foreign
[Music]
welcome to today's
last are we all good to go
cool hi welcome to today's last session
um business as usual as we've been
proceeding sort of throughout the
conference we've got 35 minutes of a
fabulous presentation followed by 10
minutes of questions so it's a pleasure
to introduce today's speaker called Owen
Lansbury with his presentation why a
culture of Open Source contribution is
good for your business with the
background in user experience design
Owen's focus is on sustainable business
and open source Community Management he
was a founder of the Drupal South
steering committee and was appointed to
the global Drupal Association board of
directors in 2019 just before the world
fell apart in today's talk Owen will
talk about how his company previous next
has a culture based around contributing
back to the Drupal open source project
and how this has helped the bottom line
over the years please join me in
welcoming Ellen thanks Amy
[Applause]
so that was half my talk done so thank
you
and I was a little bit worried on
preaching to the converter to the
conference like this but it's good to
see that there's a few of you sticking
it out to the last session of the day to
find out uh how a culture of Open Source
contribution can be good for your
business just a couple of other people
coming in now
so I won't run through too much of my
bio because we just heard about that but
previous next has been
based on building large-scale Drupal
websites for the past 15 years and we
also have a hosting division called
Skipper the t-shirt that I'm wearing and
it's based around kubernetes so open
source software has really permeated
every aspect of our business since we
founded but the focus of today's talk
will be on the Drupal side of things and
we made a really conscious decision to
be strong contributors to the Drupal
open source project and Community quite
shortly after we found it as a company
back in 2009 and as Amy said over the
past few years a lot of my own
contribution has been around Community
involvement working with Drupal South
which is our local conference and Drupal
South is also backed by Linux Australia
so all part of the same family and then
my role on the Drupal Association board
the Drupal Association is effectively
what the Linux Foundation is to the
Linux project just on a much smaller
scale and the photo here is from Prague
last year so there are a couple of perks
about being on that board
so in terms of what I'm going to talk
about today I'll quickly go through my
own open source Journey hi Donna
um and just in the context of how it
relates to previous next becoming a
major contributor to Drupal I'll talk a
little bit about drupal's open source
contribution model because it is a
little bit different to some other
communities and then I'm going to get
into the meat of why our company is a
strong contributor and then hopefully
through all of this there'll be some
ideas that you can take to your own
organizations or your own companies
so without going too far back
like many of you probably did my career
started in the very early days of the
web I Was A Fine Arts graduate so
generally a lot of my experience was
more on the design and user experience
side of things and I've really tried to
avoid mangling too much code through my
career as much as possible
and fast forward to 2007 most of my work
was as a user experience consultant and
mainly working with clients that were
building large-scale sites handling
large volumes of content and I kept
seeing quite a few common patterns with
how they were trying to manage their
content the first one they were paying
way too much to Big Enterprise platforms
from companies like Oracle the second
one was that they were still paying way
too much money to smaller companies that
were building proprietary platforms and
then going out of business and leaving
them stranded with unsupported systems
or often the worst case was that they'd
gone and built their own the cms's from
scratch and then they'll start
maintaining that with the very expensive
in-house team
and it was around this time that we did
see a lot of the the nascent Open Source
cmx Products emerge so Joomla it was
released in 2005. WordPress was released
in 2003 and both plone and Drupal
started in 2001 so my question to the
clients I was working with became
increasingly why aren't you using an
open source content management system
instead of the thing that you currently
are and through a process of my own
research
I did find that Drupal was the CMS that
seemed to have the best feature set for
what I was trying to use a Content
management system for and again because
of my lack of Dev skills it was the
system that wasn't getting hacked at the
moment that I installed it on cpanel
and I think what I was also seeing was
that internationally in North America
and Europe I was seeing that Drupal was
really getting adopted by similar
clients to what I was working with so
big media companies larger non-profits
kind of mid to large scale Enterprises a
lot of use in universities and then very
importantly government agencies and
departments and that was right up to and
