“Generally speaking, any mechanism that can help teams cope—for example, communicate more efficiently or reduce the need to communicate, anticipate and explain events and member actions, learn who knows what or where to find expertise, figure out who did what and when on particular task activities, and who is around—has the potential to offset some of the coordination problems. We expect this to be true for both collocated and geographically distributed collaboration.”
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Similar shared space/ambient signals lost to automated systems: “Notice how much of the knowledge discussed here is available at relatively low cost in “open” work environments involving multiple human agents. For example, in older, hardwired control centers, individual controllers can often infer what other controllers are working on just by observing which displays or control panels they are attending to.”
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In Slack, nobody can see your over the ear headphones.
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From the first article, although I wonder if this is because there is/was no other forum for serendipity. Saying “the water cooler was broken” would be an interesting discussion starter for project retro.
“Furthermore, studies have shown that a substantial amount of coordination in software development takes place through informal encounters and meetings in public places such as the water cooler or coffee room [47, 63], which does not happen when members are separated by distance.”
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Alternatively, sometimes the most important component is the one no one has ever recognized: “And they realized: Irving & his trip was the missing secret ingredient”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3140528