The Dutch Drupal Foundation (Stichting Drupal Nederland) is excited to welcome three new board members and to have found a new chairman in Bert Boerland, a sales executive at SUSE. Bert is a well-known figure within the Drupal community due to his decades of dedication to Drupal. He founded the Dutch Foundation and blogs daily about Drupal and open source through various channels.

The board’s new members are Bart Vreugdenhil, information analyst at Finalist, Björn Brala, technical director at SWIS, and Esmeralda Tijhoff, internal Product Owner at DICTU. The board is delighted with this reinforcement and is already working hard on upcoming activities and initiatives like Drupaljam.

We asked the three new board members why they wanted to join the Dutch Drupal Foundation and what they most look forward to.

Esmeralda: ‘I am very happy that I was able to join the board. I am committed to a transparent government, of which open source is an important part. I also want to help strengthen cooperation within the Drupal community in Europe, for example, through regular online meetings of the European boards with the Network of European Drupal Associations (NEDA). That goes much better if you are part of a strong club such as the Dutch Drupal Foundation. I hope that with the Foundation, I can help the Drupal philosophy to grow in the Netherlands and beyond.’

Björn: “As CTO of SWIS, I have been contributing to the technical side of Drupal for years as a core maintainer of JSON:API. I am very happy that I can now also contribute to the Drupal brand in the Netherlands as a board member. In addition to my role as treasurer, I will work on more cooperation within Europe and the connection of Europe to the global Drupal community. Of course, my goal remains to ensure that Drupal remains the best open source headless CMS, now and in the future.”

Bart: ‘My first contact with the Drupal community immediately felt like a warm bath. It’s nice if you can contribute to maintaining the community. As an information analyst, I try to build bridges between business and IT. I constantly try to find the connection between the various stakeholders. In fact, we do the same at Stichting Drupal Nederland. We try to connect all the cogs of the entire Drupal ecosystem as well. What I look forward to the most are the various events, such as Drupaljam and the Splash Awards, to connect and connect developers, freelancers, software vendors, and customers with each other and with Drupal. After all, together, we are strong.’