including Obama's whitehouse.gov
adopting it in 2009 little bits happened
since then but I think drupal's use on
the White House site was really rocket
fuel for its adoption within government
now just remembering I'm not a developer
so I did enlist the help of my now
business partner Kim pepper to validate
that Drupal could do what I thought it
could do and despite him being a Java
developer looking down his nose at
something built in PHP he gave it his
tick of approval and now he's of course
a massive advocate for Drupal himself
and 2009 was also the year that we kind
of knuckled down and said all right well
let's form a company around building
Drupal websites for large-scale clients
and off the back of that one of our very
first projects was for New South
wales.gov.eu and we're still working on
the same site 15 years later still
running on Drupal and also being hosted
on now Skipper hosting platform
now importantly around that time when
we're starting our company we'd been
drawn to Drupal in large part because we
knew it had a dynamic Community around
it and as soon as we had some cash in
the bank from working on client projects
we jumped on the plane to San Francisco
to drupalcon which is one of the main or
it is the main conference in in North
America for Drupal and the shock of
seeing more than 20 people sitting in a
room talking about Drupal was quite a
revelation and we discovered at that
time that Drupal already had a
catchphrase of comfort the software stay
for the community and that's still the
case today and that first trip we used
it personally to meet a lot of the
people that were were responsible for
writing the code behind Drupal and
started that understanding of how we
could start contributing ourselves so a
big fast forward 15 years later a lot of
those principles that we put in place
early on around open source
contributions still apply today probably
even more so and I would say they've
been the absolute core of us being a
sustainable business through that time
and of course many of you probably seen
people still use Drupal
and I think like a lot of people outside
the Drupal bubble uh
um if you're not kind of embedded within
it you're not that aware of what's
actually going on within that Community
but I can tell you that Drupal is still
thriving uh in quite a big way so
WordPress is by far and away the most
dominant CMS across most categories but
Drupal has found itself running 10 of
the tops 10 000 most visited sites and
to put that into context it's more than
Adobe site called content full Joomla
plane and braco and kentico combined
and at the Drupal Association we've done
some work around calculating the value
of projects using Drupal each year and
the figure that we've put on that is at
least three billion US globally uh each
year so that's on par with what Adobe
earns from their digital experience
platform based around Adobe experience
manager so it's it's very easy to say
that Drupal is as because Adobe in that
context
um and while overall install numbers for
Drupal have tapered off in recent years
as smaller sites have moved to SAS
platforms uh that kind of drop-off is
consistent with most CMS platforms as
the markets become more Diversified and
different platforms are targeting
different sectors but the scale of the
projects that Drupal services companies
are working on these days has increased
massively over the past five years or so
and if you ask any Drupal company how
business is going the consistent answer
is great
and a lot of these tests success success
stems from the changes that were made to
drupal's architecture when Drupal
version 8 was released back in 2005 and
this was a really big deal in the Drupal
community at the time because up until
that point we had a lot of hobbyist
developers that were just using Drupal
to build smaller sites and Drupal 8
basically meant that you needed much
deeper development skills complex
workflows and we really pissed a lot of
small users off but that was very
intentional maybe not the pissing people
off part but moving to a more
standardized architecture that would
scale for these bigger more complex
websites and at the time drupal's
founder driest pitett from Belgium he
put a stake in the ground and said that
Drupal was for ambitious websites and
this is a little slide that he had at
the time and bearing in mind that around
2015 was the time that SAS platforms
like Squarespace and Wix and Shopify
really started hitting their stride and
started hoovering up a lot of those
smaller scale websites and while
WordPress actively targeted that smaller
segment with both SAS and self-managed
versions Drupal made this very conscious
decision to just Target the larger scale
projects as its specialization and who
is our main competitor in that space now
well of course it's Adobe and the
problem with competing with someone like
Adobe is that adobe spends about 2
billion dollars annually on their
product development sales and marketing
all of that information is available in
their their annual report but the Drupal
Association budget for this year that I
oversee is Treasurer it's it's 3.5
million so 600 times smaller
