A new one-day conference focused on remote workers that will look at the latest trends, tools and techniques for successful distributed teams. Sounds great doesn’t it!!

Sarah Milstein is CEO and co-founder, with Eric Ries, of Lean Startup Productions, a media company that teaches people how to build and scale high-growth startups. She is also co-author, with Tim O’Reilly, of The Twitter Book, and she writes regularly about race, gender and merit-based decision making. She’s going to tell us a little more about Office Optional and her experience of being a remote worker.

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I haven’t worked anywhere near my coworkers for 20 years. Sometimes, I worked for companies or with coworkers that were based thousands of miles away. Sometimes, I worked as a consultant and wasn’t onsite often, if ever. These days, I’m running a company with no office at all, and we all work from different locations in several countries. While distributed teams are becoming the norm in more companies, much of our conventional business wisdom assumes that you and your colleagues are sitting next to each other. There simply isn’t enough exploration of relevant tools and techniques for working with people who aren’t in the same building, or the same town, or the same continent.

We’re addressing that problem with Office Optional, a new conference for people who work on distributed teams. We’re bringing together team leaders and members to discuss better ways you can: manage from a distance; collaborate remotely; and find effective tools for both. The event will be held next week, on April 22, in San Francisco. If you can’t make it in person, we’re offering live stream tickets, which we’ve set up, naturally, for an interactive remote experience.

First of all, you should expect to take away not only lots of very useful advice you can implement immediately, but also several Big Ideas. For example, urban designer Laura Crescimano will look at the larger trend toward remote work and its long-term implications, while Lukas Biewald, CEO of Crowdflower, will talk about the vast potential for matching microtasks with a massively distributed global workforce.

Some of our talks covering the human side of virtual teams include Steelcase’s Teryn Rikert helping you recognize key collaboration behaviors and how understanding them will result in better remote meetings. Yammer’s Christina Lucey will reveal a series of experiments her teams ran in three offices, eight time zones apart, to feel like they were radically closer. Lullabot’s Jeff Robbins will share time-zone tips to make working globally much, much smoother.

A number of speakers will talk about specific processes for building trust when you’re physically far apart. And several people will explore the best uses of and setups for in-person meetings. Automattic, the company behind WordPress and one of the world’s biggest fully distributed firms, is sending Lori McLeese and Davide Casali to talk about what they’ve learned in hiring hundreds of remote workers. And because so many of us work from home, we have a panel that’s logged thousands of collective work-from-the-living-room hours debating how to do it productively.

Of course, we’re going to examine the best tools for remote teams. For instance, Editorially co-founder David Yee will talk about getting the most out of group chat, while Intridea’s Patti Chan will review third-party collaboration tools. A series of speakers will show us how their teams make great use of apps and video for remote brainstorming, project management, daily communication and more.

We’ll cap the day with a conversation between The Lean Startup author Eric Ries and Bob Sutton, whose new book, Scaling Up Excellence, provides great fodder for a question so many of us face in distributed companies: How can remote teams spur, rather than hinder, growth in our organisations?

The day will be very conversational, with lots of moderated Q&A after every batch of talks, so you can jump in and participate. We’d love to see you at Office Optional –whether that’s in person or via live stream.

• Conference: http://officeoptional.co/
• Program: http://officeoptional.co/program/
• Tickets: http://officeoptional.co/register/
• More info on live stream tickets: http://officeoptional.co/2014/attend-office-optional-from-anywhere-in-the-world/

Filed under: events

We are trying out Know Your Company at work.

Know Your Company is an online tool that was originally built by Basecamp (formerly 37signals). The idea is that through asking questions (both work-related and social) of employees and then sharing these answers everyone involved will get to know their company and the people in it better. There is a significant trust element behind this and everyone, especially the management, need to be ready to hear some truths that might be difficult to handle.

A tool like Know Your Company can be incredibly important in a dispersed team environment when opportunities to just ‘say how you feel’ or talk about what you are up to’ are minimal. I’ve talked about how we build in Watercooler moments before but this is an attempt to further facilitate those discussions.

So every week we answer three questions – the request comes via email. You can answer these questions openly or send the answer to just the management team. There is no obligation to answer. The answers given openly are shared later on in the week.

The questions cover:

• How employees feel about the business, the work, the culture, etc.
• What everyone in the company is working on.
• More about each other as people. This could be a favorite recipe or movie. The small connections can bring people a little closer together.

Know Your Company have some ground rules for managers:

1. You have to want the truth. This isn’t about checking a box. This is about genuinely getting to know your people better.
2. You have to ask questions. You can’t expect information to come to you. A leader’s job is to go first, and start the conversation.
3. You have to be committed to taking action. The entire purpose of feedback is to do something with it. Otherwise, why ask for feedback at all?
4. You have to make it a routine. You can’t ask for feedback just twice a year. Information dumps aren’t useful or timely enough to act on.
5. You have to make it easy. It can’t be a burden to get to know each other better, or else no one will do it – including you.

Some of the responses to ‘what are you reading’

So far the experiment has been interesting.

I now know that I can chat to many of my colleagues about graphic novels (one of my favourite genres!) and I have a better idea of what people are up to. I’m also more aware of how different we are as individuals, issues bother others that I hadn’t given a second thought to, and I’m sure it is vise versa. I knew this before through discussions had in online meetings, but I think allowing us to express our own personal feelings through the answers to questions seems to be less confrontational and more objective. Building trust within our organization is a key priority right now and I’m glad our management team are trying out ways in which this can be done. Maybe it has given us a little space in which to reflect and has dampened people’s fuse a little. Surely a good thing!

A few weeks back saw the first Office Optional Conference – a new conference for distributed teams organized by Lean Startup and chaired by Sarah Milstein. The actual conference was held in San Francisco but I managed to catch quite a few of the streamed sessions from the luxury of my own comfy work chair! Slides from the day are available on Slideshare.

Here are a couple of the sessions I caught, I was particularly interested in the area of building trust – as this is a key issue for us at work at the moment.

Sarah Milstein chairs

David Casali and Lori McLeese from Automattic, the company behind WordPress, offered some Lessons from the World’s Biggest Distributed Company. Automattic has workers in home offices around the globe–with no central headquarters, much like Open Knowledge where I work. However they are much bigger with more than 230 employees in 30 countries and growing fast. David and Lori talked about how at Automattic they have 40 hour trials for new starters as a way to see if they will fit in to the organisation. This allows both parties to get insights into whether the situation will work. The long term effect of this was that hiring had become more successful process with more trust and communication. They concluded with the quote “Management exists to minimise the problems created by its own hiring mistakes” ;-)

Cheryl Contee from Fission Strategy gave an interesting talk on how you Build Culture, Establish Trust within an distributed organization. Cheryl explained that despite the plethora of tools (Yammer, Quik time, Zoom – video conferencing – Google communities, ossana – to name but a few) it is their core values that lead to the building of trust. These are:

1. Success through collaboration – what unites is bigger than what divides
2. Beauty and excellence
3. Learning and sharing
4. Teaching and empowering
5. Resourceful creativity
6. Fun and inspiration

Cheryl explained how you need to create a culture of trust in each other by assuming good intentions and optimising systems before tweaking people. Her motto was to hire slow – fire fast (eeek! – but here the emphasis is on hiring people you will want for the long haul). There was some interesting discussion around healthy conflict versus unhealthy conflict and how organisations need to build an environment for healthy conflict.

Videos of the Office Optional talks are available for a cost – but here are some of the remote working tips shared, more are available from the Office Optional blog.

