiple income streams.
Q: Why was it chosen to have an absolute (non inflation corrected) amount where the total budget will grow. Does the DA agree that a relative number (like 20% of the total budget) would have been a more useful metric and will the DA or the board change this?

  • With regards to "The Drupal Association is the heart of a strong Drupal community"

I would welcome the DA as the heart of the community. However, it seems that the DA itself has contrary opinions and statements on this. For example sentences like "...and repairing relationships with the community", "The Association must support this launch by empowering the community to.." and "We will continue to work through and with the community" it places itself implicitly <i>outside</i> the community.
Q: Does the DA agree that with the current wording of the DA, is it very hard to see the DA as part of the community and will the DA change this wording just so that it is better even if it was just in semantics?

  • With regards to the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) as a Key Performance Indicator for meauring the succes of the DA

Apart from the fact that the eNPS has many shortcomings and there is no acedemic evidence that the metric has any correlation with the growth, choosing the eNPS as a metric seems very weird.
How will he NPS be measured? Who is the customer, "the community", prospects, users? What is the product being advertised, the community, the code, drupal.org? Why has 70% (and incredible high score unheard of in any branche) chosen?
Q: Does the DA agree that eNPS is not a good metric for being used as KPI?

  • With regards to the sholarships / grants

The DA has a metric of how many people apply for Scholarship and grants.
Does the DA agree that the number of granted scholarships is more important then the number who apply for it?

  • With reagrds to the number of active users in 2012 on drupal.org

The table says there was no data ("NA") for 2012, however this is unlikely. This since the data was needed for the election process with the community board members.
What was the number of active users in 2012 on drupal.org?

  • With regards to Drupal.org Excellence

The data is unclear on the number of projected pageviews per onth for 2014 on the landing page for Drupal 8. It says both "NA" and one cell lower "13.000"
What is the number of pageviews for this page?

  • With regards to "Investing in our version of COD"

This sentence might need some cleaning.
Does the DA have an own version as in form of the COD distribution?

  • With regards to the percentage of beginner developers on a Drupalcon and the goal of having two%

It seems that two percent is better than 1 percentage from the table and it makes sense in a way. However, the question is relevant if 20% new users is better than 10% new users and hence 100% is better than 50% which is clearly not the case.
What is the optimal value of the percentage of new users?
* With regards to the role of content writer.
The content writer "will spend 50% of their time on D.O and 50% focused on DA needs." It is not clear for me anymore what the statutes of the DA are or where they can be found. The old statutes of the old Drupal Association VzW ( https://association.drupal.org/about/history/drupal-vzw-statutes) were very clear. There was zero influence of the DA on the project (the code) and the website (d.o).
Q: What will the content writer do on drupal.org and how does this relate with influence of the DA on d.o?
Q: Where can we find the statutes of the Drupal Inc
Q: What is the relation between the Drupal INC, the Drupal VzW and the to be founded new Drupal Association in the EU with regards to reporting, line management, finance and structure

  • With regards to the lineitem "4350: DrupalCamp Income" in the spreadsheet

As someone who co-organized a conference where the DA was used as a fiscal agency we were promised that the profit was in a subaccount and "owned" by the conference organisers, not the DA. However, this line item is only visible as income, not as expenses  and while a budget is not bookkeeping, it suggest that the DA sees the income from camps as profit for the DA, not as a reserve for the organisers.
Q: Who owns the profit of the camps where the DA was used as a fiscal agency?

The basic question however is, how will the DA make sure the core of the budget is directly beneficial for the community.

 

Looking forward to the answers, I might want to add some more :-)

holly.ross.drupal’s picture

Hi Bert - 

First - I really appreciate that you've taken the time to really read through the budget and leadership plan and think through all these questions. I hope you can see that our intent in creating the plan is to create more accountability by setting real metrics that we will work towards as an organization. And the point in realeasing this plan is to provide more transparency. We are working really hard over here to provide more accountability and more transparency, but we're still learning. We haven't done this in the past, so we know what we've outlined here is not going to be perfect. But we believe strongly it's a good first step.

Now, you had a LOT of questions. I will definitely do my best to answer things clearly below, but apologize in advance if I miss something. 

1) More perspective? The DA spend more on stamps (!) then on hardware for the Drupal websites in 2013.

  • You're right - according to our 2013 projections, shipping could total more than D.O hardware in 2013. However, it should be noted that is includes shipping the media kit around the country, etc. It's not really just stamps. We don't really send that much mail. Additionally, it should be noted that the BUDGET for D.O hardware was $25,000 in 2013, much more than spend on postage and shipping. The Infrastrcture team recently decided to make some more invesments in hardware, which will make out 2013 final spend closer to $8,000.

2) Q: Do you agree that it is wrong for an organisation like the DA to have a goal with hard (cardinal) data ("10%") mixed up with a very soft (beyond nominal) timeline like "long term"?

  • Yes - I am uncomfortable with a very specific goal and a very opaque timeline. However, I'm ok with it this year. Remember that the Association is fairly new, and I am really new in it. My job this year has been to get a lay of the land and to try to bring some more order and operational clarity to the Association. With the board, we have moved from an organization with NO published goals, to some increasingly concrete objectives. This is progress. But we need a couple of other key pieces to be able set goals - both short and long term - the right way. First, we need a strategic plan. The board has done a great job at getting out of the business of helping the organization operate and spent time last fall thinking about more long range goals. You see that reflected in the Leadership plan. However, we lack a strategic plan to cohesively guide our thinking. We also don't have any values articulated yet. Both are really important for goal setting. We are working on both at the board level (we're talking values in January), but this is a process. So I see goals like 3% to 10% of the web as good objectives for now, but objectives that will also need re-evaluating as we mature. I did not want a lack of a strategic plan or values to keep us from starting this practice of goal setting and measuring however. 

3) According to the site the document is referring to (w3techs.com) the percentage used in November 2013 is 1,9% The DA however projects that by the end of this year, just over one month, it will be 2,3%. A year later the goal is to put this number on 2,5. While according to the same site, the percentage measured this way has been declining declining month by month

  • Again, I'm going to say that this is the very first year we've put goals down on paper. Our thinking is that a strong D8 release can hold things steady or turn them around in 2014, but we just haven't lived with this data long enough to really understand it. This is definitely a goal that is going to be difficult for us to absolutely meet in 2014, but we wanteed to get it into the mix, start tracking it alongside other metrics and see what we can learn.

4) Q: What activities is the DA planning for the worldwide community?

  • In short - the same things we are doing now globally, with full recognition that this is NOT enough. We have to focus in 2014, and that focus is on Drupal.org. So we'll continue our other work with the community, but we won't be expanding it. We're still funding $40,000 in community cultivation grants globally and we'll be organizing Global Training Days. The new addition in 2014 is that we will be able to provide fiscal sponsorships to Camps operating in the UK, as we already do here in the states. That will be available as soon as we get our London office set up. Would we like to do more? Absolutely. And we'll keep listening for ideas, knowing that our focus will be on improving Drupal.org for its global audience first.

5) Q: Does the DA agree on the fact that it is not healthy for any organisation to have a projected loss for the foreseeable future and what will the DA do to make sure costs and income are inline?

  • Yes, we agree with that statement. It's not only unhealthy, it can be deadly for an organization. And let me stress here that this is not something that the board or staff take lightly. In all my years of nonprofit management I have never constructed a budget that deliberatlely showed a loss, and I have never managed a budget to a loss either. That's how important we all think this investment in Drupal.org is. The first budget draft I presented to the board had a much smaller deficit, because it had a much smaller investment in Drupal.org. We could have gone that route - a small defeicit in 2014, a more break-even budget in 2015, etc. and grown the Drupal.org team at a much more conservative rate of 2 or 3 people a year. However, we really hear the community's frustration with the site. There's too much more we need to do quickly than we can accomplish with just 2 or 3 more staff. So we're taking a big plunge this year. Before we decided to take this plunge, the staff prepared 3 year's worth of projections to show that we can get back to a point of building reserves by 2016. 

6) Q: Does the DA agree on the fact that the percentage of the money spend on wages, travel and office expenses should be under 25% and what will the DA do to make this happen?

