Confluence Holiday Workshop: End of year team gratitude

[#1]

At the core of our mission at Atlassian is the belief that behind every great human achievement, there is a team. (We’ve even got the mission statement to prove it!) That’s right, corny as it may sound, we really do believe that we’re better together ❤️  and stronger as a team 💪.

The end of the year is a great time to practice gratitude, our impetus for creating this activity. Join us in expressing gratitude for a teammate (or teammates) who made your 2021 brighter!

It’s as easy as:

1️⃣  Complete the template below to thank a teammate for their positive impact on you(r team) in 2021 ✍️

2️⃣  Share your note of gratitude in the comments of this post (be sure to tag any fellow Community members!) and/or on social with #ConfluenceHolidayWorkshop and tag @Confluence 💬

3️⃣  Bonus: Elaborate on something that your teammate contributed to in Confluence this year.

I’ll start: This year, I’m grateful for my teammates here in the Confluence corner of Community (all of you, dear readers) for your enthusiasm, support, and contributions! Thanks for going #MeetLess in May (and September + November), channeling your inner Bill Nye in the #ConfluenceCollaboratory and joining our Dream Team Fantasy League during Premium Week. Getting to know you all better through Confluence social + Community has been a highlight of 2021!

[Laura Holton _ACE Rotterdam_]

This year I'm grateful to my community teammates as well as my newly found teammates at Valiantys for their warm welcomes, support and Atlassian awesomeness!

Thank you for joining and speaking at Your Journey with the Atlassian Cloud 2021, writing amazing content we can share with the wider ecosystem, and working incredibly hard so I can shout it from the virtual rooftops and win industry awards for the team. Here's to the best year yet and an even better one to come 💙

[Jack Brickey]

This year I’m grateful for my Community teammates - the Community development team - for continuing to add great value to the Community application. @Monique vdB has done an amazing job leading the charge with the new Kudos program and taking all of our feedback back to the dev team. I look forward to what they have in mind for 2022.

[Kristján Geir Mathiesen]

I started as Community Leader late last year and it always takes a little bit of time to get going and get to know people. So 2021 is really the first full year. @Jimmy Seddon, @Jack Brickey, and @Dave Liao have been super helpful and nice in every way - they've made me feel at home here in the Community. Pointing me in the right direction and being super patient when I ask "silly" questions. Let me not forget to mention @Fun Man Andy - my fellow Speedo enthusiast! So Kudos to them and actually all of you!

The Atlassian Community team has also been supportive and helpful in so many ways; @Erica Moss especially.

I am stoked about 2022; to continue this friendship and hopefully get to meet ya'll in person in Vegas, baby! 🎰 🃏 That will take this awesome community to a whole new level for me.

[Erica Moss]

@Kristján Geir Mathiesen We're so lucky to have you!

[Thomas Schlegel]

This year, I'm especially grateful for my ACE Hamburg teammate @Lars Mählmann - we do not only lead the Hamburg Community together and organize events but became more and more friends. Apart from organizing Community events, we meet for talking, playing boardgames and have a great time.

Thank you, it's great to have a teammate and friend like you.

[Kristin Lyons]

Better together, stronger as a team.
This year I’m grateful to my teammates - my current Atlassian Administrator team for working together through some interesting obstacles we’ve faced when merging multiple instances of Jira and Confluence together! It was a long process but the team came together to each contribute a great deal!

[Dave Liao]

@Kristján Geir Mathiesen - what @Erica Moss said! No such thing as a silly question, and if you're intentionally asking a silly question? That's then a joke. 😜

Happy holidays to anyone who is celebrating one of the many holidays during this lovely month. ⚡

[Jimmy Seddon]

@Kristján Geir Mathiesen thank you for the kind words.  I think it really says something when I thought you had been around for much longer than a year.

There are two very wonderful fellow Community Leaders who are some of my closest friends even though we live half way around the world.  @Teodora V _Fun Inc_ & @Fun Man Andy thank you both for being there, supporting my various activities (like Extra Life) and helping to keep me sane through the past year.