• For in-person meetings, we don’t do ANYTHING that we think could be accomplished in a virtual setting, and instead pack our team retreats/conferences with things like: intense, long-term planning brainstorm sessions; team building, conversations about things that are deeply personal. — Sarah, Teach for America, Wheeling WV
• We also try to spend our in-person time in different team members’ home towns, so that we get to see them “in their element,” meet their families, eat at their local restaurants, hike in their local parks, etc. It’s HUGE and completely amplifies the purpose of getting together in person. — Sarah, Teach for America
• Occasionally, we’ll have a distributed movie-watching session using Netflix. We open up a HipChat channel for commentary. Works great for team bonding! — Shaunuak Kashyap, Rackspace, San Jose CA
• Oversharing is key, so we have a daily QOTD (question of the day) in our chatroom every day, even if the questions are really dumb. I love knowing which of our team members secretly listens to Miley Cyrus while working.– Sarah, LKR Social Media, Mammoth Lakes CA
• Our onboarding tradition: get the whole team on Hangout. Each person asks the new hire a weird and personal question, then the new hire gets to ask one back to them. Side effect: existing team members learn even more about each other. — Sarah, LKR Social Media
• Security is important for protecting IP. I’ve been using Zoom for HD web meetings. Zoom provides three levels of security: 128-bit encryption, password-protected meetings, ability to lock the meeting after everyone has joined so no one else can eavesdrop. — Rich Harris, TeamLeadContrast, Plattsburgh NY
• Test your new headset and microphone before using it in for meetings first time! — Galina Landes, Emanio, Walnut Creek CA

Last week I managed to hook up with old friends, Kirsty and Rich Pitkin from Event Amplifier when they helped me with streaming a one-day workshop I was organising.

Room set up at start of day

The workshop (Making it Matter: Supporting education in the developing world through open and linked data) took place on 16th May at the Friends House in London. The aim of the day was to bring together software developers, educators and individuals from the development community to see how they can work together by using open and linked data to support education in the developing world. We recognised from the start that many of the people we’d like to participate weren’t going to be able to make it. Some of these people live on the other side of the globe and wouldn’t be able to come up with travel funds for a one-day event. Streaming the day and, possibly more importantly, making the videos from the workshop available online became high priority.

Here’s a summary of what we did.

Pre-event

We created a Google doc so that those interested in participating remotely could register their interest and add comments on areas of interest.

We also created a remote participation page for the event. This included details of the programme, an embed of the streaming, a form for questions from the remote audience, a link to the etherpad to be used for the break-out group session, information on the hashtag (#mim14) and an embed of the Twitter stream.

A couple of days before the workshop we contacted remote speakers and provided them with details of what was required. They were asked for the email address associated with their Google presence, a copy of their slides and any links they might wish to show and an alternative contact route (e.g. Skype name, mobile telephone number). All speakers were asked to share slides in advance. The day before Kirsty ran a rehearsal hangout for the remote presenters so they could familiarise themselves with Google hangout features, check their settings and ask any questions. We then scheduled a Google Hangout on air for the entire day.

During the event

Kirsty and Rich have lots of useful equipment (cameras, mics, extension leads, tape etc.) so they brought this along to the venue and we set up the room. We had a laptop at the front with the slides on for presenters to use, a camera (1) at the back of the room for general recording of the day and a second camera (2) near the front, which would be connected to a laptop logged in to Google Hangouts and streaming using Google Hangouts on air. The venue provided a projector and speakers. We also had a microphone reasonably near to the lectern at the front. Later on we switched to a lapel microphone when drilling noise outside the room became a little too much.

The Google Hangout setup – camera 2

Speakers presented from the main lectern and were asked to try and stand reasonably still. They were filmed on both cameras, but camera 2 provided the feed for the Google hangout.

As mentioned some of the speakers presented remotely. Two did this by recording a video in advance and this was sent directly to the Google hangout and simultaneously played on the main projector in the room. The other two presented directly in the Google hangout – they were asked to turn up 20 minutes before their scheduled presentation time. For these presentations the hangout was opened up on laptop on the lectern and shown to everyone.

There were 3 breakout group sessions during the day. Feedback from these was also streamed – this is the first time I’ve seen this happen. Remote participants were able to join in the conversation remotely using an event etherpad.

Post-event

After the workshop the video footage was chunked up, given a title page and uploaded to YouTube. They were then shared along with the slides on the LinkedUp website. All outcomes from the breakout group groups was summarized in a blog post and the choicest tweets were pulled into a Storify.

Any small problems?

At one point due to a problem with the speakers we ended up with the Google hangout people ahead of the people actually physically at the event. Kirsty and Rich were able to play music during periods when there was nothing being streamed – this let people know they were in the right place.

In the middle of the afternoon the Google Hangout crashed. Unfortunately the only way round this is to start a new hangout. This meant a new code had to be embedded in the remote participation page and shared with those watching via Twitter. Luckily due to the two cameras there is no break in the final videos of sessions.

The wifi at the venue was fine but we still had a few teething problems when Google hangouts was shared with those in the room. We got it to work eventually after a little faffing but had to show the slides separately and move them on manually at the presenter’s request – good job we had them in advance! Whenever you have a technical hitch the problem is always when do you decide to drop something from the schedule because it’s just not working.

I scheduled lots of tweets in advance to save myself time, this was fine but we were a little over timing wise so people got to hear the details a little early.

A few top tips

Have a master programme with details of what is happening for each talk, this should include links to the slides in various formats, links to videos and details of whether someone is presenting physically or remotely. Our master also had all the login details for accounts – just in case. We had an offline version and an online one. The online had quick links to all the slides, which I’d uploaded to the website in pdf version as a back up.

Have a back channel for event amplifier communication during the event as you’ll probably end up ignoring your emails.

The hashtag I picked for the event turned out to be shared by quite a few other events including the Memphis in May barbecue championships! Luckily none were on the same day. Next time I’d probably go for a more unique hashtag – though that might mean using up a little more space in tweets.

Get your post-event stuff (blog posts, slides, videos etc.) up as soon as possible after the event – that way there is still momentum from the day. Big thanks to Kirsty and Rich for being super speedy with the video processing and for all their other help!

We’re still on the hunt for a ‘video conferencing/webinar service type thing’ at Open Knowledge and a couple of weeks ago we tried out Mumble.

Mumble is a voice chat application for groups that has been designed primarily for gaming. Mumble is the client application and Murmur is the server application. The client, Mumble, runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and I had no problem downloading it once.

There isn’t a huge amount to say about Mumble, it does what it says on the tin, but we were all extremely impressed with the latency and sound quality. It pretty much felt like you were talking to someone on a good landline, or better to be honest. The reason for this is ‘de-noising’ – apparently this a standard part of Speex 1.1 implementation.

One annoying thing is the text-to-speech feature – which speaks out all the chat messages. Luckily this can be turned off, and I can see some advantages in having it.

I guess the biggest issue with Mumble is that you can’t screen share, so the possibilities are limited. But as a voice chat application it was pretty smart!

There is a good FAQ on the technical aspects of Mumble.

Over the weekend We took a trip down to Kent and had a day out in Rochester. It’s a really interesting place and those who have visited will know that it has many Charles Dickens connections.

Down a little lane we found Charles Dickens’ two-storey Swiss chalet. The chalet used be in the garden at Gad’s Hill Place, Higham and was used as a summer study house. Dickens wrote many of his famous novels there from 1865 until his death in 1870. The chalet is currently in the gardens of Eastgate House in Rochester.

So what struck me about the chalet is that it is essentially an elaborate remote working/home office/shed! Dickens must have struggled with many of the issues we remote workers struggle with – interruptions from family, messy working space, feeling the cold etc.

Maybe I should do a tour of famous people’s home working spaces? ;-)

Unfortunately the chalet is in a bit of a bad way and needs considerable restoration. There is an appeal to raise over £100,000 which hopes to sort out the wood rot and give the chalet a much needed make over.

OK, so I don’t hate Google Hangouts. It’s an incredibly useful tool, and it’s free. We use it a lot at Open Knowledge for ad hoc meetings, catch up calls, scheduled webinars and sessions, even for parties.

Open Knowledge online Christmas party

However I find it a confusing tool to use and I’m always getting caught out by it in some way. I think I get it…and then I discover I’ve messed up. So here are 10 things that annoy me and the lessons I’ve learnt.

