Participating in nonhierarchical organizations

Posted on 2025.02.03 by bl00

Network/nonhierarchical organizing is my preferred methodology over hierarchy (that was a joke where I put my preferences into a hierarchy). And while I’ve written a fair amount about organizational structures on this blog, I’ve never really talked about what I expect of participants in a network beyond defining governance models. So this is about that.

Intrinsic Motivation

I learned this term from Debbie Chachra, and I love it. You can learn a whole lot more in this video and in this book, but the basics are this:

Purpose – You gotta know why you want to do something. In networks, this is usually either the thing the network has decided is their collective purpose together, or people joining the network are signing up to the already-stated purpose. Purpose can shift over time, and it’s good to check in on, on occasion, without getting too navel-gazey.
Scaffolding – You gotta know if you’re on the right track towards your goals within that purpose, and are making progress against that track. In networks, we usually use documentation and skill shares from folks who have already tried it in this or another context.
Autonomy – With shared purpose guiding you and scaffolding pointing the way, you gotta be able to make decisions for yourself and move without someone else telling you what to do. Because in a network, people (generally) don’t tell each other what to do. There is coordination without control.

Do the work

If you’re present, you should be contributing towards the purpose. This of course includes caring for people doing more directly related work, mentoring, etc. But separate out the philosophical navel-gazing discussion time and people from the work at hand. It’s so much fun to have those philosophical discussions! It’s even important for the purpose of the group and how you communicate that to others. But if you’re not contributing, get out of the way of the people who are and just read their newsletter instead of distracting them.

Self awareness and integrity

Because no one is telling you what to do, and no one is tracking your work, it is vital that you have enough self awareness to notice if something is going off the rails, or your ability to deliver has changed. You then need to communicate with others about how things are going, even if it’s bad news. Otherwise a competent person who is well resourced quietly working on their own looks the exact same from the outside as someone who is in over their head and can’t deliver.

Communication

Here, I look for transparency and sharing space. Talking about what your part is in a way that opens up the space for others to weigh in as well is vital. And I’m always a big fan of the rule of N – speak 1/Nth of the time, whether that means taking up more or less space than you’re prone to!

It’s also important here to speak only for yourself. If someone is missing from the room, work to bring them into the room. But speaking for others is paternalistic and you often get it wrong, anyway. The number of productive conversations I’ve seen derailed because someone started concern-trolling about something they barely understood on someone else’s “behalf” is staggering.

It’s also fun to look at the COINTELPRO guide to disrupting and delaying effective action, and to just avoid doing those things.

Why I know what I’m talking about

I’ve done a lot of network organizing since I got started in 2009. First organizing hacker and makerspaces to share skills and a 501c3 umbrella for Jigsaw Renaissance and School Factory; then connecting disaster and humanitarian technology groups to each other and responses via Geeks Without Bounds and then UN OCHA’s Digital Humanitarian Network; and now with an art and music campout festival called Priceless. I even considered being an academic for awhile on this topic and how it overlaps with hierarchical orgs at the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Technology. Phew.

What I’m doing to prepare

Posted on 2024.11.17 by bl00

I realized on Friday that all my experience in organizing marginalized frontline populations in times of crisis is really going to come to bear on the upcoming years. This time, we even have some time to prepare, and lots of foundational work has already been happening in our communities by those who haven’t been served by ANY administration that’s been in power.

Find your people

Ideally, you already know some of your neighbors. But maybe you don’t! Capitalism and eviction culture lead to not knowing who’s around you. It means we have less solidarity and less strength against the ruling class. If you don’t already know your neighbors, start getting to know them! Get comfortable knocking on doors with cookies. Be open to who you meet. More and more people are uncomfortable with the status quo, even if they voted differently to you. Remember that the uniting cry of the Zapatists was “¡Ya Basta!” (“enough!”). You may end up with strange allies, but they will be allies nonetheless.

Have a good sense of who you can trust with what. Some folks are excellent at helping people feel welcome, but also don’t have a good gauge of how discrete a new person can be. Some folks are good in a crisis but otherwise aren’t dependable. Etc. There are many things you can trust someone with, have a good sense of who to trust with what.

Be open to new folks showing up, but also be aware that there will be lots of attempts at infiltration as time goes on, especially as you become more known. Each person having a story and a personal contact who can vouch for them goes a long way, but also just behave as if you’re already infiltrated.

