Upstream went to Maine

January 22, 2009 by alex

We went to Maine” well, close. To evaluate the past year and make plans for 2009, the Upstream crew recently spent a weekend together. We stayed in a holiday home right on the North Sea coast where we enjoyed the frosty weather and a cosy fireplace. Everyone brought about three cameras on average. This resulted in heaps of pictures with “naturey crap” (the amateur is speaking). See by yourself on Flickr, Tumblr and KommtMit.

Our CEOs Alex and Thilo gave a presentation about Upstream’s past year. Then, our aim was to outline what Upstream should do in 2009 and how each of us wants to get involved: How much we want to work and for how much, which technologies we want to learn, does it make more sense to attend conferences or to get involved in various open source projects? We collected our ideas and discussed some of them further.

Next to talking business, we wanted to get to know each other better, so everyone had also prepared a presentation about a non-technical topic of interest:

• Alex introduced us to Sailing, "the most expensive way of travelling inconveniently".
• Matthias talked about Photography, what else!
• Katrin gave a talk about how to recycle old consumer items by turning them into furniture, showing examples from ecoble, WebUrbanist and Lockengeloet, Hamburg.
• Thilo shared his Pen and Paper Roleplaying Game experiences by reading from his hero's diary.
• Frank talked about Screamo, his favorite kind of Hardcore/Punk Music, with many sound snippets!
• I presented Rhythms of Resistance, a network of political samba activists.

After all those fun sessions and walking around at the beach taking pictures of every grain of sand it wasn’t so easy to get back to work but we managed” As a first result we are today relaunching the upstream website presenting our new software development/consulting products: Lift Off, Scene Investigation and Turbo Boost. More on this in another blog post.

For further reading about our weekend see what Mathias wrote.

This entry was posted on January 22, 2009 by alex.