1. Screen sharing – Screen sharing on Google Hangouts is confusing. If you are trying to present slides the best way seems to be to share your desktop and present your slides using presentation mode. You’ll need to get someone else to monitor the chat but at least people can see your slides properly – and not some sad, half-version of them with notes. And you know exactly what people can see – no confusion there. Sharing a window (or part of your desk top) just doesn’t seem to work that well ☹

2. Broadcasting a Google Hangout – Set up your Google Hangout on Air page and then go directly from that page to the hangout using the start button. Only go by this route, do not pass go and do not collect £200. Do not use the url for the hangout that you’ve got along the way. Doing that means you will end you up in a hangout with no broadcast button, which means no streaming and no YouTube video! I’ve made this mistake a few times. Also the “Start broadcasting” button is often grayed out for ages before you can start, or maybe that’s just my broadband!

3. Muting when typing – I get the point but arrrrgggggh!!

4. Number of participants – Google Hangouts has a limit of 10 active participants, 15 if you have Google+ premium or create the hangout from a Google Calendar event. Sometimes 15 is not enough!

5. People popping up – If you run a Google Hangout on Air and share the Hangout link openly be prepared to have people (normally teenagers) popping up in the middle of the session. Normally they just should something silly then leave. Oh joy!

6. Too much going on – Facilitating a Google Hangout on Air by yourself if tricky. There is just too much to keep an eye on. There’s the chat in the Hangout, the chat in the Hangout on Air and also the Q&A thing too. I just don’t have that many hands or enough space in my head.

7. Crash – When a Google Hangout on Air crashes for the person who set it up a new Hangout on Air needs to be started. Grrr! This caused problems at the Making it Matter workshop I ran.

8. Google monopoly – If you don’t do Google then you could be shut out of the fun. For example if you want to participate in a Hangout on Air by asking questions or commenting in the accompanying chat you need a Google+ account. Not very inclusive.

9. Loosing your chat – Once it’s gone it’s gone! Or at least it seems like that. If you accidentally drop out and come back in the chat has gone – it’s like people talking behind your back! It would be good if there was a way to hang on to your chat in a Hangout. I keep loosing important links.

10. Google effects – Fun for 5 minutes then annoying and confusing – mainly because you are distracted by searching for an effect you’ve used once before but can no longer seem to find!

I actually didn’t think I’d be able to come up with 10 things but it wasn’t tricky…

Legal details normally turn people off, but it is extremely important stuff! Kelly Mansfield is an editor and writer at Workplace Law. Workplace Law specialises in employment law, health & safety and environmental management and is a provider of information, training, consultancy and support services. Kelly has written a post for us that considers some of the main legal issues for employers in light of the recently released Flexible Working Regulations 2014.

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Is Remote Working the way Forward for Employers as well as Employees?

Remote working is the new workplace fad, but can all employers trust their staff to work responsibly away from their desk? With employers implementing workplace rules that mean workers must travel to the office each day to carry out their working activities, it would appear that some bosses want to keep a close eye on their staff.

However, forcing employees to make their way into the office every day can actually have numerous detrimental effects.

With over a fifth of commuters in the UK spending more than 30 minutes travelling to work on a daily basis and the cost of travel ever increasing, both time and money is being wasted by forcing workers to always travel to work.

As new legislation come into force though, it will be interesting to see whether employers find themselves having to be more adjustable.

Photo by Sarah Joy, Flickr

The Flexible Working Regulations 2014, which came into force on 30 June 2014, allows any employee with 26 weeks’ continuous service to request flexible working. Prior to the new regulations, only employees with children aged under 17, or 18 if disabled, and those caring for the elderly, who have 26 weeks’ continuous service, were able to request flexible working.

So will this change simply mean that employers will be bombarded with applications from employees wishing to change their working environment, or their working hours, or maybe even a combination of the two? The answer is probably yes, but employers must remember that they are not legally required to accept an application. However, they must have a good reason to reject it if they choose to.

A business can actually only refuse the request under eight specific business reasons, and must go through a very structured, legal and time-bound procedure when considering the request. If the request is granted, it’s a permanent change to terms and conditions; if it is not granted, the employee has the right to appeal and thereafter, the process is closed.

Implications for statistics

It is extremely likely that the introduction of the new regulations will ensure there is an increase in the amount of people who work from home. However, statistics show that a large number of people already do enjoy flexible working.

In line with the National Work from Home Day in May this year, TUC findings were published, which stated that the number of people who say they usually work from home has increased by 62,000 over the course of the last 12 months. The way people work has been beginning to change for the past few years and the new flexible working regulations will possibly accelerate the figures in the coming months.

Invasion of privacy?

It is vital to remember that no matter where an employee’s workspace may be, any area used for working at home must comply with the legal requirements which apply to all workplaces.

As ever, there are numerous legal issues which apply to office-based workers, but if you have employees working at home while still employed, then health and safety remains a fundamental issue.

To assess if a homeworking space is compliant, a suitable and sufficient risk assessment is required. This process could perhaps feel like an invasion of the employee’s personal space, if the assessment is carried out by a professional, or even a Manager of the workplace, and they are investigating around one’s home. However, it is possible for the employee to undertake the assessment themselves, providing they have the correct training and direction.

Photo by Infusionsoft, Flickr

For inexperienced staff, it is important that they are led through the process and if the individual is required to complete the assessment, consideration should be given as to general safety training.

Keeping an eye

Email / internet use obviously enables better communication between a remote worker and their employer or other colleagues, but does it allow employers to keep an eye on their staff working away from the office and ensure that work is being completed? Do employers have the right to monitor the use of email / internet?

This remains a highly contentious issue and in terms of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (Scotland) Act 2000 (RIPA), it is unlawful to intercept communications without the consent of the communicating parties.

Ideally, employers need to put together an email / internet policy document in line with the Data Protection Act 1998 and ensure that all workers are aware of it, understand it and then follow accordingly.

Within the policy, details on whether employers are potentially going to be delving into employees’ emails can be included. When it comes to monitoring emails, employers need to be careful and should only monitor messages’ address or heading.

Advising employees that their emails might be monitored for business purposes and then educating them on the terms of the policy is the way forward for employers. Informing employees about what does and does not constitute proper use of the system and explaining that any breach of the policy will result in disciplinary action is also advised.

Look to the future

The Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) states that technology has meant we’re increasingly on the move and that workers can now adapt to handling their time and workload more flexibly to suit both business and personal needs, which of course if handled correctly, can be a benefit for both employer and employee.

The introduction of the new flexible working regulations enhances the need for employers to recognise the necessity to move towards modern ways of working, and create the right organisational culture and relationship with employees so that requests for flexible working are considered fairly and result in a beneficial outcome.

As flexible working starts to become the norm, it is crucial employers start to get on board with the idea and more importantly, realise that with the right attitude from both parties, working remotely can prove extremely beneficial.

The week before last I attended Open Knowledge Festival in Berlin organised by Open Knowledge (my lovely employers). The festival is the biggest open data and open knowledge event to date: global, inclusive and participatory.

Rufus Pollock opens OKFestival. Photo by Gregor Fischer from the official festival Flickr album:https://www.flickr.com/photos/okfn/14550151469/

It truly was a fantastic event and I’ve written two blog posts on it from the perspectives of my ‘projects’: Open Educating at OKFestival and OKFestivaling for LinkedUp.

As a remote worker meeting up with my colleagues, peers and community (or should I say communities) is always incredibly important. It really solidifies those relationships that sometimes seem fragile when you are sitting at different ends of an ethernet cable.

A colleague of mine, Lou Woodley, one of the OKFestival organisers, has written a great post [Lovely 2 C U – the importance of in-person events #okfest14] that reflects “on the importance of these flagship annual events to bring together people from distinct projects and communities, who mainly connect online during the rest of the year, or perhaps don’t connect at all with those outside their own community.” Lou is based in the UK but hoping to move to the US in the near future. I met her for the first time at OKFestival despite having spoken to her countless times via Skype!

Festival organisers, Lou Woodley in the middle. Photo by Gregor Fischer from the official festival Flickr album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/okfn/14756611213/in/pool-okfestival2014

It’s hard not to reproduce all of Lou’s post here as she hits the nail on the head so many times with her ’7 factors that in-person events provide’ but I’ve restricted myself to a few of her spot on observations (read her post for more!).

