Agenda

  • Finances
  • OSL Intern
  • DrupalCon North America
  • SunServer
  • 2008 Budget
  • Trademark
  • tld.drupal.org
  • drupal.org redesign
  • Software freedom law center
  • Fundraising Update

Board members in attendance:

  • Dries Buytaert
  • Angela Byron
  • Gerhard Killesreiter
  • Kieran Lal
  • Zack Rosen
  • Moshe Weitzman

Absent: Dries Knapen (excused), Boris Mann

Association members in attendance:

  • Bert Boerland
  • Robert Douglass
  • Neil Drumm

Finances

No financial update this time, as DriesK could not make it. However, we know from the last meeting and e-mail discussion that we have roughly 50K in the bank that is not allocated.

OSL intern

The OSL has invited us to pay for an intern. A yearly donation would cover 75% of a student admin's salary, which means they could work on Drupal tasks 75% of their time. The estimated cost is $13,500 USD/year. This is part of Gerhard's proposed infrastructure budget for next year (see mailing list).

No short-term decision is necessary; it's part of the larger infrastructure budget, which will be voted on at the General Assembly.

Drupalcon North America

There was a proposal from Lullabot for a Drupalcon in Toronto, but that has been withdrawn due to timing issues. There was also some debate about whether a commercial DrupalCon would be a good thing.

Kieran issued a call for proposals last week. We've received two letters of interest for Drupalcon North America: one for Boston and one for Denver, which had not yet arrived at the time of the vote.

The Boston proposal had a November 13 deadline from the hotel (the day after the board meeting).

Vote #1: Do we want to organize the next DrupalCon in Boston as per the proposal? (Passed: 5 yes, 0 no, 1 abstain)

Sun Server

Sun Microsystems shipped a server to us. An announcement needs to be written.

2008 Budget

Since the new/next board is due soon, Bert Boerland is interested to know who of the current board members will propose a plan and financial budget for their next term. DriesB proposes to have these plans in place within two weeks. The request was for everyone to commit to proposing a budget within two weeks.

DriesB (overall), Kieran (Fundraising), Angie (Communications/Marketing), and Gerhard (Infrastructure) all committed to this. The budgets need to be turned in by November 25.

Trademark Funding

Bert Boerland would like to know where the board stands regarding the trademark issues and proposes for the next agenda short item of full payment of these costs from the Association to DriesB.
If the board is supportive to the idea, DriesB can either write a more concrete reimbursement proposal, or we can agree on a budget right now.

Generally, opinions were supportive of DriesB being reimbursed for legal costs related to trademark, although some were dubious because of the lack of ownership on the part of the Drupal Association of the trademark. A more full proposal was generally felt to be a good thing (which will incur further legal costs to DriesB in the area of 1500 EUR).

The suggestion was to do this in two parts: first, request an immediate reimbursement of costs spent to-date (which would likely pass with little-to-no argument), and second, a more full budget proposal for dealing with trademark issues.

Additionally, Dries pointed out that in order to 'market' the trademark, we need to make it more obvious on drupal.org that Drupal is a trademark and Dries B owns it. He asked if it was ok to proceed with that, and there were no objections.

tld.drupal.org

Bert Boerland wrote a proposal for how we can let people use tld.drupal.org. The goal (at least at the outset) is to setup infrastructure for communities with no community site yet (Serbian/Danish, rather than German/Spanish)

Vote #2: Do we want to support Bert's TLD proposal (and leave it up to the infrastructure manager to select what modules to support)? (Passed 4 yes, 1 no, 1 abstain)

Drupal.org Redesign RFP

Just before the meeting, Kieran sent along a rough sample RFP for the Drupal.org redesign. While not quite in its finished state, Kieran was looking for a vote on whether or not he could proceed with getting the word out to the community, with the idea that doing this early would allow closing of RFP by Jan 15, interview finalists Jan 30, vote on Feb 15, sign contracts Mar 1, and have first design deliverable by May 30.

Rather than decide now, or delay until 2008, the decision was to hold another board meeting in two weeks instead.

Software Freedom Law Center

DriesB has been working on an official relationship with SLFC, but unfortunately their retainer didn't make it in time.
Vote #3: Unless someone disagrees on the mailing list, can DriesB go ahead and sign the SFLC agreement with DriesK? (Passed 4 yes, 0 no, 0 abstain)

Fundraising Update

Kieran gave a fundraising update. Essentially, our current fundraising efforts aren't enough to support our future ideas/plans for growth. We've received only 10K in donations in the past 4 months. Google Adsense has been online for 3 days and so far has an average of $2.98/day.

Kieran proposed doing direct mail

Vote #4: do we agree to email the 1600 service providers who, have their contact preferences set to receive email, to request they become members of the Drupal assocation? (Passed 4 yes, 1 abstain, 1 no)

Closing notes

  • DriesB is working on a global budget proposal. All directors are invited to provide input and to help refine their budget (if any).