The-turing-way: Remote collaboration: Pros and Cons

[malvikasharan]

Summary

• Pros and cons of working remotely or in a distributed environment

What needs to be done?

• [x] Brainstorm ideas
• [x] Summary from the discussion

Pros and Cons (can be transferred under different topics

==Pros==

• Positive impact on the environment by reducing travel related co2 emissions
• Will work well equally for low resource environment as the cost will be reduced by not having to deal with on site expense
• May lead to innovative way to establish social interactions and social dynamics in general
• Will help us learn about more colleagues from different parts of the world and make us more educated about our cultural differences and how to accommodate in our work environment
• Will make it convenient to have decision making by making sure that every stakeholders will be present, given the meeting is done in a mutually convenient time

==Cons==

• Developing camaraderie - as we are used to doing that in person relationships
• Separating working hours from life (may blur lines)
• Allocated time might not be enough for arriving to a conclusion and may sometime lead to misinterpretation of decisions made by the team
• Conflict resolution maybe difficult if most interactions happen in an allocated time slot
• Will lack human interactions, i.e body language, and may lose water-cooler-effect and innovative ideas that results in by not having chanced interactions
• May lead to having distractions that can make it difficult for some people to focus and have disciplined work practices
• People will have different working condition, i.e. access to hardware, that can lead to wrong assumptions regarding replication of certain task

Who can help?

• Anyone who have worked remotely
• Anyone who would want to work remotely
• Anyone with an insight on team working and dynamics

[PabRod]

As someone who used to commute 4 hours per day for 12 years, I have an important _Pro_ to add:

• Remote collaboration dramatically improves the life quality of those who cannot afford to live close to their office. In two words: reduces inequality.

[adswa]

One aspect to add to keep in mind (quite specific, but I got this from a talk on data feminism at Fosdem 2020 and had never thought of it before):

• certain web-based services are not available in certain countries, for example, GitHub is still banned in Iran and Syria if I am not mistaken, so choice of distributed service could lead to exclusion

[malvikasharan]

@PabRod I added your inputs and a quote:

@adswa: Thank you for pointing the accessibility aspect. We are discussing that in this issue #939, and I will make sure that your example is added there. 🙌

[malvikasharan]

Added in a subchapter in the PR #1566