Challenges You Will Face When Working With Remote Teams

For a number of reasons at a number of times in my career, I’ve found myself working with variously-distributed teams of one kind or another. Perhaps the “office” is a building that spans 2 square miles, perhaps someone was working from home for a day or someone was on a 2 week “vacation”, or even working for a distributed company with no real office. These were all different situations, but they all suffered from simliar challenges. I want to take a look at a couple of those challenges and some ways that you can help mitigate them.

I’m looking at this mostly as a member of a technical team of some sort, but I’m sure a lot of it would apply to pretty much anyone who’s not working face-to-face with their colleagues. Apologies in advance for this being kind of rambling (and very long). It’s a collection of all sorts of observations, links and ideas that I’ve collected over time. (more…)

Here Comes The Giki

You heard it here first – I predict that Google will soon release a wiki-based product of some kind. I don’t know what they will do, or how they will make it ‘simpler’ or ‘smarter’ than wikis are already, but that’s their problem I suppose.

I got my most recent copy of the ‘Google Friends‘ newsletter, and towards the end, completely unrelated to anything else in the newsletter, they offer a definition (sort of) of what a Wiki is. They provide a link to Wikipedia and then leave it at that.

Google have already delved into the world of blogs (they own Blogger.com and run their own GoogleBlog), so I guess it was only a matter of time before they got into wikis as well. I wonder where this is going to go… especially since Yahoo! is already an avid supporter of Wikipedia at least (hosting some of their servers).