David Norman (deekayen)
Thu, 12/27/2007 - 16:19 — deekayen
What is your motivation for being a member of the Drupal Association?:
In short, I'd like to be a part of maintaining stability in the Association. I have some of the fewest cool new ideas around and have settled my role in Drupal more as a maintainer than a visionary. I know the visionaries will work to make things happen with arranging conferences, contributing code and docs, and organizing conferences. They will do so without poking or prodding, without thank-yous or money, and without sleep. The rest of the community will manage the quality of the products and Drupal will evolve beyond any ideas known today. I would like to make sure that when those visionaries are in the zone, and need resources beyond time and talent, the association remains a resource for providing tangibles.
What are the primary goals you would like to work on?:
So many of the high-visibility things the association needs to do revolve around money and watching the budget would be my focus. While the Paypal method of donation has a steady flow of contributors, I would like to see donation options expand. Each new adoption of Drupal by various companies may be leveraged for regular goodwill and I believe much of such partnerships would have natural reciprocation (e.g. Sun's automatic exposure for a server donation).
I think server infrastructure has been an issue to give continuing and regular attention. Assisting with a major Drupal conference is also a recurring opportunity for Drupal marketing and information exchange. I think it's unfortunate that it takes a conference to get some of the great information that comes out of presentations, and would like to expand the attention the association gives towards supporting projects through grants or paid services where appropriate.
Beyond that, I would like to be sure there is a reserve fund in the association, not so much to be conservative as it would be because I hope there are new evolutions to Drupal that will require association assistance I could not possibly imagine right now. At some point, I hope part of that evolution spreads in to educational applications.
What strategy will you employ in order to accomplish said goals?:
Budget permitting, create a bounty item for creating more donation options. Work with the drupal.org webmasters and the historical membership statistics to create some sort of donation estimation method. Maintain some sort of dynamic budget format so unexpected donations can be accounted for, even if it must be a spreadsheet.
What yearly budget would you need in order to accomplish said goals?:
I think expenses can and should be prioritized and a list of high priorities can be set for regular operations. Since the association survives on generosity and goodwill, I think the budget can be predicted based on a combination of historical estimates of donations relative to the membership of drupal.org and/or groups.drupal.org, and annual donations from activities with a historical track of donations (e.g. Google Summer of Code). I haven't yet seen a figurehead person to depend on for campaigning for donation increases from deep pockets, so to set a yearly budget based on goals rather than historical donations and expectations of those continuing, is in my opinion, too speculative. I have not yet seen a past budget to comment on.
I have reviewed http://groups.drupal.org/node/6943, and I think what webchick started is great. I also think the budget should be set for marketing (and everything else) separately from the brainstorming session. Make a reasonable estimate of what funds the association will have for the year, then prioritize all the cool things listed in the brainstorming wiki for what actually gets funded.
What strengths/experience you have to help you accomplish the goals?:
I was licensed in Florida (I just recently moved) to transact in matters of legal expense, life and health insurance, and annuities. I have a master's degree in business and I'll hopefully complete requirements for Certified Financial Planner in 2008. I don't like credit, and I'm a regular listener of Clark Howard and Dave Ramsey. I did note interest in the Treasurer Assistant position, however if only one person may act in that role, I will bow to out Ryan.
How long have you been using Drupal, and how'd you get your start?:
I first found out about it when Dries sent me a beta copy of the code that went on drop.org along with some benchmarks against Thatware (http://sourceforge.net/projects/thatware), the CMS I wrote between 1999 and 2000. Drupal beta loaded pages in 0.1 of the time it took Thatware, and my attention immediately started drifting away from Thatware and towards Drupal. I've been using Drupal on live sites since 2004.
Have you made existing community contributions, and if so, what?:
My list of Drupal contributions (http://drupal.org/user/972) is long enough to not re-post here, but can be summarized as contrib modules, patches to contrib modules, and mentoring for Google projects. I'm trying to write a Drupal book chapter and a dissertation for my Ph.D. in instructional technology.
How much time can you invest in your Drupal Association work?:
10 hours/month
Apply for Board of Directors membership:
Apply for Permanent Membership only
Board of Directors position:
Treasurer Assistant
Statutes:
I have read and understood the Statutes of the Drupal Association. I am prepared to participate by following those statutes.
Comments
boring stuff...
Hi David,
I think you wrote a great application, and I think maybe you could be the glue between the accounting and the fundraising parts of the Association. However, I was wondering whether you would be willing to help me with some rather boring, and more "insignificant" jobs as well. I'm looking for someone to help out with stuff like:
- checking CiviCRM memberships against the bank and paypal accounts
- sorting and filtering paypal history exports and generating summaries of donations, memberships, payments, euro balances, dollar balances, ...
- manually adding donations (and updating memberships) on association.drupal.org when people don't use paypal
- answering questions like "can I pay by wire transfer as well"
- writing invoices
- finding a good way to safely archive invoices and other financial documents online to make the archive less dependent of my laptop and my various backups
- subsequently archiving these documents
- ...
thanks,
Dries Knapen
Treasurer
that's me - boring
With the exception of the last three, those items sound perfectly within my interests. I feel like I should expand on that somehow, but really, set me up.
Document archival seems like something that ought to be on an association server. If it were me, I'd probably setup an barebones, no-frills, OpenBSD machine with just SSH open, RAID1 some disks together, and not worry too much about anything but the disk size and that it gets backed up. That's really something to coordinate with the infrastructure team and use what they're more interested in managing.
There are services like http://www.strongspace.com/ (which I use for my personal backups) that would also offer GUI-fied multiple accounts to get to the filesystem, but I'd rather not spend DA donations on that if we could get someone's old server with a slower CPU, not a lot of RAM, and just some upgraded disk space to house at OSUOSL. Then again, maybe Joyent would donate an account and space on their backup service and then they'll manage the servers. Either way DA would be depending on the generosity of OSUOSL or Joyent, which either could withdraw at any time anyway.
The backup thoughts are just brainstorming, but if I'm admitted, I'm assuming there should be some sort of intermediary place to store shared financial docs. I am able with GPG and have S/MIME certs, but using IMAP for large scale transfers of data isn't sustainable.
Good application.
Good application. I'm wondering if it leans closer to "Fundraiser assistant" (donations, fundraising) than to "Treasurer assistant" (bookkeeping, liabilities) though.
true
I did indeed intend treasurer assistant, though now that you point it out, I see the overlap. I guess I imagined having involvement in each, though the bookkeeping is still more interesting to me.
Wow, excellent app!
I think you cover many areas that the existing Association members either don't have expertise in, or don't have time to do as effectively as we might like. The thought of having a person dedicated to this (esp. someone with an actual business degree ;D) sounds great to me. I don't really have anything else to add.