[teampractices] Tracking team member calendars?

Wed Jun 3 23:12:00 UTC 2015

On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 4:50 PM, Kevin Smith <ksmith at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 3:28 PM, Greg Grossmeier <greg at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>> > Is it
>> > possible to set up group aliases in google calendar, allowing you
>> > quickly
>> > set up a meeting with a certain 10 people?
>>
>> I don't see how that's possible given all of those 10 people have
>> different scheduled :/
>
>
> Being able to enter, say "search-team" as a guest, and have the system
> auto-expand that as if I had entered 10 names is a reasonable feature. Not
> one that exists, apparently, but it would be nice if it did.  Just today I
> realized that I had invited 6 of our 7 team members to a meeting, because I
> had to type all the names in, and I forgot one.
>
>>
>> I don't find it too hard to schedule ~10 people for a meeting... It's
>>
>> not a fun job that I tend to just offload to Sarah, Megan, Praveena,
>> with immense gratitude.
>
>
> Absolutely. For actually scheduling a meeting, they do a great job. But for
> me to quickly answer the question "How much of our team will be around next
> week?", or "Where's teammate Betty today?", existing tools don't work well.
> Creating a pretend event, and then typing in 10 names, only to discard it
> moments later, is annoying.
>
> Before I started this thread, I had a brief informal chat with Sarah about
> team calendars. She seemed ambivalent about them. If she had felt strongly
> one way or the other, I might not have brought this to a wider audience.

Unsolicited $0.02:

 I'm a remotie (oh hey that means we are all remoties) who works with
diverse people on diverse projects in diverse timezones. I don't care
if you are at the doctor's office, in Guam or working in your pajamas.
If I have a question for you I will: ping on irc, send an email, cc
you on a phab task, comment on a code review, schedule a meeting. If I
am really out of the office and won't be at least daily checking any
and all of these communication channels I will set an away message on
my email giving a short timeline to @wikimedia.org email addresses.

If there is any information I can only get from a single person other
than "what's your favorite ice cream flavor?" then we have already
failed as a distributed organization. The time I spend at my keyboard
or not should only be of mild concern to my direct report manager who
may be asked questions by HR if I appear to never or always be on
vacation.

Bryan
-- 
Bryan Davis              Wikimedia Foundation    <bd808 at wikimedia.org>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]]  Sr Software Engineer            Boise, ID USA
irc: bd808                                        v:415.839.6885 x6855