A case study in how Drupal contribution is good for business: CI&T

This guest post comes from Paulo Herinque Cota Starling, who explains how CI&T made contribution to the Drupal project a central part of its work culture, and how that has improved the Drupal talent on their team and brought them more business. 

For four years, CI&T has made its mark as a top Drupal contributor in Dries Buytaert's report "Who sponsors Drupal development?".

In 2016, we created internal initiatives to get noticed by the Drupal Community with the quality and volume of our contributions. Today, we see the results of these efforts, with recognition as a Drupal leader and increased visibility for the CI&T brand through the Drupal marketplace. This commitment has directly helped us win new businesses.

To manage our efforts, we have an internal Drupal Competence Office (DCO), a team responsible for leading Drupal community contributions and building relationships with the broader Drupal community. The DCO operates as a bridge between the Drupal community and CI&T development teams tackling different pipes. DCO's developers are focused on solving various module issues and Drupal core issues, organizing and updating all Drupal training materials, and providing training support for new developers joining CI&T.

New DCO members who are not knowledgeable in Drupal often start working on less complex module issues. These new developers gain significant knowledge as they discover the modules available in the community, their structure, what Drupal offers out-of-the-box, how to extend its functionality, and how to search for information in various channels. We also often welcome new people at the DCO who are trained, contribute to Drupal, and are ready to work on a project at CI&T.

In addition to our Drupal team, we also undertake internal contribution campaigns, allowing all CI&Ters outside the DCO to feel motivated to contribute. These campaigns usually take place once a year and last approximately six months so everyone has an opportunity to contribute and be recognized. After the end of a campaign, people who made the most significant contributions receive awards. For this year's campaign, the first-place winner will take home a new PlayStation 5!

These internal campaigns are a win-win situation for both CI&T and the greater Drupal Community. Internally, we recognize the contributors while at the same time increasing the number of overall contributions made to the Drupal Community. Contributing to Drupal for the first time can be tricky. It's common for CI&T to run 'dojos' to teach everyone interested in getting a Drupal environment up and running quickly, creating or finding an issue, creating a patch or a merge request and reviewing the changes made in an issue. The participants can also collaborate with documentation, camp organizing, and support requests. 

Drupal has been a widely used technology in customer projects in recent years. In addition to being an open-source framework and significantly lowering our costs, CI&T's contributions to the Drupal Community help the company's business to grow. When talking to potential customers, we're frequently asked about our current contributions, which modules are we a maintainers of, and whether we help in core or not. If the client asks about this issue, we know it will be a significant factor when deciding whether to close a contract with CI&T or another company.

All our initiatives for the Drupal Community aim to increase our employees' knowledge so that they can work on projects, help win new clients and increase the overall quality of Drupal. CI&T, in turn, can continue to offer innovative solutions that meet the needs of our clients.

Editor's note: We at the Drupal Association want to congratulate CI&T on taking the initiative to put their Drupal Competence Office together within their organization. We believe that other organizations in the community can learn from their example, and create a rising tide of contribution to raise all ships in the Drupal ecosystem - building both better Drupal software, and executing better projects for Drupal clients.