and that's just from One commercial
competitor that Drupal has in the the
CMS market and that market as a whole is
about 50 billion U.S annually so there's
a lot of attention on it but the good
news is is that we have continued to
evolve Drupal since Drupal 8 was
launched in 2015 and we just had Drupal
10 get released Before Christmas in 2022
and there's a suite of new features and
a modernized user interface that really
help us keep Pace with those commercial
competitors
now one of the big issues that we're
grappling with uh since Drupal 8 was
released is that the balance of
contributors have Ma has markedly
shifted from individuals contributing
their own time uh to people working
within organizations that effectively
sponsor them to contribute to the
project now unlike the Linux Foundation
the Drupal Association doesn't have 180
million dollars to direct a strategic
projects each year or have companies the
size of Intel Google or IBM all sponsors
of this event paying their teams on on
quite a big scale to contribute to the
project in the Drupal ecosystem we do
have one billion dollar company which is
Aquia also started by the founder of uh
of Drupal and it employs about 10 people
full-time to work on drupals so they're
by Far and Away the biggest contributor
to the project and the rest of drupal's
contributing companies like our own
some of them might be lucky they have
one person that's effectively full-time
working on Drupal contribution but most
of us are basically spreading our time
across climb projects as well but
despite that we've got about 7 000
individual developers who contribute and
that's backed by about 1200
organizations of course in that context
the 80 20 rule applies so 80 of the work
done is definitely done by 20 or less of
the people in that mix
um but it's very fair to say that
without companies like our own
sponsoring their staff to contribute to
Drupal the project really would have
died a quick death uh quite a long time
ago so the Drupal Association is in the
midst of trying to to boost this
um and there's things like the Drupal
certified partner program that I'll talk
about uh a little bit later that
contribute to that
so that the current mechanism that we do
use within the the Drupal ecosystem to
measure contribution is what we have is
a a credit system and credits are
weighted based on their importance to
the project so if you're writing some
code for a little extension module that
only a handful of sites use it's
obviously weighted far less than Drupal
core code that everyone benefits from
and we can track that within
drupal.org so you can see here this is
our profile page on drupal.org you can
see how many issues we've worked on the
past three months how many roles we have
within the project how many different
projects we support so things like
modules
um and then things like events that
we've sponsored so all of that's
trackable and from what we understand uh
this credit contribution system is
relatively unique in the open source
world and we've actually just been
collaborating with Git lab over the past
year to see how we can roll that
Paradigm into gitlab itself so that then
it can be applied to any other open
source project
now one of the main paradoxes that we
have with Drupal projects getting bigger
and more lucrative is that Drupal
services companies have had less
resources to actually dedicate to Drupal
contribution it's that classic chicken
and egg thing so to address this uh the
Drupal Association is just starting to
Embark upon assessing how we can have
strategic funding for Innovation
projects within the Drupal project
similar to the model the the Linux
Foundation has where there's funded
development of the course software now
this is no small task in the Drupal
Community because the Drupal Association
has always been very arm's length to the
actual software development it's always
been positioned as just facilitating the
community to go off and do the
contribution rather than actually
directing it so there's a lot of
historical reasons for that that I'm not
going to go into in this talk but there
is recognition that that model needs to
change now that the bulk of contribution
is happening from within organizations
like my own company
and it's not all plain sailing like any
software projects or Community drewville
has Myriad challenges that it needs to
address and that's everything from
competing with well-funded proprietary
platforms to just having an aging
demographic of developers who've been
working on the platform for 20 years
quite a lot happens in those 20 years
families
running businesses all of those types of
things and so they're not easy problems
to solve but the heartening thing is is
that people are going to keep needing to
manage content in the long term and
Drupal is still very well placed to meet
that need
so this brings me to why previous next
still contributes to Drupal
and the first point that I want to make
here is that long ago we did separate
any Notions of pure altruism from
commercial reality around our open
source contributions so for us it's
never just been a feel-good exercise we
do it because it makes a lot of business
