jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Becoming A Manager
Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Other | Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events |
How To Run A Free Online Academic Conference - Franklin Sayre, Tisha Mentnech, Amy Riegelman, Vicky Steeves, Shirley Zhao Successful research computing projects build a research community around them, but not always on the scale where throwing a national or international conference or workshop to bring practitioners together seems like it would make sense. And even if it might make sense, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to test the idea first, to see how it goes? This evolving Google Doc distills what the...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Other | Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events |
Moderating Discussions over Video - Beth Andres-Beck Working remotely and communicating online doesn’t really introduce new problems so much as it greatly amplifies exiting problems that can otherwise be papered over with in-person interactions. Some meetings are pretty straightforward and translate well to online - standups, or team status updates. But it if you want to have a brainstorming meeting or a meeting to come up with a new solution to a problem - or even choose which problem to solve - rather than just...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events | Working With A Research Community: Other |
Organizing a Conference Online: A Quick Guide - Geoffrey Rockwell, Oliver Rossier, Chelsea Miya & Casey Germain Two weeks ago I included another resource for putting together an online conference; this one explores does more to the range of different outcomes you might want a conference to have — what would make you think this conference you’re considering was successful? — and how you could arrange a virtual conference to achieve that. What’s more, it goes into a couple possibilities for ways that a virtual...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Meetings |
Remote brainstorming for regular humans - Bartek Ciszkowski Whiteboarding and brainstorming are harder to do when the team is distributed. Here are some suggestions for Ciszkowski on how to do distributed brainstorming: Do it in ~20 minute chunks with 5 minute breaks Use a simple white boarding tool (Ciszkowski suggests excalidraw which I hadn’t seen before) or even just a screenshared google doc to record responses. That way people can visualize connections between ideas to trigger new ideas. Periodically restate to your objectives to keep...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Becoming A Manager: Conflict/Difficult Discussions |
Virtual “Storming”: How to Work through Tensions with New Teams - Nobl Academy A lot of heist movies have really clear depictions of Tuckman’s four stages of group development. Forming is the initial “the team is brought together” sequence, where a group of individuals comes together for a common (nefarious) purpose. After the initial honeymoon phase, when the hard work begins, comes the Storming phase - the individually brilliant but mismatched group initially has conflicts as they try to figure out how to work together....
Continue...Inclusion in a Distributed World - Christoph Nakazawa Most of our teams are going to be moving to some kind of hybrid model of distributed and office work, and this mixed approach is notoriously difficult to get right. So it’s important to start figuring out now how to make the transition and what the future will look like. Nakazawa talks us through some of the issues - principally, if there is an “in office” and “remote” split in the team, it is really really easy...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Diversity |
Microaggressions at the office can make remote work even more appealing - Karla Miller, Washington Post Office spaces aren’t equally welcoming environments to all of us. Here Miller points out that for many potential team members, distributed work can mean less of the constant low-level stream of bullshit they’d normally experience in a predominantly white and male workplace. This point: Working at home has largely spared them from having to deal with such incidents as […] being mistaken for another colleague of the same race...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other |
Three Core Ideas to Make Remote Work, Work - Cate Huston Huston has been working remote for over five years, and for those of us getting ready to continue working remote for real and without a pandemic driving it, suggests three key approaches: Embrace async. Enable autonomy. Build connection. Crucially, these are all team-enhancers for in person teams, too: Even for team members all going to the same office, meetings can be hard to schedule, unnecessary meetings are bad, and having written documents outlining how...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Managing A Team: Knowledge Sharing |
Easy Guide to Remote Pair Programming - Adrian Bolboacă, InfoQ Bolboacă walks us through the how and why of remote pair programming, and InfoQ helpfully provides key takeaways (quoted verbatim below): Remote pair programming can be an extremely powerful tool if implemented well, in the context where it fits. You need to assess your current organization, technical context, and the time needed to absorb change before rushing into using remote pair programming. There are useful sets of questions for that. Social programming means learning easier...
Continue...