Agenda

  • Financial Status Update
  • Drupal Events
  • Infrastructure Update
  • Membership model update
  • advertising update
  • Legal representation
  • Drupal.org

Attendance

Board members in attendance:

  • Dries Buytaert
  • Angela Byron
  • Gerhard Killesreiter
  • Dries Knapen
  • Kieran Lal
  • Boris Mann
  • Zack Rosen
  • Moshe Weitzman
  • Absent: None.

Association members in attendance:

  • Neil Drumm
  • Earl Miles
  • Steven Peck
  • James Walker
  • Robert Douglass

Financial Status Update

  • Dries K e-mailed a financial overview to the Association mailing list.
  • We have 36,725 EUR to spend (although some of this will be paid in taxes).
  • No further comments on this item.

Drupal events

Recently, there have been several event-related proposals to the list:

  • Gabor wants 530 EUR to help him organize DrupalCon Hungary
  • Roy Scholten (creator of the Drupal Association Planet banner) asked for financial support for a room to hold the Dutch Drupal user group meeting
  • Robert Scales want to man a boot at blogworldexpo

Dries B has offered to take a lead in maintaining a 2500 EUR conference budget for Q4, with assistance from Bert Boerland and Laura Scott. However, there are no guidelines in place yet as to how and to whom this money should be distributed.

A discussion ensued. Items that came up during the discussion were:

  • Have three points of contact for events: North America (Boris), Europe (Bert), and Asia (Robert Scales?)
  • Come up with listing and prioritization of which conferences/events we'd like to have Drupal representation, and do a call for proposals, with clear guidelines on what we can fund and how to ask for it.
  • Figure out what conferences people are going to anyway, and fund things like marketing materials, printing costs, etc.
  • For now, let's not fund things like hotels, airfare, etc. but leave the door open for this to happen as the Association grows.
  • It's preferred to vote on a general event budget rather than individual items, but voting on an amount doesn't make sense until we have guidelines in place.

VOTE: do we give 530 EUR to DrupalCon Hungary? (PASSED 7 yes, 0 no, 1 abstain)

VOTE: Roy wants to do a user group meeting and ask for support. No concrete numbers are given. Do we still want to allocate a maximum of 150 EUR for him? (DENIED 3 yes 4 no 1 abstain)

VOTE: do we want to allocate 2500 EUR to Boris so he can spend it on events in Q4? (DENIED 2 yes, 6 no)

Infrastructure Update

  • Gerhard provided update to the mailing list.

Membership model update

  • So far, 2700 EUR have been raised, CiviCRM infrastructure is in place, and technology seems to be working.

Advertising update

  • Page views are rather low, so may need to switch to a full-page of sponsor hosting links for the type of revenue we want.
  • Main blocking issue is lack of statistics: page views, click-throughs, success rates, and ensuring ads are relevant and useful to the community. Google Analytics was suggested as an alternative which needs no security review, although it may bring forth some privacy concerns.
  • So far, interest from consulting shops has been very poor, but interest from hosting companies has been very high -- GoDaddy, midPhase, BlueHost and SiteGround have shown interest. Dries pointed out that hosting companies are less concerned with stats and just care about sales. Kieran argued that we still need the stats to confirm things are working on our end.
  • Still tweaking things on our end to increase traffic flow, need to confirm that things are working (1 week).
  • Suggestion is to setup Google Analytics, partner with 1 or 2 hosting companies based on that data, create full/half page advertising section for hosting companies (analogous to http://wordpress.org/hosting/), collect statistics, and then contact other hosting companies.
  • Volunteers needed to help manage this.

Legal representation

  • The question was posed, "What's the status of our legal representation?"
  • We're getting into an engagement with the Software Freedom Law Center about the GPL issues.
  • Our accountant firm can do basic legal reviews for certain types of legal work.
  • If neither of the above can help, it's probably useful to get a Belgian lawyer to look at any contracts.
  • Suggestions for US lawyers are welcome, too.
  • Moshe has offered to read over contracts and give feedback, and there is also http://groups.drupal.org/legal.

Drupal.org redesign

  • We need to develop a number of first steps and outsource these to the Drupal community.
  • One approach is simply to ask the companies we know with big check books to get funding.
  • Another is to appoint leaders of each "section" of the site and give them the task of coming up with a plan with the help of the community (example: http://groups.drupal.org/node/3777).
  • Some argue that we need IA/wireframe re-organization done first, before doing any "desinging." This should be assigned to one shop/IA expert.
  • Question was raised about who gets to choose the theme? It would be put to a Board vote, as the Drupal Association has purview over drupal.org.

DrupalCon North America

  • In terms of Boston/MIT, Jay Batson is actively working on an RFP. A venue is still needed. Kieran has a lead at MIT that we will explore.
  • LA is a possibility as well.

Miscellaneous

  • Drupal Trademark status -- DriesB has been working with lawyers to resolve the conflict around the US Drupal trademark. We're almost there and it looks like we're on the winning hand.
  • Legal issues: DriesB has a conference call with the Software Freedom Law Center on Friday. Worked with community to compile a first list of questions: http://groups.drupal.org/node/6318