  • Not necessarily. I've worked in nonprofits a long time and am very sensitive to the idea that nonprofits should invest everything they can into serving their mission. I sincerely believe that. But I also know that 25% is just a made up threshhold. For example, I do not see all salaries in the budget as overhead. The largest salary burdens in 2014 will be for staff who are working directly on Drupal.org, and I consider that mission-critical work. I also think that traveling to Cons is mission critical work. So I wouldn't think of all salary and travel as "overhead." But this is a really interesting and rich discussion, and I would love to keep talking about it. Perhaps we can arrive at a percentage and a way of calculating it that will work for us.

7) It feels strange to me that the projected loss this year (with 11/12th behind us) feels like a guess (100.000) yet the projected loss for the future (for example 2016) has a false sense of certainty with a number like 327.527. Could you explain why this was done?

  • Yes I can! But it's really boring - fair warning. For 2013, I essentially inherited a budget. I did some work on it, but without the deep understanding of the business of the DA, we had to make some pretty reasonable, but still, gueses. The budget draft was based on expected total income and expense for the year. The general rule of thumb when you are not sure WHEN and expense or income will be recognized is to take the annual number and divide it out evely across all 12 months. When we put our the budget into our accounting system, this is what we did. We did that because it was February (when I was hired) and we needed to get it into the system, and we didn't have great historical records to look back at and see how the income our exapnse might actually ebb or flow. The reality is that money is never received or spent in 12 months of equal installments. So, as we looked to projections, I did some best guessing and totaled things out to a nice round number that we should meet or exceed. All of this is based on the fact that we have old accounting data in two platforms, and they don't align very well. For 2014, things look more precise because we BUILT the budget witht eh ebbs and flows in mind, trying to account for expenses as they would occur. And, we really took the time to investigate EXACTLY what we would spend (for example) on online services. 

8) Q: Why was it chosen to have an absolute (non inflation corrected) amount where the total budget will grow. Does the DA agree that a relative number (like 20% of the total budget) would have been a more useful metric and will the DA or the board change this?

  • Yes. However, that goal was set by the board in November of 2012, when the $1 million mark made absolute sense in terms of the where the DA was at the time. We'll meet that goal in 2014, so we'll re-evaluate. See my larger point about needing a strategic plan for more context above. 

9) Q: Does the DA agree that with the current wording of the DA, is it very hard to see the DA as part of the community and will the DA change this wording just so that it is better even if it was just in semantics?

  • Bert - if it is just a matter of changing our words to become better integrated into the community, sign me up! :) Honestly - this is the thing I want most for the Association. It hurts me personally when people respond to things we say or do with suspicion. I understand why it happens, but I can attest that there isn't a single a staff or board member that wants anything but the best for the project and the community. So if my words are getting in the way - tell me how I can say it better.

10) Q: Does the DA agree that eNPS is not a good metric for being used as KPI?

  • This point I am going to respectifully disagree with. We plan to use this metric in our post-con and annual community surveys. We have to find some way to measure folk's satisfaction with our work, and I believe this NPS is the best proxy we can implement here at the DA for that. Remember that we are not using NPS alone to show satisfaction with the Association or any of our programs. It's one metric among many. Together, they tell a better story. NPS varies greatly from industry to industry and the key for us will be to measure against ourselves, not against other nonprofits or companies. I'll just also say again - this is out first take at very visible accountability. You may turn out to be right and we may find that metric is meaningless, but we all agreed that we should try it.

11) Does the DA agree that the number of granted scholarships is more important then the number who apply for it?

  • We may want to look at that differently in the future. Our thinking was that we don't want the number of applicants to DECREASE. In 2014, the number we are able to offer will likely stay steady, so we can't really measure a change there.

12) What was the number of active users in 2012 on drupal.org?

  • We might need to Drumm to chime in here, but I'm trying to respect his Sunday night. In short, as I understand it, the way the data is written to the database does not allow us to track this data for 2012 accurately. What is stored is the "last log in date" so as soon as an individual logs in in 2013, any record of a 2012 log in is now gone. Does that make sense?

13) What is the number of pageviews for this (D8 Landing) page?

  • You caught a mistake - it looks like we got that line in there twice. When we were finalizing the plan back in late October, that landing page was very new and we were struggling to estimate page views because we obviously have no older datat to use. I just updated the plan to reflect an estimated 13k pageviews for 2013, and an average of 8k per month as a goal for 2014. Update: I just looked at our analytics and we're actually already at 19,654 unique page views for 2013.

14) Does the DA have an own version as in form of the COD distribution?

