We here at Because We Can are big fans of open source and sharing. We love Blender, the open source 3D modeling software. We donate money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We release almost all our work under a creative commons licence, even our business plan. But one area you might not know is that we directly fund the development of modules for Drupal, the open source content management system.

While Drupal runs this public site you're reading now, we also use it 'behind the scenes'. We rolled our own agile production management / project management / Lean-ERP system using Drupal. Drupal, being very modular, can be extended and configured into whatever you need it to be. While we call this system "The Wiki" it's so much more than that. It's become a cornerstone of our business and how we work. And a big part of how we work is keeping track of time.

In the best traditions of Open Source, we reached out to one of the maintainers of a Drupal Module that's critical to our in-house system: Time Tracker. We hired Chris Hertzog of Codework Designs to help add some features we needed to the module. These features are then shared with everyone, given back to the Drupal community, so everyone wins. Which we really dig, as it's our goal to make the world a more interesting place.

Time Tracker is a nice, lightweight system that lets you track and log time on whatever Drupal Nodes you wish. Using it, we made a system that shows everyone in the company exactly where we are on all of our projects, how much time has been spent, how much time is left in the budget, and who's doing what and when. And it's all woven right into the same 'wiki page' that we use to manage and track information about the project. One lean, powerful place to help keep us on time and on budget so we can focus on what we love to do: making great things for great people.