I am having one of those Wurm days where I am reminded that some things used to be done a lot better. In this case I am missing the almost irreplaceable efficiency of working with people face-to-face. When I started in the media/entertainment business in the 1970s our studio-to-studio intercom was a large grey phone, we had no email or Internet or even a fax machine, we had no computer database organising our library and … well, it was a long time ago.
However, despite that, we were still working in surround sound (Dolby Stereo), we were producing orchestral recordings as good as now (except we used REAL orchestra’s) and there was nothing sound, picture or live event we didn’t try to achieve. We never had the situation of not being able to do something because we didn’t have the right plugin – there was always a way. However, sometimes you have no choice, and sometimes technology can help you achieve something that would be almost impossible otherwise. At Wonderful Wurm Inc, only one of us is in the official Wurm office. And that is Rolf. Well, fair enough, he is paying for it! So he is the lone guardian of the coffee pot, the company water cooler and the stone forge where all the code stuff is smelted before knocking into shape.
But of course Wurm is not always a one man band. We have that little gaggle of people, Mortimar, Kinoss and crew, who are scribbling away with their pens and pencils in the studio upstairs. We have some others who dry out strings of code on the washing line outside, reading for knotting up in the scripting room. Then there is Oracle who is normally found leaning on the water cooler in the call centre down the corridor where all his GMs, CMs, FMs and PAs do their thing, portaling in an out all over the place, while he shouts out instruction. And there is me in my office with press clippings on the wall, elastic armbands holding up my sleeves, and a row of black phones that I use to phone people up on for various reasons. Oh, and there is the printer who inks up ready for changing the front page of the site, another artist who is going to paint some pretty pictures….
Oh, if it were really like that. All those people exist and they are real people, with real lives and with real families, opinions and annoyances. But they are not all in the one place. It would be so easy if we all were in Sweden, in a big old converted barn looking over the Lake near where Rolf is. It would be so efficient if when Rolf gets a bright idea we could drag the right bits of the team into the comfy room with the pool table and work out the plan in five minutes flat (and then waste the rest of the day playing pool and drinking Vodka). As it is, we are scattered through out goodness knows how many time zones, with different real life commitments and in many ways not actually knowing who each other are – not really, not in the way you know someone when you share a beer for an hour or two.
Okay, so we are stuck in the world of zeros and ones and bits of wire to shove them down. What we need to do is to make that better. At the moment, the way the team works is a little disparate. We chat on the forum, we send emails to each other, we use wikis in various places, a code repository in another place. We use IRC, Skype, MSN, bits of websites, strange avatars and occasionally we remember we are proper people and call each other by our real names (I like that bit best, funny old so-and-so that I am.)
For the last few days I have been looking for an open source (and free) “Collaborative Project Management Tool” that can effectively mean we can all be in the same place much of the time. Or at least use a common resource. So, Oracles front-of-house team can have their own ways of keeping records, discussing cases and perhaps teachers’ staff room. The art team can have an area with lots of space to pin up sketches and ideas for them selves, then let other Wurm Team members have a peak. The server team (Egal and Rolf) can have their own area which is secured by a great thick iron door (this is the engine room, after all), where they can keep an eye on all the various issues, updates and so on that effect all the servers. The Client team can have their own area to work in and share information and idea. And maybe I can have my own little hole for all my bits and pieces and of course my orchestral friends.
Hopefully, the result of this would be that all team members, who ever they are, which ever team they are part of and which ever timezone they are in, tend to log into the same place all the time where they will see little snippets of what others are up to, collect their messages, chat, organise themselves, work across boundaries and generally communicate as much as possible.
I am looking at several solutions at the moment, including the mind numbing Twiki, the more accessible TikiWiki and several things with the word “forge” in there somewhere. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that there isn’t one solution that does it all (and it needs to be, or appear to be a single solution for this to work.) But I dont think that is the main problem.
My brother used to be a VP of a company that produced highly customisable groupware some years ago (a dated solution now, but the same philosophy that I am aspiring to). Heads of companies loved the concept of this stuff; the idea that everyone uses the same core solution to do all their work so that they could cross-fertilize ideas and continue to communicate fully while being remote was very attractive. But they all ran into the same barrier as I am sure I will run into: Persuading everyone to learn and use the damned thing in the first place!
You see, at the core of every wired up team there is the nagging suspicion that there used to be a better way of doing this. And that involved a coffee pot, a water coller, a table with chairs round it …
UPDATE: I am now braving the world of Portlets and am climbing the mountain called Liferay. It is rather good, you know!