  • Yes, we do. We are still working with COD mainatiners about what the best course of action is for either committing our changes, or aligning our changes with the direction of COD, etc. In short - we're trying to get what we need to make CODs work for the Cons, but do it in a way that gives back to COD. We're just not sure what that is yet, or how to do it. It will likely continue to be a long discussion.

15) Q: What will the content writer do on drupal.org and how does this relate with influence of the DA on d.o?

  • This position was created at the request of the Content Working Group. The writer will report to our Marketing and Communications Manager Joe Saylor, because they can't report to the working group for practical purposes. The work they will undertake will be at the request of the CWG and will likely focus on things like case studies for that section of the site and content related to special landing pages, like the D8 landing page, the site builder landing page, etc. Regarding the Association's influence on D.O - that's a good topic. As I am sure you know, our charter states that we exist to support the project and the community but we are specifically not allowed to influence the direction of the Project. It's becaome painfully clear to me in the last few months that the definition of "the Project" is pretty widely interpreted. Some folks think of it as the Drupal software code only. Others define "the Project" as the Drupal software code and Drupal.org. Others include the Cons in their definitions of "the Project." I think we're going to have to agree as a community on what "the Project" means or the Association will always be stepping on someone's toes. We can't decide that in this blog post, and I'm not sure how to go about solving it yet, but we definitely need to address it.  I bring it up because it sounds to me like you include Drupal.org in your definition of "the Project" and it is something that the Association, in your mind, should not have too much influence over. I am neither agreeing or disagreeing with that opinion here - but I do want to point it out.  

16) Q: Where can we find the statutes of the Drupal Inc

  • You can find a link to our ByLaws at the bottom of the the board page. Note that we're aware that things are pretty unfindable on the Association site. I'm working on cleaning it up one page at a time until we have some bandwidth and budget to really invest in IA improvements.

17) Q: What is the relation between the Drupal INC, the Drupal VzW and the to be founded new Drupal Association in the EU with regards to reporting, line management, finance and structure

  • DrupalCon Inc is a US-based 501(c)3 nonprofit. When I talk about the Drupal Association, the Association, or the DA, this is the entity I am refering to. The Association is a complete and separate legal entity from DrupalVZW. The office the Association is opening in London is just that - a branch office. It is not it's own legal entity, and will not have a governing structure separate from the existing Association. Finances etc. will be reflected on the Associations books. The opening of the branch allows us to open a UK-based bank account which is advantageous for running of Cons and because it allows us to exapnd our camp fiscal sponsorship prorgam to the UK.

18) Q: Who owns the profit of the camps where the DA was used as a fiscal agency?

  • The camps own any profits from the camps - you just can not see that on our Income Statement. All camp profits are indeed reserved for the camps and are held on our balance sheet - precisely because we do not recognize it as Association Income. To see this, check out this blog post, where we post the June, July, and August financials. Look at the Balance Sheet for any of these months and you will see camp funds listed there. What you are seeing on our 2014 budget is a fee that camps pay us for this service. We primarily charge that fee to cover the bank and other fees we incur for processing transactions for camps, as well as for a very small portion of the staff time it takes to provide this service. This is agreed to by both parties ahead of time. Does that clear things up?

Ok Bert - I think I got to them all! Please know that I am really glad you asked these questions and I hope we'll be able to talk more directly on 12/2 community call. Or, I'd be happy to set up some time to talk to you one on one.

nickvidal’s picture

Hi Bert,

I've also studied the budget, and although I agree with you on many points, I did find this and other statements quite offensive:

the trend is to spend more money on staff wages and expenses like declarations for traveling and the likes. When in 3 years time the budget should be near zero, there might be a problem if the income stays at the projected level and the costs should be cut with 100's of thousands of euros. This might mean letting go of staff and cutting down on luxury the organisation has become used to.

I don't think the organization has got used to living in luxury, specially not the staff. If staff wages are at $320K and we have 8 staff members, that would mean that each one receives $40K per year or roughly $3.3K per month. If a Drupal developer can charge $100 per hour (at least in the US and Europe), that would mean that the amount the staff earns to work in a whole month is equivalent to what a Drupal developer can make in a week. The travel expenses are just part of their job to attend DrupalCons. It's not like they are going on vacation.

