“We cannot do what we do, especially for Drupal.org, without your funding support. Thank you!” - Megan Sanicki, Executive Director

There are many ways you can contribute to the Drupal Community. One way is being a part of the Supporting Partner Program. Supporting Partners fund Drupal.org and the engineering team who make the improvements you continuously see on Drupal.org - the home of the Drupal community and Project.

The engineering team has been hard at work in Q4 on several things from the roadmap.

• Worked with the Technical Advisory Committee on the developer tooling study
• Provided stable release of Composer facade
• Expanded issue credit system algorithm to reward code and non-code contributions in 2017
• Documentation Migration
• Drupal 8 User Guide
• Coming soon: Industry pages
• Launched the DrupalCon Vienna 2017 website
• More flexible DrupalCI testing options for contributed module maintainers
• Better database cluster

For more details, follow the Drupal.org blog and feel free to watch the latest Public Board Meeting.

Big Thank You

Drupal Association Supporting Partners help keep Drupal.org future-ready. We would like to thank our new and renewing Supporting Partners from this quarter.

1. Adyax
2. Anexus IT
3. Ashday
4. Avalara
5. Bellcom
6. Berger Schmidt
7. Breakthrough Technologies
8. Capgemini
9. Celebrate Drupal
10. Chapter Three
11. Chromatic
12. Comm-press
13. Crew.co
14. Davyin Internet Solutions
15. Dropsolid
16. Druid
17. Duo Consulting
18. Exove
19. Faichi Solutions
20. GoDaddy
21. Inclind
22. Innoppl Inc.
23. Inviqa
24. Koriolis
25. Lightcrest
26. Microserve
27. Mobomo
28. New Target
29. NorthPoint Digital
30. One Shoe Interactive
31. OPTASY
32. Osforce
33. Outsourcing Technology Inc.
34. Previous Next
35. Softescu
36. Spry Digital
37. SymSoft Solutions
38. Technocrat
39. The Brick Factory
40. undpaul
41. Vector Media Group

Our Supporting Partners, Technology Supporters, and Hosting Supporters help us make Drupal.org  a great site for our community and Drupal evaluators. They also become some of the best-known Drupal contributors. Read about the program benefits. If you are not yet a Supporting Partner and want to give back to Drupal while receiving benefits, please contact our Executive Director, Megan Sanicki, for details.

As Drupal, the Project, keeps growing and changing, so does DrupalCon. As the Events Team at the Drupal Association, we are continually working to improve the event - to strengthen the programming and to better fit the needs of attendees. Over the past year, we've heard through both formal and informal conversations that DrupalCon sprints are ready for a change.

A consistent topic in those conversations was that Extended Sprints, held on weekends before and after DrupalCon, may be too much. While 9 days of sprinting at previous DrupalCons evolved informally, they were a key part of the hard push that got Drupal 8 out the door. Concerns were raised that it is not healthy for contributors to continue at this pace. Contributors said that they were a little burnt out and didn't need as many days of sprinting.

A few weeks ago, we met with some of the sprint leads to discuss DrupalCon sprints to really hear what the Project needs at this point in its life-cycle. What we heard was: "Shorter sprints, with greater support." Based on this conversation with sprint leads, informal conversations from community members, and some feedback from the attendee survey, DrupalCon staff will no longer be organizing weekend Extended Sprints at DrupalCon going forward.

We will continue to support full day sprints from Monday through Friday. There is a dedicated sprint room throughout the week at the convention center, open Monday through Friday, as well as a designated location at the host hotel for 24 hour sprinting sessions. Sprint mentors are available at the DA sponsored mentor table in the exhibit hall throughout the conference to answer any questions about the contribution process, help new contributors pick which sprint best fits them, encourage new mentors to join Friday, and help both new contributors and new mentors know what to do to prepare for the sprints on Friday. We will concentrate our support on providing sufficient quality sprint space, and lunch and coffee, sprint room signage, supplies, special t-shirts for mentors, etc. - things that will help everyone have a quality productive sprint experience.

With these changes, our main objectives for DrupalCon sprints are to support current contributors, bring in new contributors, and nurture those who've dabbled, but not fully jumped in. We believe this is an imperative for the health of Drupal.

If you've attended a sprint at DrupalCon in the past, we certainly hope you will join us again in Baltimore. Our full conference website launched this week - be sure to check out the call for papers, buy a ticket, or apply for a scholarship.