Scope your focus

I have chosen to focus on my state and county. If a trans kid from Florida shows up on my porch, Reed and I will talk about housing them. However, I can’t do anything about trans kids in Florida at this point. I can keep giving money to Planned Parenthood in the Midwest and the South, and I can keep giving money to Translifeline, but other than that, I need to hone my focus close to home. Maybe you’ll pick a specific cause to focus on rather than a geographic one. But regardless, pick something that matches your area of influence and stick to it. Else we all go mad and burn out.

I also really liked this article that’s being passed around, that has four areas of focus: protect people, disrupt and disobey, defend civic institutions, and build alternatives. I think it’s good to know which frame folks are using when they’re asking for action. I also think it’s important that all four of these bases be covered (or intentionally left out) when organizing a broader group.

Continue reading →

Calling artists and authors to help with a response zine!

Posted on 2024.06.19 by bl00

As some of you know, I have cared about crisis response for a long time. And now, as a side project, as furthered recently at my birthday conference, I’m working on a guide for the formal sector to interact with the informal. I’m also starting work on a zine for informal groups to know what’s up in times of crisis. The informal groups are harder to reach as you don’t know who they are in advance, and so our goal is to make this zine something the formal sector is willing to hand off, something that is findable online, and something that activist groups might seek out themselves in advance.

I’m really excited about it, but it’s also a LOT of work. And I’m not the only person with writing or artistry skills out there, so I’d like to use this as an opportunity to commission some work. There’s a form at the bottom of this blog post to sign up for a section if you’re interested. What follows immediately are short write-ups of areas I think need better words and/or a piece of art to express.

Basics of response

Reviewing in an informal way things about WASH and food safety, plus common sense for physical safety for collapsed buildings (unit 7) etc. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast, it’s worth moving carefully. Would require some independent research to figure out what is being detailed by official sources.

Data safety

You’ll be setting up some basic things immediately – a place to chat (mailing list, Signal group, etc) and a place to store information (wiki, Google Drive, etc). When a crisis first kicks off, data is gathered fast and loose, and access is given to anyone who might be able to help. That is expected and we get it. However, after time wears on and things stabilize a bit, some thought needs to be given to data retention and security, including who has access to what.

Limit how many administrators you have. Use secure-enough tools, limit who has access, send over encrypted channels. Retrofitting is a pain, but is worth the pain. Do your best in the moment, without sacrificing efficacy.

This would be a conversation we have to flesh out details you might be interested in and to highlight what I think is important and reasonable here.

Sustainability & leadership

At odds with a do-acracy, it makes more sense to select each other for leadership positions. Be wary of narcissism, usually indicated by someone wanting full ownership of something. Quiet, competent leaders are great in American cultures. This is something for conversation if you don’t already have a background here.

Self and community care

Support your leaders, IE if they’re a single parent, get them child care support while they coordinate. Taking at least one day off a week is necessary. You cannot go all out indefinitely, and your work will suffer if you try to. Rotation of duties is an excellent way to build resilience of responsibility in your community and to strengthen things by knowledge sharing. Feeding the group is important work. Etc. This would be great for someone passionate about governance structures and self care. Happy to have conversations about this and the sub topics to deepen the thinking here, but if you’re already familiar with self organizing structures, you’ll have a great start.

Documentation

Documentation often seems like the BIGGEST waste of time, but it is SO important. It will help you with handoff to other people (sustainability), it will help you communicate and coordinate with other groups (impact), and it will help you tell your story later (learning). Share outward as much and as often as you can handle, it will help everyone, and they in turn can help you.

A documentarian can be see as an apprentice to a role, writing down what they’ll do as they learn about it. This builds resilience in your group in multiple ways.

Happy to have a conversation about this one, but if you already love libraries and/or wikis, you’re probably set here.

Dealing with money

Eventually, someone will probably want to give you money, or you’ll start running into ways that you’d like to get money to spend on certain things rather than always coordinating material goods directly. Some groups, like Occupy Sandy, just estimate that they’d like 10% to fraud and that it would cost 15% in overhead to track, and so just gave away cash to projects based on donations flowing in. Other groups, like Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, ended up forming a 501c3 so they could better accept funds to pay for people’s airline tickets. Each comes with risks and benefits. This would be a conversation with me and some other folks to get you set up on models and information.

