After an unforgettable Open edX 2022 conference and co-working retreat last year in Lisbon, Portugal, we were eager to see what our 2023 trip had in store!
As our team is 100% remote, these two weeks of the year are a great way to connect, catch-up, and meet new team members. Sadly, not everyone was able to join in the fun, but we still had representatives from Australia, Europe, Asia, North America, South America, and Africa. Here’s the lowdown on the two weeks we spent together.
This year, Open edX went back to its roots and hosted its annual conference at MIT, the birthplace of the Open edX project. In fact, the conference was held in the very same building in which the first lines of code were written for the platform. Sitting there 12 years later, you couldn't help but think how much the platform has grown and how far we've come as a community over the years.
As some of Open edX's biggest fans and most active contributors, the OpenCraft team makes an effort to attend the conference whenever we can. It's a wonderful opportunity for us to reunite with the people we work with during the year - both within our own team and the community at large. Also, because our team members are often selected as speakers at the conference, we get the opportunity to show off what we've been working on and share our ideas with the community. In turn, we get the chance to learn about what others have been working on. We often leave a lecture hall feeling inspired by the efforts of other community members and brimming with new ideas!
Four OpenCraft team members presented a talk this year. Xavier Antoviaque spoke about "Building Collaborative Courses" by involving learners in the course creation process. Braden MacDonald joined other members of the Product Development team to introduce the Modular Learning Initiative to the community and discuss how community input helps shape product development. Jillian Vogel joined Brian Mesick to share the progress of the OARS (Open Analytics Reference System) project: an ambitious effort to improve the analytics of the Open edX platform. Lastly, Piotr Surowiec discussed the work that went into migrating a comprehensive theme from a legacy frontend to the MFE. He outlined the key differences between the theming options in the comprehensive theme and the MFE.
Every year, the welcome address and keynote talks are some of the main highlights of the conference. For those of you who couldn’t make it to Boston this year, we’ve linked to the videos of these talks below:
When not presenting talks, participating in workshops, or meeting with our clients, the OpenCraft team managed to sneak in some good old-fashioned fun! We beat the cold by visiting the Cambridge Brewing Company (who, by the way, serve delicious fried Brussel sprouts that even devout haters of the vegetable would enjoy!). We embarked on a self-guided tour through the MIT grounds where we marveled at the Biomimetic Robotics lab, got chased out of the library, and walked the campus grounds alongside a group of Canadian geese. On Wednesday night, we attended the conference reception where we wined and dined within the walls of the MIT Museum. And on the last day, just to throw in a little bit of culture, we visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum where we found each display to be more interesting and opulent than the last.
The conference went by in a flash, but we certainly managed to make the most of our time! Not only were we able to interact with the community in a way that remote collaboration doesn't always allow, but we also got the chance to strengthen our bond as a team - something money just can't buy! Once the 2023 conference had drawn to a close, we headed back to our Airbnbs to prepare for our next adventure: an OpenCraft co-working week in Bogotá, Colombia!
We arrived around the 1st of April, ready to have fun in the vibrant city of Bogotá. The Colombian capital is a whopping 2,625 meters (8,660 feet) above sea-level. We were warned that the city’s dizzying heights can give you a touch of soroche, or altitude sickness. So we made sure to take it easy the first few days after we’d landed.
One week is definitely not enough to catch all the sights of Bogotá. The city sprawls as far as the eyes can see, cradled between the chilly peaks of the Andes mountains. We experienced four seasons in one day. Sun, rain, wind, hail - you name it. We never knew what to expect. Thank goodness for our cozy co-working space at CO+LABORA in Usaquén. The area oozes cool. Trendy restaurants and bars adorn cobblestone streets, while storefronts are painted with bright patterns and colors.
When we travel as a team, you never go hungry. Everyone is eager to try everything! This time it was arepas, empanadas, pescado frito, ceviche, bunuelos, arequipe, and, of course, coffee!
