On our last day in the beau­ti­ful and sur­pris­ing sum­mer­ly Finnish cap­i­tal we vis­it­ed the pub­lic Helsin­ki Cen­tral Library Oodi to antic­i­pate and dis­cuss obsta­cles our lab will have to grap­ple with when Annette relo­cates to Fin­land. For this we made use of one of the many meet­ing rooms in Oodi that can be booked by every­one for free, even from Ger­many. Already impressed by this ser­vice, the O’BRAIN lab mem­bers strolled through the library dur­ing meet­ing breaks just to find even more strik­ing offers like freely avail­able 3D print­ers, sewing machines or VR gam­ing rooms. All this was only topped by the actu­al library on 3rd floor with a beau­ti­ful sun terrace.

In the after­noon we retreat­ed once more in the think cor­ner in the Helsin­ki inner city. On the agen­da was the the first draft for a code of con­duct and sum­ma­ry of val­ues the O’BRAIN lab iden­ti­fies with (run­ning inter­nal­ly under the work­ing title “the O’BRAIN man­i­festo”). The val­ues ranged from work envi­ron­men­tal issues like fam­i­ly friend­ly meet­ing slots to com­mon goals in sci­en­tif­ic trans­paren­cy and open sci­ence. The man­i­festo shall serve as a guide­line for cur­rent and future mem­bers of our lab and con­vey to the pub­lic what we stand for, as a research team as well as an employer.

Hav­ing checked off this list last item on our Helsin­ki to-do list we left all mat­ters of busi­ness suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed behind and enjoyed the remain­ing hours of the almost nev­er set­ting sun. Being aware of the chal­leng­ing but at the same time excit­ing sit­u­a­tion that the O’BRAIN lab is fac­ing the next years, we pre­pared our­selves for the depar­ture the next morn­ing, know­ing that most like­ly we will not have seen this stag­ger­ing city for the last time.