She talks about:

“Relationship building: Meeting someone face to face helps to deepen your relationship in terms of building trust and understanding (and a better appreciation of their quirky sense of humour that may have been less obvious online!). When you do this at scale, that’s a lot of goodwill being generated that can then help sustain projects and partnerships in the future.“

So true – nothing builds a relationship more than being able to sit and have a beer with someone, chat and get to know what they are really like as an individual.

and..

“Getting things done: Remote working – and connecting – with others can have its advantages in terms of work-life balance and allowing you to choose your preferred location, but it may also be less productive. An increasing number of people live in cities because having everything (and everyone!) in close proximity allows us to get more done. So too with meeting face-to-face at an event like this. This benefit of face-to-face working was true for the three organisers too. We all live in different cities, but really benefited from the handful of occasions when we got together for a couple of days to push hard to reach key milestones for the project.“

I don’t live in a city, I live off the beaten track, but Lou’s point about face-to-face working rings true. Taking time out to concentrate on working on something in particular is hugely helpful.

“Shared attention – Meeting face to face isn’t only good for building trust and understanding, and getting things done. Having shared experiences to reference back to is also important for a sense of community spirit. So, a successful event programme needs more than sessions where people work together to do things in small groups. It also benefits from opportunities to sit together as a large group and put collective attention onto the same thing. The keynotes each morning at the festival were designed to do just that.“

Group activities at OKFestival, Photo by Gregor Fischer from the official festival Flickr album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/okfn/14736486182

Experiences are the most important part of getting to know people. I was a little gutted that OKFestival took place at the same time as the Institutional Web Management Workshop. IWMW is an annual event that I’ve attended (and been co-chair of) over the last 14 years, only missing when my giving birth (to each of my 3 children) got in the way. Many of the attendees have become good friends over the years and our shared experiences of each year’s special moments (such as the IWMW song, Brian Kelly’s capers and some of the best/craziest plenaries) made that happen. Fingers crossed different scheduling next year might allow me to attend both OKFestival and IWMW!

and let’s not forget…

It’s fun! And finally, for those of us that spend large chunks of our working lives online, it’s important to be able to have some more sociable “downtime” spent in person with our colleagues. The lack of watercooler chat that working remotely can bring – with no easy opportunity to pop out and get a coffee together – means that when you do meet face to face, there’s a lot of catching up to do. And what better place than a former brewery to work really hard together for a few days, and then to share a celebratory beer and slice of cake in the sun afterwards?

It was fun, a lot of fun! I love being able to spend my days up and moving about rather than sat rigid in a seat. Seeing new things and meeting fab people really is the best part of my job. Returning home feels a little bit of a come down.

So thanks to Lou for her brilliant observations. Events like this take a huge amount of organising (huge gratitude goes to the organisers Lou, Bea and Megan – who really put in the hours and devotion on OKFestival) and a lot of effort, but damn, they are so worth it!

Selling OKFestival T-shirts with my colleague Sally Deffor

Back in 2012 I took part in an Introduction to Openess in Education MOOC. I participated for a number of reasons. Firstly I wanted to experience a MOOC first hand, at the time they were a relatively new phenomena and I was curious. Secondly I was interested in the topic area, my knowledge in certain areas (for example around open data) was patchy. My final reason was to give myself something to talk about on this blog, I was struggling to find things to write about and needed a focus.

So I’m struggling again with blog content…and I need a little inspiration. Maybe it’s time for my second MOOC – an opportunity to see how things have moved on – compare and contrast.

Today Stanford have launched a OpenEdX MOOC entitled Open Knowledge: Changing the Global Course of Learning, it’s a topic I know a fair amount about, I actually work for an organisation called Open Knowledge! So I’m interested to see if the MOOC will change how I feel about different areas of Open Knowledge and if their (the course creators) ideas radically differ from mine by the content they chose and the questions they ask. I’m also interested to see what there is still to be learnt (lots I’m sure) and to catch up new with people.

First thoughts…

The MOOC is research in itself. The Stanford team are carrying out research study on learners’ perceptions of open knowledge within the MOOC and one of the first activities is a survey. It will be interesting to hear their findings later on.

The Open Knowledge MOOC was developed by a team of instructors from Canada, the US, Ghana, and Mexico. They have attempted to make the MOOC as bilingual as possible with significant content in Spanish. The interface language can be changed, videos are transcribed and subtitled, content is flexible – none is mandatory – so missing content not available in your language is an option.

After browsing through the first module it looks like all the videos are available on YouTube and the recommended reading are all available online. It would be good to have the licence of content clearly marked though – I added this as a comment.

What is indigenous Knowledge? Rick Hill Video – available on YouTube – here with transcription

Statement of Accomplishment…

I haven’t worked out how much time I can put in to the MOOC yet but there are different ‘Statement of Accomplishment’ options depending on the time spent. These are:

• The Connecting track, for those looking to spend less time on the course.
• The Evaluating track needs a little more time to complete, and involves not only completing the Connecting requirements, but also doing some further writing. 


• For the most ambitious students there is the Creating track. This will take the most time, as you will need to complete both the Connecting and Evaluating requirements, as well as build a digital project.



I’ll probably go for the Connecting Track – I need to:

• Write 4 discussion forum posts over the course of the semester. These posts should focus on topics from the weekly course content.
• Constructively comment on 4 peer discussion posts throughout the semester.
• Write 8 tweets throughout the semester. These tweets should focus on topics from the weekly course content – can’t find the hashtag for it at the moment!
• Share 8 newly discovered resources in the course Diigo group.
  Write a self-assessment documenting my completion of the track requirements and describing your learning experiences.

Once I’ve got in to the MOOC I’ll publish an update to let you know how it’s going!

Kelly Smith works at CourseFinder.com.au, an Australian online courses resource. She also provides career advice for students and job seekers and works as a freelance writer.

She’s written a post for us on Google Apps for Business and the potential for remote workers.

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Many remote workers might remember the statement from Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Meyers, who condemned the idea of working remotely and swiftly ordered all of the company’s employees to show up in person at their offices. Her opinion was echoed by Yahoo’s HR head, who claimed “speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home [...] we need to be one Yahoo, and that starts with physically being together.”

But the above is a very limited point of view. Provided that remote workers use the many cloud tools available to them in a smart way, there should be very few sacrifices involved with a remote working environment. One of the most popular and efficient packages that help team members to collaborate, communicate, as well as store and manage data is Google Apps for Business.

But what exactly is Google Apps for Business?

It’s a set of the most popular Google apps that help to manage a business from remote locations. Inside, we find apps everyone knows and uses on daily basis – Gmail to provide email, Drive for storage and document creation (among them text documents, spreadsheets, forms, slides and sites), or Hangouts for video calls and instant messaging. Another feature is Calendar, which helps to create integrated business calendars and ensure that all workers are on the same page when it comes to important deadlines.

Google Apps for Business features two special apps – Vault and Admin. Admin is an interface for broadly defined administration and includes functionalities for mobile device management, security and control, as well as access to 24/7 Google support. Vault, on the other hand, provides an archiving service for all emails and chats, which can later be searched, managed and easily exported.

The Potential of Google Apps for Business in Remote Working

The benefits of this communication and collaboration system are multiple and varied. First, companies don’t need to spend lots of money on specialized hardware and software – all apps are in the cloud and available from every device connected to the internet. It’s perfect for companies with low budget or organizations with remote workers, who will be able to access Google apps from all locations and almost every operating system.

Seen from the perspective of remote workers, Google Apps for Business help in several major areas of any business collaboration:

• Communication – Google apps are made for easy communication. Gmail has an understandable interface, it’s quick to use and features multiple, built-in and highly efficient security features like filtering and spam detection. Gmail includes an added feature which adds your company domain name to personalize the employee email addresses. Hangouts and Google+ can foster both individual and group communication too.
• Collaboration – Google Drive, and its various functionalities, is there to make collaborating easier than ever. Users can edit files at the same time and consult with one another using an adjacent chat window, which can save the time lost on switching to a different instant messaging window or other devices like cellphones.
• Efficiency – all apps are literally in a single place and available with a few clicks. After logging in, workers won’t need to switch to other programs, ensuring high productivity and no time lost on the usual distraction when using a variety of tools scattered around different platforms.
• Time-management – All in all, Google Apps for Business really helps to save time on everything, from editing documents to brainstorming an idea.