Failure modes

Formalizing your group in different ways (often done to deal with the money problem) leads to different types of failure. People who form businesses (disaster capitalism) usually end up failing as a business because they thought their one-off crisis lessons applied everywhere else. Right-wing response groups over optimize for centralizing power, especially when things are going sideways, which leads to bits of the group breaking off to do their own things. Leftist response groups fail to build consensus around the next actions to take and dissolve. A conversation can be had here.

Some tips for interacting successfully with the formal sector

Like it or not, the formal sector is probably going to show up at some point and try to deploy to your area. Here are things to know about how they work and what they expect that can help everything run more smoothly. I’d write the intro to this section, but the subsections can all be conversations if they’re not clear enough already.

Have a person the formal sector can talk to

A broker liaison could be someone who has done CERT training or that otherwise has worked within a command structure before. They should be open to understanding where the formal groups are coming from, but firm in what will and won’t be accepted by the community. They will need to be available for lots of informational meetings. This is how the formal sector thinks of these folks. If someone wants to prepare for this in advance, FEMA’s independent study is great.

Flying drones

Drones are a really great way of checking out your area to see what is going on. However, if any planes are up in the air, the drones have to come down. Low flying planes are used to take photography for damage assessments to see where resources should be sent, as well as being used occasionally to deliver supplies, so they’re an important part of response and shouldn’t be interfered with (unless you’re in an adversarial environment).

Rule of thumb

If there is a SERIOUS safety issue, like a hazardous spill, if you cannot cover the entire area from view while holding up your thumb, you are too close.

Where and how your formal sector colleagues can talk with you

Formal entities can (and should!) be held accountable for decisions they make and actions they take. This means all communication has to be audit-able, which means they can’t talk to you on something like Signal. Their systems are also often locked down so they can’t install the latest and greatest new collaboration tool. Being willing to join them where they’re at (if they can get you an account) and/or to find new third places is a key component to opening up communication.

Interested in helping out?

Interested? Here’s a form to fill out to indicate interest! I’d love to see responses in by July 22nd. When estimating, please be kind to yourself, but while I’m making Bay Area money (NOT software engineer money), I also have a kid and stuff. I have worked as a contracting artist before and will limit myself to 2 revision rounds on each thing. You will absolutely be credited in the zine. You’re welcome to reach out to willow dot be el zero zero at gmail if you have any questions or want to see how progress is going.

Distributed playbook

Posted on 2020.12.13 by bl00

While I was at Truss, I helped move us from a dozen people in the Bay Area to nearly a hundred across 20 states. Through monthly meetings to run experiments in improving our practices, we came up with the Distributed Playbook. It’s since changed format enough that I missed the original version, so I’ve ported it over from Github to a page on this blog. It, along with the onboarding guide, are two of the things of which I’m most proud from my time at Truss. Hope they can help you out, too!

RecoveryCon Report Out

Posted on 2020.05.29 by bl00

Last weekend RecoveryCon happened, a distributed conference to examine how we can come out of this pandemic better than we were before. A blog post on how the facilitation happened already got posted, and now that the participants have approved the notes for public viewing, here they are, followed also by our Joy Gallery (things that are bringing us joy right now).

Sessions

These are very rough notes from session report-outs, linking to the track’s notes doc.

Supply chain: How we can organize the supply chain for emergencies. What’s going wrong right now, how it can get better. Anarchist organizations and organizing. Challenges of adoption and disseminating information to get people to use the system. Mechanisms that have prevented organizations from centralizing too much power.

Resilient organizations: gentler with ourselves and each other. This is unprecedented, we’re communicating differently. Internalize, feel it, express. How different organizations are trying to adapt. Yearning to connect, be of service. Not everyone is online. Social innovation, getting through the day. Invitation as a way to communicate. Going from community to life organizing and coaching.

Reclaiming streets: How our streets are changed right now, how to sustain those places. Not just pipes to get places. Less use of public transit from this pandemic but bikes as key. Political will to keep this momentum up. How can we take these experiments and make them more human scale, open to all, plan and build?

Putting your own mask on first: Make spaces meet basic need. Shit, sleep, eat. Many people are relocating right now which is not great. Get a bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen into a reasonable state. Bathrooms often only place you can be alone and vulnerable. These spaces are important. Change concept of success – instead of “hit these things or you’ve failed” – but instead “what is the smallest increment on the way to a goal you can be proud of? Cultivating joy and satisfaction.

