CW20 - 2020-03-31 to 2020-04-02
Idea 3 - Message in e Bottle: work more effectively with ephemeral teams across timezones. - CI3-CW20
Participants
- Shoaib Sufi (shoaib.sufi@software.ac.uk),
- Carlos Martinez (c.martinez@esciencecenter.nl) (scribe),
- Alessandro Felder (a.felder@ucl.ac.uk) (chair),
- Emmy Tsang (e.tsang@elifesciences.org),
- Aleksandra Nenadic (a.nenadic@manchester.ac.uk)
Original slide at - _https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GbwxVrWpqw_Nk9Mg9dinLUUThHSfetVsg7KD2SiGIkk/edit?usp=sharing _
Context / Research Domain
Are you:
- A workshop host delivering a session to participants from multiple time zones?
- A hackathon organiser facilitating collaborations between newcomers and experienced community members in teams spread across different time zones?
- A conference organising team hoping to virtually deliver keynotes, poster sessions and demos and build a sustainable community?
Message in e bottle is your solution – a personal, semi-asynchronous, efficient system to facilitate collaborations and improve team productivity across multiple time zones.
Problem
It is hard to collaborate online, and even harder to collaborate across different time zones with people you have not met before. One of the largest challenges is to pass messages effectively. Interactions can be awkward and not personal: it is not clear at what time of day and how the messaging should happen. Not knowing how to pronounce each other’s name impedes the forming of a collaborative human bond.
Solution
Message in e bottle – a service that allows you to handover a workshop so you can run a collaboration workshop across multiple time zones.
When a team working on a particular time zone runs out of time to contribute to the workshop, the team will ‘bottle’ their progress.
The next team to come online can ‘open’ the bottle to receive an update on the current state of the workshop and continue from that point onwards.
What should a message contain?
A message should be easy to digest and should allow people to take work up easily. It should allow newcomers to become familiar with individuals in the team at a human level: voice messages and familiar faces, coding languages they know/ tools they work with.
Using existing technologies
Existing platforms like youtube or instagram could work in a first instance. Be aware that there are privacy considerations that need to be taken into account.