I feel video conferencing is a sidetrack. It is an approximation of a physical meeting that never captures the spirit of the real thing and prevents us from moving on to something better.
The real power of digital communication is that it is searchable, remixable and that you don’t need to be at a specific place at a specific time to take part, and yet we now all have slots in our calendar requiring us to be in something that has none of those benefits. This is an anti-pattern.
Group communication needs to be async, written and structured for easy access. The linux kernel mailing list is a much closer approximation of how it should be than any video conference, but it too is a high friction system. No tool so far has cracked this, although some like discourse and basecamp are trying. Google tried to once upon a time with wave, but they’ve given up and joined the physical meeting proxy club.
The real power of digital communication is that it is searchable, remixable and that you don’t need to be at a specific place at a specific time to take part, and yet we now all have slots in our calendar requiring us to be in something that has none of those benefits. This is an anti-pattern.
Group communication needs to be async, written and structured for easy access. The linux kernel mailing list is a much closer approximation of how it should be than any video conference, but it too is a high friction system. No tool so far has cracked this, although some like discourse and basecamp are trying. Google tried to once upon a time with wave, but they’ve given up and joined the physical meeting proxy club.