Resilience & Rehabilitation: Incarceration, systems and narratives in place that are very broken. Are the majority of people in the state system convicted of violent crimes? Internalized the narrative of what the system is and who’s in it, why and how they’re there, what should happen after. Parole is really social death, people go back to prison because of parole violations not because of committing another crime. Showed a video clip. And interventions of restorative and transformative justice. Focus on healing process for survivors.

End of capitalism: Weird, deadly time we’re in. Need to look at new models already out there for a global context. US, UK are grappling with things that aren’t new. Patterns from elsewhere in the world. Think about transfers in one direction, need to go in other directions as well. Imagine alternatives. How do we change incentives? Challenge false dichotomies. Cooperative buy-outs.

How are we collaborative?: How we’ve collaborated during this time. Moving collaboration entirely online, better than half on half off. Not having to travel but still having access. Challenges of everything being online. Divide between digital and non digital conversation. Everyone has to contribute. If there’s a digital divide it’s difficult. STructure so everyone can participate. How things can improve: siloed and fragmented, lots of work within single communities. Conferences like this help, but not clear how this scales. How do we get the right people to talk at the right time?

Campuses: Many US campuses on path to closure. Physical space, use for space that is changing and not what the market structures would deem. Could we build with intention and in community? Concepts of education, pulling away from a system that encourages disparity. Experiences to the table. Book recommendations. Paths forward to making and taking space, like squatters’ rights. Fighting entrenched class structures. How to not need to feel productive at all times.

Data for all: Questioning assumption that data is record of record, faithful construction of reality. Constructed, produced. Produced in all types of new ways we don’t know the repercussions of. Dominant narrative of data generating new insights and how to meet those needs, but also new ways for data to control us without our consent. Concentrated interests extracting value out of us and our systems. Even when I’m presented with a request for consent, I don’t know, don’t have a meaningful way to opt out. Our paradigm of more data should shift from individual consent to harm reduction. Do we need new kinds of institutions to mediate these discussions?

What art is giving you visions for the future you want? How can creativity be part of future-crafting? Ways art can bring our imaginations closer to what another world could look like. Star Trek, UKL. Art in community, collaborative process being deeply fueling, esp with other collaborative processes. Meaning making and community building of having a physical object. Street art as assertion of people in space. Dystopian art as highlighting or telling us what we want to avoid?

Fun, creative, and inspiring opportunities for the future of [digital] communications/socializing more vulnerable populations participating. Rope people into ways we want to connect online. Serendipity of real world is missing. Town Online is trying to mimic that, but not really there yet. How we can get to conversations, like rooms for conversations like a house. Brackets and multithreading in chats to track topics. Using video chat with shared activity without expectation of eye contact. How to emote with avatars? Changing video call backgrounds as framing conversations. Annotation as something everyone can contribute to

How do we plan for a post-scarcity society within a society that is collapsing? What is hope? Redefining hope, going from this model of “everything will be ok in a few months” versus what I can have hope in today. Changes expectations and outputs of what you’re capable of. Prepper talk. Differences based on environment, and who is around. Unevenness of post scarcity. How unevenly distributed these crises are. We’ve seen alternative systems of sharing value, but it happens at small scales and in homogeneous places. I believe other worlds are possible, but I don’t see a path towards the multicultural world I want to live in. Security in a world of collapse feels bubbly.

We were all scared to show up. There’s not a lot of capacity to do things, including for the organizers and facilitators. But we’re glad we did.

Joy Gallery

Bookcases! Lots of bookcases: https://twitter.com/BCredibility/
Old Oakland Railways –
- See also https://ivansigal.net/kcr/
Gardening. And the badgers.
Listening to the wind in the trees
Putting a sprig of rosemary or lavender in my mask as I talk a walk in nature
sunset on the rooftop (I’m trying to make a ritual of it)
Micro moments to fill in

