At the Drupal Association, now is the time when we are finalizing our plans and budgets for the following year, so the focus of our pre-DrupalCon Prague board retreat was how to set ourselves up to help our community succeed in 2014. On the table were a few things that we wanted to share and get your feeback about. 

DrupalCons

Selecting DrupalCon locations is tricky business - balancing a variety of community needs with affordable and accessible locations. We've written a little bit about it, but one other important aspect to picking a location is the sheer size of DrupalCon. As our community grows, and the Con grows with it, we have to find ever larger venues near even more hotels. In order to meet these varied needs, we're going to have to start plannign a lot further out. The fact is that we've outgrown a lot of smaller cities, and in larger cities, we only fit into a couple of venues. So at this time, we're working on city selection for 2015, 2016 and 2017.  We conducted a survey earlier in the year to get ideas for new locations, are vetting them now, and will be sharing with the board in November. We'd love to share the results with you then, but we'd ruin the surprise!

Governance Updates

In June, we started convening the Drupal.org Working Groups and began the task of addressing technical and policy issues that have been long-ignored, while also beginning to create a long-term roadmap for the website that we all call home. You can see an example of their recent work in this update. During the board retreat, each working group shared their plans for 2014, which included budget requests (yes! we'll be funding Drupal.org next year!). We're not quite ready to publish those plans to the community because we expect they will shift a bit while we're here in Prague. Working Groups will meet together for the first time shortly and should have plans finalized and approved by the board in November.

Leadership Plan and Budget

The last big area of dicussion centered on our Leadership Plan and a draft budget for 2014. The Leadership Plan is a document that the staff creates annually to articulate what our imperatives are (the things we MUST focus on, or we will fail), our success measures (the metrics we will use to measure our progress towards our imperatives), and the staffing we will need to meet those imperatives. The budget is the financial representation of the Leadership Plan, showing we're we're investing our money throughout the year (and of course, where our funding will come from).

Our presentation was just a draft, designed to get feedback and ideas from the board that we can incorporate back into the documents. While the details are far from nailed down, I think there are a few ideas that we should share now:

• Drupal.org will take center stage: We are aligning both the budget and our staffing to provide much more (like 3 times) more investment in Drupal.org. The simple fact is that running web sites is what this community does, and it's time for Drupal.org to be run as well as our marquee case studies. We want to properly fund and resource the site in ways that allow us to do this while continuing to work with the community in the right ways. In other words - let you do what you want to do, and we'll do the rest.
• Drupal8 Release: The Drupal 8 release presents a tremendous opportunity for our project. The momentum a relase brings to a project can help us recruit new developers, increase adoption, and strengthen ties in our community. As with Drupal.org, we want to find smart ways for the Association to shoulder the burden of the release in ways that the community can't, or doesn't want to. We'll be working diligently throughout the last quarter of this year to learn what you do and do not want to see, and where we can help. In 2014, we'll be focused on implementing those ideas with you.

I want to also take this opportunity to thank the Board of Directors for the remarkable amount of work they do to build a better and better Association. Now it's your turn - tell us what you think! 

PS: Don't forget about the public board meeting here in Prague!

Flickr photo: stevepurkiss