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Twist – Mindful Team Communication

twistapp.com

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Re: Twist – Mindful Team Communication

#51

Post by alfra »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #49
mistaken wrote: post #15

Hmm. It seems that these chat applications are more and more becoming like a polished webmail system. Now they've introduced threads, it's searchable forever, you can mail erm. I mean send messages to individuals or even groups. This new technology is amazing. Seriously there is nothing wrong with using e-mail (apart from the dated protocol) and for knowledge sharing your team is better of with some kind of wiki with…

There is a simple reason that email is not a good team communication mechanism, and that is onboarding new members and capturing collective memory. A threaded store and forward system works better for that as it allows new participants (members of the team) to read back in the historical documents about what happened before and what outcomes were created. The three pillars of communication appear to me to be: Time se…

An archive isn't a good tool to onboard people.

The knowledge you get at school or college is a kind "onboarding" new members. But it doesn't make you read every single piece that was ever written. You get a summary of both events and outcome, and most importantly the current state.

That's also how Wikipedia works: Articles don't get longer and longer, you can also summarize and put stuff into perspective. That's why there is a way to delete stuff (with version control, of course).

Moreover, onboarding new people (or maintaining the collective memory) isn't the only form of communication that happens in a team. Maybe it's not even the most important.

What about coordination? On the smaller stuff, on the daily stuff, but also on the bigger picture?

Re: Twist – Mindful Team Communication

#53

Post by ChuckMcM »

alfra wrote: post #51
ChuckMcM wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a simple reason that email is not a good team communication mechanism, and that is onboarding new members and capturing collective memory. A threaded store and forward system works better for that as it allows new participants (members of the team) to read back in the historical documents about what happened before and what outcomes were created. The three pillars of communication appear to me to be: Time se…

An archive isn't a good tool to onboard people. The knowledge you get at school or college is a kind "onboarding" new members. But it doesn't make you read every single piece that was ever written. You get a summary of both events and outcome, and most importantly the current state. That's also how Wikipedia works: Articles don't get longer and longer, you can also summarize and put stuff into perspective. That's why…

I don't disagree with your assessment but note that in 'school' the subject is taught from a text book which is a distilled version of the knowledge. Those text books get periodically rewritten. In an engineering organization it would be difficult to justify the expense (although it might be worth it!) to hire a writer to distill all of the learning that happened and the history of that learning into a text that could be handed to new members to bring them up to speed. As a result it is simpler and more cost effective to have a mailing list archive that can be reviewed.

Now it you want to create a product/company out of that practice, then you would build a system that would let people reviewing messages be able to 'vote them up' based on their importance to the over all work product. That sort of 'auto curation' would then let you scan just the list with a 'curation threshold' and just read the important bits rather than everything in the list.

That might be a good compromise between a dedicated historian/textbook writer and a list which had all the data but it was inter spersed with the occasional "lets gets the group together for a movie / which movie" discussion.

Re: Twist – Mindful Team Communication

#54

Post by devrandomguy »

Diederich wrote: post #50
devrandomguy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the native Slack app is just an Electron wrapper around their web app, as far as I can tell. The performance feels roughly the same for both web and desktop. The main reason I kept the desktop app, is so that I don't need to "download" the app every time my browser's cached copy is invalidated or expires. But being able to start the app with a couple keystrokes from my OS's quick launch menu is also nice.

Interesting. So you're saying that it really 'spins the fans' when you run slack as a pure web app as well? It seems quite lightweight to me, on latest chrome in Ubuntu on a late 2016 macbook pro.

Just tested again. Performance is good when idling, but while loading content in a heavy channel, scrolling gets laggy and one CPU plateaus for a while. Maybe the app is inserting DOM nodes individually, in a loop?

I guess it's too early for me to evaluate the performance of Twist, because I am not on any large teams there. But I can see that Slack at least, has room for improvement in rendering performance. Perhaps there is some general optimization they are missing out on, like immutable state + shouldComponentUpdate. That one saved a flailing app of mine in the past.

I'm in Firefox on Linux, i7-4500U, 8GB ram.

Re: Twist – Mindful Team Communication

#55

Post by alfra »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #53
alfra wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An archive isn't a good tool to onboard people. The knowledge you get at school or college is a kind "onboarding" new members. But it doesn't make you read every single piece that was ever written. You get a summary of both events and outcome, and most importantly the current state. That's also how Wikipedia works: Articles don't get longer and longer, you can also summarize and put stuff into perspective. That's why…

I don't disagree with your assessment but note that in 'school' the subject is taught from a text book which is a distilled version of the knowledge. Those text books get periodically rewritten. In an engineering organization it would be difficult to justify the expense (although it might be worth it!) to hire a writer to distill all of the learning that happened and the history of that learning into a text that coul…

When I look at, for example, technical updates from the Facebook Engineering teams, it's really a little textbook, a distilled version of the knowledge at that point in time.

Same if you bring new team members up to speed by talking to that person.

There is typically no single "historical" document that does the job. Old documents (e-mails, descriptions, comments, ...) tend to be outdated. New documents tend to be increments, so they don't really make sense if you don't know what is written in the old documents.

