HackMDAsync Management
Getting things done without time constrains
The issue
There are more than 10 meetings a week at TEC, that's without the community calls and other activities like the Psychology Research sessions.
The citizens of ancient Rome did their errands and most of their social life in forums because they were public spaces that provided tremendous value, similar to the current shopping malls, a common area where you could take care of your business and interact with other humans as a result of places with high concentrations of people. On this human centered and hyperconnected world we're building finding an equivalent is imperative, and for some reason we're failing into the same problem, us revolving around the systems insted of the systems revolving around us.
The tremendous reliance on synchronous management may be causing us problems without realizing it, for the time being we're exlcuding contributors from certain time zones and limiting the so wanted fluidity with which our members can move around the TEC and the broader web3 space.
Why async management
As the TEC grows (and tries to be self sustaining) we need to scale with ways to reduce friction to contribute, increase efficiency and decrease costs. Having syncs as the only moment we interact is just not going to make it, 1 hour to address everything from the high to the lowest level decisions and necessities is not enough - not to mention that a lot of context and momentum is lost for those who wish to continue with a topic after the sync has ended.
Syncs should be about attacking blockers and other activities that require real-time feedback, not for every little thing. They should feel special.
Navigate TEC asynchronously can help us:
- Make more in less time, we don't have to wait a whole week to move things forward.
- Have better feedback, we no longer have to fit all comments into a small slot in 1-hour meetings and people can think the response without rushing.
- Bootstrap more and better contributors, time is a scarce resource and we could do better use of it.
- Reward contributions! Everyone gets a fair chance to get rewarded through SourceCred by posting relevant stuff or making important comments.
Possible solution
A pilot with two working groups switching to async management as the default and giving syncs another meaning, could be having less (e.g. 2 per month), shorter (e.g. 30 min.) or developing new dynamics to complement forum discussions (e.g. close forum discussions and collaborativelly set action items).
If this experiment goes as I hope, there will be better access to information and discussions on each topic, more thoughtful feedback as there's no time pressure to reply and there will be more cross collaboration between both WG as the members get access to all the resources at the same time and place.
All communication is thoughtful. Because nothing is urgent (unless the site is down), comments are made after mindful processing and never in real-time. There's no drama.
People build their work around their life, not the other way around.
https://twitter.com/shl/status/1222545212477599751?s=20&t=iQm8eM4cpde-i34G8KPeBA
“Status meetings is a simple but powerful example of asynchronous communication. Our Future Forum research showed that teams that moved status meetings from live meetings into asynchronous, written updates actually scored higher on sense of belonging than those teams who kept the live meetings. That's because asynchronous updates do a couple of different things. First, it signals that live team time is reserved for higher value team-building activities. Second, it makes the updates & information more accessible to everyone on the team — they can consume the information, ask questions, and provide feedback in a deeper, richer way than in a quick sync meeting”
“The criteria can feel blurry while deciding when a conversation should be moved from async to sync or vice versa. The trick is in not forcing it and finding an optimal balance between the two. If before a meeting you retrieve updates on task completions, project statuses, blockers or additional context then real-time communications can be reserved for topics that benefit from immediate exchanges such as brainstorming, problem-solving, or decision-making,”
