I'm hanging out on a google hangout with some bots. Lullabots to be exact. They are part of our team, and they are a distributed company. Being distributed introduces some unique challenges to a team trying desperately to value communication over documentation.
I've started to realize over the course of the project that they miss out on key communications, and a lot of it has to do with physical proximity. A quick fix was for the project managers to relay the information to the distributed team once key decisions were made, but this sometimes ends up being a lot like a game of Chinese whispers. They also miss a lot of the context around the discusion, which is often more valuable than the decision.
So now we've started hanging out. It allows us to ask questions and have discussions without waiting for our daily standup meeting, which is good. It's good because people don't wait for the next meeting to raise issues and get answers. It's good because the daily standup is hijacked and used as a problem solving session. It's great because it helps us remember our brothers and sisters on the other end of that interwebwidenet thingy we use to help us stay more connected.
I'll let you know how it goes, but I'd love to see us start to use this for our daily standups (and yes, I would love to see people actually stand up!)