Vicarious cat interactions through lots of videos/tiktok compilations
Seeing people’s rooms/homes in the backgrounds and getting to know them in that way
- This piñata head:
The poetry of Keetje Kuipers (example)
Somehow ended up in an all canadian group
Playing scrabble with my best friends – i have won 1 game of 700. Keep on
Art – making beauty out of struggle
Convening spaces for community across the world – humanitarian wise. It is hard but people really appreciate it
Reconnecting with old friends, virtual hangouts
These Twitter threads:https://twitter.com/kylosbarechest/status/1264208265245683712
https://twitter.com/vilruse/status/1263891922168545281
I (Zephyr) have been putting out a small newsletter every Friday of only good/cute/queer/hopeful things – https://tinyletter.com/zalsoa
MINECRAFT (building huge group projects with friends)
Being with my son
Being able to enjoy my art installment around my nome Meural
Reconnecting, finding my grounding and sense of place
Being outside, hiking, connecting with my friends

What’s bringing you joy right now?

Facilitating a distributed conference

Posted on 2020.05.24 by bl00

I was pretty sure it was going to be a disaster the day before. Hell, the week before. Having multiple tracks of participatory sessions meant that people would need to move from video conference link to video conference link. We didn’t have a shared chat space consistent across all the “rooms,” and I was anxious to go to other links myself to gather people, leaving the core room unattended.

It could have been terrible. Instead, RecoveryCon was a smashing success, with people joining from all over the US, plus the UK, Germany, and Turkey. We ran (mostly) on time. We shared back what had happened in sessions. We cried a bit together. And we ended 3 minutes early.

Another blog post will happen soon with a summary of sessions, links to notes, and our Joy Gallery; but for now I wanted to tell you about facilitating a multi-track open-spaces style event. A caveat that a high proportion of my friends are facilitators and/or are tech savvy. YMMV.

The logistics

We had as many video conference “rooms” as we had tracks. This will come into play with the agenda. One “room” should be both a track and also where you start / regroup to. This means anyone coming to the conference at weird times is swept up in a session without extra overhead. It also gives a consistent sense of a “common room” that people know to go to if they get lost or booted or whatever.

Start a notes doc for each track, including headers for each session and reminders of when to come back to the main room. That way, folk don’t need to ask about it. It will be a bit of a Thing when times change and you have to go update each doc, but oftentimes folk will have already updated it for you. You will be able to see this in the notes doc when the content overview post goes up.

If I were going to do this again, I would have a chat of some kind with the session leads and facilitators to coordinate and remind about coming back. This time it worked out great, tho!

The agenda

This was bananas to me. I am in the school of facilitation that does not share the agenda for an event, but rather encourages people to be fully present by asking them to trust me and giving folk whatever comes next as it happens. This time, I shared a spreadsheet of when various things were going to happen. This spreadsheet also provided a source of truth so far as links to video conference rooms and notes docs so folk could self-sort.

All sessions ended up being the same length of time, which was different than originally planned. I tried to add in complexity where it wasn’t needed, and we organically got back to a simpler state.

Expectation setting

In addition to a version of the participant guidelines from Aspiration I give (and was reminded to do so this time — thank you), we also had the expectation of all watching the clock together, and of returning to the main room. I asked at least once on each front for those to be repeated back to me, and made the main room clear in the communications emails sent out to attendees.

We also set the expectation of collaborative note taking as active listening and of reporting back on sessions so folk who went elsewhere still felt like they got something out of the sessions they missed.

Thank you

Thank you to all the amazing folk who came to RecoveryCon and made it what it was. Special shout out to Greg, for helping with organizing; to Liz, for having boundaries; to Adrienne and Heather for facilitating tracks; and to Cheryl, Beatriz, Nathan, sevine, Julie, Courtney, Lou, Ahmet, B, and two other folk I missed for leading sessions.

A playbook for distributed teams

Posted on 2019.09.16 by bl00

Originally posted on the Truss blog

There are a lot of articles coming out these days about how to be an effective distributed employee. But there is much less around on how to be a good distributed team. Truss hired our first distributed employees back in January of 2018, and we’re now at 55% outside our “home state” of California (and many of us are spread across CA). We’re now 75 folk, and there are usually 5 of us in “the office.” As Isaac recently said, “it’s like a coworking space that only Trussels have access to.”

We’ve had to learn a few things in order to keep the organization functioning and aligned with our values. We’ve now codified the steadiest of these lessons in a distributed playbook on GitHub.

A quick note on language, and why we chose “distributed” over “remote.”

