This Corona year was exhausting, but somehow also beautiful. If you look closely, you'll see more teamwork than we've seen in a long time. Those who know us know that teamwork is very important to us. That is why we would like to take a reflective look back at various aspects of our cooperation that have made us happy.
Remote Work
We have a lot of experience with flexible workplaces, cross-time zone collaboration, and of course open source solutions that support this work. This year, we have been able to support many organisations and companies with this experience - be it with video conferencing solutions for events moved into virtual space at short notice, or with privacy-compliant tools for home offices and home schooling. To name just a few examples.
Clients as part of the project team
Our mantra at the start of the project: we see our clients as part of the team, in order to roll out a successful project together. We haven't just been living this since this year, but this year it became especially clear, for example in the remote work support, but also in a lot of mutual understanding for private exceptional situations.
This is what makes our everyday work so human, and we would like to say thank you again for that. Without you, it really wouldn't be so nice!
Volunteering
Giving something back has also always been important to us. We work primarily with free open source software and see it as our duty to give something back to the open source communities. We are committed to the CMS Garden e. V., the Drupal community, the OpenHAB Foundation and the Free Software Foundation Europe.
This year, our commitment "on top" also consisted of providing conference solutions. New collaborations have emerged here (for example with BBBatScale, with Mozilla Hubs), which have made us enormously happy. Open source communities are moving closer together.
But more importantly, you are connected with people who have each also gone through a challenging year while continuing to maintain their volunteer commitment. They were intense conversations that gave us all mutual strength.
Partner
We want to make our collaboration with other experts more visible. Because together we are more than the sum of our parts. This is also reflected in the Splash Award, which we won this year for a project in which we cooperated.
That's why we put a lot of energy into building up our new business division CoWAIN this year. Through this joint brand, we want to make it more visible that, in addition to IT competence, we can also offer a range of services that can be called "full service": thorough conception, modern design, audits, expertise in marketing, accessibility, automation, digitalisation and much more. More on this shortly.
Society
This year, however, it was obvious to all of us how important (and successful) it can be to work together to overcome a crisis. You can't wait for others to take care of it.
Be it the many unbureaucratic solutions that supported workers in their individually difficult circumstances, be it the vouchers we all bought from our service providers to help bridge the lockdown, be it the orders placed with local suppliers instead of global crisis profiteers. The saying thank you, not just at the supermarket checkout. The understanding of tense nerves.
We are aware that we were largely unaffected by the partial lockdown. Fortunately, our clientele was little affected by the economic impact of the Corona crisis, and thus we were not a link in a chain of service providers/suppliers that subsequently ran into their own crisis. In addition, our team members have all had practice with home office issues. We are grateful for this and hope that we have done enough to support others who were not so lucky.
All in all
We do not want to gloss over what was hard and exhausting. We want to share these thoughts in the hope that they will inspire and give confidence. There are still so many aspects of collaboration, whether without Corona or as Corollaboration. What would you like to contribute? Send us your thoughts on Twitter @gzevd
