Drupal is one of the largest and most active open-source projects in the world, and the Drupal Association is responsible for enabling it to thrive by creating and maintaining tooling and other projects that keep Drupal humming. Though many in the Drupal community and outside it see the Drupal Association only as the organizer of the global DrupalCon conferences each year, the Drupal Association is, in fact, responsible for some of the most critical elements that sustain Drupal as a software product, including localizations, updates, security advisories, metadata, and infrastructure. All of the "cloud services" that we work with on a daily basis in the Drupal ecosystem represent fundamental functions of the Drupal Association.

In recent years, the Drupal Association has launched several features that reinvent the way developers interact with Drupal as a software system, including DrupalCI (Drupal's test infrastructure), Composer Façade (in order to support Drupal's adoption of Composer), and Drupal's ongoing migration to GitLab for enhanced source control. For many years, Tag1 Consulting has supported and contributed to the Drupal Association not only as a key partner in visible initiatives but also in the lesser-known aspects of the Drupal Association's work that keep Drupal.org and the ecosystem running. Though we've long provided 80 free hours of work a month to the Drupal Association, we're proud to announce we are expanding this commitment by 50% to 120 pro-bono hours per month (75% of an FTE). In addition we have also made a donation toward #DrupalCares' $100,000 goal.

In this special edition of the Tag1 Team Talks show, we introduce a miniseries with the engineering team at the Drupal Association, including Tim Lehnen (Chief Technology Officer, Drupal Association) and Narayan Newton (Chief Technology Officer, Tag1), along with Michael Meyers (Managing Editor, Tag1) and Preston So (Editor in Chief at Tag1 and Senior Director, Product Strategy at Oracle). In this first installment, we dive into some of the mission-critical work the Drupal Association performs for the Drupal community with the support of Tag1 and other organizations and how they represent the lifeblood of the Drupal project as well as its continued longevity.