[UPDATE: The newest version of this presentation is here. joduinn 12feb2014, 09nov2014]

Last weekend, during Mozilla Summit, “We are all Remoties” was held *4* times: Brussels (catlee), Toronto (Armen and Kadir) and Santa Clara (myself, twice!). Big props to Kadir for joining in with his data – its always great to meet others who are also thinking about to best work together in a growing and geographically-distributed Mozilla.

I was happy to see that these different speakers, in different locations, all covered the session well, in their own personal style, and all had great responses and interactions. From all accounts, people really found this topic helpful, which is very nice to hear.

The one feedback that did surprise me, from all these sessions, was that most of the people attending were already working remotely, yet very few people based in offices attended, even if their entire group was geo-distributed. The topics covered addressed people in offices too, and several times people who were remoties said to me that they wished their office-based-co-workers had attended.

Its possible that the title makes people think the session only applies to non-office-based people. One earlier title I had was “working effectively in geo-distributed teams”, but that sounded very PHB. Another title (“If you are a remotie, or if you are in an office, working with a remotie…”) was too long, but it brought me to the current title. If everyone who is on a geo-distributed team considered themselves all to be on the same level playing field, then “we are ALL remoties!”.

Spreading the word, including to more people in physical offices, is important to make everyone’s work life more effective. If you’ve any ideas/suggestions, please let me know. And thanks again for the great support in all four summit sessions!

John.

[For a PDF copy of the entire presentation, click here or on the smiley faces! For the sake of my poor blogsite, the much, much, larger keynote files are available on request.]