A lot of people believe that in a decade, remote working will be as much or even more popular than the traditional office environment. The truth is that both employers and workers benefit from the dynamics of remote working. That’s why it’s likely that digital tools that foster easy collaboration, communication and management, such as Google Apps for Business, will become increasingly effective, user-friendly and geared towards breaching the time and space barrier to ensure a stimulating remote working environment.

Yikes! Week 3 of Stanford’s Open Knowledge MOOC already!

Last week the topic was ‘Technological Change, Digital Identity, and Connected Learning’ and I watched Socialnomics by Erik Qualman (picked because it was the shortest video!) which filled me to the brim with interesting (and sometimes unbelievable) statistics.

• 53% of Millenials would rather lose their sense of smell than their technology
• Each day 20% of the terms typed into Google have never been searched before
• More people own a mobile device than a toothbrush
• The average person has an 0.07 attention span, average goldfish has an 0.08 second one

This week it’s ‘Participatory Culture, Citizen Journalism, Citizen Science’. The idea is get critical perspectives on openness as well as the positive ones. Now this I liked! I’m always really keen to try and get an opposing view to my own. Many of us live and work in a little bubble where we surround ourselves with agreement. The RSA Animate – The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens? Talk by Evgeny Morozov was really interesting.

Morozov presents an alternative take on ‘cyber-utopianism’, the seductive idea that the internet plays a largely emancipatory role in global politics. He talks about ‘cyberutopians': people who believe in transformative power of the web and “ipod liberalism”: the belief that people who have ipods will support western values. He sees these ideas as dangerous and naïve – for example some believe that if social networking was around a few years back the genocide in Rwanda wouldn’t have happened. Morozov’s main point is the good ole one that tools can be used for both good and bad. While getting countries online has aided democracy it also leaves an evidence trail. Dictators now just need to go to Facebook and Twitter to lay their hands on information they used to have to torture people to find. I like his idea of ‘digital renegades’ and ‘digital captives’. “Are they (young people) the “digital renegades,” ready to leverage the power of social networking and text messaging to topple their undemocratic governments? Or are they “digital captives,” whose political and social dissent has been significantly neutered by the Internet, turning them into happy consumers of Hollywood’s digital marginalia?” (New York Times)

Hmm, which am I? Something to chew on while using my 0.07 attention span.

Martin White is a well-known face in the information management world. He has been the Managing Director of Intranet Focus, which provides consulting services related to intranet strategies, for over 15 years. In 2012 Intranet Focus launched a series of Research Notes on topics arising from their consulting work. Topics are broad ranging but often touch on areas of interest to those working remotely.

Martin recently published a research note on Managing Virtual Teams. The extended research note [PDF]  provides an overview of good practice in managing virtual teams both in team meetings and between meetings. There are ten recommendations based on Martin’s own experience of managing virtual teams dating back to 1975. Appendices set out the elements of a profile of virtual team members and also the structure of a training course that Intranet Focus deliver. An article by Martin on The management of virtual teams and virtual meetings was published in published in Business Information Review (unfortunately the journal is not open access but Martin is happy to discuss with those interested.)
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Although the current language of business speaks of ‘collaboration’ it does not speak of ‘virtual collaboration’ but of virtual teams. This is useful because not all teams work in a collaborative way with a common cause. A team can be defined as a collection of individuals who are interdependent in their tasks, who share responsibility for outcomes, who see themselves and who are seen by others as an intact social entity embedded in one or more larger social systems, and who manage their relationship across organisational boundaries. A team therefore has a unity of purpose, a social structure, and its members share a common responsibility for outcomes which is not necessarily a common cause.

Probably the most comprehensive survey of virtual team adoption currently available was undertaken by the Economist Intelligence Unit in late 2009.

The main reasons quoted in the report for establishing virtual teams were

• Improve collaboration with other business units
• Tap into a larger pool of expertise
• Improve competitiveness through a faster response to opportunities
• Cost reduction, especially travel costs and the need for internal meeting spaces
• Improve collaboration with customers, suppliers and partners

The challenges of working in virtual teams were seen as

• Misunderstandings due to differences in culture, language and an inability to read people’s expressions
• Difficulty in leading teams remotely
• Difficulty in building camaraderie and trust
• Difficulty in managing the productivity of virtual teams
• Managing information overload

Building a virtual team takes a lot of care and effort. The considerations of language, location, time and culture have to be taken into account in not only the selection of the staff concerned but also in setting up and managing each meeting.  There may be potentially a key member of the virtual team who does not have good spoken language skills and it may be necessary to bring in an interpreter who themselves may not have the security clearance to be participating in the meeting.

Adding someone to the team may be required but removing someone could be very difficult. In a physical meeting situation a quiet word to a manager may be effective but in a virtual team that call has to be made by ‘phone, and the person who is asked to leave may feel that not enough has been done to enable them to contribute to the meeting. The newcomer may also change the dynamics and levels of trust in the team.

The word TEAM provides a useful mnemonic for virtual teams

• Trust between members of the team, and that their work is worthwhile, is essential. Once broken it cannot be rebuilt
• Engagement is very difficult to achieve in a virtual team and so has to be worked on in a step-by-step approach recognising that each member of the team is an individual
• Achievement, both personal and as a team, should be recognised and used to build engagement and trust
• Membership needs to be kept under continuous review, as just one person that fails to achieve and/or fails to engage and/or fails to understand the importance of trust will have a major impact on every other member

Culture, time and place

Virtual teams have three dimensions to their operation

• National and organisational culture (which includes language)
• Time
• Location

These need to be taken into account at all times in the planning, execution and review of a virtual meeting. A simple ‘3D’ graphic pinned to a desktop can be a valuable mnemonic.

Most multi-national companies adopt English as a corporate language for corporate communications, but certainly companies outside of the USA are made aware every day that this is a guideline and not a command. This is especially the case in Europe where it is difficult to travel more than 500 miles from a city centre without entering a country with a different language.

In meetings with attendees from different countries it is often easier for them to understand English spoken as a second (or even third) language than English spoken by a native speaker because of the use of idioms and inadvertently complex sentence constructions. An important point that is often overlooked is that native speakers of English need to allow time between sentences to give others a chance to ‘translate’ concepts (rather than words) into their own language.

When planning virtual team meetings it is important to understand that there are four elements of language skills

• The ability to speak
• The ability to understand what is being said
• The ability to write
• The ability to read

Individual team members may have different levels of skill in each of these four areas, and making an assumption to the contrary could lead to major problems with understanding and with decision making.

The concept of location is also complex. Members of the virtual team could be in different floors of the same building, in different buildings, in different countries and of course not even in a building at all but on a train, plane or in a hotel dining room.  With audio or Skype video conferences it might not be at all obvious where the attendees are actually sitting. The location may have an impact on ambient noise levels, on whether the attendee can be overhead by colleagues or strangers, and on whether it is possible for the attendee to write notes of the meeting.   This mobile location component is increasingly important as mobile technology enables people to be away from their offices on a more extended basis.

Even a small company operating on a regional basis may want to include one or more of its employees with others in a virtual meeting.  It is important to understand that even having one person ‘phoning in to what otherwise would be a regular physical meeting will change the dynamics of the meeting. This is especially the case when the person leading the meeting tries to do so from a remote location, or even on vacation. This is because another aspect of location is the distribution effect. If the majority of the participants are in one location then they will be a dominant force in the discussion, especially if the leader of the meeting is also present at that location. They will also have the benefit of being able to see the body language of their colleagues and to time their contributions to the discussion.

Just some of the challenges of time in virtual meetings include different times to start and end the working day and public holidays being taken on different days (even in the UK!).  We all want to manage our own diaries and feel uncomfortable when someone calls a meeting at an unsuitable time without prior consultation. Even if we can actually participate in the meeting we may do so in a less-than-constructive way.  Even a small change in time, say from 09.00 to 08.30 could be very difficult for people commuting by public transport to accommodate easily.