I expect that in the near future, automatic summaries based on NLP would be able to do all the heavy lifting, so the head of engineering (or whoever is in charge) will only edit the doc, not write it from scratch.

Re: Twist – Mindful Team Communication

#56

Post by 013a »

jensenbox wrote: post #21
mistaken wrote: post #15

Hmm. It seems that these chat applications are more and more becoming like a polished webmail system. Now they've introduced threads, it's searchable forever, you can mail erm. I mean send messages to individuals or even groups. This new technology is amazing. Seriously there is nothing wrong with using e-mail (apart from the dated protocol) and for knowledge sharing your team is better of with some kind of wiki with…

I hate to say it but I concur... mostly. The idea that is different here is that it is an invite only system - meaning no spam. The first question that came up for me was 'who do I invite' - I had to think who in the team is an early adopter and would be receptive to trying something new. Then my next thought was to Hangouts them and tell them what I was doing so they did not see an invite for something unknown... th…

And even the spam isn't a very good argument. You could easily set your email account to block everything that isn't from a specific domain. You can even do this in Gmail.

Re: Twist – Mindful Team Communication

#57

Post by MikeKusold »

nbrempel wrote: post #48
jameslk wrote: post #24

How is this different from Google Wave, besides being less clunky? How will it overcome the adoption issues that Google Wave had?

This is the exact thought that I had. What were the issues that Google Wave had? Why didn't it succeed?

Marketing.

Google was unable to properly explain to people what wave did and why they should use it, then killed it after 2 years citing adoption numbers.

Re: Twist – Mindful Team Communication

#58

Post by goshx »

MikeKusold wrote: post #57
nbrempel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the exact thought that I had. What were the issues that Google Wave had? Why didn't it succeed?

Marketing. Google was unable to properly explain to people what wave did and why they should use it, then killed it after 2 years citing adoption numbers.

Source code still available here: http://incubator.apache.org/wave/source-code.html

Re: Twist – Mindful Team Communication

#59

Post by Alex3917 »

mistaken wrote: post #15

Hmm. It seems that these chat applications are more and more becoming like a polished webmail system. Now they've introduced threads, it's searchable forever, you can mail erm. I mean send messages to individuals or even groups. This new technology is amazing. Seriously there is nothing wrong with using e-mail (apart from the dated protocol) and for knowledge sharing your team is better of with some kind of wiki with…

> Seriously there is nothing wrong with using e-mail (apart from the dated protocol) and for knowledge sharing your team is better of with some kind of wiki with organized information.

I'm the co-founder of https://www.fwdeveryone.com, which implements the same sort of functionality on top of email. This way you can capture both the knowledge created within your organization, and also conversations between your coworkers and people outside your business. There is no new client to adopt, and your data already comes pre-exported into your gmail or google apps account. And if you have a conversation you'd like to share publicly then we provide tools, like requesting permission and redacting sensitive info, to make this easy also, e.g.: https://www.reddit.com/r/Connecticut/comments/65kbok/good_hi...

Wikis are great, but maintaining them is basically a full time job, which is why they tend to be terrible and out of date. And even in cases where you have a PM maintaining your wiki full time, the majority of organizational knowledge is still locked up in email. Given that the amount of personal non-spam email sent every day is something like 100x the total size of Wikipedia, it seems unlikely that chat programs, email replacement solutions, or wikis can ever really be a complete solution.

Also, everyone already knows how to write or respond to an email, but many people within organizations don't know how to do simple things like making an account on a website. It sounds like a trivial problem, but we've found that having a system where everyone can contribute without having to learn anything new is actually a big win.

Re: Twist – Mindful Team Communication

#60

Post by jpolitz »

I think this has lots of potential. I have thought before that if I could make two changes to Slack (which I already think is pretty great), they would be:

1. Hitting "Enter" doesn't send the message. This encourages writing actual paragraphs in response, rather than sending fragments of sentences

that can be interrupted across multiple lines

because you're not really sure if you've finished your sentence just yet

oh and you thought of one more thing so everyone else please take this line into consideration as well

Of course, you might say "train your team to not do that." Sure. But I'd rather use a tool that doesn't require breaking (perhaps reasonable) habits. And if communication shouldn't be through short bursty chunks by default, why make that the easiest thing to do?

2. Make threads more of a default way to respond, and make thread comments first-class citizens. Presented with the UX of Slack, it's really hard to move yourself towards using threads because the easiest way to respond to things is to type and hit enter. Also, threads live in their own "All threads" space, not organized by channel. Thread comments aren't first-class citizens like regular chat is because they can't have files attached, be posts or snippets, etc, so sometimes it feels like I actually _lose_ functionality by starting a thread.

Twist looks like it has what I love about Slack – good for newbies to join in and see organized, curated history (I can't show new folks _my_ inbox labels and organization, or spin up a new channel on a mailing list for each topic we want to discuss), good for lurking on projects that aren't your own but are related, and has emoji responses for celebration, quick feedback, and commiseration.

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