“Remote” suggests that there is a central place to which a node is remote. Because we wanted to emphasize that we are all on equal footing, we instead chose “distributed” – there is no “center.” We have collections of Trussels in NYC, Atlanta, Chicago, Sacramento, LA, and SF; as well as individual Trussels in many other locations.

What the playbook holds

We think healthy distributed team interaction falls into four buckets: facilitating interaction, properly resourcing people, bonding with each other, and seeing each other in person on occasion. This includes other things like taking stack, having a place for banter, having offsites, and having ways to connect about not-work. Things we’ve talked about in previous blog posts and will continue to post about (and now will collect into this playbook as we do).

A quick note on internal references in the playbook

We talk in the playbook about TDRs – Truss Decision Records. We pulled these from ADRs (Architectural Decision Records) which we use in our code repos to document why we made certain choices. We do the same for our organization now, and anyone can propose a new decision. We should probably do another blog post on that at some point.

We want your help!

We’re still learning about distributed team interactions—we all are—and we’d love your feedback and contributions to the playbook so we can all learn with each other.

Facilitating distributed All Hands meetings

Posted on 2019.08.26 by bl00

Originally posted on the Truss blog

All hands meetings are important – they are a way to spread a message, a way for a team to get to know each other, and a way to move a decision making process forward. They are easy to do wrong—to hear something everyone already knows a thousand times over, to be unclear, or to be a jumbled mess without enough time to accomplish a goal. I’ve run the numbers of how much we pay for an all hands meeting (something I can do with internal salary transparency), and the cost is nothing to laugh at. So why do we have these meetings so often (at Truss, once a week), and how can we make sure we’re getting the most of them?

We see facilitation as the way to get the most out of a meeting like this. I’ll arbitrarily define “meeting facilitation” here as the act of deciding what you want to get out of a gathering, planning for, and then constructing and maintaining a space and flow to optimize for achieving that goal with a group of people. This is different from presentations—which are also useful—as a presentation is about the clear delivering of a message by one or a small group of people to another set of people. It is possible to facilitate a set of presentations, especially if there is Q&A at the end.

Facilitating distributed meetings

As we’ve talked about before, facilitation changes when you have a distributed group. And so as Truss noses up past 70 (and still growing) we’re hitting new facilitation challenges. As our client base grows, and our internal operations change, and fewer Trussels know each other well, what do we want out of our all hands meetings (that we call “Practitioners’,” or “Prac” for short), and how can we be sure we’re achieving those goals?

Skill share

We know we don’t have all the answers at Truss, and so we wanted to have the conversation about how to further improve our practices with a broader group of people. Four Trussels (Sara, MacRae, Isaac, and Willow) were joined by Emily of honeycomb.io, Pam of One Medical, Aaron of CivicActions, Liz of Public Lab, and Mike of an undisclosed media company to skill share. The all hands we facilitate run from groups of a handful to in the 70s. Some of us rotate facilitators, some of us hold that honor for a prolonged period. Some of us are fully remote, some of us are clumped into rooms in different locations.

While you can get into the details by watching the video or reading the notes, our main categories of interest fell into engagement & participation, meeting purpose, and who is remote versus who is in person. We had a few main takeaways that we’ll be cross-pollinating across our organizations.

Facilitation Guild

Having a group of similarly dedicated folk within your organization can help up everyone’s game. Try out experiments together, lean on each other for support, and perform course corrections by having allies to check in with. We try out new things on our project teams and then share them back to the guild, helping the whole organization benefit from gains (and avoid and/or reproduce discovered failures!)

Collaborative decision making

While some of us (including Truss) still use all hands primarily as a way to disseminate information, Aaron of CivicActions and Liz of Public Lab told stories of making decisions as organizations during all hands meetings. This makes my robot heart sing with joy, and the Truss facilitation guild will be looking for ways to start doing this in our projects.

“Hand” in chat

As a group grows larger, it becomes more difficult to track who wants to say something, and in what order. We use the video conferencing software’s chat to raise a hand through text—literally typing “hand”—in order to signal we want to say something. Not only does it help the facilitator keep stack, it also gives time to folks who want to consider what they want to say before they say it

Banter / Side channel

Banter is a great way to keep everyone engaged—I may not want to take up everyone’s attention with the perfect gif in reaction to something that’s just been said, but if I have somewhere to post it, I’m more likely to stay engaged as are the folk looking at and responding to the gif. Using a side channel (so not distracting from the “hand” channel above) means everyone wins.

