Aaron Winborn
Mon, 01/07/2008 - 18:27 — aaron
What is your motivation for being a member of the Drupal Association?:
I plan to continue to give back to the excellent Drupal community. I am deeply committed to the dual visions of Open Source and democracy, and the Drupal Association has the potential to be a strong flagship for both. I want to be there to help with the heavy lifting sometimes required.
What are the primary goals you would like to work on?:
I would like to help with the newsletter, and helping to flesh out general marketing ideas. In the short term, I would like to see the Association continue to improve both its own visibility, and that of Drupal's. In the long term, I would like to see the Association help make Drupal as essential to the web backbone as Apache and PHP.
What strategy will you employ in order to accomplish said goals?:
I would like to help schedule a regular newsletter, ready to publish 2-3 issues in advance when possible. As a developer with Advomatic, and with a constant connection in the various Drupal IRC chat rooms, I am in perpetual contact with some top-notch developers and themers, and can help find authors for articles and tutorials.
What yearly budget would you need in order to accomplish said goals?:
With donated time, the budget for creating a newsletter is almost nothing, unless and until we choose to advertise on commercial sites or magazines in the future. Once we take the step of advertising, that can run anywhere from $500-10000+ per year. However, I think it important to coordinate that step with people experienced with marketing and budgeting.
What strengths/experience you have to help you accomplish the goals?:
Before working with Advomatic and Drupal, I taught at Sudbury schools for about 8 years. A large part of this work was community outreach, both by introducing people to the Sudbury model of democratic education, and by editing and writing newsletters.
How long have you been using Drupal, and how'd you get your start?:
I have been working with Drupal into my third year, and was developing for the web for nearly a decade before that. I started freelance, and then joined the Advomatic team as one of its first employees at the end of 2005.
Have you made existing community contributions, and if so, what?:
I have contributed and helped to maintain several modules, including Embedded Media Field (integrating third party video, images, and audio as a CCK field), Views Slideshow (a jquery plugin to turn any view into a slideshow), Drupal RPG (a series of modules being developed to create online RPG's), and Magnifier (integrating a jquery image zoom into Drupal). I have helped debug and patch Drupal and its contributed modules over the past couple of years. I continue to help people when I can in the forums and chat rooms. I am writing the book "Drupal Multimedia" with Packt Publishing, which is planned for release this summer. As a former staff, board member, and present parent of a student of a Sudbury school, I have much experience in working with a democratic organization, and believe this makes me a strong candidate for taking this new step with the Drupal community.
How much time can you invest in your Drupal Association work?:
11-15 hours/month
Apply for Board of Directors membership:
Apply for Board of Directors membership
Board of Directors position:
Communications coordinator would make sense. As I understand things, this could easily be a shared position.
Statutes:
I have read and understood the Statutes of the Drupal Association. I am prepared to participate by following those statutes.
Comments
Work on newsletter so far?
There have been several kicks at the can with this, the main issue has been consistency. What is your plan (other than your listed connections) to consistently fill the newsletter with quality content?
Did you mean this to be a board-level position? I think any of the permanent members and members of the community at large could work with a BoD "Director of Marketing" position in order to get the newsletter out. Your application is quite short to be looking at the larger goal of an entire marketing / communications plan.
That being said, I recognize your work and know that you've been a great contributor.
Proactive Editing
Thanks for your comments, Boris. I apologize for not being more complete in my application; due to the number of applications that people have to sort through, I figured that brevity would be most helpful at this stage of things.
I singled out the newsletter as a focus for my application because I've identified that as an essential piece of communication that currently seems to be lacking. I would work with Robin, Trevor, and other folks involved with the process to help kick start that, and I believe it will take some concentrated effort in the beginning. We would need to meet a few times during the first month or so to work out the details, such as defining roles, refining the schedule, recruiting writers, assigning tasks, etc.
Once a newsletter were in place and smoothly running, I would work with others in the community and in the board, probably in tangent with the Director of Marketing, to identify other areas that need focus.
I should note that I plan to be involved with the newsletter regardless of my presence on the Board. I also believe that I would be a valuable member of the Drupal Association, and that my experience will be an asset for the Board.
Thanks,
Aaron Winborn
Love it
Especially that Drupal newsletter!
I also really like the background in democratic organization and the demonstrated module development, as well.
If I were already a permanent member, I would definitely vote in support!