I can't even begin to show my appreciation for my company Arctic Wolf & my manager Matt Carse.  I joined a little over a year ago, to a brand new team and we have accomplished so much in the past year while trying to find our groove as a new team 100% remotely.  It's hard to believe a year has past and I am extremely grateful for the number of opportunities I'd had to continue immersing myself in the Atlassian Ecosystem to help Arctic Wolf.

Lastly the community managers, @Erica Moss @Monique vdB @Bridget you have all been there to support my crazy out of the box ideas and to help me do great things within the community and I can't thank you enough for supporting me on that.

[Erica Moss]

@Jimmy Seddon Cannot wait to watch you continue to shine in 2022, Jimmy!

[Brittany Sudlow]

This year I'm grateful to my teammates @Meg Bailey and @Reni Carlson for always have brilliant, fun ideas and games to play in the Community! ❤️🙏

[Lisa]

This year I'm grateful for my teammates on the Confluence Cloud Load Testing (Autobots) team for the support we provide each other to keep the workload balanced across the team and for making virtual collaboration an enjoyable experience as we've worked to achieve our milestones this year! 

@Kenneth Yu @Sumol Lodha @Matthew Trinh @Lorien Hou 

Special thanks to @Rahul Patasariya for providing insights and direction through our many many Confluence system bottleneck investigations as we've scaled above and beyond 20k. 

And I also have to thank @David Rizzuto and @John Yi for guiding the team through an initially bumpy transition to better team practices and goal alignment.

[Lulu Wang]

This year I'm grateful to my teammates @Erik Gui @Sami Peachey for always being super easy to talk to, willing to lend a helping hand whenever I have any questions, being active participants in our games sessions/slack channel which helps boost our team culture, and overall just being great teammates who I can always depend on!! :) 

[Sumol Lodha]

Grateful for awesome teammates Lisa Ke, Lorien, Matthew, Kenneth !!! It was fun working with you guys :) 

Thanks for David and John for steering the team to achieve the right team milestones :) 

[Andy Gladstone]

As 2021 draws to a close and 2022 dawns on the horizon, I reflect on the deep pools of the year past with great admiration and adulation for those that have touched my life in 2021.

Since this is an Atlassian post, let me first give a big thank you and shout out of gratitude to @Dileep_Bhat the NYC ACE Community Leader. Despite the difficulties of coordinating in person events, he and the NYC ACE Team (@Andrew Kendris gets credit too) have put together some excellent virtual group meetups that have reignited my passion for all things Confluence and the Atlassian ecosystem. I look forward to some day soon meeting my NYC area co-fanatics in person.

I started using Confluence in the early 2010's at my previous company, and there Jake Lawson and I formed a team that was focused on building our Confluence instance into the single source of truth every day. We really had captured lightning in a bottle, and I am thankful to him every day for giving me an ideal to strive for. 

It's that ideal and drive that I am so thankful to my team members at Fidelity Payment Services and Cardknox for believing in and buying into. It's the team members of our Development, Support and Operations Teams that have created and curated thousands of pages of documentation that is essential to our day-to-day tactical and strategic business operations. I appreciate the effort that they all put in during 2020 and into 2021 as we went from office-based, to remote, to hybrid and back - to make sure that although we were no longer a tribe in one place, our tribal knowledge would be consecrated and available for all team members to seek, search, digest and utilize through Confluence. Most of them are not Community members here, but they are all part of my family.

Finally, I am appreciative of the Atlassian Community for giving me a place to spend my free time (OK, I really should be doing something else now), refresh my skills, collaborate, learn, participate, practice my writing (sorry about the long posts) and all of the content masters that have created engaging and fun ways to connect. @Monique vdB, @Gabby Williams, @Meg Bailey, @Jimmy Seddon, @Thomas Schlegel, @Lulu Wang and so many others that I cannot name them all. Thank you!

[Dave Liao]

This year, I'm grateful for the Communiteam for being able to do what they do. Remotely, it's a challenge, and during a still-ongoing pandemic, it's no easier. @Erica Moss @Mandy Ross @Grace Chang (I know you've moved on, but have to give you a shout-out!)

