‫אוטומטיק - חברה‬
‫וירטואלית‬
Seven Tips for Virtual Collaboration
November 16th, 2008 - Tel-Aviv, Israel
Raanan Bar-Cohen
http://raanan.com

Quick Survey Time
• WordPress.com / WordPress.org / WPMU
• Mac / PC
• iPhone / Blackberry

Global Automattic Team
- 30 people, 7 countries & 9 Time zones
We Are World Wide

Projects
- WordPress.org
- WordPress.com
- Akismet.com
- bbPress.org
- BuddyPress.org
- IntenseDebate.com
- PollDaddy.com
- Gravatar.com
- WordPress for iPhone: iphone.wordpress.org
- WordPress for LinkedIn: linkedin.com
Projects

WordPress.org
WordPress.org

WordPress.com
WordPress.com

WordPress.com
• 4.7 million blogs & adding 300K+/month
• 240 million global unique visitors last month
• 531 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters last
month and 2,000 gigs of new files uploaded
• 1.1 billion page views, 8.9 million new comments, and 1.1 billion
words created
• 1000+ servers, multiple data centers
• 24/7/365 Support
WordPress.com

Traffic Growth On WordPress.com
Traffic Growth WordPress.com

Geo Breakdown WordPress.com
• Over 50% traffic outside the U.S.
Geo Data WordPress.com

Akismet
• Total spam:
8,438,814,740
• Total ham:
1,409,382,518
Akismet

bbPress
bbPress

BuddyPress
BuddyPress

IntenseDebate
IntenseDebate

PollDaddy
PollDaddy

Gravatar
Gravatar

WordPress for iPhone
WordPress for iPhone

WordPress for LinkedIn
WordPress for LinkedIn

Global Partners & Clients
• Working with companies, contractors, universities, and
non-profits in the US, Canada, Korea, China, Japan, India,
Europe, Israel, and Australia
• Organizations hosted with us in WordPress.com VIP
include : NFL, CNN, Macleans, New York Times, Yahoo,
TIME Magazine, Fox News, Red Hat, Symantec, Viacom,
BBC WorldWide, and Lolcats :)
photo: icanhascheezburger.com
Global Partners & Clients

Seven Tips Based On What
We’ve Learned So Far

Tip #1: Empower Your Team
• Have everyone set their own hours & work from
their own location of choice. No “out of office”
• Focus on output not “face time”
• Work with people who are self-motivated and
have a real passion for their work
• Have people own projects as much as possible -
personal equity / having skin in the game is a great
motivator
• Keep your organization as flat as possible
Empower Your Team

Tip #2: Go Real Time
• Go Real-Time & use IRC:
• Why ? Creates a virtual hub of activity/buzz and
provides a record of decisions and discussions
• It’s also secure, searchable, bot friendly, and old sk00l in a
good way !
• We coordinate 95% of our projects on IRC
• Avoid email for internal communication - only 4% usage
for us. You’ll get enough external email to keep you happy
• Keep track of time zones with FoxClocks:
stemhaus.com/firefox/foxclocks & use Skype/AIM
Go Real Time

Tip #3: Go Semi Real Time
• When you can’t use real-time tools, go semi real-time
• We use internal blogs for product & biz discussions. Twice
daily email summaries
• We use Prologue “group twitter” for status updates:
prologuetheme.org
• Open Source and available for both WordPress.com &
WordPress.org
• iPhone / mobile friendly
• Leverages all the built in WP features: RSS, tags, privacy
options, etc.
Go Semi Real Time

Prologue
Prologue

Tip #4: Get Together (Real World)
• With all these virtual interaction, go out of your
way to meet in person a few times a year
• We fly everyone out twice a year for one week
off-sites where we do sprint projects and eat lots
of BBQ
• Coordinate to be at the same conferences,
meetups, etc
• Work from cities where other colleagues live
Get Together

Tip #5: Open Source
• Open Source your projects
• The more people involved the better chance the project will
have a long and productive life
• Better chance to draw in help / ideas and people
• At Automattic we Open Source everything we can - new
Open Source projects include:
• iPhone app
• BuddyPress
• (coming soon) a new h.264 HD video player built with AC3
Open Source

Tip #6: Metrics
• Obsess over metrics
• Run lots of experiments and collect data
• Build metrics into your product and use 3rd party tools
so you have more than one data point, 3+ is ideal
• Even more important in a virtual organization to lean
heavily on data for product and business decisions
• We track thousands of data points
• Side note: Stats panel in WordPress.com is consistently
the most popular page in WordPress.com dashboard
Metrics

Tip #7: Go Bite Size
• Break down a project into bite sized tasks that can
be worked on independently
• We use Trac to check-in code via SVN, keep track of
tasks/bugs via tickets
• Small tasks lend themselves well to virtual
organizations
• Allows new people and contractors to work on
small well-defined aspects of a project without
needing to know and understand the entire system
right away
Go Bite Size

That’s It.
Or Is It ?

photo: Gizmodo.com

Prologue Groups
( A Sneak Peak )
Official Launch @ WordCamp Australia Nov 29/30, 2008

Prologue Groups
Prologue Groups

Prologue Groups
Prologue Groups

Prologue Groups
Prologue Groups

Prologue Groups
Prologue Groups

Prologue Groups
Recent Activity is a aggregate of a blog feed and the activity on Trac
Overheard is a feed from Google blog search
Prologue Groups

Prologue Groups
Prologue Groups

Prologue Groups
Prologue Groups

Prologue Groups
Prologue Groups

Prologue Groups
Prologue Groups

Prologue Groups
• 100% WordPress Theme - no plugins
• Projects are Categories on Steroids w/
Extra Meta Data
• Trac integration
• For development updates check out
Automattic’s Sam Bauers blog @
http://unlettered.org/
Prologue Groups

Thanks ! ‫ -- תודה‬Questions ?
Raanan Bar-Cohen
raanan.com