Quarterly update – a splash of colour for the office
We’re back with another update! This time we’re coming at you with a half-year update to give you an idea of what the first six months of 2021 has had in store for us. The strangeness of 2020 certainly did not go away with the new year, but we have tried to take it in our stride and are now (finally) beginning to enjoy the return of normal life. We hope you are too!
BrightMinded office facelift
We are starting to open up the office to our team for those that would like to go back, but first we wanted to give it a bit of a refresh. We’ve thrown in some new furniture and some colour onto the walls. We moved some stuff around to make the return back to the office even more exciting and make sure the environment is as comfortable as possible. Have a look at what our refreshed workspace looks like!
Team expansion
We are very excited that we have been able to expand our team even further. Anwen Williams has joined us as a Junior Software Developer. Anwen does some really fascinating work with codebar running free coding workshops for underrepresented groups in the tech industry, and has even been named one of the BIMA 100 champions for change. We’re honoured to have her be a part of the BrightMinded team.
We have also welcomed Samuel Olaegbe to BrightMinded this year. He has been interested in web development since he was 16, managing to get himself a scholarship with New Horizons Systems in Lagos, Nigeria. He has joined the team as a Software Developer and we are getting him more and more hooked on the WordPress development ecosystem.
In February Jitender Sokhy joined as an Account and Project Manager. We had known Jitender for years as he was at one of our early clients, Rickshaw Travel, and he is therefore able to give us that all important client perspective.
Finally, Emily Wigmore is joining us this summer for an eight week summer internship program. She is helping out with marketing and social media during her summer break between second and final year at Sussex University. We’re very excited to have an intern in the office for such a long time and look forward to seeing what exciting ideas she brings to the table!
Mental health
We appreciate how important mental health is, even more so now than ever. That’s why we have made sure we have a member of staff who is a Mental Health First Aider. Amy has taken on this role so she can be there to support anyone suffering with their mental health in any way within the work environment. In the future, we hope to have more of our staff be fully trained Mental Health First Aiders.
Applied Ecology Resources goes live
The British Ecological Society went live with their new Applied Ecology Resources (AER) membership platform that we developed within their existing website. AER is open to any organisation that produces evidence-based information on the management of biological resources, and membership allows organisations to upload their work such as open access articles, research summaries and grey literature.
The ever-growing collection of AER information is shared with the British Ecological Society’s broad international audience, and visitors can filter the information by member organisation, content type, topic, organism, location, and language. Visitors can also stay up to date on the topics in which they are interested by registering for weekly emails that summarise newly-published content tailored to their interests.
Natural Curriculum wins awards!
Our clients Natural Curriculum and ERA have won two Educational Resource Awards for the site we created for them. They won both categories they were shortlisted in: Free Educational Resources and Primary Resource or Equipment – ICT. We are honoured to be helping to bring technology more into primary education and hope to do more projects with such inspiring goals with ERA and Natural Curriculum in the future.
The start of this year has been strange, but we have thoroughly enjoyed all the projects we have had the chance to work on. We can’t wait to see what the rest of 2021 holds for us!