Training requirements

In view of the increasing importance of virtual teams companies should be providing training in how to manage virtual teams but very few do so. Team leaders in particular will need to gain some additional skills.

These include

• Understanding the skills and experience that team members need to have to be effective members of a virtual team
• Maintaining close working relationships with the managers of team members to ensure they are aware of the organisation and office environment in which team members are operating
• Taking additional time to prepare for a meeting so that for example all team members have the documents they need several days in advance
• Being adept at using conferencing and social media applications to help the team achieve objectives
• Being able to motivate team members that they have not met, and may not have chosen to be a member of the team
• Being ready to call team members by name to contribute, remembering which team members may not have spoken for a period of time
• Accepting that it is very difficult to concentrate on leading a virtual team meeting and make notes of the discussions and actions

A team leader who is excellent in managing physical meetings may not be equally as proficient when managing virtual team meetings. If leading or even participating in virtual teams is a core activity then their performance should be included in annual performance appraisals.

Some companies have built a certification process into virtual team participation so that employees (and managers) initially build up expertise in single country/same time zone virtual meetings and then progress to managing complex multi-national, multi-cultural teams in due course.

Recommendations

My ten recommendations for getting the best out of virtual teams and virtual team meetings are

1. Recognise that virtual teams are going to be increasingly important to any organisation, and ensure that current and potential participants have access to training and mentoring on virtual team management and virtual team meetings.
2. Virtual teams should have very clear objectives so that it is possible to set the investment in the team against the outcome and also that team members bring appropriate skills, expertise and authority to take action.
3. Leadership skills that work for physical teams may not be as valuable in a virtual team environment. Other skills are needed and have to be acquired through practice, not just through reading or teaching.
4. Without good team meetings a virtual team is very unlikely to achieve its objectives and so particular care should be taken in developing guidelines for virtual meetings and for facilitating feedback.
5. Develop good profiles of each team member, taking into account local availability of technology and offices, which can be used to take part in virtual meetings (especially in the case of open-plan offices) and language expertise.
6. Ideally each team should have an opportunity to meet with other members of the team at the outset of the team being set up. Where this is not possible there should be an initial virtual meeting where team members can introduce themselves and gain experience with the technology being used before the first formal meeting of the team.
7. Team dynamics of virtual teams can be quite fragile, often depending on a very high level of trust in people they may not have met before. Introducing a new team member into an existing team may mean starting the process of building trust all over again.
8. Social media applications can be of value in supporting virtual teams but may need to be tailored to specific team requirements.
9. Issues of language and culture need careful consideration but should never be an excuse not to bring specific individuals into a team.
10. Every member of a virtual team should feel that they gave gained from their participation the experience that is useful to their local situation and their personal career development.

This article was first published on the UKeig blog.

Week 4 was a cliptastic week on the Stanford Open Knowledge MOOC with a plethora of remixed videos arguing for and against current digital copyright laws and other legal and economic issues of openness.

The Copyright clearance video explained it well: “copyright is complicated” – even more so when you start working across country and sector boundaries.

Rights like fair use (where use is based on best practices and takes in to account the purpose and character of the use, e.g. commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; the nature of the copyrighted work; the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work) help the situation, but as most of us knew before embarking on this MOOC copyright is out-dated for the digital age. In the UK our equivalent fair dealing is limited to research and private study (both must be non-commercial), criticism, review, and news reporting.

Interested in looking at something beyond the arguments around licensing I decided to put my energy into watching law professor Yochai Benkler on Open-source economics looks more deeply at the economics driving the democratization of cultural production. His argument is that years ago producers had to be able to raise financial capital to start producing news content. There was an industrial knowledge economy but it was market based or government owned. This requirement has been inverted by the Internet. There is now a distributed knowledge economy, capital is still required but it is spread out, resulting in communication and computation sitting in the hands of population. The issues are no longer just quality but relevance. We now have four transactional frameworks: market-based or non-market based, decentralised or centralised. There is more competition but also new opportunities – toolmakers for new systems, building platforms etc. Social production is a fact, not a fad, in some contexts it is more efficient than markets or firm, but it is a threat to and threatened by incumbent industrial models.

This week the expert on hand was Dr. Cable Green, Director of Global Learning for Creative Commons. Cable is a member of the Open Education Advisory Group of the Open Education Working Group I co-ordinate so nice to see him involved. Cable has posed three questions for the course attendees with some suggested answers. To summarise, his questions were:

1. What does open educational resources (oer) success look like? “what is the world we’re trying to create?” “how can we quantify it?” “are there intermediate ‘mile posts’ or changes of state, either catalytic or symbolic that we want?”
2. Where can NGOs, foundations and individual open advocates have the most impact? What are the things we must do and/or are best positioned to do? What opportunities are out there for us that we’re missing?
3. What role does open policy have to play?
4. What metrics should we track? If we could only pick a few metrics to guide us, what would they be? What would show we’re collectively having impact?

Great questions and I hope to share them with the Working Group sometime soon.

Despite many organisations moving away from remote working (see the recent demands from Reddit that their staff relocate – last year Yahoo did the same) remote working continues to become more popular. Monica Wells of BizDb reminds us why.

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Remote work has during the last few years become an increasingly popular professional trend. More and more people are finding it easier to work from home, saving up on time and money that would otherwise be lost in commuting. Companies, on the other hand, can easily outsource their services and use cutting-edge technologies to communicate and collaborate in such a way as to render distance irrelevant and create a cohesive team.

Mobile Worker by Michael Coghlan on Flickr, CC-SA

Here are the top 3 reasons the explain the present popularity of remote work from the perspective of workers and employers.

Flexibility

What workers love about remote work is its flexibility and the opportunity it grants them for achieving a great work-life balance, where they’re able to cultivate their passions and get a lot of work done in one day. Working from home, employees don’t need to feel stressed about their schedule and commuting – this helps them to stay productive and more satisfied.

One of the biggest perks of remote working is the ability to control one’s schedule. Gone are the days of a 9 to 5 job – mobile devices and cloud computing allow to work literally from anywhere and at any time, provided there’s an Internet connection. All this accounts for the increased satisfaction of workers, who have more freedom and so are more motivated to do a great job for their organization.

Workers And Employers Can Cut Expenses

When working in remote, employees not only save time, but money as well. Saving up on gas or public transport tickets is on the long run great not only for their wallets, but also for the environment – less cars on the streets simply mean less pollution.

Seen from the perspective of employers, remote work is a cheap affair. Companies are able to find qualified workers who provide similar talent and productivity to local workers, but at a lower cost. Apart from salaries, companies open to remote work additionally save up on office space and other facilities.

Companies Can Attract Talent

This is particularly relevant to sectors suffering from skill shortage or tough competition to acquire talented workers. Thanks to remote working environment, companies can benefit from skills of people who don’t need to be located near its headquarters, automatically rising the chance of finding competent and talented candidates.

In order to attract talents, employers need to come across as flexible and ready to accommodate skilled employees through a variety of employee-oriented policies. Companies can offer remote work to on-site employees too – it’s a great factor to retain them and boost their satisfaction.

Remote work still needs to be addressed as a potential challenge, but its benefits are simply worth the price. Communication is the biggest issue here – without proper tools and training, distance might affect the dynamics of team collaboration.

Needless to say, the management style employed in remote context will also radically differ from traditional one and could possibly require additional training. Without specific knowledge, managers will see the productivity of their team crumble under the pressure of distance.

Fortunately, there’s a whole wealth of technologies and cloud services that make collaboration and communication significantly easier. Other than that, companies interested in remote work can benefit from the expertise provided by specialized venture that deliver solutions for creating, managing and improving remote work opportunities.

Is remote work for everyone? That largely depends on the industry and company size. Following the steps taken by Yahoo, Reddit has just placed a new policy, which forces workers to either relocate to the company’s headquarters in San Francisco or face contract termination.

While remote might not work for those tech giants, it’s a perfect working environment for budding start-ups and mid-sized companies that know how to use technology to their advantage and employ it in order to efficiently manage remote workers and help them to collaborate as a team.

