ungleich-staticcms/content/u/blog/remote-working-with-opensource-sustainability/contents.lr

title: Remote Working with Open Source
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pub_date: 2020-03-15
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author: ungleich
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twitter_handle: ungleich
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_hidden: no
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_discoverable: no
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abstract:
Remote working infrastructure at team ungleich
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body:

## Working at the time of Covid19

So looks like 2020 is the year of remote working for the whole lot of people. Hey, welcome to the club! Our team has been working remotely since 2013 and now we are distributed in 5 different time zones.

We obviously couldn't do it without the digital infrstructure, and that's what we're going to share here. Remote work, but what do we use as technology for that? We got you. Here's a practical list of tech stack we use in our daily business: remote working chez ungleich, check it out.

## How we decide what to use

A disclaimer: we’re an open-source, sustainability focused IT company. So we decide which tools to use by these criteria.

1. open source
2. sustainablility
3. state of the art
4. usability for people with all backgrounds

## 1. Chat: Zero carbon chat - Mattermost and Matrix

You definitely need a chat system when working remotely with your
team, and you need it to be secure and hassle-free. We used to be on
Slack at the very beginning, but we did not like the fact that Slack
is hosted with AWS: from our point of view AWS datacenters are not
sustainable compared to our own renewable energy datacenter in
Switzerland, so we moved away from Slack into hosting our own chat.

Now we have two chat systems, [Mattermost](https://ungleich.ch/u/products/zero-carbon-chat/) and [Matrix.](https://ungleich.ch/u/products/hosted-matrix-chat/)
Mattermost offers an extremely easy and smooth team communication for
people with all kinds of backgrounds. Most of our team talk happens on
this platform. [Our chat](https://chat.ungleich.ch) is open for public
and anybody can join with their email and have a conversation with
us.


![](/u/image/zerocarbon-chat-screen.jpg)

[Zero Carbon
Matrix](https://ungleich.ch/u/products/hosted-matrix-chat/), on the
other hand, offers end-to-end encryption and federation, which makes
it very attractive for people with high sensitivity for privacy and
security. It also allows us to be more open. Matrix works nicely with
video and audio calls as well, suitable for secure conference call
with different teams.


![](/u/image/penguin-matrix.jpg)

## 2. Cloud storage - Nextcloud

We are using hosted [Nextcloud](https://ungleich.ch/u/products/zero-carbon-cloud) for data storage and sharing. It supports cloud storage, file sharing between teams and real-time collaboration for document editing. It's pretty easy and we like to save data in Switzerland and not somewhere we don't trust how the authorities operate.

![](/u/image/nextcloud-docediting.jpg)

## 3. Project management - Redmine

[Redmine](https://ungleich.ch/u/products/project-management/) is our longest standing project management tool since the beginning of our company. It supports calendar, ticket creating, issue tracking, wiki, roadmap and more.

![](/u/image/open-infrastructure.jpg)

Redmine is just very handy for managing multiple projects and subprojects, and giving access to different people can be done on a role basis. Our whole [data center infrastructure](https://redmine.ungleich.ch/projects/open-infrastructure) is actually in redmine & we open it for public, so you can take a look to get an impression.

![](/u/image/open-infrastructure-overview.jpg)

## 4. Code hosting - Gitlab

We used GitHub before, but [we decided to move to our own Gitlab in 2018](https://ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2018/10/18/moving-away-github/) due to GitHub's lack of #IPv6 support and some other issues. It turned out to be a very good idea, and we're hosting Gitlab for our customers too.

![](/u/image/github-penguin.jpg)

## A decision with sustainability goes a long way

So that’s what we use at our company. And we run it all on our servers with renewable energy. Many of you who are new to remote working might have to make decisions in a hurry, but try to remember that decisions with sustainability in mind saves a lot of pain in the long run, and also saves our environment.

![](/u/image/decarbonize-penguin.jpg)

## Questions?

 If you have some questions on the above stack, our remote-working team is around to give you answers. ;) Stay healthy, and happy remote working to you all!

![](/u/image/zerocarbon_no.jpg)