Passion Time at OpenProject: Turning passion into benefit

It’s time for Passion Time: It’s that time of the year when we spend two weeks on topics that are close to our hearts. We call them passion projects. Passion is actually one of our company core values. We believe that working together on an open source project should make an impact and also be fun.

Why do we have Passion Time at OpenProject and what is the goal of these projects?

There are some frameworks that usually guide our regular work and creativity in the team:

• We are usually planning our roadmap quite carefully and well ahead of time.
• We are doing a lot of feature development for our partners and have external dependencies.
• It is not that easy to quickly add a new feature to the next release.

Our team is one of the best sources of ideas and inspirations on how to make life easier. It is not only the Product team that comes up with great new feature ideas. Ideas also come from Sales, Support, Marketing, Operations, Finance, QA, and of course from the Software Engineers. We work with OpenProject every day and we all have great ideas in mind how to improve the software itself to ease our daily (project management) life, our admin life, our processes, or other organizational topics.

Great ideas thrive in a great environment

For working outside the regular box, we also need a new surrounding. How do we want to spend our Passion Time? What are the rules?

This year, we decided to meet at ungleich.ch’s Hacking Villa Diesbach in Switzerland, from 19. - 23. June 2023. We found this great place because they are hosting our Matrix chat. That’s a great coincidence: A wonderful and inspiring place in the beautiful Swiss mountains with nice people that share our values: Software should be free and open.

We have put together rules that guide us through our projects:

• The passion projects need to be completely finished (i.e. merged) within the 2 weeks.
• Try to work together in a team with other colleague. You can get support from Design/UX/Marketing if needed.
• Either work fully on only one idea or follow multiple tiny ideas.
• You can also choose to help out in multiple teams.
• Take it as an opportunity to add value to areas where you usually would not get into.
• You decide how much you want to participate, especially non-devs, if you have to much going on ATM.

In order to involve other people interested in similar topics, we pitched our ideas to the team before the Passion Time started.

What we achieved so far

During our last Passion Time we started some great initiatives that evolved over time and now became an integral part of OpenProject.

Some of the former projects that have been initiated from the team during Passion Time:

• Time tracking via a widget on the MyPage
• Notification center to avoid floods of emails
• OpenAPI to improve the API documentation
• Design system documentation using Storybook

Open source development is also about being free and independent. It is about empowering users to thrive and implement their own ideas. I am missing this feature so I am developing it and share it with the Community.

This spirit is what our Passion Time is all about! We will be sharing the new ideas we are working on during the course of the projects. Looking forward to sharing more of our projects with you. With open source and open mind.