Dries Buytaert

The Drupal Association sponsored 500 EUR (700 USD) to help the Hungarian Drupal user group pay for the venue of DrupalCon Hungary 2007 (pictures). They had a maximum capacity of 150 seats, and the conference sold out pretty quickly. In other words, the conference was a success, and it is great to see that the Drupal Association helped made this possible. Giving the Drupal community what it needs to flourish is exactly the goal of the Drupal Association.

To date, the Drupal Association's Board of Directors has been voting on sponsorship requests on a case per case basis. However, we would like to recruit an event coordinator that wants to manage a quarterly event budget. The Board of Directors would then approve the quarterly budget and the plan that requires the quarterly budget. We'd no longer vote on individual sponsorship requests.

So, part of the event coordinator's job would be to define the activities that we want to support and how we want to support these. It might not be an easy task as it will be impossible to distribute the available budget equitably among the many sponsorship opportunities around the world.

To further professionalize the Drupal event coordination, the event coordinator would also be responsible for providing visibility to Drupal events, for articulating best practices to event organizers, for making sure that Drupal is represented at strategic conferences, for shipping promotional materials around the world, for helping with the organization of the main international Drupal conferences, etc.

If this is something that interests you or if you have ideas or best practices to share, I'd love to read more about your thoughts and suggestions in the comments of this post.