Enhancing our engagement with the Drupal community

Over the past five years, PreviousNext has steadily increased its commitment to the local Drupal community through funding local events like DrupalSouth, DrupalGov and Drupal Downunder, and were instrumental in bringing the first official DrupalCon to the Southern Hemisphere for DrupalCon Sydney 2013. In parallel with this, PreviousNext's dev team has been noted as one of the top 10 companies globally contributing code to the upcoming Drupal 8.   

Our attitude is that Drupal’s future success is intrinsically tied to a strong local community, and as a company we’re committed  to ensuring that remains the case. 

Enter Donna Benjamin, aka Kattekrab, aka Little Ms Drupal. Donna has worked for the open source community, behind and in front of the scenes, at a local and global level, over the past decade. This has included a Directorship of Open Source Industry Australia, President of Linux Users of Victoria, advisor to the Ada Initiative (Women in Open Technology) and, most recently, as a board member of the global Drupal Association, the non-profit that oversees Drupal’s community governance.  

Possibly stemming from her experience as a theatre director in earlier years, Donna has been involved in organising large open source community events, including linux.conf.au, Open Source Developers Conference, Software Freedom Day, Drupal Downunder Melbourne, DrupalCon, Libre Graphics Day, OpenEdge, and the Australian Computers in Education Conference.  

Having collaborated with Donna on Drupal events and projects over the years, she was the natural first choice when we at PreviousNext started considering how we could cement our longer term commitment to the community.   

Our notion for a role responsible for community engagement is twofold: To ensure PreviousNext’s own community related activities are well coordinated; and that broader community events, training and other activities get the attention they need to be consistent and of high quality.  

Donna’s community focus will be paired with Drupal consulting and project management for PreviousNext clients, and provide us with a permanent presence on the ground in Melbourne. 

Welcome aboard!