Raanan Bar-Cohen gives seven tips for effective virtual collaboration based on his experience working with the global Automattic team. The tips are: 1) Empower your remote team, 2) Use real-time communication tools like IRC, 3) When real-time isn't possible, use semi real-time tools like blogs and group messaging, 4) Meet in person a few times a year, 5) Open source projects, 6) Obsess over metrics to guide decisions, and 7) Break projects into bite-sized tasks. Bar-Cohen also discusses Automattic's various open source projects including WordPress, BuddyPress, and a new group messaging platform called Prologue Groups.

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

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

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

4. 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

5. WordPress.org
WordPress.org

6. WordPress.com
WordPress.com

7. 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

8. Traffic Growth On WordPress.com
Traffic Growth WordPress.com

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

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

11. bbPress
bbPress

12. BuddyPress
BuddyPress

13. IntenseDebate
IntenseDebate

14. PollDaddy
PollDaddy

15. Gravatar
Gravatar

16. WordPress for iPhone
WordPress for iPhone

17. WordPress for LinkedIn
WordPress for LinkedIn

18. 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

19. Seven Tips Based On What
We’ve Learned So Far

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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

23. Prologue
Prologue

24. 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

25. 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

26. 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

27. 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

28. That’s It.
Or Is It ?

29. photo: Gizmodo.com

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

31. Prologue Groups
Prologue Groups

32. Prologue Groups
Prologue Groups

33. Prologue Groups
Prologue Groups

34. Prologue Groups
Prologue Groups

35. 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

36. Prologue Groups
Prologue Groups

37. Prologue Groups
Prologue Groups

38. Prologue Groups
Prologue Groups

39. Prologue Groups
Prologue Groups

40. 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

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