I reckon the video chatroom presents an excellent opportunity for managing virtual teams in general without being overly surveillancy.
Take the following into account because the problem of virtual management seems under-appreciated:
The Economist, studying European companies, discovered:
(Only) one in three executives agrees that virtual teams are badly managed. This is probably a result of virtual working simply evolving into being rather than being planned in advance, but it is also to do with the difficulty of leading people from a distance.“ That might be excusable were it not for the fact, as Forbes observed, that “Managing virtual teams has become a must-have leadership skill.”
A survey of workers themselves — The Challenges of Working in Virtual Teams Report — found that a majority of respondents thought their team successful, identified the inability to read non-verbal cues as the biggest negative in working virtually. Other challenges, in the order of their importance to the 600 respondents, were:
Collegiality;
Difficulty establishing rapport and building trust;
Difficulty seeing the whole picture;
Reliance on email and telephone; and,
A sense of isolation.
For instance, the SHRM report, Successfully Transitioning to a Virtual Organization: Challenges, Impact and Technology, offers the example of on-site team members dominating meetings with their remote colleagues:
“Remote workers felt irrelevant and unable to significantly contribute,” says the report. Remedying that took a “conscientious effort” by the manager to have the remote workers speak first. And it helped that he sent Starbucks cards to the remote workers so they wouldn’t feel left out as their in-house colleagues enjoyed company provided coffee.
...
Ten years ago there were few global virtual teams. Today it is rare for companies not to have teams dispersed across countries, cultures and time zones – colleagues who are expected to work together… while at the same time working apart. How should managers organise these globally dispersed teams? How can they build trust when their team members rarely come face to face? Which techniques bridge cultural, linguistic and geographical distances – not to mention time zones? When do cultural differences produce creativity rather than crossed wires? Above all, how can distance and diversity be turned into competitive advantages?
It facilitates what Insead considers the virtues of virtual management:
Cross Cultural management Self awareness Trust Communication Negotiation Cooperation Innovation
(If you're familiar with the backstory of the LWSH, you can skip to paragraph 5. If you just want the link to the chat, click here: LWSH on Complice)
The Less Wrong Study Hall was created as a tinychat room in March 2013, following Mqrius and ShannonFriedman's desire to create a virtual context for productivity. In retrospect, I think it's hilarious that a bunch of the comments ended up being a discussion of whether LW had the numbers to get a room that consistently had someone in it. The funny part is that they were based around the assumption that people would spend about 1h/day in it.
Once it was created, it was so effective that people started spending their entire day doing pomodoros (with 32minsWork+8minsBreak) in the LWSH and now often even stay logged in while doing chores away from their computers, just for cadence of focus and the sense of company. So there's almost always someone there, and often 5-10 people.
A week in, a call was put out for volunteers to program a replacement for the much-maligned tinychat. As it turns out though, video chat is a hard problem.
So nearly 2 years later, people are still using the tinychat.
But a few weeks ago, I discovered that you can embed the tinychat applet into an arbitrary page. I immediately set out to integrate LWSH into Complice, the productivity app I've been building for over a year, which counts many rationalists among its alpha & beta users.
The focal point of Complice is its today page, which consists of a list of everything you're planning to accomplish that day, colorized by goal. Plus a pomodoro timer. My habit for a long time has been to have this open next to LWSH. So what I basically did was integrate these two pages. On the left, you have a list of your own tasks. On the right, a list of other users in the room, with whatever task they're doing next. Then below all of that, the chatroom.
(Something important to note: I'm not planning to point existing Complice users, who may not be LWers, at the LW Study Hall. Any Complice user can create their own coworking room by going to complice.co/createroom)
With this integration, I've solved many of the core problems that people wanted addressed for the study hall:
There are a couple other requested features that I can definitely solve but decided could come after this launch:
The following points were brought up in the Programming the LW Study Hall post or on the List of desired features on the github/nnmm/lwsh wiki, but can't be fixed without replacing tinychat:
It's also worth noting that if you were to think of the entirety of Complice as an addition to LWSH... well, it would definitely look like feature creep, but at any rate there would be several other notable improvements:
(This article posted to Main because that's where the rest of the LWSH posts are, and this represents a substantial update.)