The Drupal Association General Assembly met on March 2 to elect new Permanent Members and select a Board of Directors. The Assembly elected six new Permanent Members from the thirteen valid applications that were received:
Following the election of the new Permanent Members, the entire General Assembly (including the newly-elected permanent members) met to select the Association’s Board of Directors. The Assembly voted for each board applicant. The position of President (held by Dries Buytaert) and Treasurer (held by Jacob Redding), were not up for election this term per the Association's statutes.
The following existing board members ran for a position on the board: Angela Byron (webchick), Tiffany Farriss (farriss), Larry Garfield (Crell), Cary Gordon (highermath), Gerhard Killesreiter (killes), and Kieran Lal (Amazon). Permanent member Laura Scott (laura s) also ran for a board position focusing on membership. All were elected.
The Drupal Association thanks everyone who ran for election this year. Look forward to hearing more about the Association’s ongoing initiatives in the coming weeks, and how all members of the community (not just those in the Association's General Assembly) can play a part in helping Drupal flourish!
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The Drupal association permanent member candidate submissions are due on Monday. Many candidates are applying to be elected as permanent members but I wanted to highlight non-elected members who do a lot to help the Drupal association. This is not an complete list of people who volunteer for the Drupal association, but a sample.
If you want to help support the Drupal project, the Drupal association may be an organization you can work with to have a significant impact on the Drupal project. If you would like to help, please contact me.
The Drupal Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping the Drupal community with funding, infrastructure, events, promotion and distribution. The current Board of Directors was elected almost a year ago, so it's election time again!
On March 1st, 2010 we will elect new Permanent Members to the General Assembly. The General Assembly will then select our Board of Directors, who are responsible for oversight of day-to-day operations. All the details can be found in the Drupal Association's Statutes.
We are looking for people who aspire to become Directors on the Drupal Association's Board and who can provide leadership and experience to expand the reach of the Association and its activities. All current Board positions, except the President and Treasurer, are up for election, including Secretary, Legal Officer, Marketing and Communications, Infrastructure Manager, Fundraiser, and Events Manager.
The Association is also looking for new General Assembly members with skills in marketing, drupal.org webmaster coordination, project management and more. People interested in becoming a Permanent Members are invited to apply. While Permanent Members don't have the defined responsibilities of board members, membership implies a commitment to work for and promote the goals of the Association.
The Drupal Association is run by unpaid volunteers and we expect that our board members will spend a considerable amount of time working on Association responsibilities and obligations. If you think you're a good candidate, and you have the time it takes, find an existing Permanent Member to support your candidacy (i.e. find a supporter) and submit your application. Applications are due by February 22nd and on March 1st, we elect the new Permanent Members and the new Board of Directors.
If you have questions, don't hesitate to ask them in the comments, or to contact the Drupal Association.
As promised, here is the recorded webinar on SEO for the Drupal.org redesign.
A couple of weeks ago we prepared to do a live webinar and take questions from the community about Drupal.org SEO. Unfortunately, I was not familiar with all the features of our webinar software. The result was that no attendees were able to attend the webinar, and the webinar was recorded in a proprietary format. Fortunately, Forest Mars was able to decode it and so I've now made it available.
If you have questions about Drupal.org SEO feel free to ask them in the comments below. The folks from Volacci will gather them up in January and respond when they are back from holiday.
If you are interested in helping to implement the Drupal.org redesign, we certainly could use some help. Don't hesitate to contact us.
Next Wednesday, Dec 9th, at 12PM EST we will be hosting a webinar to help educate the re-design implementers on Drupal.org SEO techniques. All interested members of the Drupal community are welcome to register and attend the webinar.
We received word that people were unable to log into this webinar. We have recorded the webinar and will be posting it shortly for feedback
Drupal.org re-design implementers recruitedWe have now recruited 12 different Drupal consulting shops to help implement the redesign. One of the big challenges in implementing the redesign, is understanding what are the implications for Search Engine Optimization.
