Full Circle Associates

OK, I don't often use the word "virtual" to connote "online." But because the title of a session I'm co-leading at the Collaborative Technologies Conference in Boston in just over a week carries that name, I'm using it as a matter of consistency. I'm also working on a few posts about meetings that span geography and time.

This first one is about an image I doodled on to try and think about how we choose technologies for distributed meetings. It follows on some images I posted last year on Flickr that are part of the work Etienne Wenger, John Smith and I are doing on technologies for communities.

The picture is an attempt to tell a story about technology selection and adoption from the perspective of the meeting activities a group needs to do. You will need to click on the thumbnail to see it, because it is too big to fit in the blog post space.

In this scenario, we have a global organization that spans 10 time zones and has a practice of small, frequent synchronous meetings supported by ongoing ansynchronous activities. The synchronous is for decision making, reporting on key milestones (particularly those that may require adjustment or impact others' milestones) and team bonding, while the asynchronous is for information sharing, more general reporting and day to day project management.

This idea of meeting changes from "something you stop everything and go to," to a slight codification of the work we to together. Meeting becomes the bits of interaction that keep a team in synch and moving forward. It is, ideally, forward motion itself, not a full stop.

In brainstorming our workshop, Julia Young, Eugene Eric Kim and I thought about F2F meeting practices. One was the quick, stand up meeting. By standing up, people are apt to be more succinct and focused. I am now wondering what the distributed adjunct of a stand up meeting is. A quick IM or VOIP call? The 15 minute synchronous weekly check in?