Collaboration Across Three Continents

I have started a new project at work where I need to collaborate with colleagues in my own office as well as those in Europe and Asia. There are technologies that make things easier but there are still a number of difficulties. The most obvious problem is the timezone issue. Trying to coordinate a conference call with teams in North America, Europe, and Asia means that one continent has to join a meeting in the middle of the night. I hate it when it is me.

Recently we have started using the Meeting Owl from Owl Labs. It integrates nicely with WebEx and allows you to see all of the participants in a conference room. I have not tried the device with other conferencing software but I understand it works with them as well. Personally I am not a fan of video conferencing as it means I have to dress professionally even when I am taking calls at home. However it is always nice to be able to put a voice with a face.

I also use a lot of e-mail to coordinate efforts between teams. The only problem with e-mail is that often times, someone will get left off the distribution list and fortunately there are other technologies that might be better. One that we use is Confluence from Atlassian. In June I will be hosting an internal company conference put the agenda into Confluence. Now if anyone has any questions, they can check the system and don't have to sort through old e-mails. Furthermore I can update the schedule with minor adjustments and don't have to send out a ton of needless e-mails.

Part of my job requires that I work with data. Sometimes I am performing complex analysis and other times I am just trying to manipulate it so someone else can do the analysis. For that I like to use Jupyter Notebooks. They allow me to include comments and sample code with countless graphs and other visualizations so that others can see what I have already done. While I doubt anyone will gain any great coding pearls from me, I like the ability to borrow work done by others.

Finally there is the good old airplane. I am writing this as I wait for my flight back to Salt Lake and can't help but mention planes as I am staring into the cockpit of one right now. There was a time when we thought technology would allow us to do away with travel. Sometimes you just need to get on a plane and visit people in person. At least for the moment.