I don't think a month is nearly enough time to form any judgements. From personal experience, it takes about a year to really learn how to work out of an office.
Multiply this by an entire office and they're in for a world of hurt. To really successfully pull this off, they'd need a couple of fascists who already knew how to work remotely, people would need to defer to them, and they'd need a serious transition period to get used to all the tools they'll need (ie: work a day or two per week remotely).
The biggest problem they have, though, is one of measuring success. They don't really say what a successful experiment's going to look like. It's easy enough to measure writer output (quantity, not necessarily quantity), but most other facets of the business aren't quite as measurable. Even the success of writers is ultimately determined by the number of eyeballs on their stories. It's awfully hard to measure that stuff with any kind of reliability over the course of a month.
The best possible tool we've found for this is IRC. I assume Campfire would work reasonably well, but it's awfully simple to find bots that speak IRC and do useful things.
These are great suggestions--and good points about the limitations. Thanks! Do you think IRC is superior to other IM clients? A lot of folks in the offices have never used IM before--and may be more comfortable with something like AIM or GChat.
Well, for our purposes a group based chat is much, much nicer. Especially with logs. People drop to IM at times (or private messages in IRC), but we seem to get more out of the virtual watercooler/mass meeting room. The one on one stuff generally works better through email, where it's less transient and people can easily reference it later.
If you have people who haven't touched IM before, you should definitely checkout Campfire. One mass "company" room can get crazy so you can always fragment it off into a couple of area specific chats alongside the primary.
Comments
I don't think a month is nearly enough time to form any judgements. From personal experience, it takes about a year to really learn how to work out of an office.
Multiply this by an entire office and they're in for a world of hurt. To really successfully pull this off, they'd need a couple of fascists who already knew how to work remotely, people would need to defer to them, and they'd need a serious transition period to get used to all the tools they'll need (ie: work a day or two per week remotely).
The biggest problem they have, though, is one of measuring success. They don't really say what a successful experiment's going to look like. It's easy enough to measure writer output (quantity, not necessarily quantity), but most other facets of the business aren't quite as measurable. Even the success of writers is ultimately determined by the number of eyeballs on their stories. It's awfully hard to measure that stuff with any kind of reliability over the course of a month.
The best possible tool we've found for this is IRC. I assume Campfire would work reasonably well, but it's awfully simple to find bots that speak IRC and do useful things.
These are great suggestions--and good points about the limitations. Thanks! Do you think IRC is superior to other IM clients? A lot of folks in the offices have never used IM before--and may be more comfortable with something like AIM or GChat.
+1 to group chat over IM for company use.
Skype has excellent group-chat, that's what we use. Much easier to adopt than IRC for non-tech types, and it's free which is a bonus.
(I didn't even know Skype had a chat feature, let alone group-chat, until I got to my current job.)
Well, for our purposes a group based chat is much, much nicer. Especially with logs. People drop to IM at times (or private messages in IRC), but we seem to get more out of the virtual watercooler/mass meeting room. The one on one stuff generally works better through email, where it's less transient and people can easily reference it later.
If you have people who haven't touched IM before, you should definitely checkout Campfire. One mass "company" room can get crazy so you can always fragment it off into a couple of area specific chats alongside the primary.