To make our work as easy as possible, we make use of a number of external tools. Here we give you an overview of why we use what.
The worst thing at the beginning. We discussed for a long time in the team whether we could use Amazon's cloud service as a hosting provider. Sustainability is a toss-up of alternatives among the three dimensions. Ecologically, AWS is certainly not the worst choice, as hardly any other hosting provider can run server centres in such an efficient way. In addition, a switch to 100% green power by 2025 is taking place. All certainly not perfect, but no worse than most others either. Socially, there is a lot of room for improvement, to say the least - which has led to the aforementioned need for internal discussion. So why AWS? The most crucial point for the decision is purely a question of cost. Even though we are sholarship-funded, our financial resources are limited. We are not allowed to generate any income during the term of the scholarship and all cost centres had to be planned precisely before we started. In the case of AWS, neither the scholarship money is charged nor do we have to pay anything ourselves. We are in a start-up programme that gives us virtually two years of complete freedom from costs, which could become a very important factor in view of the required self-funding of overlook from 2023. The start-up programme also gives us free access to the premium functions at some of the providers mentioned below, which simplifies our daily work immensely. On top of that, there are really cleverly solved technical aspects of the cloud structure that allows us to scale overlook strongly and easily at the same time. For some, the words scaling and growth might make their hair stand on end, but this is the only way overlook can really make an impact.
Second worst: we use Google Drive as a cloud storage solution. If it were only about storage, Google would certainly be the first program we would like to say goodbye to. Besides a monopoly structure that can be rightly criticized, however, Google offers advantages that we would not want to do without:
To summarise the two providers mentioned above: We do not use the most (environmentally or socially) sustainable tools and are aware that there is room for improvement. Nevertheless, these tools enable us to work significantly more efficiently and effectively than with comparable providers, so that we have opted for these tools, at least for the moment.
We currently use IONOS from 1&1 as our mail hosting provider. Since we wanted to have a first website quickly before we even had a rudimentary product (in retrospect, quite pointless, we have to admit), we got a Wordpress package here for little money. IONOS advertises climate-neutral hosting (more info at: https://www.ionos.de/umwelt). However, how seriously one can take this information is questionable. 1&1's sustainability report is full of greenwashing phrases. We will therefore look around for an alternative in the near future.
Slack is our main means of communication in the team. We hardly ever write each other emails, but use the chat functions to communicate with each other.
For classic project management, we use Asana to keep our daily tasks in order. On the one hand, it gives more structure to your own work, and on the other hand, it gives us some transparency for each other about what the team is currently working on.
Notion is our knowledge database. All information that could be relevant at the present time and/or in the future is stored here. We honestly love Notion. We do not pay anything for the premium functions because we have received start-up credits.
We use Miro boards for brainstorming sessions and for visualising and recording content. We don't have to pay anything for Miro either because of start-up credits.