Evidence that the tone set by your last comment is offensive is in Holly's response:

It hurts me personally when people respond to things we say or do with suspicion. I understand why it happens, but I can attest that there isn't a single a staff or board member that wants anything but the best for the project and the community.

I feel that the Drupal Association has really learned from past mistakes and are working hard to be become more transparent and open to constructive criticism. But the agressive criticism will not help bring these changes we want. Your budget analysis was brilliant, but the tone and personal attack on staff members almost invalidated the great points you made.

So let's be gentle on people, and hard on numbers.

Kind regards,

Nick

nickvidal’s picture

Got the numbers mixed up: $700K for 14 staff members translates to $50K per year per person or $4K per month. But the comparison still holds: what a staff member earns to work a whole month promoting the Drupal community is equivalent to what a Drupal developer can earn in a week.

bertboerland’s picture

Thanks for you answer. Just to clarify something that might be interpreted different. I dont care what salary the DA staff makes; that is between the staff, the board and the IRS. What they make is none of my business that is why I didn't mention anything about.

Now I could counter your your reasoning that you have your numbers wrong.
"If staff wages are at $320K and we have 8 staff members, that would mean that each one receives $40K per year or roughly $3.3K per month." The wages are not 320.000 dollars, but 2.000.000 dollars (including taxes) and the staff of 8 are not FTE. But that doesnt matter. Or at least not to me since this is not my definition of luxury and if someone took it that way I hope they see that this is not what I meant.

What I meant with luxory is not realted to money as income per person, I wish all the staff the best they can get. What I meant with lucory is having an organisation that has been taught for several years to overspend, on purpose. It is luxury to have a big staff, bigger than your income might justify. And hence, ceteris paribus, this luxury has to end someday.

Once again, if someone thought that I was referring to the individual  money a staff member makes,  I do apologize. That is not part of the definition of luxory of the organisation I was referring to.

nickvidal’s picture

Hi Bert,

I see: what you mean by luxury is the opposite of lean. I would argue that the D.A. staff of 14 (currently) is very lean considering the amount of work they have. Perhaps a staff of 25 (for 2014) is more appropriate to handle a community of this size, but I do agree with you that the proposal to go negative is very risky. What would you suggest otherwise?

Kind regards,

Nick

P.S.: I did get the numbers wrong at first but I fixed right away. The numbers I stated refer to 2013. As for 2014, your numbers are correct.

bertboerland’s picture

So we are on he same page. The DA is very capable of making their own decissions and dont need my advise. But since you are asking. :-)

Part of the goal for teh DA seems to make a loss of  1.3M dollar the next couple of years due to too much money on the bank. I think it would make more sense ifyou want to spend this in 4 years to do the bulk the first year (2014) and make sure that the organisation is close to zero loss when the money is not there any more.

So 2013: 100k, 2014: 600k 2015: 400k 2016: 200k 2017:0 loss

I also would try to search to invest in non recurring costs, hardware is an easy one but there is only so much iron we need, consultants who are not on the payroll, experimenting with offloading to ec2 alike environments, CDN's etc, All costs that are not sunk into the organisation but have a benefit for all. But also make a DrupalCon in Asia and try to loose 100k on it (I think / hope the DA will fail to make a loss :-), sponsor a documentry or do a kickstarter about the rise of Dries a/o Drupal (like whoisjw.tv), publish some books about Drupal, create sponsor boothes with generic Drupal and send them to differnet countries etc.. 

There are many options. But all ending with a healhy organisation and no sunk costs.

webchick’s picture

We've been doing "consultants who are not on the payroll" for a long time. The problem with that (in addition to generally higher costs due to the short-term nature of the work) is a total lack of institutional knowledge of how Drupal.org works, because the finer details are trapped in 30+ heads, each of them knowing one part of the system, but no one knowing all of it. We can't support something this critical to the success of the project and community in this sort of "swiss cheese" fashion. Further, when those consultants are not on active payroll (because there are no active known development projects that have been budgeted for, or because budget for those projects ran out) they nevertheless still often need to (or maybe more accurately feel a huge personal obligation to) jump in as volunteers to answer questions, fight fires, triage issues, etc. *because* they are the only ones who know how a certain thing works. This ends up heavily burning out those folks because they have to drop everything they're doing to deal with, say, a user database compromise or a Git permissions issue or what have you, and they mostly end up doing so "off the clock" due to the randomosity with which these things come up.