While we do work a bit and the face-to-face interactions are invaluable, we also play a lot. Our team has an amazing adventurous spirit. But there’s also no pressure if a proposed activity is not your jam. For example, only a few of us decided to tackle the mountain of Monserrate. It sits 3,152 m (10,341 feet) above sea level, and it dominates the center of Bogotá. At the top of the mountain rests a church with a shrine, devoted to El Señor Caído. We set out, and it was testing. But in the words of our intrepid leader, Xavier Antoviaque, “This mountain isn’t going to hike itself!” And it didn’t. We used every muscle and every breath to make it to the top. The steep rise in altitude is what makes the hike a beast. The route is scenic and peppered with colorful vendors and their canine friends.
We stopped multiple times, not just to take in the majestic views, but to also catch our breath. But, we did it in the end! And it was worth it. Magnificent gardens lie at the foot of the church. The views are so good that no picture can really do them justice.
Other highlights of the trip included visiting and working at the awesome EduNext offices. We’re so lucky to have such wonderful friends and colleagues like you!
We also visited the beating heart of Bogotá, La Candelaria. The neighborhood‘s narrow streets are adorned with out-of-this-world graffiti, shops selling emeralds, handcrafts, religious artifacts, crystals, and sacred herbs for smudging. This melting pot of culture leads to hotspots like the Gold Museum and Museo Botero. Both showcase absolutely amazing collections. Not to be missed!
Now back to food. Every year we end our week with a special team dinner. Our team dinner this year was nothing short of spectacular. We were treated to course after course at Humo Negro. The chef presented us with his preferred menu. He was full of passion and it just added to the beauty of the experience. The dishes were beyond original, and praised local ingredients. Think “salad” that comes in the form of a ball that pops in your mouth, grilled oysters with burnt cream and seaweed, sea urchin mousse, crispy sea snail with pumpkin seed puree and pickled guatila, chawanmushi with pirarucu, scallops and spirulina, and arracacha with grilled wild berries and yogurt. I would never have been so daring if the food hadn’t been set down in front of me. And man, it’ll remain one of the best memories of food I’ll ever have. Our team laughed and bonded over these strange, surreal dishes. Well done, Humo Negro. Well done, OpenCraft!
On the last night, we had a festive night in. We sat around the fireplace at Xavier, Jill, and Piotr’s Airbnb. Kshitj cooked us a delicious curry and we tried a variety of native Colombian fruits. Some were more palatable than others 😂. Watching everyone pull a variety of faces was priceless.
I can’t believe another conference and co-working week has come and gone. I’ll forever be grateful to be part of this kind, wonderful team and community.
Until next year…
Listaflow is a new open source tool being built by our team here at OpenCraft. Although it is still in its early stages, Listaflow is already being put to good use by the Open edX community.
In this post, I’ll give a brief overview of:
OpenCraft is a remote company, with team members based all over the world – from Adelaide, to Vancouver. Needless to say, real-time meetings are not an option for us. We need to make sure our team members are on the same page, even though they’re on different continents.
Enter Listaflow, the open source workflow tool for remote team collaboration, and reporting.
Now, I know what you’re thinking…
“Another workflow tool?! But, why? Process Street and monday.com already do everything I need.”
Well, it really depends on what's important to your organization. At OpenCraft, we are passionate about open source (in fact, we contribute the majority of the code we write to the public version of the Open edX® learning platform). So, although tools like monday.com are fantastic, many of them are closed source, and whenever presented with the option of closed vs open source software, open source wins every time!
Additionally, many of the products on offer didn’t have the features we were looking for. Not only did we need an asynchronous way to plan our development sprints, but we also wanted to give the whole team an overview of how everyone else’s sprint was going (without needing to contact them and potentially interrupt their focus). Very few services checked all the boxes, and the few that did, were all proprietary. We soon realized that, if we wanted an open source tool with everything we need to manage our remote team, we would have to build it ourselves.
And so the idea of Listaflow was born. We were thrilled! By building our own tool, we are no longer subject to decisions made by external teams. We can also guide the direction of Listaflow, and adjust our efforts based on actual user feedback. By following a “user first” approach, we aim to create a first-class user experience for our users.
Listaflow is still in its early stages and we expect its feature list to evolve over time. We want to keep things agile, and allow the tool to evolve alongside the needs of our users. For now though, here is a quick summary of the features we are working on:
OpenCraft started contributing to the Open edX platform all the way back in 2013. Over the years, we’ve made thousands of code contributions, and have become an important part of the Open edX community.