sense for us and it helps our company
remain very sustainable in the long term
and it just so happens that our own
selfish commercially driven reasons also
help everyone else that contributes to
Drupal so it's a win-win and from that
perspective
um and one of the questions that we ask
ourselves is if Drupal disappeared would
we even have a business uh and as for
that reason that we've always had very
close involvement with the direction of
the platform because it has been
responsible for our business success and
long-term viability up to this point so
we could easily run a Drupal services
company that has zero involvement with
the project or Community plenty of
companies do that but from our
experience they don't tend to stick
around as Drupal services companies very
long because they never develop the
depth of expertise
to really deliver on a consistent basis
so the classic case is a client comes to
them and says hey can you build a Drupal
site for us they say yes they get maybe
one or two projects off the back of that
but because they don't have that depth
of expertise they move on to the next
shiny new thing for us as a company on
the other hand yes we could probably
retool if Drupal disability appeared
we've got a lot of smart people but
we're here precisely because of that
depth of expertise in Drupal and so
we've got a vested interest in ensuring
that the project as a whole is
maintained as a sustained long term and
from our perspective who is a client
going to choose to work with the one
that's got a couple of Drupal projects
in their portfolio or the one that has
people on the global Drupal security
team that contributes code to Drupal
core that's written and maintains
hundreds of truthful modules that speaks
at all the Drupal conferences and has
leadership in the governments of the
community so sure we'll lose on the
basis of price occasionally but we'll
never lose on the basis of expertise and
I think the really nice thing about the
drubal community is that it is a classic
democracy so if you're interested in
something you can get involved and just
get on with it it's not to say that
Drupal has a perfect Community free of
disagreements or politics but overall
overall we found it a very welcoming
place where help is appreciated if it's
offered and that's how we myself and Kim
pepper originally came into the
community and how we introduce our new
team members into the community as well
if they're Keen to get involved
themselves
um and four new staff that are joining
us uh that haven't been active within
the Drupal Community before joining us
we often use our open source
contribution model as the main method of
onboarding them and helping them develop
best practices in their own coding and
then using their involvement in the
Drupal project as part of their
professional development
and a big part of that professional
develop development is building
relationships and learning and mentoring
from people outside of previous next
we're a small company of 20 something
people so it really helps broaden the
perspectives of the team outside of what
we can do as a company ourselves and in
many cases our team members are working
alongside some of the brightest Minds in
open source technology and it's not an
exaggeration to say that many of the
smartest people I've ever worked with
have been through the Drupal community
um and in a similar vein working on open
source contribution does help team
members to maintain an interest by
working on things that just aren't your
run-of-the-mill client projects so our
own company we're quite pigeonholed in
terms of the types clients we work with
it's primarily higher education and
government
but if people are working on Drupal
contributions they're often scratching
different itches that they might have in
terms of technology and they're able to
work on a way bigger scale than anything
that we could do as a company ourselves
and a classic example that I always use
is one of our younger developers
maintains a module that's used on 125
000 websites and that's a huge impact to
have as a young developer and way
outsized uh beyond what we could do as a
company ourselves
um now in terms of expertise what we've
really honed in on is the notion of
expert driven marketing and we learned
quite early on with previous next that
spending money on traditional forms of
marketing whether it's paid advertising
or just putting sponsor booths at random
Tech conferences not this one really
wasn't relevant for us as a company in
terms of winning business and we quickly
found that referred projects from people
that considered us to be experts in
Drupal or where all the best
opportunities were coming from and why
do people think that we're Drupal
experts it's because all of our
marketing budget that we would have
otherwise spent elsewhere was directed
to getting team members to conferences
like this often talking about things
that were closely related to their open
source contributions and often doing
very deep technical dives into that so
over the years we've just embedded this
approach into how the team works so they
contribute Drupal and paid company time
