The Ura Team
Working remotely can be comfortable and productive at the same time, but some time getting together with your co-workers, having coffee,discussing, brainstorming… is also good to have from time to time.
At Ura we all work from home, so we have our "Ura work week" every 6 months as a way to bring the team together. While our daily/weekly work often requires us to collaborate with one another, the fact that the whole team have had the chance to meet, makes this process much easier.
We had our first working week this November where all gathered in the city of Tirana. We would start our meetings in the morning, usually by having breakfast and some coffee first and then start working accordingly with our pre-made agenda.
The first day started with some photoshooting for the whole team which was quite a fun experience, and everyone had an updated profile within the day in all the platforms we use for our daily work. We spent the first day mostly by going back to what we had been doing so far, what had gone good and what could have been done better. As everyone shared their thoughts, we started planning what our next steps would be. While going through this process, feeling confident about we had achieved and also a bit challenged for what’s going to be next, we were all very optimistic and motivated to keep doing our work and find ways to be more creative. We had already been searching for an alternative which would help us to better organize our work and while looking for the different options, we decided to proceed with GitHub as a task manager and have our whole working process fully in the open.
Being a new company that promotes openness and believes in open source values, we wanted to be fully open too, about the way how we operate, how we work with our clients, how we get resources and support from different organizations and the future projects we plan to be part of. We believe that by working in the open, we are part of a more productive and transparent process especially because we have constantly been getting support from people and organizations, some through our Patreon donators but also from other sponsors and supporters. We also believe that in this way we can also get feedback from other professionals in the field and this can help us improve our work daily. Just as it happens with other open source projects, we give something and get something else back. This is our repository for our tasks management which you can feel free to take a look at and share your opinions and thoughts with us if there is any topic you are interested at or related to.
We also decided to switch to Mattermost as a tool to communicate. As we always try to find open source solutions for every choice of platform we make, Mattermost as an open source, self-hosted approach resulted as one of the best options for us since it offers more control and privacy, which we all value so much.
Of course, there were many other side activities during Work Week. We all went at the cinema together, had dinner and drinks and a great time as well.
So, now what?
We plan to collaborate and work this way now on, share our knowledge with other people and keep spreading the open source love. More efforts now will go for our brand new product, Identihub, an open source and self-hosted software to manage and share your brand and visual assets which is keeping all the team very enthusiastic for what’s to come.