What’s next?

Huge shout out to all the folk who joined for this facilitation skill share—I’m excited about a lot I get to do, and this was still the highlight of my month thus far. To be able to share skills across organizations is rarer than I’d like in the private sector, and that’s just silly. We all do better when we all do better. I hope we have more reason to collaborate with each other to grow and uplift the spaces we’re in. Is there something you want to learn or share about?

There is a growing body of work around working from home and working from anywhere… as well as the practices individuals take to stay sane and healthy while doing so. But we’re lacking a supporting body of work in how to help groups work together well in this new distributed environment. Truss is beginning to codify our learnings into a distributed playbook, which we’ll share when it’s good enough to face the tumult of the internet. When it’s out, we hope you’ll join us in making it better.

Upping Our Distributed Practices

Posted on 2018.12.05 by bl00

Originally posted on the Truss blog

While there are lively debates about whether or not the Future is Distributed, at Truss we’re having a pretty solid time of it. Running online meetings is just the beginning of making sure your distributed team is included, and we’re continually working to improve our distributed practices.

We have a running doc of practices we want to try. Our goal is to fail at least occasionally — it means we’re actually reaching further than our grasp. Here are a handful that we’ve recently tried, and to what result.

Persistent distributed video : quiet failure
Being Humans Together : resounding success
#in-out-status : success
Synchronized cupcake delivery : failed, but worth a re-attempt

Persistent distributed video

One of the things we missed most in becoming fully distributed was the human bonding time we got with our rad coworkers while in the office together. One of our attempts at addressing this has been a standing video link which people can jump into and out of to “cowork” with each other. There’s sometimes some idle chitchat, and then often heads-down working.

It ended up not working for a few reasons:

being on it as the same time as other folk is rare;
we have a culture of scheduling time to talk about specific subjects rather than hoping it happens organically;
the standing video link quickly became “invisible.”

Result : quiet failure

Being Humans Together

Getting distributed folk in a video in a coordinated way to talk about Not Work is now a standing half-hour weekly timeslot. It is some Trussels’ favorite part of the week. We do a couple different formats:

if under 9 participants, each person gets 2 minutes to talk about anything at all they want to, so long as it’s not work.
if it’s more than 9 participants, a quick checkin happens on how people are feeling, and then breakout groups of 3-4 people each for a deeper dive.

We sometimes have a prompt (“what’s one story about you that you think really represents what you’re like?” or a show-and-tell.

Breakout functionality in video conferencing software has been amazingly useful. So far we’ve done these randomly, but at some point we might try self-selection into these “rooms.”

Result : resounding success

#in-out-status

Has this ever happened to you? You log in on the East Coast after a sick day, and you have no. idea. what is going on with different stories. Did someone delete that blocker, or has it been worked around? And it’s 3 hours before anyone else who might know what’s going on will be online.

We now have a Slack channel called #in-out-status where people give a brief summary of the status of what they were working on before they go out for the day. It’s evolved to be a place where we also flag when we’re in for the day, going to lunch, taking a sick day, etc.

Result : success

Synchronized Cupcake Delivery

The project I manage recently hit a big milestone in October. While it was more of a non-event than our June release, there was still some stress around it, and a celebration was warranted. I set up a 2-hour session — the first hour of which was to catch up with each other (similar to Being Humans Together, but less structured), and a second hour to wander around where each of us is, and post pictures back to the group. The pictures were to put everyone on equal footing, rather than prioritizing office Trussels.

Also, during the first hour, I had lined up (what I thought would be) synchronized treat delivery to people regardless of location, scheduling deliveries for the time of the zone of delivery (IE, deliveries marked for 11:30 PT, 13:30 CT, and 14:30 ET in the interface should all arrive at the same point in time).

It ends up this is not a use case for this particular delivery service.

While all the cupcakes (plus one cookie order and one bundt cake order for some destitute places of the world which don’t have cupcakes available for delivery) for people in my timezone arrived as expected, 2 folk received theirs at the time requested but in MY timezone (hours late), and 2 received theirs hours early (for conversion errors I don’t understand).

While it didn’t work out this time, everyone felt included and celebrated. Definitely worth trying again at some point.

Result : failed, but worth a re-attempt