One of the many Open edX projects we are involved in, is the Core Contributor Program. The idea behind the program is to entrust specific members of the Open edX Community with advancing the development and adoption of the platform.
When Friday (the tool that the Core Contributors were using for their asynchronous sprint check-ins), announced that they were closing shop, we knew we needed a reliable alternative. Listaflow was the obvious choice - not only was it already in development, but it only required a few tweaks before it could effectively fill Friday’s shoes! What’s more, many of the people working on Listaflow were Core Contributors themselves, so already understood the process and what was needed. The rest is history. The Core Contributors became the first Open edX team to start using Listaflow, closely followed by the Marketing Working Group.
Today, both of these teams use Listaflow for their end-of-sprint check-ins. This is how it works: towards the end of the sprint, each team member receives an email encouraging them to complete their sprint check-in. The check-in is a quick and simple questionnaire asking a few questions about the previous sprint. It includes things like, “What did you accomplish during the previous sprint?”, and, “Is there anything where you could use help from others?”. Team members can choose to go into as much, or as little detail as they like, and most of the questions are optional.
Even if team members choose to answer only the required questions, Listaflow can still generate meaningful reports of the responses. Reports take all of the feedback received from the check-ins, collate it, and transform it into an easy-to-digest visual representation of a team's responses. They are a great way to get an overview of how the sprint went, and to identify any pain points or action items. What’s more, reports are also filterable and downloadable, giving users the ability to generate reports that suit their specific needs, and save them for their records, or share them with people who may not have a Listaflow account.
With two Open edX teams actively using Listaflow, we are getting a lot of priceless user feedback. This is helping us to make incremental improvements, all based on real feedback from real users. The next step? Continue to onboard more and more teams within the Open edX community, and expand outward from there. Once Listaflow is working like a well-oiled machine within the Open edX Community, we plan to open it up to external teams, allowing us to tap into the needs of remote teams worldwide.
So, there you have it - the first chapter of the Listaflow story. Although we don’t know exactly what’s in store for the rest of the tale, we do know that Listaflow users will be the protagonists. They will guide our decisions and steer our feature list. In return, we hope to provide them with a fantastic tool - a tool that gives them the peace of mind that everything is organized and accounted for, so that they can focus their energy on the right things at the right time.
Featured Image PSD Mockup by Pixeden
This article was written by Jeff Miller, a member of the OpenCraft marketing team.
It’s probably not a surprise that a company that develops open source software values transparency. After all, transparency is one of open source’s biggest benefits. Concerned about the security of the software? Worried about whether it is compatible with other critical systems? Need to understand exactly which services the application relies on? With open source, there’s no need to simply take the word of the vendor or consultant for answers to any of these questions. You can go directly to the source.
Open source principles also diminish the chance of vendor lock-in. Our clients can see their code and can move to another vendor at any time.
Here at OpenCraft, we don’t just believe in the transparency of our code. We believe in transparency within our working environment, as well. And, once again, you don’t have to take our word for it. We make nearly all of our internal guide for operations and policies, the OpenCraft Handbook, available for anyone to read. We’re not alone in having a public handbook. Gitlab, Trello and Basecamp also make theirs accessible to everyone.
If you read it — and we encourage you to do so! — you’ll see that openness is listed first among OpenCraft’s four core values (the other three are quality, commitment and empathy). That’s not an arbitrary ordering. Openness comes first, because it forms the foundation of our company culture.
But while our handbook is publicly available, there are a few things we keep private. Our internal discussions, for the most part, remain internal. Certainly, reviews of pull requests and discussion on public edX Jira tickets are available to people outside the company. But we recognize that our clients have different needs and a different philosophy than we do, so we typically don’t perform client work in public, though internal discussions about projects are available to team members. That said, if a client is open to radical, public transparency of our work with them, we’re happy to oblige!
It’s also important to note that, even internally, we don’t make everything public. Financials, for example, and initial pull requests for new team members remain private. Occasionally, there’s justification for a private one-on-one. But our strong bias is toward transparency.
That said, our default is to practice radical transparency at OpenCraft. Private discussions are rare. In fact, we actively discourage them. Instead, nearly all discussions occur in the open, where anyone in the company can read them.
