After my recent “We are ALL Remoties” presentation at Wikimedia, I had some really great followup conversations with Arthur Richards at WikiMedia Foundation. Arthur has been paying a lot of attention to scrum and agile methodologies – both in the wider industry and also specifically in the context of his work at Wikimedia Foundation, which has people in different locations. As you can imagine, we had some great fun conversations – about remoties, about creating culture change, and about all-things-scrum – especially the rituals and mechanics of doing daily standups with a distributed team.

Next time you see a group of people standing together looking at a wall, and moving postit notes around, ask yourself: “how do remote people stay involved and contribute?” Taking photographs of the wall of postit notes, or putting the remote person on a computer-with-camera-on-wheeled-cart feels like a duct-tape workaround; a MacGyver fix done quickly, with the best of intentions, genuinely wanting to help the remote person be involved, but still not-a-great experience for remoties.

There has to be a better way.

We both strongly agree that having people in different locations is just a way to uncover the internal communication problems you didn’t know you already have… the remote person is the canary in the coal mine. Having a “we are all remoties” mindset helps everyone become more organized in their communications, which helps remote people *and* also the people sitting near each other in the office.

Arthur talked about this idea in his recent (and lively and very well attended!) presentation at the Annual Scrum Alliance “Global Scrum Gathering” event in Phoenix, Arizona. His slides are now visible here and here.

If you work in an agile / scrum style environment, especially with a geo-distributed team of humans, it’s well worth your time to read Arthur’s presentation! Thought provoking stuff, and nice slides too!