How are you nurturing an ecosystem of “Specialised contractors”?

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WordPress, our spirit animal, is the golden standard of open source ecosystems. While Automattic (the company that essentially drives WordPress forward together with The WordPress Foundation) employs people in the several hundreds, WordPress is the source of livelihood for several thousands of WP workers, spread across companies and solo entrepreneurs.

So how do we compare? We’re not at WordPress’ level yet, but we’ve come pretty far!

  • Discourse.org (CDCK Inc.) currently employs 18 people (proper announcement of our many new hires is coming shortly) and we expect our growth rate to keep accelerating. :business_suit_levitating:
  • We’re aware of ~5 people that nearly or completely sustain themselves with Discourse-related work.

Hopefully in a few years the ratio between those two numbers will be flipped. The bigger CDCK gets, the better we can afford to invest in ecosystem improvements that don’t make a lot of economic sense in the short term but will improve Discourse’s sustainability & service offering in the long term.

:heart_eyes:

What are we doing to nurture this ecosystem?

We pass on any kind of work that doesn’t fit well with how our company operates

The Discourse Encouragement Fund

We also have some developers from the community effectively “on retainer”, doing medium-sized development gigs on a regular basis.

We hire from within

This is a bit of a double-edged sword (but a pretty awesome one either way). There’s a very simple incentive in “do great work within the ecosystem, and Discourse might hire you”. Yet every time we do that we remove another person from that outer circle that ought to be the biggest one! Again, this will be less of an issue as we get bigger.

What more can be done?

The list is in constant flux, and ranges from “any day now” to “maybe, if we get to >500 employees”.

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