Our goal is to have approximately 50% of our hours provided by staff outside the core team. In recent years this has been closer to 20%. In order to reach our 50% goal, we created the Contributor role, which combines the flexibility of freelancing with the community and team feeling of an in-house role.
Our current Contributors are some of the best in the industry. They add additional capacity to our team so we can do bigger and more ambitious projects. They can add specialist skills that we don’t have in the Core Team.
Working with Contributors gives us a quick and easy way to try out working together, which can lead to a Core Team engagement eventually. Similarly, some Core Team members may want to shift to Contributor sometimes, to fit their life goals better.