Drupalcon SF Drupal Association Retreat Report

Summary

As the Drupal project and community have grown rapidly over the past few years, the mission and responsibilities of the Drupal Association have changed as well. To ensure that the Association continues to effectively meet the needs of the Drupal community and project, and to plan its efforts for the coming year, nearly all permanent members of the Association met after DrupalCon San Francisco for a day-long retreat.

Topics discussed included:

* an overview of the DA's budget and resources
* an exploration of the DA's mission and responsibilities
* defining the DA's top priorities for the coming year
* defining the organization's staffing needs
* improving the DA's decision-making processes and communication both internally and with the wider community

Coming out of this retreat, the Association identified five areas that it will focus on in 2010. The DA will work on other initiatives as well, but these items were deemed to be the ones that had the highest priority:

* Completing the implementation of the Drupal.org redesign
* Continuing to build a sustainable model for DrupalCons
* Improving internal processes and decision-making
* Hiring permanent staff to help the DA better execute on its initatives
* Improving the technical infrastructure of drupal.org

Below you can find an in-depth explanation of the process.
Background

The Friday following Drupalcon San Francisco, 23 Drupal Association members (some European members forced to join remotely due to angry volcanoes), including 8 of 9 board members, participated in a day-long workshop to focus on improving our efficacy as an organization. This workshop was led by a facilitator, Charmaine Ess of Partners in Scale, who has almost 20 years of international non-profit and for-profit experience, specializing in organizational strategic planning and operational efficiencies. The overall goal of the retreat was to get all members on the same page regarding our over-arching mission as an organization, from there extrapolate specific issues to focus on in 2010, and then to come up with strategy on how to achieve our aims.
Preparation

Prior to the retreat, a survey was sent to all Drupal Association General Assembly members, as ambassadors to the larger Drupal community, to get a general "feeling" for how people perceive the current state of affairs. This survey was filled out by 29 Drupal Association members, and consisted of 27 questions, focused around four main sections:

* Questions on the Mission
* Questions on 2010 Objectives
* Questions on Association Goals and Individual Goals
* Questions on DA Vision and Staffing

Additionally, supplementary phone interviews were conducted with all 9 board members.

Charmaine's overall finding was that we were all remarkably on the same page. And also, that we have some things to work on. ;) Read More