An odd feeling: this period seems to be evidence for most people that remote work's The Future, but it's pushing me the other way! In its absence I find myself forcefully drawn to face-to-face collaboration, shared physical studio spaces, long lunchtime walking discussions, etc.
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This may be mostly about a difference in style of work. Or maybe it's just a sign of fogeyism.
I feel more in love with live, synchronous SF "Global Weird HQ" culture than ever! I'm throwing wistful paper airplane love letters to it from up in a high castle! 👋
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It's likely more a sign of my own failings than anything else, but I've never been able to make deeply generative collaborations work remotely. Tried many models with many people! Procedural, separable work: sure! But with generative work, best I've seen is "bad but tolerable."
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I'd love to learn from successes here! I've read many articles, threads, stories on remote collaboration practices, but almost exclusively with a frame of execution and operations, separable tasks and skillsets. I'd love to read stories of ideation, invention, free jazz, etc.
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Oddly, one of the best models I have here is old-school correspondence. People working mostly independently on creative projects, sending each other long letters (emails) every few months with distilled thoughts and wonderings. A different kind of collaboration, but quite good.
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I think The Postal Service is a good example of creative work that had this shape
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How cool! I had no idea. It’s interesting that Such Great Heights seems not to have come together in that way, but rather during the recording sessions.
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Oh, for real. My experiences with that office type have been truly awful. Very grateful for my studio and cloister+commons experiences.
One of my big open office peeves I don’t often see discussed: there’s never enough wall space for incremental work to live!
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Having done both for many years, I think Ink & Switch's model strikes a good balance. A fractally distributed mix of synchronous and asynchronous work at varying scales. In person time, when precious, is best reserved for ideation and other forms of intense collaboration.
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I like that best, too: Collaborate as if everyone was a freelancer, and do one's best work in solitude; and then meet up to hang out and discuss things and let ideas flow.
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Have you seen:
ma.tt/2020/04/five-l and the idea of transitioning to asynchronous rather than just remote work?
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Yes, and I think that’s good advice on what management considerations look like at different levels. But it has little to say about how to conduct deeply collaborative and generative work in this setting. What are the concrete nouns and verbs? Have heard no strong stories here.
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Maybe open-source projects? Most of them are remote-only for 30 years. I have very fond memories of the PLD Linux project I worked on in my high school years. The mailing list was a very good experience for both learning and collaborating. We also used Jabber for more p2p collab.
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Before the Current Situation I started working on a piece about the Republic of Letters happening in the modern world. My perspective on that has shifted significantly in the past few months.