Yesterday the LinkedUp Project announced the winners of its Vici Competition, the third and final competition in the LinkedUp Challenge. All 3 competitions have involved the judging of software prototypes and apps that build on open education data using an extensively researched and refined evaluation framework. They have also all included an ‘online open vote’.

Winners of the Vici Competition

The process of implementing the People’s Choice Award has been a bit of a roller coaster ride and I’m keen to share our experiences.

I wanted this assessment of our approaches to be both open and honest, and so it feels appropriate to publish it here – on my own personal blog – rather than on the LinkedUp site, or elsewhere.

Some Background…

Before the launch of the first competition I was in discussion with colleagues at Open Knowledge (where I’m based) and we agreed that although the evaluation framework is a fair way to judge an open data competition it is not a very inclusive process. Only an elite group of reviewers get to judge the entries – everyone else’s views are discounted. Community building within LinkedUp is very much about building new audiences so we came up with the idea of the People’s Choice Vote – a way to involve everyone and anyone in the judging of the competition. It was agreed that the People’s Choice Vote would be run in parallel with the evaluation framework assessment giving competition entrants an opportunity to promote their submission, and external people an opportunity to be involved in the voting process. In my role as dissemination and community building co-ordinator it seemed like an interesting approach to take and and the consortium agreed that it was something we could spend time on. Maybe at this stage we were naive in our thinking that it would be easy to run such a vote.

Although I’d had some experience of running online votes before (mainly related to chosing sessions for a conference I’d been involved in) we did recognise that the People’s Vote would be some extent an experiment. We were unfamiliar with the currently available software used and had only a vague idea of the challenges such a vote would pose. However the LinkedUp Project is partially a research project so this level of experimentation seemed reasonable providing we share our experiences; it was agreed that it was a risk worth taking. Hopefully our insights will prove to be a useful resource for others planning to run a similar open vote in the future.

Veni Vote

For the Veni Competition I carried out quite a bit of investigation into who was running online voting and the type of solutions involved. In the end we went with Ideascale. The setup worked well but unfortunately our freemium version meant that while voters could only vote once on each idea they could vote down as well as up using a dislike button. This meant that some competitors and their supporters were coming to the site and voting everything down except for their own entry. Naturally this upset many of the competitors and to ensure positive results we added in extra opportunities to physically vote at the LinkedUp poster session at the OKConference in September 2013, venue for the Veni awards. The competitors who were causing the problems also ended up getting eventually locked out of the system.

Veni Vote in Ideascale

I documented my thoughts on the Veni vote in the following blog post: Online Voting: The highs and lows.

Vidi Vote

It was clear that the service to be used for the Vidi Competition Vote had to only allow positive voting. We were offered an alternative software solution: GNOSS, a software platform, created by RIAM Intelearning LAB S.L. who specialise in online social networks with dynamic semantic publishing. The GNOSS team were actually shortlisted for the Veni Competition so had some understanding of what was required for the People’s Choice. The system (described in this post) was much more complex than Ideascale and to prevent vote rigging it required that voters register with the GNOSS site or use an already established account. The GNOSS setup is still available online.

Vidi Vote in GNOSS

The system, whilst being more secure, received some criticism for its complexity. Loging in was either via Facebook, Twitter, or a new GNOSS registration. During this process the interface would change language (from English to Spanish at regular intervals) so for example you were required to make selections related to the community you wanted to participate in with little explanation.

The GNOSS solution was definitely better, but still didn’t tick all the boxes for us.

Vici Vote

Despite being out third effort and the feeling that we should almost be there by now, the Vici People’s Choice was by far the most complicated.

In response to the feedback that the GNOSS system had been overly complicated we opted to use a dedicated, yet fairly simplistic online voting app. The app was called Vote Contest was created by Wishpond and for the first time during the LinkedUp Challenge we actually paid for the software. It’s simplicity was it’s appeal and we were able to embed it in our website. You can read more about the Wishpond system in the Vici People’s Choice launch post.

Vici Vote in Vote Contest from Wishpond

Unfortunately it became clear fairly early on that there were problems with the software. The mobile version of the site had a bug that enabled people to refresh the page and then vote again with the same email address. There was also no email verification and as the Mobile version failed to remember the MAC address this resulted in opportunities to game the system. After a few days and discussions with the Wishpond team (who initially denied the problem and then admitted that they were unable to fix it) we were left with broken software and scores that were effectively null and void. After a consortium meeting an executive decision was made that due to a relatively short-timescale there would not be a chance to investigate and implement alternative online voting solutions. The only option was to cancel the online vote completely. Not wanting to let the Vici entrants down completely it was decided that we would replace the online People’s Choice Vote with an offline People’s Choice Vote. The People’s Choice winner will be identified during a physical People’s Choice Vote that would take place at the poster session at ISWC in Italy – where the Vici awards were to be held.

We were put in a very difficult position and it was clear that whatever decision was made would cause some upset. Many of the competition entrants complained but came to realise that we had been left with no other options.

Tokens for the Vici People’s Choic

Running a physical People’s Vote at ISWC was an arduous task. All ISWC attendees received a token (shown above) in their ISWC delegate bags. This involved the creation of 650 ‘tokens’ (pieces of card with the details of the vote on). The tokens had a space for people to write their name and their entry on – the thinking behind this was that it would involve competitors ‘borrowing’ tokens from unused bags. The Vici Challenge entrants were invited to showcase their entries and their posters during the ISWC minute madness session encouraging delegates to come and vote for them. The posters were then on display in a dedicated Poster and Demonstration session and delegates were able to vote for their favourite submission by placing your token in the relevant poster bag.

At ISWC alongside the LinkedUp Challenge there was also a best poster competition. Over 130 posters were competing in the competition and delegates could vote for their favourite poster using the ISWC website or phone app – this involved using a code number placed in their delegate bags – again more ways to avoid gaming the system. It was clear that with so many choices delegates were at voting saturation level. Although over 100 votes were placed for the LinkedUp Vici Challenge it was a relatively small sample of the 650 attendees.

Conclusions

Over the last year the vote process has given me extensive food for thought around our innate tendency to compete, and at times cheat. Any voting system has to be set up with this in mind.

In hindsight the time and effort in running a successful People’s Choice Vote was underestimated. Software solutions need to be well tested by a committed team looking for loopholes and opportunities to break the system. They also need to be tried out on multiple devices. While all the LinkedUp People’s Choice votes has been marred with attempts to game the system I still glad that we run it and believe that it was established with the right motivation in mind. LinkedUp has attempted to be inclusive and innovative in its approaches to raising the profile of open data in education. In fulfilling this task we have worked hard as a consortium to reach out to new audiences and include the general public when possible.

At this year’s ISWC the complexities of running the People’s Vote seemed overwhelming and at times I felt like we’d let entrants to the competition down. However one shortlisted candidate kindly pointed out that it is impossible to keep everyone happy but if you try your best and your motivation is good then you just have accept that there is little more you can do.

Making things ‘open’ often highlights flaws in the system. These flaws may be with a service or device, or sometimes they are human flaws – the need to win at all costs. It’s unsurprising that online election voting has yet to reach fruition! However I still believe that transparency is a worthy approach and hope that those who competed in the LinkedUp Challenge will recognise that it was in pursuit of the goal of openness that we made our mistakes.

10 point specification for open voting software

Experience has shown us that to fully work an online voting system will need to consider the following points:

1. Email validation – those with a creative mind can make up emails, there needs to be some way of proving that a voter is an individual.
2. One person = one vote – basically the ability to block voters after one vote.
3. Only allow positive voting – having negative votes is depressing for all.
4. Random listings of entries – people will often vote for what is at the top of the, random listing of entries goes to some lengths to ensure more even voting.
5. Urls links for entries – it’s not totally necessary but it can be useful to have one url per entry – this allows easier promotion entries.
6. Easy to use – If it isn’t easy users will give up before voting.
7. The ability to add tags – not necessary but allows you to do interesting things with the content.
8. The ability to add images and links in the description – some software will only let you add plain text.
9. Embedding into your website, Facebook etc. – versatile services will let you embed the app and not require users to go to a separate website.
10. Test your software – test it, and then test it, and test it again on lots of different devices.

