My alarm goes off early.. I jump out of bed, a bit groggy and head for a quick 2 min shower. Grab breakfast - a bowl of cereal. Make coffee. Head straight out to my office. Open up the laptop, sign in and wait..
Check a few emails, start to catch up on skype chats from last night.. keep waiting.
Ping someone else: Is this call on?
5 mins longer.. still no call.
Check the calendar: Yup it’s right there in mine, good good.
Check the team calendar.. OH it was 5 hours ago..
This is remote working..
Sometimes this is just how it goes. There over 20 of us, spread over 7 countries, we hit at least 7 timezones. Most of us work from home or a coworking space. We can’t all talk daily. Not even in chat. Some days you just don’t overlap. We can’t run video on our team calls: the bandwidth just doesn’t hold up to that.
Our teams aren’t always grouped together: Crowdmap has 1 person in the US and 1 in South Korea. Ushahidi 3.0 has developers in Atlanta, Greensboro, Nairobi, Cape Town and Auckland.
Sometimes I think we’re mad. But then I couldn’t work on what I do if we didn’t work this way.
I get to live in New Zealand, close to family, often working at home with my 2 year old son. I get to work on open source software every day, With amazing users mapping corruption, environmental pollution, tracking violence and much more.
Maybe we’d be more effective if we were all in the same place, or even in just one country, but we also wouldn’t be the same company. Our odd mix of staff from around the world, all passionate and dedicated to the work we’re doing.