# Plone 6 Sprint (remote-only)

Events Sprints
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8

The timezone is not likely to work well for me when mixed with busy work and child raising. Thats my 5pm-11pm.

But for what it's worth here are my opinions on what you should plan to do differently than whats currently in your etherpad.

  1. Use voice and PTT (push to talk, thing walkie talkies) rather than gitter. Have a single list of voice channels thats super quick to jump and out of. One working channel per team and one sidebar room when you need a longer side conversation
  • why

    • sprints are about getting to know people as much as work. bonding. chat doesn't let you do that nearly as well and its much slower about it. Continuous voice on the hand is too distracting. PTT works well in practice once you get used it.

    • what makes a sprint different from normal open source online collaboration is the frictionless conversations.

    • slack/gitter is really distracting and slows you down when you are in a flow.

    • you can have social channels and anyone can create more, see who is there and wander over and talk to them. better presence.

    • chat is asynchronous. It doesn't tell you when people are busy or in a meeting. It discourages you engaging others because you never know if they will reply or not or when.

    • for a much better writeup on why this works in practice read this excellent article - https://sketchtogether.com/blog/how-push-to-talk-solved-interruptibility-for-our-remote-team.html

  • how
    • use discord - https://discordapp.com/ or similar. Download the app and setup global hotkeys so you talk talk to someone in your team without having to take your eyes off the code. Much closer to simulating a team at the same desk. You can set work channel to be PTT only and sidebar channels to allow VAD (continuous talking)
  1. Always sharing everyones screen
  • why
    • if you have to setup a meeting to share it creates friction. If you have to ask if someone is having problems instead of looking over their shoulder it creates friction.
  • how
    • discords live share is perhaps not good enough since it only lets one person share at a time. Maybe jitsi per team for video only with the video channel put in the discord room description.
  1. some kind of pledge or commitment to certain hours that can tracked are reported on daily.
  • why
    • online makes it easy for someone to say they will join but not let their loved ones or work know and then their commitment tends to flag or they get distracted during the day. If a team plans to have 5 members and ends up with 2 this can be disheartening.
  • how
    • if using discord you can use voice channel time as a measure and statbots like https://github.com/johann-lr/discord-stats to track this.
    • perhaps backed up with a deposit you get back at the end, or the promise of a tshirt if you make your commitments. But maybe a leaderboard is good enough.
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