What makes up the entirety of DigitalCube Inc. is not only limited to 14 members, but it also includes our activities in the community.
We began in 2006 and we believe in open source and its ability to change the future for the better.
Starting with one, we built and grew our team with this passion for open source, always keeping its vision in mind when we make our services public, when we design our products and when we interact with other members of the community.
“We’re in love with Open Source.”
This is one of the slides of our CEO (preferrably HBT “Happy Beer Taster”), Hiromichi on his recent trip to Korea for the very first AWS Korea User Group (AWSKR UG) & Japan AWS User Group (JAWS UG) joint meetup.
His talk, “Contributing to Community: Why It’s Important to your Business” sums up our activities in WordPress, Amazon Web Services and different contributions to open source.
Introduction
Our efforts in WordPress landed us.
We were also grateful for receiving Amazon Web Services Advanced Consulting Partner.
Our team works from either home, coworking space, mountain, beach and their preferred location to work.
We are proud of being a distributed team working remotely from any corner of the globe. It shows our team strength, our unity, our ability to bridge the gap, communicate well despite of differences in languages, timezones and locations.
WordPress + Amazon Web Services
WordPress on Amazon Web Services is our main business model.
With all the platforms available in the world, why did we choose WordPress and Amazon Web Services?
WordPress is open source, powers over 25% of the web, it has a lot of users and demands from around the world.
On the other hand, AWS provides tons of tools and raw blocks to choose from and build into something great.
With WordPress & AWS structure combined, we were able to scale up our business and help other businesses to grow as well.
A small company and small team can accomplish giant projects.
We’ve combined our knowledge of WordPress & AWS and the result is AMIMOTO.
AMIMOTO is a tool created by our team for us to use, then we later on decided to open it to the public at AWS Marketplace.
It’s currently available in 10 global datacenters (Seoul included) and will also be available in another region very soon.
AMIMOTO provides a reliable WordPress & WooCommerce hosting service in the cloud.
With a few clicks, users can deploy a Single AMI (Amazon Machine Image), or one of our latest: CloudFormation (provides a template with necessary AWS tools that’s able to support large architecture and projects).
Growth through Community-Driven Development
Though we’re a small team and not all members are engineers, we were able to grow the number of AMIMOTO users by practicing a community-driven development that’s composed of 4 points:
1. Open Source
Making our AMIMOTO project open source and available to public changed the perspective of the community and how users utilize it.
The culture of open source changes how people react to a project, how it’s being used and how it can influence the way we use products now and in the future.
Our passion for open source reflects our Community Contributions:
- WordPress: More than a hundred of our plugins are published in WordPress plugin directory, downloaded over a million times.
- Amazon Web Services: We’ve published a total of 19 AMIs (Amazon Machine Image), 4 CloudFormations, 32 Github repositories.
We believe that opening the code to the public is not a risk, but a benefit.
By publishing the code to the public, everyone can use it, edit and add to their projects with confidence.
2. Community
By joining the community, we learned a lot such by contributing to the WordPress core, creating plugins, sponsoring (20 times total), speaking at WordCamps (69 times).
We made a lot of friends and partners from around the world.
Our team organized and hosted a total of 33 local and international hands-on training seminars and workshops.
JAWS UG event organizer (10 times).
In the last 4 years, our JAWS UG group members grew to over 1000.
3. Working on What you Enjoy
Opening the code to the public and supporting communities brings smiles to everyone (and of course allows you to taste lots of great beers!)
4. Share and feedback
Feedback is very important to us.
When we create services and products, we are inspired by the voice of the users and their needs.
AMIMOTO ranked in top 76 out of over 4000 products.
This is due to people’s comments and feedback on the services. It tells us what’s good, what needs to be changed and what we can add or remove in our next releases and so on.
Summary
Contribute
source culture makes the world better.
Community
A strong community is the foundation of great products and services.
“Everybody can copy the code; Nobody can copy the community.”
Continue
Continue contributing, one step at a time.
Communication
Communication is oxygen. Respect each other, accept diversities.
“Don’t sell to the community. Sell through the community.”
