Hi all,
last week some people created the a FSFE-wiki page about Free Software solutions for remote working. I think it has grown quite cool and gives a good overview. What do you think? Is it good? Is there missing something essential?
https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/FreeSoftware4RemoteWorking
Best, Erik
On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 04:45:28PM +0200, Erik Albers wrote:
Hi all,
last week some people created the a FSFE-wiki page about Free Software solutions for remote working. I think it has grown quite cool and gives a good overview. What do you think? Is it good? Is there missing something essential?
Under the Chat/InstantMessaging app IRC is completely missing, while still being the most stable and ubiquitous system for instant messaging ?
--strk;
On Tuesday 31. March 2020 17.30.12 Sandro Santilli wrote:
On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 04:45:28PM +0200, Erik Albers wrote:
Hi all,
last week some people created the a FSFE-wiki page about Free Software solutions for remote working. I think it has grown quite cool and gives a good overview. What do you think? Is it good? Is there missing something essential?
Under the Chat/InstantMessaging app IRC is completely missing, while still being the most stable and ubiquitous system for instant messaging ?
This is actually a good point. Since a lot of workplaces have suddenly been forced into thinking about remote working, the media narrative seems to be dominated by technologies like videoconferencing, "feature-rich" real-time chat, and other things that happen to have prominent and opportunistic proprietary vendors looking for new customers.
Yet successful distributed work can take place without these proprietary products. Indeed, some of the currently-hyped solutions are possibly some of the least efficient ways of getting work done, as some people are finding out. Meanwhile, asynchronous communications like e-mail keep getting the job done for many, despite continuing threats from the forces of consolidation and monopolisation towards independent mail (and Web) service providers.
Paul
The FSF is also working on a similar list.
https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Remote_Communication
Best, Michael McMahon | Web Developer, Free Software Foundation GPG Key: 4337 2794 C8AD D5CA 8FCF FA6C D037 59DA B600 E3C0 https://fsf.org | https://gnu.org
On 3/31/20 3:29 PM, Paul Boddie wrote:
On Tuesday 31. March 2020 17.30.12 Sandro Santilli wrote:
On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 04:45:28PM +0200, Erik Albers wrote:
Hi all,
last week some people created the a FSFE-wiki page about Free Software solutions for remote working. I think it has grown quite cool and gives a good overview. What do you think? Is it good? Is there missing something essential?
Under the Chat/InstantMessaging app IRC is completely missing, while still being the most stable and ubiquitous system for instant messaging ?
This is actually a good point. Since a lot of workplaces have suddenly been forced into thinking about remote working, the media narrative seems to be dominated by technologies like videoconferencing, "feature-rich" real-time chat, and other things that happen to have prominent and opportunistic proprietary vendors looking for new customers.
Yet successful distributed work can take place without these proprietary products. Indeed, some of the currently-hyped solutions are possibly some of the least efficient ways of getting work done, as some people are finding out. Meanwhile, asynchronous communications like e-mail keep getting the job done for many, despite continuing threats from the forces of consolidation and monopolisation towards independent mail (and Web) service providers.
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Am Dienstag 31 März 2020 21:29:12 schrieb Paul Boddie:
the media narrative seems to be dominated by technologies like videoconferencing, "feature-rich" real-time chat,
To understand why people long for those features, we have to look at the people and their ideas of workflow. If you want to do your meeting online now, you are accustomed towards seeing and hearing your communicatio partners, reading their communication on all levels. You also see the shared boards, printout, scribbles, looking at screens and projections and more. It is quite understandable for people to want much of these channels as possible as they are an important factor to raise the chance of successful meetings. (There used to be a research field called "computer supported cooperative work" (CSCW) where those basic needs had be examined starting a few decades earlier.)
and other things that happen to have prominent and opportunistic proprietary vendors looking for new customers.
Yes, proprietary vendors jump a lot and people are lacking time to consider the choices. And providiers often have more capacity. There are Free Software solutions as well, though.
Yet successful distributed work can take place without these proprietary products. Indeed, some of the currently-hyped solutions are possibly some of the least efficient ways of getting work done, as some people are finding out.
And some solutions are actually delivering more than what people had before.
Meanwhile, asynchronous communications like e-mail keep getting the job done for many, despite continuing threats from the forces of consolidation and monopolisation towards independent mail (and Web) service providers.
It would be very cool to have an article to show how other collboration methods like wikis, fileshareing and email can help remote working. However it must be non-lecturing in tone to be useful in my view.
Best Regards, Bernhard
On 2020-04-01 11:39, Bernhard E. Reiter wrote:
Meanwhile, asynchronous communications like e-mail keep getting the job done for many, despite continuing threats from the forces of consolidation and monopolisation towards independent mail (and Web) service providers.
It would be very cool to have an article to show how other collboration methods like wikis, fileshareing and email can help remote working. However it must be non-lecturing in tone to be useful in my view.
I've been working a lot remotely the last couple of years. While my company is based in Aarhus and Copenhagen, more or less coincidentally I've spent a long time on projects where *all* of my co-workers are located in Copenhagen.
While a lot of communication goes through asynchronous, written media - email, Redmine tickets, Rocket Chat - high-quality video conferencing is also very important. As we know, people sometimes fail to communicate well in written media and thus misunderstandings can arise.
