This is the cake for commit number 4,000 on Citizen Space. Tasty.

FIN

Team Rubber scrubs up pretty well, although wearing suits in summer is hot!

I’m completely convinced that we need a space that’s definitely ours, where sometimes we work together intensively on interesting problems. I’m increasingly less convinced that we need to be in an office as much as we are; in fact that it has certain costs – not just travelling, or rent – but also interruption, dissipation, and the accidental exclusion of those who aren’t in the room.

The classic desk-chair-pentidy office setup – meh. I work at home with my feet up on the sofa. It’s bad for RSI but pretty good for getting stuff done. I don’t even have a desk in the office right now (happens every few years when stuff gets juggled around – means I’m constantly stealing in a vampire fashion from other people’s power supplies).

Maybe it’s time to can the desks in favour of sofas, bar tables and drawing boards. And power supplies everywhere.

Same probably goes for blogging, Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube comments, and other things that mostly use text like chat apps and forums.

I’ve found working in a remote (or distributed) way massively productive, but I don’t think remote working looks like as much fun for other Team Rubber staff as it should be, so I’ve been thinking about how we could and should do it better.

It was a handy co-incidence that I found this piece from Jason Z at 37 Signals about remote working and team parity.

In short, when most of a team work together in one location, it’s very hard to prevent remote team members becoming second class citizens. It’s very easy for the people in the same location to share information and solve problems with quick conversations, white boards, a quick sketch or a quick list of actions on a post-it note. They can also have lunch, tea and banter together.

Those working remotely miss out on this shared ’stuff’, or worse, get the negative side-effects (”we were just talking about the project and we’ve decided xxxx”, “sorry we missed your call, we were having a meeting” etc.). I’ve seen this happen and it doesn’t look like much fun

Meanwhile I collaborate almost every day on open source projects where all work is distributed. Using tools like internet relay chat (irc), forums, and web-based project management apps, I get stuff done with people in different countries and different time zones (I’m currently collaborating with people in Canada, Germany, Holland, Spain, Sweden and Russia). We use English, we use a lot of short written communication, a few pictures, and an awful lot of emoticons (to indicate when we’re really not cross…or when we really are). It’s fun and we get stuff done.

I’m not advocating that Team Rubber works remotely by default. Having a base is really important to us, and by working together closely we’ve built strong personal ties, developed seriously impressive capabilities to get stuff done, and had fun. That’s massively valuable – but we should get better at working in a distributed way, because it’s also fun and valuable, and because we already have people in multiple locations.

Wednesday is a great day to work from home – or somewhere else out of the studio/office (get out in the world!). It won’t be compulsory – and some jobs are tied to a office phone – but I’m strongly encouraging distributed working on Wednesdays, and I’m going to be very interested in how we do do it better. Our tools are things like email, irc, trac, and (omg) “picking up the fricking phone”. We’re going to learn how to do it right, and it’s going to be fun

cheers,

Andy

[Image courtesy of : Wendelboe on Flickr]

The *devil* in question was indeed the force of office evil that is Powerpoint, and Tom Alcott from the Social Network Company gave us a masterclass in how to keep presentations succinct, engaging and conversational while remaining in total control of your material.

His PechKucha style talk on social network analysis lasted exactly ‘6 minutes & 66 seconds’ and covered everything from a crash course in social psychology, the ambiguity of what being ‘connected’ actually means to mapping the *viral* spread of information within networks.

At the heart of it was that key question: Who is the most valuable node within any social network? The ‘hub’ (the most connected individual within a community). Or the ‘broker’ (the person who bridges between two communities and therefore allows that idea to spread to new audiences)?

Finding this overlap is something we are fascinated by, as it potentially allows the conversation to evolve and new participants to join. This was also a central theme to ‘Connected’ our last Rubber Book Club mail-out which explains the various ways information travels with some very entertaining illustrations.

So all good stuff and many thanks to Tom for coming in on a very warm and humid Friday afternoon.

Incidentally if ‘666′ is the number of the beast, does that ‘668′ the neighbour of the beast?

Everybody likes to think their viral creatives are going to go viral without any kind of push – but here’s the bottom line:

Summary:

How much would you enjoy reporting to your client to tell them their average cost per view was £20? (even if you don’t phrase it like that, they will be calculating it).

Including a bought spend reduces their (and your) risk – in very worst case above you’d be entering that meeting reporting an average cost per view of around 1/40th of that price – that’s 40 times more ROI for them, and a more economically viable campaign.

What’s missing from the above?

Quite a bit – for a start, the more that your content is seen, the more likely it is to get organic views – so a bought media buy makes it far less likely that you’ll be hitting anywhere close to the worst case. For simplicity I’ve left this at the most basic calculation I could.

(Disclaimer: these numbers are estimated and may not necessarily reflect real-life results, which will depend on individual campaigns)

I’m a big fan of Ice Road truckers. This is a show about truckers moving supplies in the frozen far north of Canada, in temperatures as low as minus 34 centigrade.

One thing that truckers need is diesel. Not just for the simple reason of getting their trucks from A to B. The reason ice road truckers need diesel is to run the heater in their cab. If they run out of diesel, the heater goes off. If the heater goes off, they die. It’s minus thirty four. So no heat, they die.

Ice road truckers devote time and effort to ensuring they have enough diesel. It’s a major concern for them. Because if they run out, they die.

Profit for a business like ours is rather like diesel for ice road truckers. It’s not the aim of the game.

The aim of the game for an ice road trucker is to get the goods from A to B, safely and in good time. It’s customer service, solving the customer’s problem, meeting or exceeding expectations; businesses have the same goals the world over. Our aims are no different.

We need profit in the same way a trucker needs diesel. We don’t seek it for its own sake, but we have to have it, otherwise we die. That’s why we spend time and effort making sure we have enough. We’ve always had profit and we intend to keep it that way.

For truckers, the business of maintaining diesel levels requires five simple steps: get large tanks on the truck, fill them up before starting a job, check the levels often, be vigilant for leaks, and take measures to fix leaks immediately. Five simple steps. Then they get on with the job of solving the customer’s problem, getting from A to B and providing service.

–
And because no blog post is complete without some truck pictures…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tth91722/3414501485/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/naturallight/142953959/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gr8_pics_4_u/4379003289/