In the middle of the year, terrestris will be 20 years old. We want to take this opportunity to bring important events and projects out of the darkness of the past and put them back in the spotlight many years later. Today, in the second article in this series, we want to report on our past major strategy meetings.
Today is about our major strategy meetings, company outings, or whatever you want to call them. For us, “major strategy meeting” means that we invite all employees to spend a week in a beautiful place and use this time away from day-to-day business to pursue ideas, work on existing solutions, or gain insights into how to improve internal collaboration or processes. In the background, however, the aim has always been to promote the cohesion of the team as a whole and, in addition to having a good time, to give everyone the opportunity to get to know each other better.
It all started with the idea of working with the developers for a few days away from the office. Our choice at the time fell on Mallorca. Hinrich then approached me with the idea of adding a sailing weekend to this code sprint. When our catamaran was finally loaded with food and a lot of drinkable things, we set off under Captain Paulsen. However, some of the sailors, uh – colleagues, had probably underestimated the power of the moving ship. Slight to moderate queasy feelings in the stomach prevented the plentiful beer supplies from being even remotely emptied.
Our first trip to Mallorca (2011) was followed by further major strategy meetings to Croatia (2013), Portugal (2015), Barcelona, Spain (2018), Bonn (2020), although this was due to Corona, and finally Peloponnese, Greece (2021).
From my willingness to be the cook, the tradition grew of also cooking for the employees at the following strategy meetings. Smaller impressions of what this means can be found here and here. While this was initially a rather light finger exercise, the challenge grew with the number of employees, which ultimately led to us laying down our arms at the last strategy meeting and visiting one of the many taverns on site in Greece every evening.
The highlight of every strategy meeting is always our social event. In Croatia, we were completely re-dressed for this and rafted down the Cetina Canon, divided between 2 boats. After all, on arrival we were still as numerous as on departure. In Barcelona, the younger colleagues turned night into day and didn’t take the last bus in the evening, but the first in the morning. In Greece, there was a hike to a tavern in the mountains with live music and a lavish appetizer buffet.
In addition to great experiences and a team spirit that was almost palpable, especially in the time that followed, a lot of ideas and projects have also been realized at these strategy meetings. First and foremost, our OSM WMS, which has been publicly and freely accessible for years, was born in Mallorca. Initially only a Germany-wide service, it was expanded in the following years first to the DACH region, to Europe and finally to the whole world. Furthermore, software projects such as GeoExt2 (Mallorca), SHOGun2 (Portugal), react-geo-baseclient (Barcelona) were born at the strategy meetings. In addition, however, further important internal decisions were made for us, such as the switch to the Redmine ticket system in Croatia and the internal “Project ID”, which is still important for all project matters today, was invented in Portugal. Here and there, somewhat more bizarre ideas were discussed, from which nothing useful was ever born.
Overall, it can be said that strategy meetings are among the highlights of our company culture and that the atmosphere in and around the office immediately after these always seems to be a little better than it already is.
