📗 Distributed Collaboration Manual

[unclecj]

@edgeryders

Conference calls are a listening exercise. In this way, they are no different than healthy in-person meetings: in a call with 10 people, mathematically everyone has 10% of speaking time and 90% of listening time. When that ratio becomes skewed too much for some speakers, the call is very likely not productive. Some people naturally like to speak a lot and may not notice they are cornering the other participants – a software tool that calculates and shows the speaker time percentage in real-time may help. It could show that privately to each speaker, or as a public list to the whole audience, providing an interesting cue for healthy communication. We did not yet find such a tool.

@matthias It is mentioned elsewhere how links may clutter documents - and I’m not sure if I inspired you here or not, but how do you feel about appending a link here to “CJs ‘Meditation on group communication’” for further thoughts on the topic?
Anyway, it’s a segment I care about, and would love to embed also the aforism “don’t confuse motion for progress”. Mostly I’m just mentioning it as a heads up before I go about and edit

[unclecj]

@edgeryders

independent of the religion, monks and nuns understand how and why to provide an enjoyable environment for each other

As much as I appreciate climbing the complexity hierarchy - this statement came off to me as too weird, too soon. The continuation of the reasoning is great, but why am I to believe the blanket statement as if a prime principle of monks and nuns of all religions live to “provide an enjoyable environment for each other”. Doesn’t strike me as particularly ascetic for instance. Perhaps we can embed some examples?

[unclecj]

@matthias

Unrelated side note: I am tempted to rename this document temporarily to “The ultimate weapon to beat coronavirus at your workplace” or something similar It certainly does not get the attention it deserves right now, where the document only argues for remote collaboration as climate protection …

You wrote that Monday 2/3… Yesterday or the day before that our workplace moved to recommend that anyone who could should work from home, VPN is being heavily loaded and, on a positive note, there’s more attention than ever for efforts to mitigate the impact of being forced into distributed collaboration. Assuming the world keeps standing, surely surviving organizations will be much stronger in this aspect.

Do we have view statistics for this page?

[trythis]

@edgeryders

PTT (push-to-talk) functionality in a video conferencing application would solve this, but we are not aware of any tool that can do this.

I believe discord and zoom now support this in the settings. For discord I think it was only in the standalone app, not running in the browser.

For me this has already lead to the next issue though:
I connect a bluetooth RX/TX dongle with mic so I can run around while listening, but as these dongles usually lack the PTT-button, I have to sprint back to the keyboard when I have to say something. Obviously only relevant for semi-important or less calls.

[MariaEuler]

I wonder when the first generation will start to find meetings via video or VR chat or whatever more effective and natural than meeting in person?

I already feel like writing by hand is extremely ineffective and weird to me, but I am sure there were many and are still some who said that only by writing per hand can you properly think things through and connect to them.

It is a matter of what your grow up with and accustomed to.

Once tools for synchronous and asynchronous online collaboration are more developed accepted.mastered come the point when their effectiveness also in visualising and communication something will outpace the group sitting together with the whiteboard.

Or maybe calls vs. texts and emails are a good example. Having a “real call” is an exeption, just calling someone without asking beforehand even more. Texts and emails have become a norm for more effective communication and already feel “more natural” then “just calling someone to ask something”.