Working in a distributed remote team is fantastic for all kinds of reasons. It also has challenges and the tooling to ease them is still developing.
I have worked in many remote teams and organisations. One tool I’ve found to be excellent is a persistent voice channel that you can dip into or out of at will. This allows you to have the open floor plan office experience when you feel like it, but turn it off at the touch of a button. The kryptonite of this system, though, is when someone stays in the channel but wanders away from their desk to make a cup of tea. Bob says “Hey Alice, can you pair with me to help me through this tricky problem?” and is met with dead air. In my experience, the social awkwardness caused by that moment will cause Bob to abandon the tool completely.
Workparty is a system that uses facial recognition on a webcam video stream to determine whether or not someone is sitting at their desk. It establishes a peer to peer connection with the rest of the group in order to broadcast that status. The image is never transmitted. All of this is done in the browser. This allows you to check whether Alice is at her desk or not before calling to her, and there’s no danger that she’s walked away and just forgotten to hit the “unavailable” button.
Similar tools exist without the facial recognition component. They simply broadcast a snapshot of the webcam every 30 seconds or so and you can see whether there’s a person in the image or not. The problem with these tools is that the idea of a picture of you being taken and broadcast all day all the time is deeply creepy.
The innovation in Workparty is not technical, but in the understanding of user needs and sociocultural motivations.