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Greetings,
Harry here and this newsletter is about an absolutely rad project we worked on over the last months: The World Talks! It’s exactly what it says on the tin: You sign up by answering a short survey, get matched with somebody halfway across the globe and on the 25th of June you’ll meet online for a private 1:1 conversation to exchange ideas, stories, and perspectives.

I’ve already signed up myself, along with almost 3000 others from over 80 countries! The goal is to get participants from as many countries as possible, and you can track the progress on this little page we designed and built for the event: theworldtalks.org

Of course, a project of this scope involves countless people working behind the scenes: Kudos to the ever-inventive folks at ZEIT ONLINE who came up with this logical next step after Deutschland spricht and Europe talks, Sara and Hanna from My Country Talks for their tireless work to get this through the door, all the newspapers and media partners teaming up here, Super Keen for the event branding and Bitcrowd for developing new features for the My Country Talks software (which underpins the whole project)! On our side, we’ve done product ownership on the web app, worked on messaging integration, designed and built the event website and gave input during the conceptual phase last summer.

Dear readers of this little dispatch, 

this is the final issue of a mini-series of member interviews. During the past weeks, we've introduced the people behind Village One - one person at a time, in no particular order, giving you a little glimpse into who we are and why we founded this cooperative.

Now here is what Doro said when we asked her our questions:

We’re delighted to announce that our co-op has a brand new member! Sev joined us as a senior front-end developer and co-owner in May and will support this little village (truly) remotely from Ilkley, UK.

We asked Sev a few questions that you, our dear readers, are already familiar with, and this is how he responded:

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you, and what did you do before joining Village One?

Hello, we're back with the planned programming!

For four issues of this newsletter, we're introducing the people behind Village One – one person at a time, in no particular order, giving you a little glimpse into who we are and why we founded this cooperative.

This week, we asked Christoph our questions, and here is what he said:

Heya,
this is Harry from Village One! We are interrupting the regular programming for something exciting we launched this week: After six months of work we are overjoyed to see the new TypeMates.com website + shop out in the wild!

If you don’t know the TypeMates: They are a type foundry selling retail typefaces to you and me, but also working with big companies on custom type solutions. Last year they approached us about a website relaunch and we started work in October. They’ve been the best clients imaginable, taking a very active role in the process, obsessing over every little detail with us. They even did all the branding and interaction design themselves, and then we turned it into front-end/back-end code to bring it to life!

You can keep reading or watch me demo it all in this video!

Hi lovely subscribers, how was your week?

As we mentioned last Friday, we're dedicating four issues of this newsletter to introduce the people behind Village One - one person at a time, in no particular order, giving you a little glimpse into who we are and why we founded this cooperative. And if you liked our profiles and want to collaborate with us on a project, don't hesitate to reach out! We have some availability soon for projects and are always happy to jump on a call.

In the second instalment, we're introducing Harry, who is always optimistic and energetic! Let's jump right into his interview! ⚡️

Hello world, it's us again!

You last heard from us a while ago. We were not hibernating through this awfully long winter but focusing on our client work and also busy with hiring. Now that we've been wrapping up some client projects, we regained the headspace to resume this newsletter.

Over the following four issues, we will introduce the people behind Village One – one person at a time, in no particular order, giving you a little glimpse into who we are and why we founded this cooperative. And if you liked our profiles and want to collaborate with us on a project, don't hesitate to reach out! We have some availability soon for projects and are always happy to jump on a call.

In this first instalment, we're introducing Fei! Let's ask her some questions, shall we?

Hello readers!

This is what feels like the 78th day of January, and with this edition of the Villager’s Dispatch I am happy to report that we’ve finally made it through the month! At first I was not able to pin down the feeling I’ve had over the past two weeks, but then several people started pointing it out: This January just feels extreeemely slow. As if the clock’s batteries were drained; as if someone finally decided to take out some of the world’s speed. Not the worst thing, admittedly.

After we all came back from our holiday break, we gathered for a little retro- and introspective. We met in person (which does not happen very often) to discuss the current Village One setup, past and upcoming projects, and we talked about what’s good—and where we could improve things. When putting up the following Post-it, I was not sure if I should place it on the “Good” or the “Not so good” column of our workshop board:

If 2020 and ‘21 felt like a single year, because we were all stuck at home and every day was the same… then 2022 felt like two years packed into one, because WE STARTED THIS COMPANY! 🙀 Almost every day brought new challenges and so many exciting things happened. In the tradition of end-of-year recaps, we want to look back at the key events from this year, and reminisce about what we achieved and learned in 2022.

The Village One journey starts in…

March

Hello readers!

When we set up Village One, we really put a lot of thought into what we want our work environment to be like, and what we want to do differently. Nothing puts those ideas to the test more than writing a job posting: what do we really have to offer? Who do we want to add to the team? What will it be like to join us?

Right now, we’re four people: Harry and Fei doing development, Doro for the UX perspective, and me doing all things design. Now we’re looking to extend our design team! If you’re a digital product designer with a focus on design systems, maybe we’re a match?

