Liip has a tradition of company-wide gatherings. As a company whose office locations are spread across Switzerland we want to make sure people know each other, and of course we also want to benefit, as a company, from the knowledge we constantly create with our work in Lausanne, Fribourg and ZĂŒrich.

One of the formats we find useful is the Techday, a yearly event where we learn about technical or business topics during the day, and celebrate together at night. This time, however, we thought that opening that format up and share forces with our friends from Mayflower could make it even better. They operate in a very similar way as we do, but are located in WĂŒrzburg and MĂŒnchen, Bavaria.

Connect, Share, Build

So in late September 130 people from a combined five office locations of the two companies met in southern Germany for a two-day Barcamp. The format of Open Space was chosen in order to allow all participants to get the most out of the event, according to everyone's individual needs and interests.

The Barcamp's claim: Connect–Share–Build made it clear that three separate goals of equal importance stood in the center of those two days: First, meeting with people, making new friends and celebrating together can be seen as the foundation of all working together. Second, to exchange ideas, discuss problems, develop strategies: we also wanted to learn from each other and discover new things together. And then, we of course also wanted to work together on concrete things like Opensource projects or maker projects.

Lasting Results

Despite a slight scepticism from some people unfamiliar with self-organising events, we were blindly trusted with setting up the Barcamp this way. And it paid! Not only did literally everybody work basically non-stop from arrival time at Thursday noon through midnight (with a few culinary breaks) – most of us also celebrated together through the night and nevertheless were back to work for another one or two sessions in the morning.

So during two days, 130 people of all roles within our two companies were invited to think and work together, but nobody was required to. We were even explicitly encouraged to socialise and celebrate together. There was no central instance to control the way things happened or what people did. So what some may have expected from a such a setting came as a surprise to many: the Barcamp turned out to be, as many participants pointed out, both incredibly intensive and rich in terms of what was learned and accomplished—and, at the same time, a social event and celebrations to remember for long.

Images © 2013 Marcel Hauri (1, 2) and Tiziano Rullo (3)