Publish at March 02 2010 Updated June 23 2022
"If we can't do it remotely, how could we promote 'distance'?"
Since its inception in 1996, Thot Cursus has had the principle of trying to do everything remotely: administration, supervision, sales, billing, training, recruiting, payroll, technical development, support. Everything.
As a director, I've never had to deny this principle; even if it sometimes limited our choices of actions, more often than not we arrived in almost virgin territory where the number of possibilities well compensated for the few limitations.
In the beginning, there was email and attached files. Faced with compatibility problems (compatibility of platforms, file formats, and even software or antivirus versions), a first principle quickly emerged: it's better to go with the simplest: text and html files. When you start, I think this principle still holds.
Very early on we included in our work platform a space "The Editor" sort of bulletin board where everyone could leave messages visible to all the other editors. Nothing groundbreaking, but it was sufficient for most of our needs. Sometimes we used chat ICQ (which has evolved nicely since then) and that was it.
With that we recruited, trained and supervised all our activities. There was even a year when I had never met any of my editors or technicians!" Even though technically we could go further, the bandwidths available at most of our editors made any further effort futile.
About 2002 the first collaborative applications appeared. We experimented with dozens of tools and always the same compatibility issues: beyond three people, the learning effort and the likelihood of technical bugs or outages always outweighed the benefits of traditional telephone audio conferencing technologies and a few file attachments.
Finally, the administration of most of our clients, who were still on postal mail, telephone and fax, made the limit clear: there was a lot of education to be done before they could receive a purchase order by email. Administrative compatibility was (and still is) a very real consideration.
Birth of Skype, which was immediately adopted by Thot Cursus. (Birth also of Facebook (History) but which we wouldn't consider until 2006.
With Skype and increased bandwidth, audio conferencing is becoming more and more common at Thot Cursus, but by then we hadn't changed much from our recent habits: just a little more of everything. Among other things, we had made notable attempts at del.ici.ous and PageFlakes, both of which are now defunct, but had failed to integrate them into the team's practices at that time. Things were about to change.
It wasn't until 2007 with online videoconferencing on iChat (now replaced by FaceTime) and then also on Skype that we really started to experience telepresence:The telepresence experience at Thot: what a treat. But we were still far from suspecting the future.
In 2008, the use of collaborative tools became widespread. While we had been using Zoho tools for a few years, they had never been a reflex among our employees. But over time, certain uses were confirmed. We used to use:
.Managing the flow of information in relation to weekly topics and sharing responsibilities in this dynamic has always been an issue for us. It's about coordinating the activity of 10 to 20 contributors and editors remotely, across different time zones, while maintaining everyone's autonomy.
As the use of Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and other related sites became more widespread, it became acceptable and technically feasible to ask everyone to work with a tool like Diigo. Everyone can propose their discoveries there, explain why they deserve attention; everyone can also comment and reserve the treatment of that resource for themselves. As we can index the resources, they are grouped according to our different themes and all we have to do is to make our market in what we have collected over time.
Diigo has led to an increase in exchanges and overall a better treatment of each theme by inducing a reflection on what is passing. It is not so much Diigo, as its use by many people that counts; another related tool could have done the job just as well.
Persistence
Diigo bit because two people used it for several weeks before others began to dabble in it and try to figure out for themselves how it worked; they then integrated it into their daily activities. Promotional effort and persistence are needed to see such tools enter practices; it doesn't just happen. The same can be seen with the wiki or shared spreadsheets: when a practice takes hold it takes hold through its relevant use.
Mindets change, technologies always improve, and we come to an almost natural practice of "distance." Tools like Trello and Google Docs and services like PayPal have radially simplified our uses and cannibalized virtually all of their competitors, even the best.
Since then, onboarding new employees has become simpler both because of fewer tools but also because they are already accustomed to the uses. Curiously, while communications are more regular and personal, synchronous work has become almost reserved for exceptions.
In our context, deferred is significantly more effective. Since 2019, the DeepL translator has propelled our international communication capabilities, the language barrier dissolves. Our technical needs are now all outsourced and in the cloud, with redundancy and alternatives ready to be deployed as needed.
Everything was going great and the growth in traffic and business seemed like it would never end, except for an environmental crisis. But the crisis didn't come from this side, at least not yet. An invisible virus changed everything.
Remote collaboration has become a widespread necessity, and we're gradually seeing a return to complexity: video conferencing is rolling out in a chaos of platforms, vendors are adopting automated management tools that are not very compatible, social networks are fragmenting, and tracking them requires an extra layer. We are even beginning to question the shape of our media and operations.
On the one hand, tools are improving and opening up new creative possibilities. On the other, control of the tools (ownership and data) is slipping away from us and the investment we make in them seems more precarious than ever.
Reading our history one realizes how many tools are now gone. Each new "disruption" leaves its share of corpses behind and nothing bodes well for improvement on this side. We'd better take the time to experiment before transforming; testing, trial and especially animation remain necessary.
One of our first conclusions still stands:
In other words, investing heavily is done by building on incremental progress. That doesn't mean going slowly, but incrementally, building on what works with the people who will use it. We're going back to simplicity, we're looking for it, it's even essential...
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