Community contribution

Here's a quick heads-up on our contribution to the community.  I was going to put together a page in the site for this, but felt it was better to put it here as a blog.

We think we've now settled on a good balance between fee-earning work and those other things a business should do to contribute back to the communities it belongs to.

This is how it works for us:

We dedicate 10% of the production team's time to working on community tasks that they agree with us. This is the equivalent of a full afternoon a week but we use our time logging systems to manage this - so it might be the odd hour here and there - or a full week of someone's time in one go.

The tasks range from building and supporting selected charity sites, through to developing modules and themes for Drupal (the Drupal open source community develops the software that lies at the heart of every site we build).

Current work includes rebuilding the Children in Crisis charity site. We've also recently launched the Concrete Space charity site and the FRU (Free Representation Unit) site.

In addition, we're developing a major new Drupal theme and a new module that allows Drupal to switch content depending on which Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign sent the visitor - very useful for those of us who use PPC to advertise.

All-in-all this adds to the mix of work we do in a very positive way. It gives our team a little more control over their time and more to talk about at the end of the day.

So having mentioned it here - Jan, Martin, Reece - get those projects live so people can see what we're talking about!