Personal blog tags: drupalcon

We normally share  our financial statements in posts about public board meetings, since that is the time when board members approve the statements. However, I wanted to give this quarter’s update its own blog post. We’ve made many changes to improve our sustainability over the last few months and I am fully embracing our value of communicating with transparency by giving insight into our progress.

First, a word of thanks

We are truly thankful for all the contributions that our community makes to help Drupal thrive. Your contribution comes in the form of time, talent, and treasure and all are equally important. Just as contributing code or running a camp is critical, so is financial contribution.

The Drupal Association is able to achieve its mission to unite the community to build and promote Drupal thanks to those who buy DrupalCon tickets and sponsor the event, our Supporters and Members, Drupal.org sponsors, and talent recruiters who post jobs on Drupal Jobs.

We use these funds to maintain Drupal.org and it’s tooling so the community can build and release the software and so technical evaluators can learn why Drupal is right for them through our new marketing content. It also funds DrupalCon production so we can bring the community together to level up skills, accelerate contribution, drive Drupal business, and build stronger bonds within our community. Plus, it funds Community Cultivation Grants and DrupalCon scholarships, removing financial blockers for those who want to do more for Drupal. And of course, these funds pay staff salaries so we have the right people on board to do all of this mission work.

I also want to thank our board members who serve on the Finance Committee, Tiffany Farris (Treasurer), Dries Buytaert, Jeff Walpole, and Donna Benjamin. They provide financial oversight for the organization, making sure we are the best stewards possible for the funds the community gives to us. I also want to thank Jamie Nau of Summit CPA, our new CFO firm. Summit prepares our financial statements and forecasts and is advising us on long term sustainability.

Q3 Financial Statements

A financial statement is a formal record of the financial activities of the Drupal Association. The financial statements present information in a structured way that should make it easy to understand what is happening with the organization's finances.

Once staff closes the books each month, Summit CPA prepares the financial statement, which the finance committee reviews and approves. Finally, the full Drupal Association Board approves the financial statements. This process takes time, which is why Q3 financials are released in Q4.

You can find the Q3 financial statements here. They explain how The Association used its money in July, August, and September of this year. It takes a little financial background to understand them, so Summit CPA provides an executive summary and they set KPIs so it is clear how we are doing against important financial goals.

The latest executive summary is at the beginning of the September financial statement. In short, it says we are sustainable and on the right path to continue improving our financial health.

“We are working on building an adequate cash reserve balance. As of September a cash balance of $723K is 14% of twelve-months of revenue. Summit recommends a cash reserve of 15%-30% of estimated twelve-month revenue. Since Drupal’s revenue and expenditures drastically fluctuate from month to month [due to DrupalCon] a cash reserve goal closer to 30% is recommended.

Through August we have achieved a Net Income Margin of 4% and a Gross Profit Margin 33%. Our goal is to increase the Net Income Margin to over 10% during the next year.”
- Summit CPA

Improving our sustainability will continue to be an imperative through 2017, so the Association can serve its mission for generations to come. Financial health improvements will be achieved by the savings we gain over time from the staff reductions we did this summer. Another area of focus is improving our programs’ gross margins.

You can expect to see the Q4 2016 financials in Q1 2017. You can also expect to see our 2017 budget and operational focus. We are certainly excited (and thankful) for your support and we look forward to finding additional ways to serve this amazing community in 2017.

Today we held the last Board meeting of the year. We met virtually via Zoom and covered two important topics. The first one was a presentation by Angie Byron, who serves on the Technical Advisory Committee. She gave an update on the group’s current tooling study along with next steps, which will include a community blog post where members can provide input on the various tool options being studied.

The second item was sharing our thanks and saying goodbye to two wonderful Board members whose seats expire this month - Danese Cooper and Rob Gill. Danese, who has been on many open source foundation boards, provided great insight and knowledge that helped us navigate as we matured as a community and a Project. And Rob, who worked for NBCUniversal when he first joined the Board, was instrumental in helping The Association understand how to better serve the needs of the end users in our community. We are a better organization because of their generous donation of time and talent.

Please go here if you would like to watch the November 22 Board meeting, read the meeting minutes, or review the Board packet, which also includes our 12 month execution plan dashboard.

We will announce the 2017 Board meeting schedule next month.

We’re raising funds for 2017 Drupal community programs by clearing out our Drupal merchandise. Everything must go to make room for new things to come. What better time for a big Drupal swag sale, than holiday time! Give your friend, co-worker, or favorite module maintainer a Drupal hoodie, coffee mug, t-shirt, and more.

All merchandise is 50% off. Just use the coupon code BUYBYE. Sale ends 12/31!

