Open quaid opened 4 years ago
I really like this, @quaid, and I think it'll work well in the book. I'm thinking we'll be featuring an entire section on "building community," and I'm thinking this might work well as a kind of introductory chapter to that section.
Yes, building community sounds like a good container for this. It's interesting to me that I avoided language like that--it gets used A LOT on community architect work, but I tend to label outward community building efforts as such without as easily recognizing the same things work on the other side of the prism.
@semioticrobotic Hey, I dropped out of the editorial loop and my ballpoint pen dried up for a while. Is there still a purpose or use for finishing this content, all or some of it? I'm feeling my ink flowing again with some capacity for this (or something else, but coming back through existing good-ideas-in-progress first). Thanks!
We'd absolutely still love to have it. Whether it lands in v1.0 will depend on your timeline, but either way we'd love to see it in the book.
There is a metaphor for the experience of thriving in an office environment, to consider it like a pond, where the various pebble drops of nuanced communication throughout the workday send ripples only discernible when in person.
I read that metaphor in an article in 2009--the middle of my career as a distributed team member--and I still can feel the challenge it posed to me. I knew I would likely never work co-located with a team. Would I always have that dis-located feeling, as if my senses were dulled and fuzzy when at remote? So much of that article relied upon intentional management and willing teammates to get it right. Had I just been lucky so far, or was there something we were all doing that leant itself to scaling that pond effect?
In this chapter, I'll draw on my experience and continued pondering of those questions in the years since. I propose to write about how you take the communication concepts at the core of a co-located pond experience, and scale those via people, processes, and tools into a way to detect the ripples of drops made an ocean away. The method is both directive and organic.
Here's an outline draft, how does this sound?
I think there may be a few more parts/topics that arise as I get into categorizing the different communication mediums and the interweb between individuals in support of a stronger group.