It’s Passion Time at OpenProject! For two weeks, we put our regular work aside and make room for something different: ideas that people on our team have wanted to explore, improve or build – but that don’t necessarily find a place on our regular roadmap.
This could be a feature we deeply miss in OpenProject, a performance improvement, one of those small changes that could make everyday work easier – or something beyond the product itself, such as an improvement to our website or an internal process.
This year, Passion Time started with around 30 ideas being pitched to the team. After the pitches, everyone found others who were excited about the same ideas, groups formed – and the work began.
There is one important ground rule: The project has to be achievable within the two weeks of Passion Time. After that, we all return to our regular work.
And this year, the setting is a little special: we’re combining the first week of Passion Time with our annual company offsite in the Harz region in Germany.
Collaboration at heart
What makes Passion Time special is not only the opportunity to work on an idea you care about. It’s also a great occasion to collaborate across teams.
Passion Projects don’t have to follow our usual team structures. Developers from different teams can join forces, and an idea may bring together colleagues from Development, Product, UX, Marketing, Sales or Support.
This became clear during the pitches at the beginning of the week. Having a good idea is one thing. Getting other people excited enough to spend their Passion Time working on it with you is another.
And that’s part of the idea. A conversation with someone from a completely different area of OpenProject can add a perspective you hadn’t considered before. What does someone from Sales think about a new feature idea? Has Support heard about this particular need from users? How would UX approach the problem?
During this first week of Passion Time, many of these conversations can happen face to face.
From remote collaboration to time together
OpenProject is a remote company, with colleagues working from different countries. We are used to collaborating across locations and time zones – but meeting in person still creates a different kind of space for exchange.
For some colleagues, this year’s offsite is the first time they are meeting people in person whom they have been working with remotely for quite some time. Team members have travelled to the Harz from Germany, Spain, the UK, France, Nigeria and many other places.
During the first week of Passion Time, project work therefore mixes with everything else that comes with our company offsite: sharing meals, going outside, playing games and spending time together.
Conversations move from our screens to the breakfast table, a walk through the forest or an evening together. And ideas that started during a Passion Time session can easily continue there.
Next week, Passion Time will continue remotely, giving the teams another week to turn their ideas into something tangible.
Looking back: Passion Time 2023
This isn’t the first time we’ve put our regular roadmap aside to make room for Passion Projects. During our Passion Time in Switzerland in 2023, teams worked on a wide variety of ideas. Some of them have since become part of OpenProject.
One example is the time tracking button. The idea was to make tracking time easier by allowing users to start and stop a timer directly from a work package. What started as a Passion Time project became part of OpenProject 13.0.
Other teams focused on a collection of seemingly small improvements to make everyday work in OpenProject a little easier. The ideas included recently viewed work packages in the global search, a shortcut to “My activity”, easier copying of work package links, improvements to the work package sidebar and an emoji picker.
But Passion Time is not limited to product features. One of the 2023 teams focused on fair language, reviewing the language we use on our website and in our documentation and creating guidelines for more inclusive communication.
Looking back at these projects is a good reminder of why we make room for Passion Time: an idea someone cares about can turn into something that continues to benefit our users long after those two weeks are over. In doing so, Passion Time also contributes to our mission at OpenProject: to empower teams to achieve great things together for the good of society.
Passion Projects 2026
At the time of writing, we’re right in the middle of Passion Time 2026. So we can’t show you the finished results just yet.
The ideas range from new OpenProject features and UX improvements to technical topics and projects beyond the product itself. Here is a glimpse of some of the projects our teams are currently working on:
Let meeting participants vote on agenda items
Which topics should be discussed first in a meeting? One team is exploring a new vote-based sorting option for meeting agendas. Participants could give agenda items a thumbs up or down, allowing the agenda to be sorted according to what the group considers most important.
The idea is to make it easier for everyone in a meeting to influence the priorities, while still keeping the agenda structured and easy to follow.
Help users discover new features
OpenProject is continuously evolving, but adding a new feature is only part of the job. Users also need to know that it’s there.
One Passion Time team is therefore looking at how we onboard existing users into new features after a release. Instead of relying only on release notes or other external communication, the team is exploring ways to introduce relevant changes directly within OpenProject – for example through temporary announcements or subtle highlights where something has changed.
The challenge is to make new features easier to discover without interrupting people’s work.
Make OpenProject even more accessible
Accessibility is an important and ongoing topic for OpenProject. We regularly work on making the product more accessible, and further accessibility improvements are planned for our next major release, OpenProject 18.0.
Passion Time gives us an opportunity to explore additional ideas around this topic, and several of this year’s Passion Projects focus on accessibility from different angles.
One of them is a new dedicated accessibility page for our website. The team is working on bringing together information about existing and planned accessibility features and making our commitment to accessibility more visible. Other Passion Projects are looking directly at ways to improve accessibility within OpenProject itself.
The landing page is therefore just one part of a broader, continuous effort to make OpenProject accessible to as many people as possible.
These are just a few of the ideas being worked on during Passion Time. They are quite different from one another, but they all started in the same way: someone saw an opportunity to make something better, pitched it to the team and found colleagues who wanted to explore it together.
Two weeks to make a difference
Passion Time gives us something that can easily get lost between roadmaps, releases and everyday responsibilities: dedicated space to experiment.
What matters is having the space to take an idea, find others who are excited about it and see what we can make of it in two weeks.
Right now, many of those projects are still taking shape. Next week, the work continues remotely. And once the two weeks are over, we’ll share more about the ideas that made it from a Passion Time pitch to something real.
