OpenSource Connections
Category: Uncategorized
There have been a couple interesting blog posts this week that highlight a webinar presentation given by a Google engineer this week about innovation and collaboration, and how they manage a company with 16,000 employees. The first post I found was Blogoscoped noting the presentation, and referring to the beu blog which provided a more in depth set of notes about the presentation. Better yet, the beu blog provided a pdf of the actual presentation which has screen shots of the applications I mention below. You can also see a replay of the webinar for a limited time.
Some parts of the presentation are just showing off Google Docs and how that can be used for collaboration. Cool stuff, but Im not sure there was anything new in there. But heres four things they use internally which are pretty neat, and also remind me of various projects weve either done or speculated on at Open Source Connections:
1) Weekly Snippets
Every week developers are reminded to send an email to a specific address at Google with a status update of everything theyve worked on that week, and what they plan on working on next. Its a virtual stand up meeting. Then this is all archived and you can see what anybody in the company is working on. This is a type of application that has crossed my mind before, and Michael has considered building a project management framework for us internally that could include a similar feature. As consultants, we stay highly connected with our clients, but not always as well connected with what other consultants in our company are doing. We have some ways of maintaining that connection with our fellow consultants, but Google has formalized that within their company and made it automatic to some degree. Something like this would be a great way for us to keep in touch with each other, although it would not replace the value in getting together regularly for lunch, coffee, or beer!
2) Google Ideas forum with voting
Internal to Google they have a forum that allows employees to suggest new product ideas, and for others to vote on and comment on those ideas. A great example of encouraging a flat management hierarchy and inspiring innovation.
3) Expert Directory
Got a question and need to find a domain expert who can answer it? Google allows employees to search what sounds like a skills directory and see other employees who may be able to help them with that topic. This sounds very similar to a project Open Source worked on with one of our clients who is also a large company with lots of technical experts in remote locations, and needed a way to help those employees stay more connected.
4) Google Sites
We currently use a Trac based wiki site for managing our various projects and centralizing a lot of the information about them. Google Sites may be an interesting way to collaborate with clients as well, especially since it would allow for a central repository where our clients can upload their documents to us without any wiki knowledge or special permissions. The big advantage of keeping with Trac is being able to enter bugs/enhancements and giving the client a real time insight into the “roadmap” and progress of those issues.