[this post is available online at https://s.apache.org/dkffj ]
by Marvin Humphrey
I "arrived" at the Apache Software Foundation in 2005, unreasonably angry about
a bug in Apache Lucene. By "arrived", I mean that I sent the first few emails
among several thousand I would go on to send over the next 15 years — the ASF
didn't have a physical office where I could show up to buttonhole and berate
some unlucky customer service representative. An unreasonably patient Lucene
contributor named Doug Cutting talked me down.
Because the ASF has always been a virtual organization, the Coronavirus
pandemic has had minimal impact on its day-to-day operations. While individual
contributors may be personally affected, at the collective level there's been
no mad scramble to adapt.
Others have not been so fortunate. All around the world organizations have
been struggling to revamp their processes and infrastructure to comply with
"social distancing" protocols. Sadly, many have already laid off workers, or
even closed their doors for good.
And yet, there is a huge pool of work which could conceivably be performed
remotely but isn't yet — or which is suddenly being performed remotely but
inefficiently. If we can accelerate and streamline the transition to remote
work, many jobs and businesses could be saved. With some creativity, our
interim "new normal" could be more propsperous, and perhaps sooner than we
think!
Are you an Open Source contributor? If so, you possess expertise in remote
operations which is desperately needed in today's challenging economic
environment. Let's talk about what we know and how we can help.
The Internet Turns People Into Jerks
People type things at each other over the internet that they would never say to
someone's face. In person, we calibrate our language based on feedback we
receive via facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language. But when all
communication is written, the feedback loop is broken — and all too easily,
vicious words fall out of our fingertips.
Suddenly-remote workers may find themselves exposed to this phenomenon as
conversations that once took place in the office migrate to Slack, email, and
other text-centric communication channels. But it can be tricky learning to
recognize when a conversation being conducted via a text channel has gotten
overheated — it takes an intuitive leap of empathy, possibly aided by dramatic
reading of intemperate material a la Celebrities Read Mean Tweets
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs4hTtftqnlAkiQNdWn6bbKUr-P1wuSm0 on
Jimmy Kimmel.
Open Source communities have grappled with incivility for as long as the
movement has existed. Over time, "ad hominem" personal attacks have gradually
become taboo because of their insidious corrosive effect; there exists broad
cultural consensus that you should attack the idea rather than person behind it.
Defenses have become increasingly formalized and sophisticated as more and more
communities have adopted a "code of conduct". While the primary purpose of
such documents is guard gainst harassment and other serious misconduct, they
often contain aspirational recommendations about how community members should
treat each other — because serious misconduct is more likely to occur in an
environment of constant low-grade incivility.
Regardless of whether your organization adopts a code of conduct, it won't hurt
to raise awareness among remote team members of the suceptibility of text-based
communications to incivility — so that they may identify and confront it in
themselves and others and shunt everyone towards more constructive patterns of
communication.
Keeping Everyone "In The Loop"
Coordination is a troublesome problem even when everyone works in the same
office, but the difficulties are magnified in remote environments where it
takes more effort to initiate and conduct conversations. Teams can become
fragmented and individuals can become isolated unless a culture is established
of keeping everyone "in the loop".
At the ASF, the problem is especially acute because its virtual communities are
spread out across the globe. Due to time zone differences, it is typically
infeasible to get all stakeholders together for a meeting — even a virtual
meeting held via conference call or videochat. Additionally, many stakeholders
in ASF communities do not have the availability to participate in real-time
conversations regularly because they are not employed to to work on projects
full-time.
"Synchronous" communication channels like face-to-face, videochat, phone, text
chat, and so on are good for rapid-fire iteration and refinement of ideas, but
they effectively exclude anyone who isn't following along in real-time. Even
if conversations are captured, such as with AV-recorded live meetings or logged
text chats, it is inefficient and often confusing to review how things went
down after the fact.
The solution that the ASF