Visit the Store

Come for the code, stay for the community. That’s the mantra of the Drupal community. It’s the reason many of us are here. It’s why we contribute in our spare time, spend our weekends organizing Drupal events, attend week-long DrupalCons. As a community we are continuing to grow and change, just like the project. DrupalCon programming should be changing too.

In particular, we at the Drupal Association want to make sure that the community programming at DrupalCons best serves the community it is made for. And that means that we need fresh voices, more support, and new ideas. We are asking for a new crop of community leaders and leading companies to step in and help us move community programming at DrupalCons forward.

How community programming got here:
Originally, community conversations at DrupalCon took place in sessions for the community track, running alongside all the other content at DrupalCons. The community track allowed for presentations on topics related to our community and although it was valuable to raise the topics, there were concerns that the session format made it difficult to continue the momentum after the Con. Further, the community track was not well attended.

At DrupalCon Prague in 2013, we launched the first Community Summit, a day-long event, on the Monday of DrupalCon week. Morten DK, Addison Berry, and others (thank you all - you have been great collaborators) ran the program and led a number of very useful conversations.

At the past few DrupalCons, Donna Benjamin has stepped up to lead unconference-style Community Summits open to anyone who wants to join, contribute to, or lead a local community. Through the unconference format, the Summit has been able to foster conversations about nonviolent communication, camp budgeting, public speaking, local community activities and more. Unfortunately, unconferences seem to stop once the Summit is over, and continuing conversations and action plans prove difficult with a community spread across the world.

Where is community programming headed?
As we continue to grow as a project and community, we recognize that we need to make sure we have the right format and space for our community to continue to grow and learn from each other.
Community programming needs some new faces to help move us forward into a world of Drupal 8, new camps, project-wide discussions, etc. We are a community full of incredible leaders and we are putting out a call for some of you to stand up and help us design the future for our community.

Community programming also needs a fiscal champion - a sponsor who fully recognizes the importance of investing in our community. Our community leaders are volunteers and e want to minimise barriers for participation. To date, the Community Summit has been free to attend. We’d like to keep it that way. But we’d like to provide attendees with lunch, and workshop tools like post-it notes, markers and flipcharts. Because we offer the Summit at no cost, we have needed to limit the space available which has meant it has booked up early, and many who would have liked to attend, have missed out.

We need you to contribute to community programming
We need you. And we are asking - can you contribute? We would love a team of community organizers to work with the Drupal Association on community programming at DrupalCon Baltimore and beyond. We need a sponsor or two to financially support the Community Summit and allow us to continue to grow it.

We are close to finalizing our space at the Baltimore Convention Center and are also nearing our online registration launch. We need to determine what the Community Summit will be so we can allocate the appropriate space and include tickets on our website. If you can help, take action now by contacting us at the Drupal Association before November 21, 2016. There are a few ways to get involved:

• Can you help coordinate and organize programming (summits, bofs, etc) at DrupalCon? Great! Email [email protected].
• Can you sponsor the Summit and show how much you value the community? Please reach out to [email protected] to pitch in.

Are we supporting new initiatives like Drupal Diversity in the best way that we can? Are we providing our Camp Organizers with the opportunity to convene and share tips and tricks to running amazing camps around the globe? What other programming can we be providing?  Comment below to let us know what you’d like to see from community programming at DrupalCons.

Thank you for your endless support of this amazing community.

Thanks to all who helped

Many people contribute to our membership campaigns and the recent campaign is no different. Thanks to Andrey, Ricardo, Martha, Ivo, and Tom, for sharing your stories. To everyone who joined or renewed, thank you for your support. And, to our members and supporters who answered the call to share our message, thank you too.

You not only help the community by growing our membership, you give us motivation too.

Focus on grants

Members fund our Community Cultivation Grants program. The grants help grow communities and build local relationships for Drupal. This connection made the grants program an appropriate focus for a membership campaign.

This campaign was based on an idea: you feel more connected within the Drupal community when you receive a grant. Participants told their stories because this idea resonated with them. We shared their stories about feeling connected and how the member-funded grant inspired them to make a local impact for Drupal.

Results

We didn't meet the specific goals of 265 new members and $10,918 in revenue. New member growth did not happen to the degree we wanted for this campaign. We got to 45% of goal for number of new members who joined. Our revenue from the new members made it to 73% of our goal for funds raised. However, this is accounting for all new membership in the time period, and not specifically attribution to the campaign itself.