they blog about it they submit talks to
conferences and awareness of us as a
company as Drupal experts is built and
maintained accordingly and one of the
funniest experiences I'll regularly have
is going to an overseas Drupal
conference mentioning that I work for
previous next and people go oh wow you
guys must be so big and I was like well
we're actually 20 people in Australia
and there's usually gasps of I'm not
sure whether it's shock or horror after
that
and just getting back to this notion of
a drivable certified partner program
like I said our open source contribution
approach is driven by pragmatic
capitalism we're not going to do it if
it's not going to win us projects
and one thing that the Drupal
Association has introduced in recent
years that I've been part of in my role
on the Drupal Association board is
developing as a certified partner
program where the idea is that we can
measure the volume of contribution that
individuals within a particular company
are making to the project and this then
translates into different tiers of
certified partner with varying levels
and of exposure and benefits
um and it's definitely been a big boost
for us as a company to be able to go
into a client pitch and say well we're
the only Platinum certified Drupal
partner in Australia and it's the type
of thing that most organizations put a
lot of value on and pay a lot of
attention to
and the final thing that I really want
to talk about in terms of why we do it
is employee retention so uh like I said
our investment open source contribution
is as much about our team's professional
development and as a small company we
probably can't compete with the big tech
companies in terms of Staff training
budgets and sending people off on
expensive courses all the time but we
can connect them into a community of
very smart engaged mentors to work on
complex challenging projects outside
their normal client work and we also
then use our local Drupal South
conferences as an opportunity to get the
whole team together in one place at
least annually so that's something
that's been very important for us as a
company even before covert we're very
distributed since covered we're
completely distributed and these are the
core elements of our company culture
that we in large part attribute to our
high rates of employee routine function
so I checked what it was just before I
put this talk together and we're
currently sitting at seven years average
tenure across the whole team and if
you're aware of what the stats are for
most large tech companies it's about
triple the average
and the benefits of us having such a
long-term stable team that's
consistently working together at just
immense and it was that high rate of in
employer retention that pushed us
towards starting an employee ownership
Model A couple of years ago there's a
whole nother conference talk in in that
but everything kind of moves towards
that as we have such a a long-term
engaged team
um so just in terms of specific
approaches that we take and things that
you might be able to adapt to your own
organization uh the key thing is that
everything is ingrained in our company
policies so the day someone joins
previous next they're given a a detailed
company handbook where all of our open
source contribution policies are laid
out and sure we have been through
periods where we took a more
laissez-faire approach to open source
contribution but our contribution levels
plummeted because they weren't being
mandated by the company owners and and
Senior managers within the business so
you do need to to have that ingrained
from I don't like saying top down
because they're all kind of owners of
the company these days but people need
to be given permission to to go off and
do it
um now one of the main components that
we adopted quite early on is the notion
of 20 time we stole that straight from
Google uh who were quite vocal about it
back when we started our own company uh
I'm not sure if they use it that much
these days I think Marissa Meyer said
that their dirty little secret is their
20 time is more like 120 percent time
um but I think importantly for us we've
always had quite a strong no overtime
policy to avoid this exact problem
unless of course there's a big emergency
luckily we don't have too many of them
and what the way that we achieve that is
that we only ever have team members
booked 80 on billable projects for for
clients and the onus is then put on each
team member to ensure that they're
meeting that 80 billable average so
people become very self-managed in their
time off the back of that and then we do
a lot of detailed tracking on people's
time to ensure that we're just
maintaining those average is do we force
people to do open source contribution
absolutely not so if people just aren't
personally that interested in it or
their role isn't that suited to higher
levels of contribution than we just
expect them to be more billable on on
client projects
but what we have been doing recently is
running full team hack days we had one
yesterday and they're a great way to get
everyone engaged on a very consistent
basis and even just spending a day
