OpenBand

It’s not often we’re able to get all of our team members from Openband and our collaboration partners together for a combined productivity sprint. In fact, DrupalCons probably make up half of the time we all (person-to-person) get to actually see each other in a given year. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we capitalize on any chance possible to push as much work into our meet-ups as possible.

A “Geek Week” in Openband lingo is a time all of our developers, designers, managers and writers get together to really geek out. It doesn’t take much room—all we need is enough power supplies and a (mostly?) reliable wireless connection—but the time we get to spend together really ramps up our process. More than a few of our more powerful products have come from brainstorming or code sprinting during these week or two-week long sessions.

Last summer, for example, we met in Stuttgart, Germany. The first week of June, a flock of Openbanders converged at the Hotel Gloria in Stuttgart, ready for a 120-hour push of productivity. That particular Geek Week saw major proof-of-concepts and even release candidate demonstrations for Openband projects like XMPPClient, concepts regarding account and profile privacy needs, GIS integration, Email, the beginning to the File Framework module, among many other advancements. This time around, we’re seeing not only polishing touches on some of our contributions to the Drupal CMS but also focusing in on a few pieces of functionality we can potentially break out of our client products and give back to the support community.