Today (Friday 21st December) is the last day of our working year here at Gaia Resources, and we’re off to have our office Christmas parties (yes, plural now we have two offices), and we’ll post more on those next year – needless to say, we’re doing something that will help the environment!  Just like our Christmas card – over the ten years we’ve been supporting the Carbon Neutral Christmas ecards, that’s now 1,873 trees we’ve planted.

Ten years – 1,873 trees planted!

Over the break we’ll be on skeleton staff in our Perth office, but the Brisbane team will be away for the whole period – stay tuned for a couple of exciting announcements around both our offices when we return in the new year, though!  If there are any support requests or issues that you have then please use our support email address – support@archive.gaiaresources.com.au – and the team members who are in the office will get in touch with you on one of the non-public holidays.

We usually take this opportunity to reflect on the year to date, as we are halfway through our usual reporting cycle of the financial year.  It’s certainly been one of the most challenging and interesting calendar years for us, with staff changes and some of the largest projects we’ve won kicking off (which we’re still not allowed to talk about publicly, but stay tuned for those announcements in the new year as well).

Gaia Resources has changed a lot since we started almost 15 years ago, from a tiny little home office through to the team we have today, with two offices and 25 staff.  The beast has grown quite a bit bigger than even I thought it would, but these vast uncharted territories are full of excitement and opportunity – this year has been no exception.

We asked the team what their wins were for 2019, and the list is pretty nice to reflect back on:

• Working on the Public Records Office of Victoria project – a great team including a great client,
• Building the Brisbane team up into a “real” office,
• Working collaboratively with our clients to reduce their anxiety levels around the Agile process, so that they are now looking forward to starting sprints instead of being concerned about how this will all play out,
• Running the training in Archivematica with the University of Tasmania special collections team,
• Attending the FOSS4G conference in Melbourne, to be around like minded people and learn a heap of new things in the workshops,
• Getting our first full-time support engineer, and generally becoming more mature around our processes for support,
• The Wildlife Drones project, especially seeing the demonstrations that have been held in Perth the last few days to see the reaction of the clients to all the work we have been doing on it,
• Setting up new technologies, like Grafana, cross platform mobile technologies, Sparx Enterprise Architect, and better use of our existing systems like Youtrack,
• Working on our new larger projects (more on that in the new year),
• Seeing our growth this year, but sustainably – just like we do everything at Gaia Resources,
• Our rehabilitation and data project with IGO Mining, where we were able to really help that organisation to make a difference,
• Our recent focus on “telling more stories” with our blog, especially the story of the Leadbeaters Possum, which has had quite a bit of interest since we released it, and
• The general transformation that the company has had over the last year, in terms of the move to FLUX, the focus on process, the new projects coming in and the exciting opportunities for the new year.

That’s a bunch of good things to reflect on as we wind down to the end of the year – and as a few people said afterwards, that’s not even the full list, as I only asked for one!

For me, the highlight has been the team that gave me all these points above.  A company is really only as good as the people who are in it, and due to them, it’s been a great journey over the last 12 months.  As always, it’s been the roller coaster that is running a small business, but I have to say, with this team around me and with us all supporting each other, it’s been a great year.  So my own highlight is the people that work here with me in this crazy ‘family’ we’ve created that is called Gaia Resources.

I’m looking forward to the break – where as is tradition a few of us will be working on a range of things to do with the business for the new year, including preparing for our ‘usual’ new year launch event, and bunch of new and exciting announcements.  I hope that you and your family – work or otherwise – all have a safe and happy Christmas break!

Merry Christmas and see you in 2019!

Piers