scratching an itch and trying to work
out something that's been bugging
someone for a while all of those things
then feed back into the the client
projects that we work on and also the
the open source contribution that we're
doing and I think the point to make here
is that the consistency of doing those
types of activities is key as long as
it's consistent and baked into the
culture then people know that they're
allowed to do it and are encouraged to
do it I think importantly we don't have
a tools down approach to this 20 time so
it's not like people work Monday to
Friday and then every Friday is uh
purely contribution time if Project work
does need to get finished it does take
priority and the way that we've been
able to measure it over the years is
that 20 time averages out over the year
as client work Ebbs and flows and I
think the biggest upside for us as a
company in all of this is that now we
have this incredibly robust culture of
time tracking of people self-managing
their own time we've got strong analysis
and Reporting around all of that and
that makes us a very productive
well-run company as a result
um another model that I wanted to talk
about is direct sponsorship so we do let
people contribute on paid company time
which is effectively sponsored time
where previous next is picking up the
cost of people's time rather than
expecting them to volunteer but a
trigger with the Drupal certified
partner program is that we need to
maintain a consistent level of
contribution to maintain our partners
here and while we haven't been too
concerned about meeting that we did have
an opportunity last year to guarantee
that contribution level by paying a
Drupal contributor who doesn't also work
on on previous next client work and we
adopted this model with a new
zealand-based developer some of you
might know Victoria spagnolo
and I'm sure she does a lot more
contribution in her own time but she at
least has consistent income from
previous next paying her for a minimum
40 hours a month to work on contribution
and then we get the benefit of those
contribution credits maintaining our
certified partner status and we have
compared the cost of doing that against
more traditional forms of marketing and
we definitely feel we've got a much
better return on our investment by
sponsoring her
um in parallel with sponsored
contribution we also bake in time in our
client project budgets to contribute
patches and new modules that we
developed back into the Drupal ecosystem
and that means that we've got a
consistent flow of code being
contributed back to Drupal that we would
have done anyway but we just made sure
that we understand our clients
understand the value of it being rolled
into their project budgets and that they
can even receive credits for it on
drupal.org as clients that sponsor that
development and that becomes more
relevant with large clients that are
looking to hire Drupal developers to
then point to the fact that we're a good
truthful citizen by having sponsored all
of this contribution already
um events and volunteering so non-code
forms of volunteering help us sustain
the project in other ways and all of our
budget and focus in this regard has been
focused on our local region
and we'll do things like sponsor the
Drupal South code Sprint paying for the
venue hiring catering and then mentoring
people and then like I said we have a
lot of team members speaking at Drupal
events sharing their knowledge again
it's good for us as company but it also
drives the the project forward and
related to this is community leadership
so as I noted earlier Drupal is a
democracy and if you just want to see
things happen you jump in and get them
done as Donna did for many years and
this has been a great way for me who
doesn't have coding skills to be able to
contribute myself and while these roles
can often be time consuming and
potentially frustrating they can be
incredibly rewarding and intellectually
challenging so we're walking working on
a small thing like a strategy for the
future of the Drupal open source project
at the moment
and then cold heart caches is the final
thing that we contribute so this mainly
comes in the form of paying our Drupal
Association uh
certified partner fees and all of that
goes to pay for the underlying
infrastructure that the Drupal
Association manages and most companies
they won't blink spending 50 000 bucks a
year with it lasting infinite jira
subscription
um but when it comes to donating funds
to an open source project there's this
strange barrier but we just view it as a
cost of doing business
and our total cost to the business uh
it's not something we obsess over and
track on a detailed basis but I did take
the chance to look at this before I did
this talk so our 20
internal contribution time that's about
a hundred thousand dollars in salary
costs that we have our direct
sponsorships and donations is about 50
Grand sending people to conferences
there's another 50 and then I'm sure
there's another 50 in there something
that we haven't been tracking that well
but the message here is that that's
about five percent of our gross revenue
and that's right on par with the bottom