The breakdown went like this:

• 120 signups by new members (100 Individual Members/ 20 Organization Members)
• $8,050 revenue raised ($3730 Individual Members/ $4330 Organization Members)

For more details, see the data here.

We had three other concurrent places for sign ups. Our main ADO page, DrupalCon Dublin registration, and a page for DrupalCamp Atlanta were available. Thanks Eric, Dave, Shellie, and the whole Atlanta team for the pilot run.

During the 52-day period, 520 members joined or renewed and we raised $35,348 in total revenue. So if the goals I had set were for new, renewing, and reactivated members, we'd have been successful. Call this a good lesson in goal setting!

The first landing page on drupal.org

We had a team effort to create a well-designed landing page for this campaign. We used new design tools to create the first landing page for membership on drupal.org.  We'll use the tools again to add visual interest to our campaigns and we'll continue testing to find what works and what doesn't.

More testing is needed

In our last campaign, the landing page on assoc.drupal.org had 16K pageviews. This campaign had only 25% of that traffic. This disproved the hypothesis that drupal.org would bring more traffic to a membership landing page.

We can see the banner launch and takedown had an impact on page traffic based on the data below. The hill showing on the graph shows the period we ran the banner (September 9-17). However, when we reintroduced the banner on September 28 through October 29, we saw no significant bump in traffic.

Traffic was 25% of the previous campaign landing page.

Social sharing makes a difference

Traffic spikes occurred around days we emailed to ask members to share the campaign. Not only do we see engagement from members, but there were spikes in membership sign-ups too.

We used a story-based approach

I used a storymapping exercise to think through this campaign concept to ensure we were telling a story that left readers satisfied. A story moves along a bell curve from exposition, to problem, to rising action, crisis, resolution, and falling action before the end. I'll try this again for the next campaign. The story-based approach helps to get our narratives into the bigger world and people are left with something they can remember and share.

Coming next

We are taking a deep look at how the drupal.org engineering team has made an impact in the community for our next campaign. We begin with the premise that the work the team does has helped increase the velocity of the innovation of Drupal. The team reduces the friction in the contribution journey and by doing so, we all benefit from their work. More on this to come on drupal.org in a few months.

Personal blog tags: Membership

On September 28, 2016, The Drupal Association board hosted a public board meeting during DrupalCon Dublin. It was wonderful to connect with the community in person to share updates and answer questions.

Over the last few months, we provided an update on The Association’s current focus followed by department-specific updates. This board meeting shared highlights of specific areas including:

• DrupalCon New Orleans
• Drupal.org front page improvements
• Membership campaigns

This public board packet provides links to those presentations along with updates on other programs. It also includes a dashboard of all our current work. You can also watch the video recording here.

We love hearing from the community. Contact us anytime to share your feedback or ask questions via email or @drupalassoc.

The next public board meeting will be on 21 November, 2016 at 7:00 am PT / 15:00 GMT. You can register for the meeting here.

 

It isn't easy to build a strong community. Many event organizers work to bring people together for Drupal. Community Cultivation Grants are one tool to make the work a little easier. With a grant, you can strengthen the local community. You can help drive the adoption of Drupal.

Drupal Association members fund these grants. A few grant recipients have told us their stories. I'd like to share more about what has happened since the grants were awarded.

Andrey from DrupalCamp Moscow

The DrupalCamp Moscow 2014 organizers have connected with the organizers of other camps — DrupalCamp Siberia (in Novosibirsk in 2015) and DrupalCamp Krasnodar (in September 2016). They've shared experiences to inspire the communities in these other Russian cities.

Andrey tells us, "In Moscow, we don't have any large companies which offer Drupal services. Our community organizes all the local events. After DrupalCamp Moscow 2014, we've held more events than ever before. 6 meetups, 22 small meetings, a D8 Release Party and one Drupal burgers event have happened. We've had Drupal specialists from other cities of Russia and the world come to visit. New participants are always welcome here and we are seeing more and more of them."

Ricardo from Drupal Mexico City

Ricardo tells us, "We held another Drupal camp in Mexico City in 2015 with 250 attendees. In 2016, our dear fellows from Axai did the same in Guadalajara.

This year, we went off the island, just like Drupal 8 has, and we organized an even broader PHP event. It was amazing. The response was fantastic, we broke all our attendance records. We've grown the PHP Mexico community & PHP Way meetups and now have 1,000 members. Our attendees could become new Drupalists. But we expect to see new Drupalists come from the Symfony world.

