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Remote Working Meetup

Meetup: Work Remotely

META: Ideas for moderation

  • collect topics upfront, cluster them and give people slots to present them during the meetup
  • try to get people from remote companies involved (e.g. GitLab), to share their experience
  • have a Mattermost chat in parallel where you cancollect topics before bringing them into the stream

Brainstorming on Topics

Chances

  • forced to stay at home, might convince companies that thought it is impossible to work from home that it is actually possible
  • being forced to learn remote work in a high speed
  • spend more time with families at home
  • spend NO TIME for commuting / travelling

Security

  • using cloud tools for collaboration might need company approval

Preparation

  • infrastructure to work from home
    • internet connection
    • hardware & infrastructure (e.g. displays)
  • asking people about concerns when working from home
  • provide office as back up for those who cannot work from home?
  • involve your clients as well

Team Spirit

  • Question: "how to take care of your team, while everyone is remote"
  • Open video call, everyone can enter all the time
  • Extend daily standups
  • Pairing

Remote Pairing

  • what's different from "normal pairing"
  • Tools, eg. MS Code pairing mode

Remote Collaboration Tools

  • Question: "Which tools can help to have remote discussions"
  • Whiteboard replacements (e.g. Whiteboards)
  • Video Conferencing tools & rules for usage
  • Slack & Co
  • Approval for (cloud) tools ** security / privacy issues

Proper documentation and remote knowledge sharing

  • How to improve documentation

Massive Video Conferences

  • how to move Meetups & Conferences to an online format
  • how to moderate such events
  • break-out chats - learned about break out rooms in @zoom_us today - might be a useful feature for ongoing remote conferences: support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/artic… #WorkFromHome

Childcare issues

  • what to do if you have to take care of your children in parallel
  • Morgenkreis 2.0
  • let children see who you talk with all day, introduce them to your colleagues
  • flexible working hours, also on weekends
  • keep some common checkpoints (e.g. daily standup)

Collection of Remote Events

Tweets

  • Yeah. And don‘t underestimate the power of body language. The physical absence has always an effect on how a team performs 2gether. Another important factor will be the fact that in many cases children will be around ALL THE TIME. might get a challenge,too

  • Hmmm.. partially agree. Depends on the tasks. But in matter of "hey can I have the needed answer, hint, whatever right off..." is much more delayed in Home Office...sometimes 🙄😆

  • Yeah! Might get hard with all that bad news in background. Additionaly I think that I will miss my guys, colleagues around (social interaction is as important as the workload/output). And of course I hope the VPN-gateways all across the companies will stand the traffic 🧐

    1. As soon as everyone is remote, it works much better than 1 or 2 being remote
    2. Video is much better than audio only - especially in meetings longer than an hour
    3. Corporate networks are often restricted and VPN in/out becomes the bottleneck - especially with video meetings.
  • Be aware and communicate that..

    1. ...corona is critical for some members of your team - do you know who is living with his/her sick mom? Ask!
    2. ...it is ok to have "noises" in the background. Kids will go mad ;-)
    3. ...have virtual coffee breaks to keep the chatter alive.
  • Yeah but apart from Skype and Mattermost/Slack what interaction is needed?

  • our team is scattered over Europe and we hat to live/cope with that fact from the beginning, so "lucky" us we had to work remote anyway, but that said previous experiences have showed me that having all people in one room is IMHO more productive

  • One of the problem by us is that people still don’t get that chats, slacks, etc. exactly as asynchronous as e-mails. You cannot expect an answer right away, and that’s ok for me.. But people really don’t seem to get that.

  • I’ve for the last half year, bypassed the rules in our company and work remote every Friday. And those are often my productive days, that I really appreciate.

  • My only concern with the remote work is the contact to other people, but what I hear from others doing remote is, you find other ways to interact, doesn’t need to be with colleagues, perhaps you find more time to go the gym, playing soccers, golf or what ever hobby you have.

Tools

(Online) Retros

Collaborative Whiteboard

Resources

@maltekrupa
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I have a couple of additions to brainstorm. I tried to align it with the headers you already provided.

Team Spirit

Preparation

A headset

It'll improve the audio quality for everyone. Using the microphone in your notebook will get noisy as soon as something in your room creates noise or when you start typing. The quality also depends on the room you're in.

IMO, having team calls requires a bit of discipline. You're not talking? Mute yourself. There might be distracting noises that you cannot hear but the other participants can.

References:

A decent chair

You'll sit quite a bit. Prepare for it.

Maybe your employer allows you to take your office chair to your home office.

Alarm clock

Sometimes I tend to forget the time when working from home. Remind yourself to get up at least once per hour to stretch a bit or take a walk.

Extend daily standups

I'd vote for written "asynchronous dailies" instead. One of my clients practices this and it's a delight in terms "less meetings" and "flexible working hours".

There is slack channel that is filled with messages like:

- Yesterday: Did this and that
- Today: Plan this, do that, meeting about x

These messages arrive between five in the morning and even after noon which is a nice reminder that different people work at different hours.

Added to this there is a fixed daily call with no expectations. No one is forced to attend and the topic is "nothing work related".

@vykozlov
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Multi-platform open-source video conferencing: jitsi.org
Possible to install on your own host.

Instruction for deployment:
[1] https://github.com/jitsi/docker-jitsi-meet
There is Docker compose at [1]. Deployment should be easy, just copy&paste the commands there. Most of work is for configuring HTTPS (DNS record, certificates), that cannot be automated.
(it seems the room name cannot have special characters including '-', '_', just alphanumerical characters)

People tested it on smartphone, just set the correct server in the setting.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.jitsi.meet

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