end of most companies marketing budgets
we really don't have a marketing budget
beyond that and remembering of course
it's all tax deductible we've even used
research and development tax credits on
our open source contribution so at the
end of the day
is there really a financial cost to us
that's that's not really the way that we
look at it so that's probably a lot to
take in
um so I'm just going to end with three
takeaways to finish with uh the first
thing is Define your policies so start
with defining what your organization
policies are around open source
contribution do you have an agreed
proportion of time that people can spend
during their pain working hours do you
contribute open source code by default
on client projects that you're working
on
second thing is set budgets so do you
have a set budget to support events like
this to support your team to go and talk
at events to attend workshops and code
Sprints and then the final thing is
connect with your community so uh you're
relying on something
for the success of your business and
your involvement in that Community is
the absolute best way to keep Pace both
with the technology and then to maintain
a profile with both potential staff and
clients
so I think we're bang on time for some
questions if anyone has any
yes I think a round of applause that was
great thank you
thank you
does anyone have any questions about
Owen
so let's start over here
so thank you very much for a very
interesting talk so my question is
related to non-code contribution because
I know a lot of businesses that do code
related contribution but do you have a
policy in a way that you deal with uh
non-code contribution from people who
are not coders in the company and does
that also affect employee retention yeah
so the main thing that we have is
opportunities for people to volunteer
their time into the community into the
Drupal community so we've got quite a
few people that work as project managers
that at our event in New Zealand in a
few weeks time are there helping out on
booths and some helping with speaker
selection and and those types of things
we also have something written in our
handbook is that if there's something
that's completely unrelated to to what
we're doing in terms of software
that people want to contribute time to
that's on a not-for-profit basis then
we'll support that as well we haven't
actually found that people have really
taken that up but it is sitting there in
our our policy handbook if they want to
take advantage of that so
um but I think with any software
Community then there's usually a limit
of how much non-code contribution you
can actually do
yes question over here
I was just curious about the employee
ownership model could you tell us just a
teeny well funnily enough I've got a
whole nother presentation here
um where do I start with that
um so I think the thing for for us
having started the company having people
working with us over a long period of
time we did reach a point where it was a
case of thinking okay
um if we are now moving into our 50s and
scaling back from the business what does
the sustainability of the company look
like if we're not heavily involved on a
day-to-day basis long term and option
one is selling a company to someone else
we have been down that path a couple of
times talking to other companies that
did want to buy us every time the
conclusion was most of the people that
work for us would probably leave in the
first week if we sold ourselves and so
then we started looking into well what
does it look like if we moved to an
employee ownership model it has been
quite complex to do that in Australia in
the past so the tax laws in a very brief
summary meant that if you uh gave
someone shares in a company in Australia
they were taxed at the moment they
received that share option not when
those shares vested that's all changed
in the last few years and so it's opened
up a lot more opportunities and the
trigger for us was that one of our
comparable companies in the US went down
this employee ownership path a few years
ago and we we saw that that was probably
the model that we could follow so the
structure that we have is that there's a
an employee Trust
that has units that have shareholdings
within the company and then all of the
employees have a stake in that trust
so and there's a lot more complexity to
it beyond that but it's uh it's quite an
interesting model
yep
hello Owen thank you for a marvelous
talk and
um I I am thinking to myself as I I
listen to your um suggestions that this
sounds like a kind of solution
um for the problem that was raised by
Jeffrey in the last session about how do
governments
um understand or start to understand
software and open source methods so I
wondered if you could share your
thoughts on communicating those open
source methods and promoting visibility
and awareness of this community
back up towards government
organizations yeah so we've had a lot of
interaction with government over the
years through the the project work that
we've done drupal's got a huge footprint
uh within the Australian government at
all levels
um and it definitely has been a
challenge to communicate that
