Looking back
2019 is now history. At year’s ends, people tend to do retrospectives and make plans for the future. Our cooperative has lived and learnt a lot over the past year. With this blog post, we want to share some of it with interested readers.
A report from the management council
We have networked with other software cooperatives and above all, we had one thing in common: We all lack experience and expertise in the acquisition of new projects, as well as dedicated staff members who actually like doing this. Whereas we fully believe in our expertise as software developers, we are still not very good at promoting those skills and acquiring new clients.
After all, we are well occupied with satisfied clients that are pleasant to work with, but the prospect to a future with a uncertain order situation is what concerns us the most.
The attempt to apply for public tenders let us realize that the requirements are quite complex. Even preparing a qualified offer comes with substantial preliminary work.
We are growing
We grew once again and now we count 6 humans and a dog being part of our collective. That results in a fairly busy daily business here at our office which is terrific. The work climate is as good as you can wish for and we are happy to see how productive we can be as a (growing) team. If you think back just 18 months, when this company only consisted of two employees, this is quite satisfying.
Events worth remembering
We had some good moments in 2019, like the taz awarding us a contract to build their new Android app (publication pending). We are especially grateful for that client. Furthermore, our collective celebrated its first birthday in May, which we did by almost breaking the highscore for the “Secret Prison” escape game. It seems logic puzzles suit us.
Recently, we bought a lever espresso machine, which — after a little practice — produces delicious fair-trade coffee. All coffee-drinking colleagues report an improvement in their quality of life. It turns out the coffee produced by our comrades from Aroma Zapatista tastes also in this machine.
Looking forward
We made some new year’s resoultions for us as a collective. A smaller project for instance is supplying the Schloßplatz in front of our office with a stable, free WiFi. The access point in our window responsible for this so far seems to overheat occasionally.
Our internally developed software project (tba) does some decisive steps in MVP direction and should go live this year.
A more general goal for us is to promote and lobby for self-governing businesses. For instance by growing (further) and talking about our values and our business concept at public events. In order to solve problems of our society we believe it is necessary to change our ways to do business fundamentally. Democratizing the decision making in companies is an important step on that way.
Closing words
We draw a positive balance and are throughout happy about our decision to create a self-determined work place. Economically we are quite stable and we enjoy our work most of the time. At least for our collective we have an optimistic and excited prospect for the future. A happy new year to all our comrades and customers!