That may seem extreme. Some might wonder whether everyone really needs to know you’ll be 5 minutes late to a meeting. But just as writing code in the open results in better quality software because others are able to see flaws and improvements that you might overlook, we’ve found that our company runs better when it’s impossible to hide or spin information. When all communications are public, it forces people to think about the entire group in all their conversations, and that fosters a culture of inclusivity that reduces politics and the formation of cliques. Plus, you never know who might need to know something that seems trivial to you. What’s more, if that conversation about something “minor” leads to a broader discussion about something more important, it’s not always easy or natural to move it back into a public forum.
Our radical transparency with internal communications also creates a resource that comes in handy when we add new people to the team or need to pick up work from a colleague who’s out sick or on vacation. Our tools are searchable, so essentially the entire history of the company is readily accessible.
Of course, this level of openness might mean it takes longer to do something. A quick note that you might fire off to a single colleague requires a bit more consideration when you know it will be public to the entire company. But we find that extra consideration to be a feature, not a bug. It makes everyone act more thoughtfully and, in the long run, leads to smoother operations and more collegiality. Sharing information in the open results in clearer, higher quality communications. It’s worth the extra effort.
Another potential problem with radical transparency is that people can become overwhelmed by the constant stream of communications, much of it not relevant to your specific work. Even if you don’t work in a radically open environment like we do, many of you have probably experienced similar problems with Slack and other communications platforms.
So how do people at OpenCraft keep up with so much information and so many direct pings in real time?
The answer is simple: they don’t. We do not expect people to be “always-on”, as we mentioned in our previous post on how we enable remote work.
Writing good code is a creative activity, and people can’t do good creative work without big blocks of uninterrupted time. So long as people look through the main feed a couple of times a day and respond to direct pings within 24 hours (not including weekends — we don’t expect anyone to work weekends), we each make our own schedules. When you’ve worked under these kinds of expectations, you quickly find that the vast majority of communications don’t have to be immediate. For the most part, we work asynchronously.
Additionally, open discussions generate a lot of information and noise, so we don't expect team members to read everything. We provide ways to mitigate the noise effect and for team members to know and choose what is relevant to them. Team members can use email filters to screen out irrelevant conversations. Plus, we recently deprecated our @all email address, and instead use an internal forum with different categories, each with their own level of urgency and response time. Announcements, for example, need to be read within 24 hours. Discussions, on the other hand, can wait a full week and only require a response from those directly pinged. For many other categories, reading their content is entirely optional.
Openness creates better code. And we’ve found it also creates better companies.
Want to learn more about how we run OpenCraft? Read our company handbook. Or drop us a line and let’s video chat. We’d love to hear from you.
Photo by Matt Hardy on Unsplash
This article was written by Jeff Miller, a member of the OpenCraft marketing team
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, hundreds of millions of people have suddenly had to adjust to working remotely, often with no more than a day or two to prepare. Not all companies have responded well. An internal memo sent out by management to Wall Street Journal employees, for example, recently drew a lot of criticism on Twitter. In case you didn’t see it, the memo tells employees to “respond in just a few minutes from a Slack or Google Hangout message” and “keep your phone’s ringer on … now is not the time to screen calls.”
That’s really not the best way to manage remote work. Especially, when you’re remote, people need the freedom to work asynchronously so they can manage their time to be the most productive.
We should know. I’ve been working remotely since 2007, and OpenCraft, itself, has always been a remote-first company, with employees working not just in different states, but in different countries. Even more, we value an open and transparent culture, as our entire company and core values are built upon open source principles.
OpenCraft is proud of our remote-first culture, and we know it's an effective and productive way to run a company for the long term. And since it doesn’t seem likely that most people will be heading back to an office any time soon, we thought it might be helpful to share a bit about our experience.
Obviously, we believe the pros outweigh the cons by a huge margin.
For employers, having a remote workforce means less overhead, because you don’t need to invest in office space, furniture or other necessities of a physical location. Plus, it allows you to access a global talent pool instead of just the folks who live within a reasonable commute to your office.
For employees, it eliminates the time spent commuting, which is huge. Plus you reduce emissions and spend less money on gas or public transit.
You can completely control your own work environment, and, if you don’t want to work from home, you can choose to work somewhere else, like a coffee shop or the library (though certainly not during a pandemic). You can cook lunch, which is especially helpful for people with special dietary needs, and if you need to run a quick errand or let a repair specialist into your house, it’s no big deal.
