[consulting] Drupal Association

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

> The elephant??? Drupal is huge and growing every day. It's struggling to
> appropriately welcome people in and help them find a place and a leadership
> position within the community. The Drupal Association, unfortunately under
> the jurisdiction of Belgium NPO governance rules


True. And the reason is simple: Dries is from Belgium and lives in Belgium.
He founded the project and the is a founding member of the association.


> is not as transparent as it should be: it's structure is just plane
> confusing to many.


The terms are confusing. The structure is not so.

There is simply a general assembly (GA) composed of members (called
"permanent members", PM, I will come to that later. New members are elected
every year. (I was elected to in the first round of elections in Jan 2008).
The GA elects the board of directors (BoD) who are the ones that have voting
power on decision, known as Board Members (BM). There are more details and
they are all in the statutes which are on the association web site in PDF
format in Dutch and English.


> The board and the permanent members do not have enough new blood, in my
> opinion.


New blood was infused in Jan 2008 and Jan 2009.


> The idea of "permanent" members is just plain bad in my opinion.


This has been brought up several times within the association, and there is
talk on changing that. As a matter of fact many aspects of the statutes are
being proposed for revision. They are not cast in stone and can be changed.

We like to hear your feedback, as well as others on all aspects of the
association.


> The custom more often found in North America of having board members rotate
> would be much healthier for the organization, in my opinion.


The board members have two year terms. ALL BOARD POSITIONS WERE UP FOR
ELECTION THIS YEAR, including Dries himself. The only exception was the
position of secretary (Angie Byron).

Anyone could have run for president. No one did, and Dries was voted (I like
to joke and say I was not sure, but voted for him :-) ).

Just for fun, and because I wanted to blog on it for a long time, but never
got around to it: Here is a breakup of the GA and BoD by geography:

The bulk of members of the GA and the BoD is North American. Heavy towards
USians and Canadians.

http://association.drupal.org/about/staff

For the BoD, Gerhard and Dries are in Europe, everyone else is from USA
except for Angie is in Canada (she is American too), and Jacob is in China
(also an American).

For the GA, Nedjo, Boris, and me are in Canada, and Kristof and Bert are in
Europe. The rest are all In the USA. Robert Douglass lives in Germany and is
also American.

So you can see that the USA is heavy in there, followed by Canada, then some
Europe sprinkled in.

Though Dries has set a wonderful example of welcoming input, criticism, new
> ideas... I don't think the members of the General Assembly, with many
> exceptions, have done as well. And I'm not sure whether Dries recognizes
> this problem.
>

We like to hear from you, and others, whether privately via the contact form
at association.drupal.org or other channels.

We realize that we should have better communication. But believe me, this is
not due to secrecy, it is due to other factors as we grow as an organization
and as we learn more.

There are plans in the works on better communication.


>
> How is all this relevant to the current discussion?


The Drupal Association's goals are many, and include the following:

- Promoting Drupal in general.
- Drupal Events (DrupalCon mainly, others in the work).
- Running the infrastructure for *.drupal.org.

What is NOT in the asscoiation's mandate is

- Dictating what code goes into Drupal's core or contrib
- Dictate what is supported or not supported.

These are all community driven, and the association stays clear out of
these.

Look at what Dries himself presented a couple of days ago on building
communities

http://buytaert.net/files/building-foss-communities-osbc-2009.pdf

Notable by its absence is the association.

Please ask any other questions that you (or others) may have, and me as well
as others from the DA will try to answer them the best as we can.
-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
2bits.com, Inc.
http://2bits.com
Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. --  Edsger W.Dijkstra
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. --   Leonardo da Vinci
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