Come work with us! ✌

Hello fellow workers,
as you’re probably aware we founded Village One as a cooperative—I’m afraid we really couldn’t shut up about this part. 🤭 Being a co-op is also by far the aspect we get the most questions about and so we decided to finally provide some context, with three new pages in our digital garden:

1. Getting started: What the heck is a cooperative?

2. Going deeper: Why we founded v01 as a co-op

3. Branching out: Resources about cooperatives (articles, books, podcasts, …)

The second page also sheds light on many of the conceptual thoughts behind v01 and why we wanted this organization to exist in the first place. Read as much or as little as you like and let us know what you think (just hit reply)!

Fun anecdote: Just yesterday we had a call with a former colleague who currently enjoys the freedom of being a freelancer, which in turn prompted us to reflect on what it’s like to be an employee at v01. Our conclusion was that we’re really getting the best of both worlds: the autonomy and freedom of being your own boss, combined with the sense of community, support and job security of full employment.

Dear readers,

this is Christoph from Village One – welcome to another edition of this little dispatch! Just tuning in with a quick look behind the scenes and some recommendations for your weekend (as if your read-later-lists were not already full enough.) Here we go!

In the last weeks, we continued to foster and grow our digital garden. A digital garden is similar to a blog, but the content on there is constantly growing, in some places tidy, in others rather messy. Eventually, this garden will become our knowledge repository: Everything regarding our cooperative, our tools, our ideas and mindset will be planted and fostered there, for everyone to read and follow along.

One of the things we get asked frequently is how we found our name: Village One. Naming things can be difficult—there are agencies and experts for that, and for good reason! A brand name carries so much weight: It has to look good in a logo, sound good in an introduction, and oftentimes it’s the very first touchpoint with peers and clients. And as all things are digital these days, there is even more to consider: What’s a cool and suitable url, and is it available? Which emoji could be used in informal communication? Is there a good word mark for abbreviation?

Ahoy shipmates!

This is Fei, writing my 1st newsletter for Village One and I'm very excited! The greeting will make sense in a second, I promise. 😄

In September, we properly employed ourselves and paid out our first salaries! 💥 Harry and Doro took care of most of the bureaucracy, and Doro wrote about some of it in her own monthly recap. We will also share more about what our employment contract looks like and how we set salaries soon in our Digital Garden!  🌱

September was also our last chance to enjoy some summer days in Europe (and gather enough serotonin in preparation for the infamous Berlin winter 😏). So some of us took a few days off just to do that.

We’re very excited to share that we’re expanding our team with a new person and new expertise: Zhuo-Fei Hui, a senior back-end developer, is joining us as a full member (more on what that means below). You can follow her on Twitter!

A bit of backstory: Back in the early days of V01 we talked to a few people from our network about potentially joining the team and with Fei we just felt a different level of energy: She had so many good observations, ideas and feedback, immediately understood what we’re trying to do with V01 and also had just left her job at Blinkist. We were a match!

Since then she’s been working on her own projects, but also contributed to getting V01 through the founding process, adding her technical expertise to our projects, as well as bringing her calm, positive and humorous way of seeing things to our internal discussions. Her skills as a back-end dev complement ours in strategy/research, design and front-end development, to build digital products and infrastructure from first ideas all the way to release.

Greetings from the Village! It’s been almost a month since our last newsletter and oh boy, we’ve been juggling quite a few things: First and foremost we’ve got a new website under village.one, which has a bit more context than the teaser page before.

Click to see our new website!

It’s still mostly a single page: We kept this first version deliberately small and decided to just get it out there, then iterate on it in the open. We considered adding videos, animations, more sub-pages, but in the end none of these seemed crucial enough to hold it back any longer. So we focused on the main ideas we wanted to get across, made it blazing fast and added a few nifty details like a subtle light/dark mode. It’s never meant to be finished anyways and will receive updates frequently. Although that’s what everyone says, and then the page looks exactly the same years later, so only time will tell, I guess.

We also started work on our digital garden: a wiki / knowledge base / handbook / library section … so far it’s pretty bare-bones, which is why it’s not linked on the main homepage yet. But we wanted to give you, dear subscribers, a little preview:

Welcome to the first edition of The Villager’s Dispatch!

You’re receiving this newsletter because you recently heard about Village One and then subscribed on our website—we’re a new and somewhat utopian design and tech cooperative (in case it slipped your mind)!

Hello, I’m Harry, one of the currently three people behind Village One, with an update on where we stand on the path to becoming a proper co-op!

First things first though, let me introduce our third member: Doro Schwartzmann! She’s a UX designer by trade, worked at think moto, then joined Goodpatch Berlin as a design strategist, later becoming part of their leadership team, assuming the role of Studio Lead for Berlin. She’s been part of Village One from the very start, but we could only reveal that now! She completes our current team, along with Christoph (taking on everything design), and me, Harry, for all things technical! Us three will have to get this thing off the ground, but we’re also looking forward to speak to like-minded people who are interested in joining—if that’s you, simply hit reply and start the conversation!