um we've done quite a lot of push over
the years to get them up to Pace there's
been little efforts here and there that
have had some success but there hasn't
been a cultural shift to it so it's it's
still something that needs to be
addressed long term
my own advice would be that any
organization whether it's a commercial
organization or non-profit or government
organization can adopt the kind of 20
time or 10 time or five percent
contribution time model very very easily
where there's a recognition that our
organization relies on this software and
without us more deeply engaging with it
at some point that software may
disappear from us and then we'll have to
move to something
that's going to be a lot more costly
and so I think having that approach is
probably the the simplest First Step
um and then beyond that engagement at
events like this
I can ask a question of my own so
um
your presentation was relatively well
defined and I think these are principles
that you've worked out over a long
period of time with a lot of iteration
yeah what mistakes haven't been included
in here so what sorry what did you try
that didn't quite make it into the
presentation yeah so like I alluded to
the moment that you take a laissez-faire
approach to well we've told people they
can contribute to open source so why
aren't they doing it
um that that's probably the biggest
thing that we faced early on where we
had said yep we've got this 20 time
policy but there was no active
engagement to say okay well how are you
using that time we don't direct anyone's
time necessarily
um so it's kind of up to people to
choose what they're interested in in
their contribution time
but we do have very regular
development team meetings where a lot of
the time they're talking about their
contribution that they're doing as
opposed to client work so just baking
that in into regular interactions and
Communications is the key and then like
I said making sure that it's very clear
that it's a a mandated thing that we
expect you to be doing and if you're not
doing it well what are you actually
doing with that 20 time and again all of
the tracking that we've kind of baked in
around that really helps us as well
where if we can see that someone's
tracking around 70 billable and we're
not really seeing that they're engaged
in any contribution then there's a
conversation to be had
um so all of that's really helped us
just refine our business practices as
much as anything yeah absolutely and I
think leading from the front you you
know yeah or something what you preach
as well yeah practicing what we preach
and um I mean like I said I don't like
saying it's a top-down thing but people
need to know that it's expected of them
as opposed to they've just been given
permission yeah
absolutely any final questions
I don't
um it seems to me as though you're I
think you said it early on that you're
sort of very wetted to the Drupal
Community yeah I don't want to for a
moment suggest that this might happen to
the Drupal Community but sometimes awful
things do happen absolutely
um best case you might end up with a
fork worst case the community might die
we've had a fork do do you have Disaster
Recovery plans for handling that kind of
thing so it's a very complex issue but
it's it's the issue that is constantly
talked about at a board level within the
Drupal Association
um and so I think the good thing for the
Drupal world is that when clients choose
to use Drupal they're making a decision
that's at least a five to ten year
adoption plan and that is definitely
related to working at the higher end of
the market
like I talked about the fork with or the
shift with Drupal 8 was a huge thing
within the community because all of a
sudden all of these smaller end users
felt abandoned and I won't say that they
were but I can understand why they might
have felt that way
um so I think it's it's definitely
around what are we doing to maintain the
pace of Innovation for the platform and
keeping it relevant long term and and
that's the primary focus of the Drupal
Association at the moment we've just
hired a new CEO that comes from more of
a product background there's a
recognition that the association itself
needs to get more involved in funding
strategic initiatives within the project
there's a recognition that drupal's
marketing as a whole could be existent
because it's
because it's not and we've got 10 market
share with zero marketing budget so
there's a lot of these types of issues
that we're we're starting to address
who we'll see how that plays out in the
next five to ten years but there is this
definite recognition that unless you're
actively engaging and working on it then
it can just dry up so
great well um we'll have to leave it
there because we've run out of time
thank you so much for your questions and
thank you so much for a fantastic
presentation so if you do want to ask
more feel free to talk to me afterwards
you can email me a blatant plug for the
Drupal South Conference in Wellington uh
17th to 19th of May if you're interested
in Drupal or not come and join us and um
enjoy the rest of the conference thanks
Ellen
thank you
foreign