Imagine working with someone on a daily basis but only seeing them face-to-face once a year or even less frequently. Instead, you’d communicate over the phone or via email, instant messaging, web conferencing, video conferencing and, these days, even social network tools like facebook and twitter. Most of my career has been spent working in and managing such virtual teams, and in managing the technologies that enable other virtual teams to work effectively. When I was working in Belgium, my boss was in the US, my staff were in the US and Singapore and I worked with people as widely distributed as Guangzhou, Kobe, Delhi, Caracas, Cincinnati, Brussels and Geneva to provide services to the rest of my company so that the marketing and production teams could work the same way.
I always thought that the technology was only part of the story. I’d been successful in creating a highly reliable and widely used service because I’d spent time designing conference rooms that were simple yet feature rich, that had the right wall colour and lighting to create the best images, and by building a team that could support the technology from anywhere. But I wondered if there was more below the surface – whether the culture of the team itself could determine the effectiveness of the team. How would the structure of a team make a difference? Was it better to have people who did what they were told or who would choose their own paths? Would the nature of interactions among team members lead to a difference in productivity?
Most literature on this topic is based in management theory. Ethnographic studies are rare. Tom Boellstorff wrote a fantastic ethnography on the on-line virtual reality Second Life, but there was no clear definition of ‘productive’ or ‘effective’ in his virtual field. I wanted to study a team that had an objective and to determine what cultural traits helped them achieve their goal. But how to choose a team?
I’ve always been uncomfortable with Microsoft’s monopoly of the personal computing market and with the poor quality of its software. A friend converted me to using Linux – a free operating system developed by interested people around the world. Everyone is free to contribute and the better modifications are carried forward into future versions in a kind of Darwinian evolution. The barrier to popular uptake of linux has been the complexity of first-time setup on a new PC, but I’ve used a brand of Linux called Ubuntu for the past 4 years and found it to work as well as Windows or Mac even at setup. Like many others, I wanted to contribute myself, but my coding skills are inferior to the young coders who’ve been poking around in Linux’s guts for years, so I decided to join the team that creates the onboard help for Ubuntu.
With that decision, my Master’s thesis was born. I would help to create and update the user guides, but at the same time I would keep an eye on the culture of the team and what helped them be more productive. Like most things in life, it wasn’t as simple as I was expecting, but that’s another post.