There are also cons to consider. For those employers who have a nationally or internationally dispersed workforce, you’ll need to stay abreast of tax and labor laws for each employee’s state and country.
Individuals may also feel isolated and can have trouble setting work/life boundaries. While the misconceptions about remote work are that people will be distracted or less productive, the truth is you have to take extra care not to over work. It’s very easy to continue working long past a typical quitting time because your office is just a few steps away from your home life. In a snap you could work a 12-hour day, which we don’t encourage at OpenCraft.
It takes extra work to build a strong, remote culture. Without everyone together in the office every day, building strong ties between teammates requires creativity and a dedicated effort -- it doesn’t just happen on its own.
To help offset this potential issue, we place strong emphasis on clear and concise writing and communication. We also foster complete transparency across our entire company. All of our work communications are open for the entire company to see. We don’t hide behind direct messages. This approach turns out to be very useful. Frequently, we'll have someone jump into an open discussion and provide useful information and context - this couldn't happen if our work conversations were private.
There are other ways to overcome these challenges. Here are a few tips for both employers and teams to make remote work successful.
Certainly, there are Agile experts who strongly recommend having all developers work in the same space, but we’ve been working remotely for years and have successfully operated on a model of two-week work sprints. The key is to find a platform for managing agile software development and tasks that works best for your culture and environment. Commit to strong usage within the company, train everyone thoroughly and ensure that everyone uses it daily.
At OpenCraft, we use Atlassian’s Jira to manage daily work, but there are plenty of options on the market. Some are lightweight, providing very simple task management, while others include chat rooms, document storage and complex to-do lists with dependencies. Whatever platform you choose, make sure everyone documents their work so that others can easily provide support or pick up where their colleagues left off.
Give your employees the freedom to work as it best suits them. Do not expect them to be always on, always available, and ready to text or chat back at the drop of a hat. That’s a recipe for burnout and implies a lack of trust on the part of leadership.
In addition to trusting our team, we work asynchronously because we appreciate a deep and thoughtful approach to work that goes uninterrupted for long stints of time -- and also because our team is dispersed across multiple time zones.
Coding is a creative activity. Developers need long stretches of uninterrupted time to focus in order to do good work. If they’re constantly getting pinged and checking Slack, Skype IMs or email, they’ll never get anything done.
This doesn’t mean people aren’t held accountable. It’s critical to make sure team members get their work done on time. But let your employees figure out what works best for them to accomplish that.
By now, almost everyone has seen the video of Professor Robert Kelly’s 2017 live interview. His toddler swaggers into the room, followed by a baby in a walker and their mother, Jung-a Kim, who heroically wrangles them out of the room.
Find a space in your house or a coworking site where you can work privately. If you have a home office, make sure those who share your living space — whether it’s family or roommates — understand that when you are working, they should only disturb you if it’s an emergency.
Set boundaries for yourself, as well. When your work shares your living space, it can feel like you never really go home. Set a schedule and hold yourself to it.
It feels ironic to talk about isolation right now, when everyone is working to social distance themselves from others. We see the memes and social media posts about people stuck in the house with no immediate plans to head to dinner or a movie. But isolation and loneliness can be a key issue when working remotely.
In the short-term, this probably won’t be an issue. However, as the weeks and months of working remotely pass, you may find yourself feeling lonely. Set aside time to chat with your colleagues about stuff other than work, and make time to get out of the house (only if you’re not on pandemic lockdown, of course).
There’s nothing wrong with going out to lunch with a friend or taking the dog for a walk in the middle of the day with a neighbor (not during a pandemic). Even introverts need human interaction. If you’re working without office mates physically by your side, you’ll want to make a conscious effort to engage with people 1:1 and in person.
For many employees worldwide, once the pandemic passes, work may go back to the office. But it may not. We suspect that many organizations will stick with the remote model as they will see strong productivity gains and employees will welcome the flexibility. The advantages are just too great and, with just a little extra work and thought, the disadvantages can be easily overcome.
Have a great way that your team works remote? Or have more questions about how to make this transition? Drop us a line and let’s video chat. We’d love to hear from you.
