Who, what, when, where and why

Behind the scenes at Sourcecamp 2014

Everyone has an origin story. Cultures have complex mythologies of being born of the earth or sea. Dad has that corny story about how he met Mom. Families have tales about how they survived hard times.

We had the opportunity to revisit our own origins recently at our annual Sourcecamp retreat, which we held this year in Mokra Gora, Serbia.

Time was short, but we managed to renew our energy and refocus our purpose. We are still only beginning the process of reviewing the many good ideas we cooked up, but a few themes stand out.

Our own origin can be tied to three qualities our founders set for Sourcefabric at the beginning: ‘Be open. Be reliable. Be beneficial.’ Those six words are going up on the wall.

We are proud of our diversity. We are 65 people spread across 12 countries, speaking more than 20 languages. The challenge for us then is to nurture that diversity while building a scalable operation.

At Sourcecamp, we applied our design thinking skills (and sacrificed many, many sticky notes) to find ways to resolve issues big and small:

• Where can we find points of integration between Sourcefabric projects?
• Is it really suitable for all Sourcefabric teams to go agile?
• How can we meet the challenges of being so widely distributed?
• What are the best ways to engage with the open source community?
• How can we better serve the customers of our customers?

And many more than we can list here. But mainly, it was simply good to see each other. Sourcecamp is the one time we get to bring everyone together in one place at one time. And we can’t wait to do it again.

Thanks to the staff at Kuestendorf who fed and hosted us; the team at Bon Voyage Travel Agency for their help in our teambuilding activity; the very patient and very professional Đorđe Đoković, who documented that whole event; and most of all thanks to our Belgrade team for all the organization in Serbia.

You can see more photos from Sourcecamp on our Flickr page.