drupal association

Now that the Drupal.org redesign is underway, Neil Drumm is currently collecting suggestions for what a revamped Drupal Association website might look like.

The current website was created in a few days back when the Drupal Association was first founded in 2006, and hasn't really received a great deal of attention since then (shoemaker's children, and all that). The current site's content can basically be distilled into three things:

1. Outdated news you already heard somewhere else first.
2. Give us money.
3. Legal mumbo jumbo.

Unfortunately, there is very little emphasis on "awesome stuff the Drupal Association is working on and how you can help." That's something I think we need to change, to both help give the community assurances that their money is being spent wisely, and also to give the larger Drupal community on-ramps to directly help the Drupal Association members achieve their mission of supporting the Drupal project.

Here's a wireframe I came up with at Way Too Late O'Clock that needs a whole bunch of work but is one approach:

The idea is to both emphasize larger spheres of responsibility that the Drupal Association has, and also highlight both what's happening NOW as well as an archive of what we've achieved in the past.

How about yourself? Do you have thoughts on what you'd like to see in a revamped Drupal Association website? Want to play wireframe ping-pong? I'll collect any responses given here and send them off to Neil on Wednesday, March 19.

In case word hasn't reached you yet for some reason, Summer of Code 2008 is a go, and this is the week for college/university students to submit applications to work on projects for their mentoring organization of choice over the summer. Our hope is of course that a whole bunch will choose Drupal, which is an awesome, knowledgeable, and fun community to be a part of, and very supportive of SoC students (I know, because I was one myself back in 2005! :D).

As part of my duties for the Drupal Association, I help to administer initiatives that help bring in new contributors, like Drupal's involvement in Google Summer of Code. A huge thanks to the admin team -- chx, cwgordon7, and dmitrig01 -- for their tremendous efforts in getting the program kick-started!

We're trying something new this year that we haven't done in years past: public community review of student ideas and proposals, prior to their submission as formal applications for Summer of Code. There are multiple reasons why we chose to "beta test" this approach, which I will detail after the break.

However, for those who want to help bring new contributors to the Drupal project, and have a hand in deciding what new awesome projects get funded over the summer with Google's multi-thousand dollar investment, please jump in and help review some student proposals! The absolute deadline for student applications is Monday, March 31, 2008 at 17:00 PDT, so it's imperative that students get their questions answered and their proposals reviewed and refined as soon as possible so they have ample time to get their applications in.

Just a reminder for all those in Drupal-land that on January 15th we'll be holding the very first General Assembly, where the Drupal Association permanent members will vote in a new round of permanent members and a new board of directors will be selected. This is the first time we're going to be admitting new members beyond the initial folks who helped review the statutes, so it's a pretty exciting and important event.