It is also worth thinking about openness – how open do you want your system to be? Could you run it on Facebook or as a smart phone app or do you feel that is excluding people?

Some current open voting systems you could try

• Google docs – you could create a poll
• GNOSS – see Veni!
• Hackdash.org – they have some great voting and collaboration software going on
• Facebook Like count linked to descriptions of items. Each user is required to have a facebook account to vote and a “like” would be consider a vote, and by design, each user can only like something once.
• Polldaddy plugin for wordpress
• Opinionstage plugin
• Jisc Elevator used a drupal module – not possible for us
• Ideascale – see Veni vote!
  Simply voting – costs, looks complex
• Estonia released its national e-voting system on github – it’s probably overkill for a competition though, fairly complex
• SnapSurvey – costs, very corporate
• Election buddy – costs, maybe overkill
• Eballot – costs

Related blog posts

• Vici People’s Choice at ISWC
• Sad News about the Vici People’s Choice Vote
• Vici People’s Choice
• Vidi People’s Choice Winner
• Vidi Competition: People’s Choice
• Veni People’s Choice Winner
• Veni Competition: People’s Choice

After moving to Italy from the UK for a change of lifestyle Gemma Wilson began to miss her old marketing role back in the UK. She opted to join the rapidly expanding remote worker workforce and has agreed to share with us 4 things she doesn’t miss about working in an office.

Gemma writes and shares many posts on the Meetupcall (a tool which makes it simple to arrange conference calls with people anywhere in the world,directly from your calendar) blog. She writes from her home in Italy on real experiences that she has uncovered through working remotely.

If you have some “things you don’t miss about the office” then share them with us in the comments!

***

This year I decided to jump ship and try out the increasingly popular method of working; remote working. As I’ve already covered previously, remote working is certainly not all about sitting in your pajamas and enjoying daytime television.

However, one of the main things I’m happiest about is that I’m no longer confined to a traditional four walled office.The last thing I would wish on a person is having to spend decades under the glow of industrial lighting in a noisy office. Seeing as I’m a little cynical by nature, I thought I’d share some of the things that I don’t miss about working in an office and why.

Irritating Employees
You know who you are. No one wants to hear your life story or the current “woe is me” situation that you are dealing with for the millionth time. This is a workplace I am here to work, I am not your therapist. In fact, there is no one here that is medically qualified to help you. So please, go back to your desk and do some work, so I can do mine. You know, that thing we’re getting paid to do?

The Commute
Ok, I admit it, this is the easiest one. In my previous jobs I had a commute of 45 – 60 minutes per day. This isn’t necessarily bad, but that was nearly an hour of my day spent on driving. That meant I had to fuel up roughly £150 per month. Now that my commute is literally 20 seconds to my computer, my fuel budget is zero. That’s money that can be used elsewhere.

Food
I don’t miss the smell of burnt coffee because someone is careless in the “how a coffeepot works” department. And for the last time, no reheating fish in the microwave! How many times do you need to be told? And what is it about offices that cause people to bring in junk food? I know sitting at your desk all day with some high calorie diet is a perfect combination, but I don’t miss it. Now that I work from home I decide what food is around me and it’s a lot cheaper making my own lunches than feeling obliged to have to tag along on ‘lunch dates’ while paying a small fortune per day just for a sandwich. Without junk food around me I am not tempted to grab a chocolate bar or a packet of crisps. I have even started going to the gym after work; especially now that I don’t need to spend money on fuel and office takeaways.

Take a pick from the fruit bowl!

Meetings
I don’t miss meetings at all. Previously, I used to have meetings about meetings. Or I was often collared into an irrelevant meeting just to fill chairs around a boardroom table. Nothing drives me closer to insanity than wasting time. Many meetings were simply that, at least in my case. Since working remotely in my new job, the meetings now actually have a purpose; but it’s once a week and to discuss important things, like the next project, or just a catch up on how things are going; and I appreciate that, especially being 1000 miles away from the office. Now it means I have more of my day to be productive and finish my tasks.

I’m sure there are many more things I don’t miss about being in an office, but these are the first ones that come to mind. This isn’t meant to say that working in an office is bad or shouldn’t be done, just that it’s not my cup of tea, especially now that I’ve experienced working from home first hand. Going through this exercise has also shown me that maybe I should post the things I do miss about working in an office. Surprisingly enough, there are a number of things, but I’ll leave that for another time.

If you work in an office, what drives you nuts about working there? What do you hate most about being in an office?

So I’m one of the many who have failed to finish a MOOC [completion rates have been given as low as 10% – see this Time article with links to stats, Katy Jordan gives a completion rate figure of 13% – 40%, there are also more reports on the OER Research Hub website. The MOOC in question was Stanford’s Open Knowledge MOOC – and I did write a few posts about the topics.

Students completing, or not completing a MOOC, continues to be a hot topic in the Open Education world. For those of you interested in the discussions then I can recommend Martin Weller’s post ‘MOOC completion rates DO matter‘ as a good starting point.

By b3d_ on Flickr, CC-BY

For me the problem has been an ending project with deadlines set in stone, a holiday and a need to spend every other non-working moment doing family chores. I also think motivation, or lack of it, played a part. Participating in a MOOC felt a little like a busman’s holiday and maybe I should have been learning about something different from that which makes up my daily workload.

Anyway I just felt I should come clean. Maybe there will be more time for me and MOOCs in many moons!

Last week I presented on Open Data in Education at the LTI NetworkED Seminar series run by the London School of Economics Learning Technology and Innovation Department. The talk was videoed and streamed and I just had to share my favourite image Tweeted by Deb Baff from University of South Wales!

My talk on screen while Debs drinks wine and eats cheese!

I was a little unsure of the crowd so ended up giving a very broad overview covering open data, open data in education, relevant datasets, how we can use open data sets to meet educational needs, learning analytics, and the main related challenges. Everything went in the mix!

Prior to giving the talk I was interviewed for the LSE blog.

The video of the talk is available on the CLTSupport YouTube Channel and embedded below.

My slides are available on Slideshare and embedded below.

There is a Storify of the Tweets.

Sometimes you end up in a situation when you are working more but there seems to be less time. I think that happened to me this year!!

In January I moved from working part-time to being full-time. As my children have got older my hours have crept up and this year it was hard to say no to full-time work. Working from home means that the hours I work are flexible (a total necessity for me) but now work seems to eek into every part of my life. Since our last house move 3 years back my computer sits in a part of the front room, so it is now permanently on and permanent seeable – even when I’m cooking, helping the children with homework or even reading a book on the sofa. Add in phones, ipads and laptops and I seem to be unable to switch off. And as a homeworker interaction with humans, other than via Skype, seems to go down as my online time goes up.

I realise all this isn’t ideal. Not only that it goes against the advice I’ve oft given out about the work/life balance.

However it is not only me that is always online – my children (now 7, 10 and 12), despite our efforts to ration, seem to be connected a lot more too. It’s hard to moan about all of this, after all my career has been built on the Internet, but I think I am really starting to see the value of taking time out to think. I just don’t know when I can schedule it in…

The upside of all this extra working is that we’ve had a few nice holidays this year and I have turned off the electronic appliances for those. Next year my husband and I are off to Iceland for 5 days – which I’m really excited about. I’ve also tried to participate in more offline/out of work activities. I do Zumba, Tae-kwondo, support our school and am in the local Friends of the Earth group – but often work puts a kibosh on these due to travel time.

I suppose a question for me right now is how can I keep my head clear in a world that is pretty much all online these days? I’ll be giving it some thought over the Christmas break. I’d really appreciate any suggestions!

Still I hope this hasn’t been too somber a post. Work is good (I’ve finished off LinkedUp, still co-ordinate the Open Education Working Group and now work on Europeana Space and PASTEUR4OA) and most of my friends and family are well. And time plods on, real fast…

As Dr Seuss said: “How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?“

But then I think of the adage – old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative. ;-)

Hope you all have a great Christmas and Happy New Year!