Conversation

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.
6
10
188
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! 👋
2
1
32
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."
1
25
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.
1
20
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
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!
2
Replying to
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.
1
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.
1
1
1
Show replies
Replying to
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.