We decided to have only one Drupal event in Mexico per year. In 2016, it was held in Guadalajara. If nobody else wants to organize an event at 2017, we'll probably do it again. If we organize the next Drupal event, it will probably happen together with a PHP event once again. Ultimately, community growth should be in concordance with demand growth. This hasn't happen here in CDMX, we are hopeful that it will."

Martha from Drupal Guadalajara

From Martha: "We attended DrupalCamp Costa Rica in September and continue being connected to the Drupal Latino Community. After Guadalajara camp, there is more local Drupal awareness. Our company has received training and quote requests since the camp."

Community Cultivation Grants do more than build connections in our community and grow our contributors. They also to help drive the adoption of Drupal.

Ivo from Drupal Roadshow Bulgaria

Ivo says, "Since the roadshow, there we've met our goal of running a Drupal Academy. We now run the biggest Drupal Course at Software University in Bulgaria. We have more than 1200 registered students. Our activities were featured in the Bulgarian National Television.
We are also proud of another result of the roadshow. One of the larger Drupal shops in Bulgaria opened their second office in a small town. We introduced Drupal there."

Tom from DrupalCamp Vietnam (2016)

Tom tells us, "I'm an entrepreneur and angel investor. Helping people become prepared for the digital enterprise is fulfilling to me. I want to spend more time coaching young developers with IT career decisions. To help get them learn how to use Drupal as a versatile data/content modeling tool. Which can act as a key platform to integrate with many other FOSS too. Including MERN stack, Hadoop, Spark, Docker, Openstack, etc.

Technology is always changing. What sticks is the experience you gain by contributing to an open-source community such as Drupal."

We're excited to see grant recipients building relationships in our community. You can connect with community and make more grants possible by joining the Drupal Association today.

Personal blog tags: Membershipcommunity cultivation grants

There are many inspiring companies that are giving their time to contribute code, help educate others, share their experiences, and be part of the Drupal community. Some of these companies have taken one step further, becoming Supporting Partners with the Drupal Association.

Supporting Partners fund Drupal.org and the engineering team who make the improvements you continuously see. Without our Supporting Partners, the work we do would not be possible.

Here is what is going on now.

Q3 2016 Roadmap

• Establish a Technical Advisory Committee (TAP)
• Evolve the D.O front page to support the adoption journey.
• Identify cost savings
• Stable release of the Composer façade
• Documentation Migration
• Project Application Process Revamp
• Drupal 8 User Guide
• The search function is now an icon in the header
• You can now directly download PDF invoices of DrupalCon ticket orders, right from http://events.drupal.org
• Security shield icon
• Virtualized Infrastructure

 

We would like to acknowledge the companies that continue to show their endless support. Here is a list of new and renewing companies just this quarter:

1. Translations.com
2. OpsGenie
3. Kellton Tech Solutions Ltd.
4. PSW Group GmbH & Co. KG
5. ANNAI Inc
6. Crew.co
7. PreviousNext
8. KWALL
9. Code Koalas Digital Bridge Solutions
10. Mediacurrent Interactive Solutions
11. Trellon LLC
12. XIO
13. Live Person
14. Pantheon
15. Rochen Ltd.
16. Bluehost, Inc.
17. BlackMesh Inc.
18. Arvixe, LLC
19. Green Geeks
20. JetBrains
21. Platform.sh
22. HighWire Press
23. Wunder Group
24. ADCI Solutions
25. Inclind Inc.
26. Appnovation Technologies
27. GeekHive
28. Deeson
29. Isovera
30. Forum One
31. Palantir.net

Our Supporting Partners, Technology Supporters, and Hosting Supporters help us make Drupal.org great. They also become some of the best-known Drupal contributors. Read about the program benefits and if you want to give back to the Project, please contact our Executive Director, Megan Sanicki, for details.

Today we launch the membership campaign focused on the Drupal Association Community Cultivation Grants program. Association members fund grants to kickstart community-strengthening projects around the world.

The campaign runs through October 28 and our goals are 265 new members signed up and $10,918 in revenue. These are a 10% increase over the same period of time last year.

We'll have a banner on drupal.org throughout the campaign and a landing page. In it, you'll read how grant recipients feel connected in the community.  Their pride shows in their words about work on Drupal camps and a traveling roadshow. Thanks to Andrey, Ricardo, Martha, Ivo, and Tom for sharing stories.

You can help make this campaign a success. Join the Drupal Association and share your story. How has community connected you with people, resources, and success? Tell your story to the Drupal community members and open source advocates you know.

Spread the word

Personal blog tags: Membershipcommunity cultivation grants