I appreciate the Community members who have dove in to help each other make this community the success that it is! The level of engagement, content moderation, and content quality is further than most places I've collaborated in. 🙏

Props to @Clark Everson for exemplifying Red Hat's open-ness in this community, too!

[Paloma Fondon Araujo]

I would like to thank one more year to all my colleagues in the Atlassian community of atSistemas, for the day to day, because we know that even if we do not always work on the same projects we always have a great team behind us that is willing to lend a hand! I couldn't have better team! 

Also thanks the entire atlassian community (each and every one of you) for making the community a place of collaboration as there are few, for the fun times, atlympics, apptoberfest, kudos program and everything else, you are awesome!!!

Thanks to all for this year!!!

[Dave Liao]

p.s. apparently I like exclamation points!

[Hugh Wu]

Better together, stronger as a team.

This year I’m grateful to my teammates on the Confluence Better Together team (too many to list!) for making me feel so welcome. We've only known each other for a short time but I already feel like part of the community and it's been so fun getting to know each and every one of you.

Looking forward to going into 2022 with such wonderful people :) 

[Teodora V _Fun Inc_]

Here in the Atlassian Community, I met more than teammates, collaborators, and people to learn from. I met true friends and created authentic and long-lasting relationships. Community friends, you are always close to my heart. 💙

I am grateful for having @Jimmy Seddon and @Fun Man Andy as my closest friends, even, as Jimmy said, we are at distant points of the world. They are unique human beings who are always brave enough to handle my moodiness :)

And I am thankful to my Old Street Solutions Team for warmly welcoming me to their mighty crew and showing me the perfect teams exist!  

[Fadoua]

                                                     Better together, stronger as a team.

---

This year, I'm grateful to my teammate(s):

@Billy Poggi without him NOVA ACE will be meaningless.

@LarryB for his tremendous help with our NOVA ACE by providing us a great presenter.

To every single leader I interacted with since I became a Community Leader

A big thank you to @Erica-atlassian, @Bridget, @queen-mo-atlassian, @Christine Dela Rosa, @[deleted]-atlassian, @Daniel Eads, @aheinzer-atlassian and other Atlassian Employees for making this community enjoyable and a great success.

All the best,

Fadoua

[Marjorie]

This year I am thankful for my teammates for their flexibility and determination. They make coming to work a joy.  And, they are continuing to come together and produce amazing results!

[Bridget]

This post is giving me alllll the holiday cheer! I am grateful this year that I've gotten to know so many of you not only in the community context at work, but also as friends. I'm especially grateful to some new Atlassians (looking at you @Meg Bailey , @Reni Carlson , @Gabby Williams , @Sally Stone , @Erika Storli , @Maggie Norby Adams , and more!!) who have proven to be amazing Community advocates. 

Can't wait to see what 2022 has in store! 

[Andrew Kendris]

This year, I'm thankful for the entire NYC ACE team ( @Dileep Bhat @Kapil Samadhiya @Madhusudhan Matrubai ) for bringing me in as a community leader with open arms.  I began my journey as a leader at the start of the year and their leadership and guidance showed me what it takes to build stellar group that can really bring together an energetic community.  I'm looking forward to seeing what great things are ahead for us!  I'm also thankful for @Susan Hauth (Toronto - JIRA Queen) for the opportunity to bring both our ACE groups together in the virtual world and expand our reach during this new way of organizing events!

I'm also appreciative for @Erica Moss and all the magic she brings when we are putting on some great events with speakers from Atlassian 🙂 They really help energize our community and bring a good crowd.

Here's to wrapping up an amazing 2021 and looking towards 2022!! 🎉

[Erica Moss]

@Andrew Kendris This is so sweet. 😭 I know I've said it a few times already, but it's been so awesome to see how you've really jumped head-first into the Leader role this year and helped the New York chapter continue to shine. Here's to even better things in 2022!

[Brant Schroeder]

This year I'm grateful to my community teammates as well as my work teammates for constantly inspiring me to be better and help those around me.