The Small Group An Article by James Mulholland jmulholland.com Lying somewhere between a club and a loosely defined set of friends, the SMALL GROUP is a repeated theme in the lives of the successful. Benjamin Franklin had the Junto Club, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had The Inklings, Jobs and Wozniak had Homebrew. Around a dozen members is the sweet spot of social motivation: small enough to know everyone, yet large enough that the group won’t collapse if one or two members’ enthusiasm wanes; small enough that you are not daunted by competing with the whole world, yet large enough that you still need to be on your toes to keep up. Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One SeesMutual appreciationSceniusTossing an idea around teamworkcreativityinnovationcollaboration
I don’t believe in Zoom fatigue An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org It’s not Zoom fatigue, it’s Zoom whiplash. It’s a hunch. I can’t prove this. The trick to get around this is to move smoothly up and down the gradient of social interaction intensity, never dropping below a basic floor of presence: the sense that there are other people in the same place as you. Instead of having two modes, “in a call” and “on my own,” we need to think about multiple ways of being together which, minimally, could be: In a video call In an anteroom to a video call, hearing the sound of others In a doc together On my desktop but with the sense that colleagues are around And the job of the designer is to ensure that their software ensures the existence of these different contexts, instead of having the binary on-a-call/not-on-a-call, and to design the transitions between them. communicationworktransitionssoftware