Drupal.org lost it's Pagerank of 9In September 2007, we launched copies of Drupal.org to help with the upgrade to Drupal 6 and our re-design efforts. The infrastructure team was contacted by members of the Drupal community who expressed concerns that these extra copies of Drupal.org were accessible by search engines. Soon after we were contacted Drupal.org's Google page rank was reduced from 9 to 8.
Drupal.org was now the only major open source content management system with a page rank of 8 or lower. Wordpress, Joomla, and Plone all kept their page rank of 9 during this period. Earlier this month, Drupal.org's page rank was increased from 8 to 9. The calculation of page rank is not fully understood outside Google, and the implications of a reduction of pagerank aren't necessarily damaging to the Drupal project. To help the implementers understand the SEO implications of the changes to Drupal.org we sought out help with Search Engine Optimization with Drupal.org.
Over the last few months I've been meeting regularly with the Drupal search engine optimization experts from Volacci. We've done keyword research, analysis of drupal.org for SEO, SEO analysis of the redesign prototypes, and developed some social media strategies for the Drupal community to help with Search Engine Marketing. If you would like to learn what we've discovered and understand how you can help with the redesign please join us at the webinar.
For the last year the Drupal.org redesign has progressed quietly and steadily. Almost 200 people have participated in the redesign by commenting, discussing, reviewing, testing, designing, theming, or writing code to get it done. We have had 6 re-design sprints (2 in Europe and 4 in the US) and built significant infrastructure to get the redesign development and staging ready for the community to make the final push. We are now asking Drupal consulting shops to step forward and help us implement one section of the redesign.
Many of the most important features are already available such as search, or improvements to the project module. In order to get the redesign completed we've reviewed the design and identified the minimum viable product for drupal.org.
A minimum viable product for Drupal.org means deciding what are the most essential parts of drupal.org that will go live when the design is refreshed. It also means defining what will be finished off after the initial launch. The remaining features will be designed and prioritized based on feedback from people who visit the site.
To understand how we selected the minimum viable product it is important to revisit the intent of the redesign and understand the motivations of the people who use drupal.org. The most important motivations were:
The minimum viable product must have the most important user journeys re-designed. For 'new users', they consider the movement from Home to About/Why Choose Drupal and/or or Get Started the most important user journey. So we must have those sections of the site done. For ‘existing’ users the primary user journeys are to specific content via search/search results and to monitor content/issues/discussions/news etc. In the redesigned site this navigation will be done via the dashboard. The dashboard must have this basic navigation for the minimum viable product. Currently, existing drupal.org users use bookmarks, and they use the URLs which they have memorized to navigate around drupal.org.
If you want to review the motivations for the minimum viable product please read the re-design post about new users and existing users, and insights into the drupal.org design strategies.
We also wanted to take a more analytic approach and review the most common paths. We turned to Google analytics and reviewed two reports, the Top Content Detail Path report and the top content detail navigation report. This gave us 50 paths to review to ensure the new site worked before we launched the redesign.
What needs to be done:The design deliverables from Mark Boulton Design lists approximately 25 landing pages. Many of those pages are quite complex and need both custom programming, additional theming, and content. To help get these pages done, we've evaluated the complexity of these landing pages 1(easy) through 3 (complex).
We are also asking Drupal development firms to step forward and sponsor a page. For each page, we request that a rough evaluation be started by Dec 1st, and a goal of completion by Jan 15th.If you are interested in sponsoring a page, please contact us using the "Implement part of the drupal.org redesign" category.
We have two project managers who will be helping to coordinate the efforts. They are myself, and Lisa Rex. The project managers will work with the contributing development shops and the existing contributors to the redesign to help it be completed. We also will work with Dries to coordinate how drupal.org will evolve.
We have also recruited a new redesign infrastructure team that has been managing and updating our ten development and staging sites. We are still recruiting administrators for that effort and I'll blog more about the progress we are making soon.
Redesign page Effort Score Notes 1.
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