2013 "At Large" Director Candidates

@starl3n: Agreed, the DA should be more distributed.

Nick,

Oddly enough, I didn't even notice that (shame on me). Although let's be honest about Drupal demographics: males are still a (large) majority. I think we're much better than other software projects in our f/m ratio. But clearly 1/18 is not a reflection of our diversity. Kudos to Aimee for applying.

About policy changes... I like to think of us as a egalitarian culture. In the next election round we should encourage a lot more people to apply, specifically mentioning the lack of 'voices' in the board from some regions and also the low number of female candidates (and the "it's complicated" also). I would hate to see a ratio set in policy, though.

Thankfully, there's already webchick, fariss and Danese Cooper in the non-elected-by-the-community segment of the board.

João

My company has picked up six significant Drupal projects in the last few months. Of these six jobs five of them are being primarily managed by women and the sixth is jointly managed by a male CIO and a female COO.

There is an overwhelming skew toward women in senior communications, marketing and web management roles within Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney - at least that is my experience.

Getting more women to participate in the community isn't about finding more female Drupal hackers, its about broadening the community engagement into areas where more women are already contributing significant value to the project.

What I will do from tomorrow is include the fee to join the DA as an organisational member in all of my project proposals. When clients ask about the fee I will tell them about the DA and encourage them to consider joining the community as an active participant in the project - even if all they are going to do is share their perspective in threads like this one.

In fact, as the membership fee is a trivial amount, I will discount our project associated fees accordingly and cover the first year expense for both the organisation and up to ten individuals to join the DA :) So, they effectively get the first year of membership for free.

I will also seek out contacts within all of the high profile deployments within Federal Govt and offer to sponsor their organisational memberships (I'll limit this to ten just to cover myself a little ;) ).

After that, I will lobby to try and establish the 'Whole of Govt' in Australia to become a supporting partner of the DA (ref: https://association.drupal.org/supporting-partners).

I can't guarantee this will bring greater gender diversity to the DA Board, but I suspect it will bring greater diversity into the public discussions which inform everyone within the community.

I believe the role of DA should be to act as catalyst, identifying emerging initiatives and throwing all its weight in to make it spread faster.

For example, we have Drupal DownUnder, a successful Drupal event that has been organized by the Australian/New Zealand community in the last few years. Identifying this emerging initiative and supporting it by having a DrupalCon in Australia is exactly what the DA should do. By support I don't mean taking over. I mean letting the community still organize the event independently, but help them to achieve the next level by giving them guidance and visibility.

A similar emerging initiative has happened in Latin America, which is the DrupalSummit Latino. But for DrupalCon Latin America, the DA took over the planning/organizing process of the event and didn't let the community participate until the last few months, when it was already too late. This is the reason why DrupalCon Sydney will succeed and why DrupalCon Sao Paulo has failed.

I like these current DA projects: Drupal Community Cultivation Grants and Drupal Global Training Days. I believe they provide incentives to the communities, but without taking over the process.

So summarizing:
1) identify emerging initiatives.
2) support these initiatives.
3) let these initiatives to remain free and independent.