Telephone/audio conferencing is already much better, but being able to see the person(s) you're talking with increases the communication bandwidth very significantly. So e-mail is indeed very important, but for many, so is the more advanced options, especially video conferencing with screen sharing. Luckily, Jitsi Meet can do this without too many problems.
Best, Carsten
On Wednesday 1. April 2020 11.39.32 Bernhard E. Reiter wrote:
Am Dienstag 31 März 2020 21:29:12 schrieb Paul Boddie:
the media narrative seems to be dominated by technologies like videoconferencing, "feature-rich" real-time chat,
To understand why people long for those features, we have to look at the people and their ideas of workflow. If you want to do your meeting online now, you are accustomed towards seeing and hearing your communicatio partners, reading their communication on all levels. You also see the shared boards, printout, scribbles, looking at screens and projections and more. It is quite understandable for people to want much of these channels as possible as they are an important factor to raise the chance of successful meetings. (There used to be a research field called "computer supported cooperative work" (CSCW) where those basic needs had be examined starting a few decades earlier.)
When I did my computer science degree, human-computer interaction was a component of the course, and during that decade CSCW was still something that people were willing to study and research. I guess the big money ran out for CSCW researchers (and for a lot of other people), but another phenomenon that tends to occur is that technology proliferates and then people feel that they don't need "experts" to tell them what to do, think or expect.
In some situations this can work out just fine: people cultivate new and efficient ways of working that were not easily foreseen. However, people may also attempt to perpetuate existing ways of working in other forms that may be enabled by technology but which are hardly "computer-supported". Already, there are stories about people learning about videoconferencing the hard way, and there will be plenty of people who never did (audio-only) teleconferencing until now, either.
(Much of this is, of course, separate to the idea that people might want to just "hang out" together online.)
Augmenting teleconferencing and videoconferencing with things that make the interactions more natural, more efficient and less confusing is a good thing. Having used one of the products currently being hyped out of obligation to my employer, I can tell you that the experience is distracting and annoying unless I and other people tune it appropriately, and even then I have to wonder whether it is an effective medium for the purpose in question.
This is where we return to the idea of people perpetuating ways of doing things that are arguably inefficient in their existing form, let alone in a form where everyone has to tune their environment so as not to make the whole exercise non-viable. To one person, the experience may feel productive; to others, it might be another interruption to their day.
[...]
It would be very cool to have an article to show how other collboration methods like wikis, fileshareing and email can help remote working. However it must be non-lecturing in tone to be useful in my view.
Well, what do you think about the wiki page as an example of the tone you prefer? I think it makes the benefits of Free Software solutions pretty clear, and given that it has been done on a wiki page, maybe that says something in itself about the medium, too.
Paul
Am Mittwoch, 1. April 2020, 21:17:48 CEST schrieb Paul Boddie:
To one person, the experience may feel productive; to others, it might be another interruption to their day.
Well, what do you think about the wiki page as an example of the tone you prefer?
It is a good start, the version I've read a few minutes ago still promises a little bit too much, examples:
"most proprietary solutions are just replacements of good Free Software solutions with a similar or better level of functionality" "replacement for skype"
It is also technical. As you write above, to make real use of remote technology, it needs instructions and hints about how to use it, addressing personal and group workflows. The wiki page does not offer such instructions how to change a workflow to profit e.g. from a combination of email, mumble, jitsi and moinmo.in wiki.
Best, Bernhard
Am Dienstag 31 März 2020 17:30:12 schrieb Sandro Santilli:
Under the Chat/InstantMessaging app IRC is completely missing, while still being the most stable and ubiquitous system for instant messaging ?
Can you back that statement up?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat has IRC usage has been declining steadily since 2003, losing 60% of its users (from 1 million to about 400,000 in 2012) and half of its channels (from half a million in 2003).
the technical standards and usual deployed privacy support seem to be of less quality than XMPP. Again from the wikipedia entry above:
As of 2016, a new standardization effort is under way under a working group called IRCv3, which focuses on more advanced client features like instant notifications, better history support and improved security. As of 2019, no major IRC networks have fully adopted the proposed standard.
Best Regards, Bernhard
On Wed, Apr 01, 2020 at 11:30:54AM +0200, Bernhard E. Reiter wrote:
Am Dienstag 31 März 2020 17:30:12 schrieb Sandro Santilli:
Under the Chat/InstantMessaging app IRC is completely missing, while still being the most stable and ubiquitous system for instant messaging ?
Can you back that statement up?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat has IRC usage has been declining steadily since 2003, losing 60% of its users (from 1 million to about 400,000 in 2012) and half of its channels (from half a million in 2003).
Makes it even more stable (less traffic!)
By "stable" I mean that I started using it in ~1995 and I'm still using it today. Can you say the same about any other chat system ?
By "ubiquitous" I mean it's accessible in very many ways, from desktop clients to console clients, to proxies, to gateways. Even many "modern" proprietary chat systems expose an IRC protocol for those already setup to use IRC clients.
the technical standards and usual deployed privacy support seem to be of less quality than XMPP. Again from the wikipedia entry above:
As of 2016, a new standardization effort is under way under a working group called IRCv3, which focuses on more advanced client features like instant notifications, better history support and improved security. As of 2019, no major IRC networks have fully adopted the proposed standard.
Yes, it's slow to catch up with adding new features. Like SMTP which we use to deliver these mails ?
--strk;