00 Goals

Vision

Digital technologies drive fundamental transformation processes and create new possibilities in the organization and design of work. We aim to create a future where work is not only more productive and intelligent but also aligned with human values.

Mission

We strive to:

  • Investigate the futures of work: Conduct research within the context of digital work, exploring digital work practices, distributed organizing, and knowledge synthesis.
  • Collaborate: Translate research findings into actionable insights while building partnerships with academic institutions, communities, and industry leaders.
  • Educate: Provide high-quality, innovative education that equips knowledge workers with the skills to navigate and shape the digital landscape responsibly.
  • Design: Advocate for the design of work environments that prioritize human-centric approaches and ethical considerations, ensuring that technological advancements benefit both organizations and their employees.

Values

Our core values are:

🚀 Impact in research, teaching, and practice

We challenge ourselves every day to make significant contributions to research on digital work, inspiring students in different teaching formats, and facilitating the application of our work in practice.

🛠️ Rigor, reliability, and reproducibility

We value rigorous methods that are based on evidence and yield reproducible results. To this end, we select reliable tools and standard operating principles.

♻️ Continuous improvement, openness, sustainability

We aim to make our work processes, continuous improvement efforts, and outcomes openly accessible. In particular, we prefer open-source over proprietary technology.

🙏 Participation, support, and diversity

We build a culture of support, encouraging the participation of different stakeholders, including current and former team members, students, and colleagues. We make diversity our strength.

🧑‍🎓️ Learning

We believe in continuous growth, setting aside time to learn on a regular basis, and curating helpful resources.

How we implement the values and goals
  1. What we emphasize during onboarding
  2. All of our teaching efforts follow the plan-do-check-adjust cycle. Our teaching evaluations and improvements are available publicly.
  3. We choose a rigorous manuscript production system, based on Git and Markdown. This allows us to involve students and research assistants in our most important projects, giving them the opportunity to learn and contribute from day one. Without the transparent versioning, reliable control, and effective contribution mechanisms of Git, we would probably “protect the manuscript” and restrict access to our work (e.g., when working with Word).

We pursue goals in the following areas:

Annual cadence

We organize our work in a cadence of first half and second half of the year, starting with the starter and mid-year planning session and concluding with the end-of-year session.

---
displayMode: compact
---
gantt
    title First half
    dateFormat  YYYY-MM-DD
    todayMarker stroke-width:5px,stroke:red,opacity:0.8
    axisFormat %b

    section Team
    Starter 🚀  :milestone, 2025-01-15, milestone
    Review   :milestone, 2025-08-01, milestone

    section Research
    Focus           :a2, 2025-02-10, 60d

    section Teaching
    WiSe           :done, 2025-01-01, 35d
    SoSe           :a1, 2025-04-23, 93d

---
displayMode: compact
---
gantt
    title Second half
    dateFormat  YYYY-MM-DD
    todayMarker stroke-width:5px,stroke:red,opacity:0.8
    axisFormat %b

    section Team
    Review   :milestone, 2026-02-15, milestone
    Mid-year 🎯 :milestone, 2025-07-01, milestone
    🎉 End-of-year  :b1, 2025-12-10, milestone

    section Research
    Focus           :a2, 2025-08-01, 60d
    
    section Teaching
    SoSe           :done, 2025-06-15, 30d
    WiSe           :a2, 2025-10-14, 65d
    WiSe           :a2, 2026-01-07, 30d

The agenda and meeting notes will be entered/linked here (along with links to our strategic / JF agenda)