6 ms·

Are any HN'ers already using Wave to collaborate within their team? If so, for what purposes, and would you mind to describe your workflow?

maxklein 17y ago
Here, I described my workflow: http://blog.cubeofm.com/on-how-google-wave-surprisingly-changed-my-li http://blog.cubeofm.com/on-how-google-wave-surprisingly-chan...
- mseebach 17y ago
  Anger and fights seems to be a big part of your workflow...
  - maxklein 17y ago
    Why do you say that?
    - stingraycharles 17y ago
      Well you do talk a bit about fights becoming more structured, but I get the impression that you're talking about "emotionally engaged" discussions there.
_Lemon_ 17y ago
I tried, however it just meant another thing to have open and to check regularly. We stick with IRC for conversations and e-mail for the matters that take a little longer to resolve. This suits better because e-mail and IRC are open anyway for customer contact all day long.
elblanco 17y ago
We usually break up a project into large tasks and make a wave for each task. Various assets for the task are stuffed into the wave and everybody comments or provides info directly into the wave. Usually each task/wave has a few people working on that part of the task, and the rest just go in if they need to. There's also usually a "Master" wave for meta-discussions and overall project coordination as well as final assembly. Waves are generally setup with a header "wavelet" we use for channel meta-data/notifications/schedules and such, so they don't get buried down in the wave someplace. Everybody edits those, but in general the agreement is to pretty much just leave the waves you put in as-is and don't mess with anybody else's. As often as not, if there are just documents, we just make it in google docs and link to the doc in the appropriate wave. We've found that's the best way to handle collaborative document editing. We haven't had a chance to take advantage of the new docs features yet, it probably would have saved us even more time since we had to export out the final document into MS-Word for final editing and insertion of various diagrams and such. One thing that would be nice, now that we've done a few projects like this, is the ability to hierarchically organize groups of waves. Right now we have to be careful to name the waves well...like "Project 4459:Phase A" or some such and search for them. It's completely replaced using groups for us and various other collaboration sources, the asset management is just much better since it ties the discussion and assets together. However, it would be nice to just have a list of attached files to scroll through sometimes. On our last project, which lasted about 14 weeks, we got everything done on-time with this, but with far less frustration, less problems with organization of stuff, only a small handful of emails (it would have easily been thousands of emails bouncing back and forth) and really very few face-to-face meetings considering. By way of comparison, a similar project I worked on resulted in thousands of emails, twice weekly multi-hour in-person meetings, constant phone calls, and when summing up the work a mad dash to find lost project assets. I felt like I could have done 3 or 4 projects simultaneously like this with all of the saved time instead of just one. We also set up lots of one-to-one or one-to-few sidebar waves for private discussions. Basically it's a meta-discussion organizer for artifact production for our projects.
- Tawheed 17y ago
  >> hierarchically organize groups of waves. This is how http://BraintrustHQ.com http://BraintrustHQ.com works. It also has a simpler user experience focused on making conversations productive and organized.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    Thanks for the link! I'll be sure to check it out.
kiwidamo 17y ago
We have a distributed team (UK & NZ) so are rarely working at the same hours. Wave is useful for brainstorming complicated processes. We use one Wave per issue (requirement/feature/etc). The top of the Wave we try to keep current with everything that we have discussed - so the first post in the Wave is sort of like a Wiki, while the rest is the discussion that goes into the creation of that post. This means we can come back at a later date and see how we arrived at the decision(s). Once we are happy with how the issue has been resolved we then transfer it into JIRA. We could use the JIRA Wave robot but our current approach is fine for now.
alex_c 17y ago
We use it as a very simple task tracker. We start a new wave every week, list what we're trying to do, and cross it off as we get it done. We do have a full Redmine install set up, but there are only two of us, so it tends to be overkill - "multiplayer notepad" is enough for most purposes at the moment.

maxklein 17y ago

Here, I described my workflow: http://blog.cubeofm.com/on-how-google-wave-surprisingly-changed-my-li http://blog.cubeofm.com/on-how-google-wave-surprisingly-chan...

mseebach 17y ago
Anger and fights seems to be a big part of your workflow...
- maxklein 17y ago
  Why do you say that?
  - stingraycharles 17y ago
    Well you do talk a bit about fights becoming more structured, but I get the impression that you're talking about "emotionally engaged" discussions there.

_Lemon_ 17y ago

I tried, however it just meant another thing to have open and to check regularly. We stick with IRC for conversations and e-mail for the matters that take a little longer to resolve. This suits better because e-mail and IRC are open anyway for customer contact all day long.

elblanco 17y ago

We usually break up a project into large tasks and make a wave for each task. Various assets for the task are stuffed into the wave and everybody comments or provides info directly into the wave. Usually each task/wave has a few people working on that part of the task, and the rest just go in if they need to. There's also usually a "Master" wave for meta-discussions and overall project coordination as well as final assembly. Waves are generally setup with a header "wavelet" we use for channel meta-data/notifications/schedules and such, so they don't get buried down in the wave someplace. Everybody edits those, but in general the agreement is to pretty much just leave the waves you put in as-is and don't mess with anybody else's. As often as not, if there are just documents, we just make it in google docs and link to the doc in the appropriate wave. We've found that's the best way to handle collaborative document editing. We haven't had a chance to take advantage of the new docs features yet, it probably would have saved us even more time since we had to export out the final document into MS-Word for final editing and insertion of various diagrams and such. One thing that would be nice, now that we've done a few projects like this, is the ability to hierarchically organize groups of waves. Right now we have to be careful to name the waves well...like "Project 4459:Phase A" or some such and search for them. It's completely replaced using groups for us and various other collaboration sources, the asset management is just much better since it ties the discussion and assets together. However, it would be nice to just have a list of attached files to scroll through sometimes. On our last project, which lasted about 14 weeks, we got everything done on-time with this, but with far less frustration, less problems with organization of stuff, only a small handful of emails (it would have easily been thousands of emails bouncing back and forth) and really very few face-to-face meetings considering. By way of comparison, a similar project I worked on resulted in thousands of emails, twice weekly multi-hour in-person meetings, constant phone calls, and when summing up the work a mad dash to find lost project assets. I felt like I could have done 3 or 4 projects simultaneously like this with all of the saved time instead of just one. We also set up lots of one-to-one or one-to-few sidebar waves for private discussions. Basically it's a meta-discussion organizer for artifact production for our projects.

Tawheed 17y ago
>> hierarchically organize groups of waves. This is how http://BraintrustHQ.com http://BraintrustHQ.com works. It also has a simpler user experience focused on making conversations productive and organized.
- elblanco 17y ago
  Thanks for the link! I'll be sure to check it out.

kiwidamo 17y ago

We have a distributed team (UK & NZ) so are rarely working at the same hours. Wave is useful for brainstorming complicated processes. We use one Wave per issue (requirement/feature/etc). The top of the Wave we try to keep current with everything that we have discussed - so the first post in the Wave is sort of like a Wiki, while the rest is the discussion that goes into the creation of that post. This means we can come back at a later date and see how we arrived at the decision(s). Once we are happy with how the issue has been resolved we then transfer it into JIRA. We could use the JIRA Wave robot but our current approach is fine for now.

alex_c 17y ago

We use it as a very simple task tracker. We start a new wave every week, list what we're trying to do, and cross it off as we get it done. We do have a full Redmine install set up, but there are only two of us, so it tends to be overkill - "multiplayer notepad" is enough for most purposes at the moment.