Versus, if these folks are on staff, they have dedicated time to focus on Drupal.org's problems, and we can easily pull them away from whatever their current priorities are to focus on these emergencies if they come up, without either causing a HUGE new unplanned expenditure in the budget or effectively forcing valuable community leaders to neglect paying work to deal with Drupal.org's problems. It allows us to have people in place who are highly available for the things that can get stuck (and there are many of these things), and allows us to let volunteers better focus on things they *want* to volunteer for, rather than things they feel they *must* volunteer for.

Or that's the plan, anyway. Sustainability++

holly.ross.drupal’s picture

Bert, I super appreciate your questions because I believe that questions and disagreements are an important part of a healthy community. It makes everyone stronger when we have to consdier so many alternative ideas and opinions. However, I think this bit crosses a line:

"Part of the goal for teh DA seems to make a loss of  1.3M dollar the next couple of years due to too much money on the bank."

It's awfully presumptious of you to say something like that. The reason we have money in bank in the first place is because it's good sound business logic to have cash reserves in case you run into any bumps on the road. We're not attempting to spend it down now because we're afraid it will look bad in the community. Rather, we're very nervous about spending it down at all because it means that we have less of a cushion if something goes wrong. Plan as we might, we all know that unexpected things can happen. 

Many of your suggestions sound as if your main assumption is that the Association is trying to get away with something or pull the wool over people's eyes. Again - nothing could be further from the truth. The board and staff here have a tremendous amount of integrity and I don't think it's fair to insult us by implying that we are somethow being dishonest, or power hungry, or any of the other things I think your tone implies. I am doing my very best to assume that your feedback is coming from a genuine desire to help, and a respect for the work we are doing, but lines like that one are tough to swallow. 

Also - to your partciular point about avoinding sunk costs - we are working to increase our use of CDNs etc. in 2014. Those are part of the working group plans. I think Angie adressed the staffing bit brilliantly in her comment.  

 

bertboerland’s picture

It's awfully presumptious of you to say something like that

Misunderstanding between us again :-). You read more in that then I meant or said. As stated in https://association.drupal.org/comment/5968#comment-5968 my assumption was that the projected loss of 1.3M dollars was because the accountants mentioned to the DA boardmembers that the profit the DA was stacking up, would be hard to justify tax wise. I am rather sure about the fact that a PM said this in public.

Many of your suggestions sound as if your main assumption is that the Association is trying to get away with something or pull the wool over people's eyes.

No, never said that nor even suggested it.. I really thought that the projected loss was because the DA needed to spend the money it had the equity because of legal reasons. That is all I meant and all I said. That might have been in fact a perfectly valid reason to spend/invest this equity, which is roughly the same amount as the projected loss.

Now if this is not the reason why the DA is aiming for such a huge loss, then really would like to know why the DA wants to have a projected loss of 1.3M dollars and why boardmembers of the DA voted for that.  Cause now I am really puzzled.

holly.ross.drupal’s picture

I'll take those comments at face value then Bert - please understand that I'm doing my best to interpret everything as goodwill, but sit in my metaphorical shoes for a moment and see if you can understand why I FEEL attacked when you write. But I'll let that go now.

One thing I want to be very careful about is that we all state the right numbers. So know that it's $750,000 loss, NOT $1.3 million, all numbers reported are USD.

The point still remains though. No, there is no legal reason we have to spend the money. As a nonprofit, we are allowed to show a profit each year and carry a reserve. What we can not do is pay out dividends etc. to the directors of our corporation. I don't know who the PM is that you are refering to, but this is absolutely untrue.

The reason that we are putting out a budget with such a significant projected loss is that we all believe that if we make this investment in D.O now it allows us to address two problems:

1. Creating a better D.O for everyone. Most of the investment in 2014 is geared toward building a technical team, right away, that can significantly improve the experience for everyone on D.O. This is the cornerstone of our mission and we need to deliver on it. We could have added just a staff member or two to the plan and NOT have to dip into reserves, but we all felt that we couldn't make big enough changes fast enough unless we took this dramatic step.

