Weekly #29: Busy bees
You know when you’re planting seeds and you throw those tiny specks of life into the ground, you wait until they’re ready to come out, and then when they come you have a lot of plants growing at the same time? Well this is us this week! A lot of the things we have been getting ready to do are finally here!
In short
- Who runs the world? Girls (and Pedro)
- Collaboration down to the pixel
- Let’s get physical
- The prodigal daughter returns
- Daydreaming
In Long
Who runs the world? Girls! (and Pedro)
And we at komuhn have tones! For a while now we been wanting to be able to better showcase what our peeps here at Komuhn have been doing and all the skills we have combined, so we are finally putting together our portfolio in a new, shiny and awesome page — you guys will soon know just how much we can do. This was quite an exercise and it gave me a small emotional moment to truly understand all the great things KBI (komuhn before Inês) has done, all the potential it has, and it made me feel humble to be able to say I am now part of it. Soon enough you will be able to share some of this emotion I have felt when you realize all the cool work we have carried out and how, if you put your thinking hat on, you can imagine all the ways you can use us (but not abuse us).
Collaboration all the way down to the pixel
If you don’t know this by now, let me tell you: here at komuhn we live collaboration and openness, we breath collaboration and openness, we eat collaboration and openness, we are ALL about collaboration and openness, and we are always striving to find the best tools to help us achieve it.
Pedro had been looking for a while (said seeds mentioned above) into a way of implementing image manipulation and graphic design more collaboratively in our team and our projects and this week we had our first session on Figma (www.figma.com). This an amazing freely available software that you can use on your browser and as a computer APP, and allows you to have several people editing the same file simultaneously! We haven’t fully explored all its capabilities but so far we are very impressed with all it can do while being all about collaboration and openness such as ourselves! (I hope this point is clear now)
Let’s get physical
Before your mind starts wandering off into all sort of places let’s just make it clear: it is not what it sounds like! We are finally ready to take the plunge into finding a physical space for The Great Good Place. These last two month we have been focusing our efforts on building a tight community, getting our name into all the right hears, and creating a strong team (even though we are not fully clear what “team” means in this context yet), so we have been doing this job mainly remotely with a weekly flavor of face-to-face action during the open-spaces and now, from this week, “team” meetings too.
But recently we have been feeling the need to start something more tangible and start putting some of our ideas into action and have a place we can call our “war-room”. As Komuhn’s Modus Operandi states “if we need it and it does good we find a way to make it happen”, we are now fully immersed on a physical space hunt, which is awesome: it’s kinda like a huge city-wide egg hunt, except for grown-ups, and you find all the eggs but you don’t know which one is right, and when you do you can’t afford it, but still, essentially F-U-N! We would like a space where we can have children, and dogs, and focused work areas, and dirty workshops and not so dirty workshops, and a communal garden, a shared restaurant, and a cafe, and a library of things, and shared bikes, and… the list could go on and on and on but you get the gist of it — we want it all!
The good news is we do actually want to get our hands dirty in the process of making our dream space, so we are mainly looking for a diamond in the rough, which makes it a whole lot more interesting, so guys, if you are reading this and you know just the place for us in downtown Peniche, we are all eyes: drop us a line. In the meantime we will continue mapping all available spaces, contacting their letting/sales agents, walking around Peniche while we “work”, enjoying the sun, do a whole lot of dreaming, and preparing for another seed that has been planted a while ago and is now germinating: the city hall meeting about the space and the project! Unfortunately for you this is a great cliffhanger and the meeting is only happening next week, so there really isn’t much to tell yet, but one thing you can be sure: we will be bringing our best “bruns” (brain guns) forward.
The prodigal daughter returns
So there is something about me that you may or may not know: Despite my recent joining of a design team I am actually a PhD in Computational infection Biology, ie. I have spent many of my best years in academia! Now having said this I have also had my biggest heartbreaks in academia, and upon my graduation I vowed I’d never step foot in the academic world again, the only thing I’d ever wanted from another university again was distance!
Weeeell let me tell you: I’ll have to bite my tongue on that one now, and I couldn’t be happier!! The Great Good Place signed, a few weeks ago, a protocol with the local campus of Leiria technical school (seeds, seeds everywhere), and this week the sub-director of the school, Dr. Sérgio Leandro came to our open-space#6 and entered our special realm of never-ending-ideas. The conversation had a very dreamy tone but the actual ideas that came out of it were very plausible: There were talks about mixing food, science and lay audiences, there talks of developing apps to help the academic world AND the general public, essentially there were talks that made me excited to say “I was wrong” and made me reconsider my previous aversion of academia. We haven’t quite figured out all the details of these ideas, but whether you are an academia lover, hater or indifferent these ideas are sure to move you either way. Stay tuned so you won’t miss a thing!
Daydreaming
It may even seen anecdotal that we take the time to write specifically about “daydreaming”, as it is one of the things we do as naturally as breathing or having a heartbeat, and realistically, unless someone has a problem, no one really cares to read about how their heart is beating or how they have taken x amount of breaths this week, so this is not the type of daydreaming I will be sharing with you.
This week we have taken the time to envision the “D day” of the TEDxPeniche and to get a clearer idea of speakers and how to go about inviting them and ensuring the best and most inspiring talks for all our attendees. We have been lucky enough to have our dear mentor Norberto Amaral, who is the organizer of one of the best TEDx events in portugal (TEDxPorto), joining us for one of the sessions, and this was a great opportunity to drink from the knowledge-and-experience-font he carries inside is brain as far as these sort of events go. I feel like we have made some much needed progress into organising this event and having everything clearer and documented is helping the team morale! Again none of this happened overnight and this has just been another one of the seeds that grew-up over this week.
Now, all these projects are just like planting a forest! No matter how many seeds you plant there will always be some that won’t grow, some that will take longer than expected, some that just naturally have different growth times, and loads that grow together,but as long as there is ground you shouldn’t stop planting and cross-pollinating to generate more seeds. And we at Komuhn, as busy bees, that is what we always do.
Over and Out,
Inês
