Wide Teams

The Well-Equipped Remote Worker

Mar 7, 11 • In Conferences

Slides, notes, and links for the talk “The Well-Equipped Remote Worker” delivered on March 5th at the Daycamp 4 Developers 2 virtual conference. On March 5, 2011 I had the great pleasure of delivering a talk entitled “The Well-Equipped Remote Worker” at the Day Camp 4 Developers 2 virtual conference. I’d like to thank Cal Evans, all the other organizers and speakers, and especially the attendees for making the conference possible.I really enjoyed participating, loved the IRC chat, and got a lot of good advice from the other speakers’ talks. As promised, here are slides, notes and links to more information. But first, if you attended the talk, I would greatly appreciate it if you would rate it on SpeakerRate. Thanks! Slides The Well-Equipped Remote Worker View more presentations from Avdi Grimm

Podcast #23: Interview with Rob Dempsey of LifeOfTheFreelancer.com (Part 2 of 2)

Feb 8, 11 • In Interviews, Podcast

Part two of a conversation between Rob Dempsey of LifeOfTheFreelancer.com and myself. In this part we dig into the intersection of freelancing and distributed teams: the phenomenon of ad-hoc teams composed of independent consultants who come together to work on a specific project. If you’re a freelancer trying to figure out how you can take on bigger jobs, you need to check out this episode. Show notes: Rob’s site is lifeofthefreelancer.com, @lifeofthefree on Twitter. Since this podcast was recorded, he also launched The Itinerant Entrepreneur. Shane & Peter is a web development consultancy that organizes teams of independent consultants to take on larger projects. We discussed using Campfire from 37Signals for team chat

Screencast: Flowdock Test Drive

Jul 22, 10 • In Toolkit

Flowdock is a web-based hosted text chat application, along same lines as Campfire or Talker. Flowdock has some unique features which set it apart from those tools, which I demonstrate in this video

The Wide Teams Bootstrap Guide, Part 4: Virtual Presence

Jul 14, 10 • In Basics

You have your mail hub, your video/audio chat solution, and your text chat service set up. What other communications tools does your distributed team need? To augment Campfire or IRC, I recommend setting up a team status/presence tool. The two most popular tools occupying this space are Presently and Yammer. With the exception of some downtime issues, I’ve had good luck with Present.ly in several organizations. In a nutshell, these apps are like Twitter for private groups.They enable team members to post short messages about their status, what they are thinking about, or problems they are experiencing. You may be wondering: is such an app really necessary when you already have a chat application? Don’t they overlap? It’s true, either a chat room or a presence app can be used to simulate the other. But ideally, they handle two

The Wide Teams Bootstrap Guide: Part 2

Jul 1, 10 • In Basics

In part 2 of this series, I talk about why face time is essential; the two types of realtime communication tool which should form the backbone of your day to day interactions as a dispersed team; and why instant messaging can do more harm than good. If you missed Part 1 of this series, you may want to go back and read it. Face Time A little face-to-face communication goes a long way with remote work. A day spent working with a teammate in person can change the whole character of your subsequent online interactions. Before, they were a screen name and an avatar. After working with them in person, with every instant message or email they send you’ll have a mental picture of their tone and mannerisms to go with it. People become more

Using a Control Channel to facilitate virtual meetings

Jun 29, 10 • In Tips & Hacks

Data communications protocols are often divided into a control channel and a data channel. An example from electrical engineering are the “control lines” and “data lines” in an RS-232 connector. The FTP protocol uses a similar arrangement, where a control connection is opened to port 21, and a data connection to port 20. The source of this common pattern is the realization that it is fundamentally difficult to manage a conversation using the same channel you are using to have the conversation. It’s hard to say “wait, you’re sending me too much information” if the pipe you you need to send that message on is clogged with all that information. Human conversations use a control channel as well. Our data channel, of course, is our voices. But when people are gathered in a room for a