Improve visibility of colleagues among each other in remote work environments

[jancborchardt]

Problem

Working remotely, you are not as connected to your colleagues because you do not meet them as regularly or see them in a physical office on a daily basis.

Current state

There are already a lot of things we do to connect people:

• Avatars is a very basic thing
• Status messages are a nice little indicator
• Availability info is important cause you don’t see them in person
• Similarly, we also now have a more unified way to set your vacation/absence
• People on the same instance are already listed in Contacts so you don’t have to duplicate people (and be possibly left with outdated info)
• We have a super nice org chart for companies and organizations
• There are dashboard widgets for "Recent statuses" and "Recent activity" (and soon also "Teams")
• We have the contacts menu which quickly shows you other people on the instance and their status at a glance – however the sorting is not specifically relevant to you, so that can be improved (see below)

Possible solutions and improvements

We can do a lot more things to connect people further

@jancborchardt's ideas:

• Contacts menu: Our contacts menu has been improved a bit recently by showing the status as per https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/40559 but we could do more. For example:
  • Showing the new "Teams" in there, and prioritizing up top the people in your main teams
  • Sorting people up top who you interact with a lot,
  • Show the most recent chat message in the subline, in addition to where the status is. Ref https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/22329
• Profile hovercard: Currently when you click someone’s picture, you just get a menu, whereas other apps usually show a nice hovercard. This can also be connected to the Nextcloud Profile.
• Personal settings: We can improve the personal settings layout to make it more enticing to fill out so the info is there for your colleagues. Ref https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pull/41718
• Work reports: These make it more transparent what everyone is working on and also give personal motivation and reflection. We already do this internally via mail but could weave it into Nextcloud.
  • Basecamp for example nudges people every end of the week via notification or email to write down what they did and every beginning of the week to write down what they plan.
  • Some of this can be prefilled based on calls you attended, events that were in your calendar, so it is nicer for people to fill out.
  • There could also be a better way of showing/viewing these reports, e.g. specifically within a team.
• Contact info next to mail composer: When you write a mail to someone or reply, we could show their contact info next to the composer. Maybe you have some notes in their contact which are relevant for that, or their company name and position. I remember some mail app did this but can not recall which. cc @nimishavijay maybe it came up during research for gap analysis. https://github.com/nextcloud/mail/issues/9622
• Contact info in Talk 1on1 conversations: Similarly it could be done in Talk, with further info of the person in the sidebar of 1on1 calls.
• Avatars in more places: Like in desktop and Android, see https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/16207

@nimishavijay's ideas:

• Friendlier screen when you start a conversation: When you first create a conversation with someone, what shows up right now is a blank screen with a "You created this conversation" message and a timestamp. It could show more about the person itself, even if it's just the avatar and role or a short text that encourages conversation (ref Slack's 1on1s)

• Better visibility of local time zone of colleagues: Currently, the time zone of the colleague is shown in the avatar menu. Just like showing when a colleague is out of office/on vacation, we can also show a notice when you are sending a message to a person in a timezone outside of their working hours ("It is currently 3:40 AM for Sam Doe. Maybe send a silent message" or something)

• Convert time zones into local time zone: Discord does a cool thing where you can send a time formatted in a specific way to make it show up in your colleague's messages in their timezone. (Eg: I type "Let's meet at /time:11:00CET for the review?" and it shows up as "Let's meet at 15:30 IST for the review?" for my colleague in India)

• Comments in Text: There are comments and chat options in the sidebar, but the collaboration technique that came up the most often in the internal design calls is highlighting a sentence and leaving a comment for your colleague. This is currently possible in office, but not so in Text. https://github.com/nextcloud/text/issues/185

• Share your ideas :)

cc @nextcloud/designers @AndyScherzinger and since it’s encompassing multiple aspects, the most relevant team leads @sorbaugh @ChristophWurst @juliushaertl @nickvergessen

[nickvergessen]

• Somewhat related to https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed/issues/6293 then, but basically instead of doing it only on "Start" we do it all the time and in the right sidebar?

[juliushaertl]

Another idea:

• when being in a call and trying to schedule a follow up, it would be nice to have a way to create a new event where you also immediately see the availability of everyone in the call

[jancborchardt]

when being in a call and trying to schedule a follow up, it would be nice to have a way to create a new event where you also immediately see the availability of everyone in the call

@juliushaertl this is probably related? https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed/issues/6292

[marcoambrosini]

• Notification badges when someone calls, sends email, message, and so forth. Regardless of where I am in nc

[karlitschek]

I like all the ideas :-) Very cool!

[jancborchardt]

A cool thing that Discord does is they have an "Active now" section in the right sidebar where you see what friends are doing. We could do this to show calls that colleagues are in where you either are already in the conversation or if it is an open conversation. This would for example be nice like our public design review call, the various coffee calls, etc. Of course this should not go into the surveillance direction like e.g. how Discord has "rich presence" where you can even show what you are listening to in Spotify or which file you are working on, that’s a bit over the top.

Not my screenshot, but as an example on the right:

[jancborchardt]

Another thing that I think we discussed in the past for Talk if I remember correctly @nickvergessen @karlitschek: A room concept sort of like Discord has with their voice channels, where if you are in a room it is in a perpetual state of call, or it is a subchannel for a conversation which is its voice channel. And it’s not a barrier to "start a call" in a general chat.

That you could use nicely for e.g. coworking in remote work environments, more spontaneous and with less scheduling. Of course right now you can already create this by just putting in rooms you call "Hangout" but it’s a bit different, more manual.

[ChristophWurst]

Brainstorming results of the Groupware team

• https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/44776
• https://github.com/nextcloud/calendar/issues/5909
• https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed/issues/11402
• https://github.com/nextcloud/calendar/issues/3234
• Edit user status in the Talk sidebar
• Visibility for status (visible to everyone vs visible to specific Nextcloud groups vs the organization team based on the assigned manager)
• Limit dashboard recent statuses (common Nextcloud groups or the organization team based on the assigned manager) because the larger the instance/organization, the less significant status updates I will see on the dashboard. I want to see the status of the people I work with closely.
• Text prompts for Calendar bookings
  • "Lunch with Anna" -> suggest attendee
  • "Piano lesson 4pm" -> prefill start time
• Use Calendar name, description and possible tags to guess the calendar for new events. E.g. Sales meeting would pick/suggest the Sales calendar over personal
• Track where people work from (office, home, other) and let this information flow into meeting scheduling

[jancborchardt]

A bunch of relevant topics for this are already part of 30, but we are pretty much full then as is.

As preparation for 31 @AndyScherzinger and I suggest that as preparation for the next planning meeting there is a brainstorming among teams to find fitting items (either already existing or new ones, like @ChristophWurst did with Groupware). These we can then talk about in the next planning to be somewhat prepared for 31 already.

@juliushaertl (already mentioned) @nickvergessen @ChristophWurst @artonge (replacement for @sorbaugh)