Dries Buytaert

Recruiting for the Drupal Association

The Drupal Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to help the Drupal community with fun­ding, infra­structure, events, promotion and distribution.

Since we launched the Drupal Association in January 2007, roughly 9 months ago, we (i) improved the drupal.org infrastructure, (ii) we helped organize two international Drupal conferences, (iii) we established a relation with an accounting firm, (iv) we funded Drupal's presence at FrOSCon, (v) we started setting up fundraising campaigns and partnerships, (vi) we are close to launching a Drupal Association membership model, etc.

By January 2008 we have to elect our second Board of Directors, and so I figured this would be a good time to start soliciting for candidates and nominations. Despite the progress that we have made in 2007, we would like to ramp up our professionalism and activities in 2008.

We are looking for people that want to become a board member, and that can provide leadership and experience to expand the reach of the Drupal Association and its activities. Specifically, we are interested in people who can provide leadership in the following areas:

• Legal issues
• Marketing
• Communication
• Event coordination
• Local user group coordination
• Drupal.org (redesign) coordination
• Changing the world
• ...

Currently, the Drupal Assocation is solely run by unpaid volunteers and we expect that our board members spend up to four hours/week working on their Drupal Association responsibilities and obligations. In other words, we are looking for people that are committed to help support and drive Drupal's explosive growth.

If you think you might be a good candidate, or if you want to nominate someone other than yourself, please let me know in the comments. I'll make sure to loop you in as soon we worked out the official nomination and election process/timeline.

Drupal training videos

Hagen Graf, author of a German Drupal book, recently donated 700 EUR to the Drupal Association. This money comes from a German Drupal 5 training video that he made together with Video2brain. For every copy they sold, 1.25 EUR was set aside for the Drupal Association, and over the course of six months, this added up to a 700 EUR donation.

If you do the math, it is easy enough to figure out that they sold 600 copies in 6 months. So not only did they contribute 700 EUR to the Drupal Assocation, they also helped 600 Germans to get started with Drupal. A double hit!

Assuming that the above is correct and given that the DVD sells for 39,95 EUR a copy, it means that this German training video generated roughly 24,000 EUR in revenue. I don't know how much of that is left after they extract all the expenses, discounts and donations, but it does make me wonder about the potential of a Drupal training video recorded in English ...

DrupalCon Barcelona wrapup

On my way home from DrupalCon Barcelona ...

Executive summary: DrupalCon Barcelona blew my socks off.

I have yet to process all the inputs but these are some of the highlights:

• September last year DrupalCon Brussels had 150 attendees. Exactly one year later, DrupalCon Barcelona had 450 attendees. We tripled in size.
• There were 84 presentations but I only managed to attend 6 of them ... I've been really busy.
• I've been to Barcelona before, but I was instantly reminded about what a great location Barcelona is.
• Adobe relaunched their Flex showcase using Drupal and announced it on stage at the Drupal conference. This will go in history as the first strategically timed release/announcement at a Drupal conference.
• Sun Microsystems was a gold sponsor and is working on integrating Drupal and Java (legacy) applications as well as industrial grade deployment of Drupal sites on SAMP (Solaris - Apache - MySQL - PHP). Impressive technology!
• NowPublic is going to help drive the development of regression tests for Drupal core. They hired testing talent Rok Žlender to write these tests in the open and hope other people in the Drupal community will start collaborating.
• Raincity Studios committed to helping us redesign drupal.org.
• Robert Scales (CEO of Raincity Studio) wants to organize a Drupal conference in Shanghai, China.
• There were more Drupal users from Belgium, than there were Drupal users from The Netherlands. This might be the last time as the Dutchmen made plans to do more outreach in The Netherlands.
• Robert Garrigos, Bert Boerland, Dries Knapen, the Drupal Catalan user group, the Drupal Association and Citilab did a great job organizing and facilitating this conference. Thanks!

Wanted: Drupal book authors

I've recently been contacted by a number of publishers that are actively looking for Drupal book authors. Packt Publishing sent me such a request today. They would like to hear from Drupal users any Drupal book ideas they may have and would like to see published, even if a proposed book caters for the needs of a smaller section of the Drupal community. They are also interested in hearing from any Drupal user who is interested in writing about Drupal, whether they have a specific book idea or not. If you have a book idea or if you are interested in writing about Drupal, let me know in the comments, and I'll introduce you to the right people.

The cool thing about Packt Publishing is that they have a lucrative Open Source Project Royalty scheme. From all the Drupal books published to date, the one from Packt Publishing generated the most royalties for the Drupal Association. That alone gives me sufficient reason to publish their call for Drupal book ideas and Drupal book authors.

State of Drupal 2007 survey

Each Drupalcon, I try to provide a State of Drupal presentation to communicate our current Zeitgeist and to share my ideas about what I think is important for Drupal. Next month's DrupalCon Barcelona is no exception.

This time around, I'd like to do something slightly different, and incorporate direct feedback from all Drupal users, contributors, developers, evaluators, and everyone else who has an interest in Drupal's future.

Whether you are a long-term Drupal developer or a recently joined new person to the Drupal community, I'd like to invite you to take part in the State of Drupal 2007 survey that I created. The goal of the survey is to better understand our needs, and to help prioritize our efforts. If you can't attend DrupalCon Barcelona, don't worry; I'll make sure to share the results after the conference.

The Luck of Seven

On 07/07/07, Drupal contributer Noel Noneck left New York City for a 7 month journey around the 7 continents of the world with a budget of $7,777 USD.

One of the goals of his journey, affably named The Luck of Seven, is to document Free and Open Source Software -- and the Drupal story in particular.

Armed with a set of cameras, Noel wants to profile the Drupal community through stories, photos, videos and ultimately, a documentary movie released in 2008. He is donating 25% of the profits to the Drupal Association.

Last night, on its way from Paris to Amsterdam, Noel stopped by in my home town Antwerp and couchsurfed here for one night. He just left this morning, and is on its way to Amsterdam to meet with Andy Smith (aka termie) ...

He is still looking to interview and meet more Drupal users, Drupal programmers, Drupal designers, Drupal evangelists and Free and Open Source experts around the world so drop him an e-mail if you want to tell him your story, or if you want to learn more about his journey.

Noel Noneck (aka Noel Hidalgo) on a terrace in Antwerp.

Noel Noneck (aka Noel Hidalgo) in a subway station in Antwerp.

DrupalCon Barcelona

This post is long due but I'd like to invite everyone to join us at the next Drupal conference held in the beautiful Barcelona (Spain). It will be a 4-day conference from September 19-22, 2007. More information is available at the DrupalCon Barcelona website.

Every year, we try to organize two main Drupal conferences; one hosted in Europe and one hosted in North-America. This year's North American event took place at Yahoo!, and now the European event will take place in Barcelona. (I'd love to do a third annual Drupal conference in Asia or South-America.)

Being one of the main Drupal events, DrupalCon Barcelona will bring together hundreds of Drupal users and developers from all around the world. Whether you are a Drupal professional or an enthusiastic user coming to find out more, you're invited to join us in Barcelona.

Kudos to the Catalan Drupal user group and the Drupal Association for taking on the organizational work. It's great to see that others do a much better job organizing a Drupal conference than I ever did. For example, I don't think we ever managed to open registration three months before the conference when I was a (co-)organizer. Good job!