The 2013 DrupalCon North American Selection Committee is looking for input from the Drupal community to help select the location for DrupalCon North America in 2013 (and beyond).

Straw poll
As we did last year, we’re releasing a “straw poll” intended to gauge community interest in various cities. This list is not intended to be exhaustive, and community members are welcome to suggest alternative options.

You can make your voice heard by going to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/drupalconpoll now!

The poll takes less than five minutes to complete, and we’ll be accepting responses through June 19, 2011 in all timezones (deadline is 11:59pm Hawaiian Standard Time Standard Time or UTC -10 hours). Everyone is welcome and encouraged to complete this quick survey.

City Nominations

If you were wondering about the North American DrupalCon selection process for 2013, wonder no more! The Drupal Association has assembled a committee to make a recommendation for the board's consideration and the committee is excited to kick off the community engagement process next week on June 1.

This committee will:

• Draft communications for *.Drupal.org for North American DrupalCons Selection
• Promote, monitor, support, and review the community engagement process
• Review and assess the Event Manager report
• Make a recommendation for a DrupalCon 2013 location to the Drupal Association Board including a proposed event chairperson in the selected city. The board will be updated on the committee’s progress at each board meeting.

The members of the committee are:

• Jeff Eaton (General Assembly)
• Betsy Ensley (Community-at-large)
• Tiffany Farriss (Board)
• Emma Jane Hogbin (Community-at-large)

This isn't exactly news, but I was always assuming that Drupal people are a bit more honest and reliable. Turns out that I am pretty naïve.

As you know, we have these fancy download stats, thanks to a lot of people's work. On occassion, there are some troubles with them, and then Brandon looks at them in detail. Today, we blocked an IP which was requesting updates very often and with a lot of different keys. Either somebody's Drupal site is broken in a bad way, or somebody was trying to tweak the stats. We can't decide this based on the data we have, but if you find you don't get updates anymore, you probably should check your setup.

The real bummer was however, when Brandon started to specifically look for requests that were only out to game the stats for certain modules.

He found a module that reported several thousand sites using it, where almost all of the reports came from the same IP address.

The map on the home page of Drupal.org is one of the most-noticed new features. It started with the prototype, which was just that— a Flash-based idea for what might go there. During implementation, we had to figure out what exactly it would be and how it would work.

First, we needed to know where people were. Drupal.org has the advantage of an audience who is more-likely to be using modern browsers, and we don’t need everyone’s location. I decided we should use the new Geolocation API, but didn’t find any existing modules. I wrote a small HTML5 user geolocation module to add a share location option to your profile page. For privacy, it is opt-in and rounded to the nearest 0.1 longitude/latitude. Over 5,000 have shared their location, less than 1% of active Drupal.org users, but still looks impressive on a map: