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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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.
That is: yes, we should judge people by their work product and allow people to use the best methods for their setting. What’s lacking IME are the actual methods for distributed generative work. (n.b. this is quite distinct from distributed execution / ops)
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and I have some experience with using a shared wiki and lots of 1:1 email for 2 people to collaborate asynchronously on writing a book but I don’t know of examples where the collaboration had more than 2 people.
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