We're doing lots of thinking at the moment about how to work together across timezones. There are only really two hours a day when we're all awake. We use backpack a lot, and email. And I assumed we'd use all sorts of fancy tools like skype and iChat (we're all on Macs) but they all seem to fall apart when you get to four people in four countries. So we're often falling back on a marvelous technology called the phone. It's great. Everyone has their own unique number and if you call it you can just talk to them using a system called 'voice'. We're also using freeconferencecall.com for weekly meetings.
We've dabbled with Second Life and other virtual environments, but they've not really worked. Apart from anything else I find that Second Life makes every conversation feel like you're flirting, and I'm not sure that's always appropriate. I think Croquet might be the answer, but we need to find someone who'd like to help us create something, and we've not done that yet.
Anyway, I still suspect that our original intention - to build a small global business using off-the-shelf consumer tools is still the right one, and with that in mind I was really drawn to this from Second Verse (found via Matt Jones). It's clearly not actually a useful thing yet, but I think it points at a way of doing asynchronous, rich collaboration - cheaply and easily. (And it uses gawker, which I love but have yet to find a good use for.)
This post will now just tail off with no real conclusion.
See.
Good post. This stuff is interesting, in a gentle way.
Posted by: Ben | November 03, 2006 at 04:54 PM
Completely agree that time-lapse video I made isn't (by itself) "useful" - but if you deliver it alongside finished deliverables, it does a nice job of creating context. Sometimes it's nice to see how your collaborators arrive at the solutions they suggest.
If you're into collaboration over distance, I humbly suggest you check out the talk I gave at UX Week this year. Found here:
http://itconversations.com/shows/detail1564.html
It addresses some of the experiences you've had, and points out some ways of handling them. Please let me know what you think.
Posted by: Ryan | November 03, 2006 at 07:08 PM