2. Open up new revenue streams to support the project. Another thing that adding just one or two additional staff keeps us from delivering on things like a job board, which the community has asked for, and which also allows the DA to create new revenue opportunities for the project. We can deliver these more quickly with this initial investment and we believe, according to some thoughful planning, that we can be revenue neutral in 2015, and back to revenue positive in 2016 under this plan.

The important thing is to think of the $750,000 as an investment, not a loss. We are investing in staff now that can help us better meet our mission and increase our revenue opportunities to keep us sustainable in the future.

Now - this flies in the face of your earlier comments about wanting the DA to be lean. This plan assumes that we need more staff to deliver on the D.O part of our mission. So, if you don't buy into that idea - the idea that we need to staff up to support D.O better, I see that this all falls apart for you. Not sure what to tell you about that! 

bertboerland’s picture

The 1.3 M is the sum of $ 750,781 for 2014, $ 118,769 for 2015 and $ 327,527 for 2016 + $ 100.000 for 2013

I think it is best to end the discussion here and both go our ways. Maybe others will ask some questions.

 

 

 

holly.ross.drupal’s picture

Hey Bert - Where are you getting those numbers for 2015 and 2016? 

bertboerland’s picture

I cant find them in the sheet. I was sure it was in there but cant find them. 

bertboerland’s picture

Public: 2014 Leadership Plan FINAL

page 5

under Well-run Organization

 

holly.ross.drupal’s picture

So I love Google docs, but I also hate them. So - we shouldn't have any numbers published for 2015 and 2016, and I can see that those were entered by another staffer and not removed. We don't have numbers to publish for that far in advance yet, and those are not current projections.  I super apologize for the confusion.

kreynen’s picture

I'm not convinced throwing more money at Drupal.org for 1 year is a solution. What the D.A. is doing/spending now is clearly not getting the job done.  Packaging releases on Drupal.org have been a problem since the D7 update (30+ days and counting).  It took weeks to publicly acknowledge the problems.  For some reason that acknowledgment has been removed though problems persist. With the recent Drupal 7.24 security updates, these the packaging problems are now contributing to thousands of un-updated sites since distributions STILL can't reliably package updates.

Because additional spending is budgeted for just 2014 w/ the hope of of spending less in 2015, any additional $$ needs to be spent on moving packaging and support off of Drupal.org in 2014 if it is going to be sustainable.

holly.ross.drupal’s picture

Hi Kevin - 

We are 100% in agreement - throwing money at D.O for one year is not going to solve anything, and that's not the intent here at all. Let me see if I can more clearly articualte what we're up to:

1) I am hearing your frustration loud and clear. Currently, and during the D7 roll out, we are severly under-resourced at the Association when it comes to Drupal.org. Despite the hard work of a couple of staff members, some consultants, and a slew of really talented and dedicated volunteers, we've definitely seen more problems that we like. I also own 100% that we should have been out there more, communicating more often with the community as the problems started to pop up. I think our instinct was to put our heads down and work through issues as quickly as possible, thinking that would be the best way to spend our time. I totally understand the mistake in that, but please know that it wasn't because we were trying to be evasive. Everyone here has been working as hard as possible to solve the problems. Regarding the acknowldgement of the problem, I think there's a misunderstanding. See comment 18 in this issue. We're just trying to keep the queues clean.

2) As for that particular packaging issue, We think we identified a fix. See comment 9 in this issue. The issue has been the bandwidth to address it. We have had larger security updates to perform that took precedence. Last night, we put the call out to some more volunteers to see if we could get someone to work on development so we can test and deploy. 

3) To adress moving packaging off Drupal.org - that, among other things is a topic that the Software Working Group will be addressing in 2014 as they work with the community and the Association CTO to develop a long term roadmap for Drupal.org. I don't know what the answer will be right now, but that's the plan.

4) Regarding budget for Drupal.org - We are increasing staffing significantly in 2014, starting with the hire of basic, who will focus on DevOps when he starts mid-January. We're building a real team to take on these time-sensitive and serious issues so the community isn't put in the position of have to address critical issues all the time, keeping them from helping to improve Drupal.org. We do NOT intend for this to be a one-year investment. Our intent is to build the team and expand our funding base so that we can sustain a level of funding for Drupal.org that's appropriate. So - this is NOT a one-shot deal. 

I hope that helps, and please know that you can reach out to me any time as well. You can find me on IRC (drupalhross) and via email.