
Owen LansburyCo-Founder & Chair
PreviousNext builds open source digital platforms for large scale customers, primarily based on Drupal and hosted using Kubernetes, two of the world’s biggest open source projects. With our business reliant on the success of these open source projects, our company is committed to contributing where we can in relation to our relatively small size. We get a lot of questions about how we do this, so are happy to share our policies so that other organisations might adopt similar approaches.
We learned early on in the formation of PreviousNext that developers who are passionate and engaged in open source projects usually make great team members, so wanted to create a work environment where they could sustain this involvement.
The first step was to determine how much billable work on client projects our developers needed to achieve in order for PreviousNext to be profitable and sustainable. The figure we settled on was 80%, or 32 hrs per week of billable hours of a full time week as the baseline. Team members then self manage their availability to fulfil their billable hours and can direct up to 20% of their remaining paid availability to code contribution or other community volunteering activities.
From a project management perspective, our team members are not allowed to be scheduled on billable work more than 80% of their time, which is then factored into our Agile sprint planning and communicated to clients. If certain team members contribute more billable hours in a given week, this just accelerates how many tickets we can complete in a Sprint.
If individual team members aren’t involved or interested in contribution, we expect their billable hours rate to be higher in line with more traditional companies. We don’t mandate that team members use their 20% time for contribution, but find that the majority do due to the benefits it gives them outside their roles.
These benefits include:
All of these individual benefits provide clear advantages to PreviousNext as a company, ensuring our team maintains an extremely high degree of experience and elevating our company’s profile through Drupal’s contribution credit system. This has resulted in PreviousNext being consistently ranked in the top 5 companies globally that contribute code to Drupal off the back of over 1,000 hours of annual code contribution.
In addition to this 20% contribution time, we also ensure that most new modules we author or patch during client projects are open sourced. Our clients are aware that billable time during sprints will go towards this and that they will also receive contribution credit on Drupal.org as the sponsor of the contributions. The benefits to clients of this approach include:
Beyond code contributions, PreviousNext provides paid time to volunteer on organising Drupal events, sit on community committees, run free training sessions and organise code sprints. This is then backed by our financial contributions to sponsoring events and the Drupal Association itself.
None of this is rocket science, but as a company reliant on open source software we view these contribution policies and initiatives as a key pillar in ensuring PreviousNext's market profile is maintained and the Drupal ecosystem for our business to operate in remains healthy.
We're always happy to share insights into how your own organisation might adopt similar approaches, so please get in touch if you'd like to know more.