Colony Tips for Remote Working

That last point is an important one. Collaboration is key, and collaboration can be much harder when everyone is not in the same physical space as they might be during a Hackathon IRL.

But coordinating entirely on teh internets is really what this hackathon is all about, and we on the Colony team have some tips for getting your projects and teams working smoothly, even if you are scattered around the planet, and have never met IRL.

The Colony team is distributed around 8+ countries and 7+ time zones, which means communication can be difficult.

On top of that, we have a pretty lightweight and autonomous culture; continuously balancing sufficient formal processes and systems to keep everyone in sync and accountable, with enough flexibility for self organisation.

This means everyone needs to be just a little bit more conscious about how we communicate and coordinate with each other.

That starts with some general attitudes:

So attach a screenshot or terrible M$ paint drawing to clarify what you mean. Specify the lines in the code you’re going to refactor today and remind your team that they’ll need to rebase. Ask teammates for help earlier than you think you’re going to need it. Give someone a 💪 🙏 🙌 when they’ve done you or the project a solid.

Sometimes where you choose to communicate is just as important as how you do so. These are the general best-practices that Colony uses to segment and organize work-related conversations:

Whatever extra tools or platforms you use, remember that it’s easy for the lines of communication to get fragmented — try to strike a balance between having things all in one chaotic place and having things scattered around in isolated channels.

We set ambitious objectives for ourselves and decide the key results that will tell us how close we’ve come to meeting them.

Our OKRs get set once per quarter, and take this form:

Objective: An ambitious goal to achieve

KRs: How that goal will be measured

One important principle in OKR setting is that objectives should be stretch goals. When scored between 0.0–1.0, the ideal score is 0.7. If you get a 1.0, you sandbagged on your goals.

For the Hackathon, a full set of OKRs is a bit much, but your team might find it helpful and motivating to set just one or two goals for the project, and decide together on the best way to make your goals specific and measurable.

An all-team video chat is a great way to go over your goals and check in with everyone. For a distributed team, this face-time is also a really important opportunity to bond and connect with the people you work with.

The daily standup is just a quick update to keep the rest of the team informed about what you’ve been working on and what you will be working on, so that others can plan their own work more effectively.

So those are some of the principles and practices we’ve used to build Colony as a distributed team. Perhaps they’ll be some help for the Hackathon teams also seeking to maximize their remote coordination potential.

We hope that you’ll take the philosophy of open organizations to heart, and keep your projects welcoming to any and all who want to contribute, wherever they’re signing in from.

Colony is a platform for open organisations.

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