teamtwine

FAQ for the concepts

Firstly: my office already has Team management software!
True, many offices have implemented Slack, Flock, Cliq (...pick your choice, there are plenty!). None of them give a sense of "presence" of each other, when team members use those systems. TeamTwine (TT for short) is also possibly the only one which has integrated a Kanban system along with a game kind of environment and also with the useful features of Slack, Flock, Cliq and other such systems. In those systems you would need separate Kanban system such as Trello, etc.

Moreover TT also connects to webhooks to those systems too

Presence? But I can see who is online, etc... and also their status messages
True. Conventional team management systems, do show the current status of team members. So in one sense you do have some idea of where your colleagues are and what they may be upto. But then you would need to go and read their status. Now frankly, how many of us are so organized to read others' status? TT allows everyone to detect others presence visually on a virtual floor layout

Why is visual presence so important?
For thousands of years humans have relied on visual presence of their fellow humans in the same team. The location of each person in the visual landscape around us is super-important. We can then get or guess answers to questions such as: What is that person possibly doing? or Should I join that group now, as they may need me? or Should I disturb the person now? etc. You will be surprised to know that even when we use computer systems in our office; the physical space of the office contributes hugely to the way we quickly take decisions on how we individually need to carry out our work.

For e.g. Most people will have someone or the other who they consciously on unconsciously track visually in the office. A colleague, boss, etc. The mere presence of that person at a particular location can change the nature of the subsequent activities that may follow.

But I get notifications about my colleagues in my system!
True. But what if you are not at your desk when such notifications arrived? Also, aren't we all a bit tired of all the notifications that keeps popping up from a fixed location? Many of us have got habituated to completely ignore the notifications. Some of us have also switched off the notifications. According to us, notifications are actually very poor alternative to the way we use capability of "presence" to carry out our work. In TT, the notifications come into your chatting system and not really as something that keeps popping up; irritating you. In fact; in this version we are not even giving any notification -- because we believe our our graphical floor layouts will notify you at your terms; and not intrusively

Hmmm...so how does TT keep me informed of the other users in my team?
The floor layout feature is a graphical game kind of environment. You can easily see the avataars of all your colleagues. You can see where are they located; and therefore you would get a neat idea of what they may be up to. It even gives you cues on when these colleagues were last active; in a very meaningful manner -- it will say "admin last activty 4 minutes back" etc. This page has a simulation of such a floor layout. You can play with it and get to know the gestures that it responds to.

Now how does a game environment help me? Wouldnt that itself be a distraction?
Not really. What we meant is that it is inspired by computer games but this one is not really a full fledged game. Frankly it is a joy to use without unnecessary distractions. Each user is represented by a circular "avataar" with a name tag indicating the person. A user can drag his/her own avataar around. Nobody else's. But you can nudge others; kind of tapping people on their shoulders.

There are other rectangular shapes -- which represents various rooms in your office. It is not really a detailed technical floor plan, but a schematic floor -- so that you dont get visual clutter. Now the sense of presence is a very much like what happens in real offices.

We humans are not "text driven". We don't go around reading status lines of people. That is not natural to us. Instead, we scan the floor we are working on; and we notice the presence of people around us and where they are located. That gives us rich information. For e.g. it can indicate (roughly) what a user may be upto.

For e.g. if we see a user in the "Marketing" department, we can be reasonably sure that possibly that person is doing some work related to Marketing. This is not rocket science. We do such scans and interpretations all the time. That is in the real world around us -- in fact, we do this even when we use team management software, such as slack

Am confused. We do what when we use slack?
In slack (or Flock or any such team software frankly) we send messages to each other. But quite often; before we send off a message or a chat, we look around physically in the office we are in. Humans are presence driven (I am repeating myself) We cooperate with each other by visually noticing who is doing what.

For e.g. If we find our colleague busy at a conference (... see thru the glass door perhaps?) we may hesitate a bit before sending off a message on Slack/or whatever...hmmm... or in another situation, we may actually send that message because we can see it can benefit him at that conference. In short, the spaces around us guide us what to do.

So how does chatting happens in TT?
In TT, it happens quite naturally. You are always ready for a chat with all your colleagues whose avataars happen to be in the same context as you. So there is no "pre-creation" of a chat group in TT. Team members can gather together in any of the contexts available on the floor plan, quite fluidly. Why so? Because each person can drag his/her own avataar to whichever context he/she wants to be in. All people in such a dynamically formed group are immediately available for a group chat without pre-deciding what that group is.

I lost you there. What is a context?
A context is simply the main topic that unites all the chats and activities at any point in time. In TT, a name is given to every room. So when you move your avataar there; you are implicitly indicating that you are changing your context to that of the room. That room is meant to encourage discussions for a particular part of your office work. For e.g. On the floor layout, you could have a room designated for Marketing So that particular room would be regarded as the space where one can be focused on Marketing.

Kind of obvious, isn't it? We do this in the real world rooms too. If you are in an office, where you see a room named "Marketing" what do you think is the main context of activities happening there? The context there would be marketing, right?

Loosely; you may want to think of a context as a "channel" in slack and such like software.

But what about projects?
Good point. Even a project would be a "room" to set its own context in TT ... This also happens in the real world. For e.g. An architect may have a project for a residential tower in Mumbai called "Europa" It is possible that the architect would designate a special room ONLY for Europa; if the project is large enough. You would find people involved in Europa trooping in and out of that room; and the rest of the office is not disturbed. It is the same in TT too. If you so wish; each and every project that is handled in the Kanboard section; can have its own "room" on the Floor Layouts

But won't that clutter up everything?
Good point! You can easily setup any number of floors at TT! You want your office to have 250 floors? Go ahead! Be our guest! You can decide which rooms go on which floor... quite similar to the way an architect would plan your office building for you. In fact TeamTwine has been designed by an architect who is also a software developer -- hence these concepts are quite deeply understood by us.

We have limitations on the number of avataars who can be simultaneously seen at a floor; and you would need to pay for avataars in sets of five. But other than that; there are no limitations! No limits to floors. No limits to projects. No limits to the number of users in the Kanboard section.

So there are rooms for departments (like marketing) and rooms for projects (like Europa) What else?
Yes. On the floor layouts, you can have rooms that represents various departments in the office. You can also have rooms for various projects being done by the office. You can also have rooms that are named after the users of the system. Think of those as cabins for the users. All these three coincide with the three terms in the Kanboard system: Departments (called 'Swimlanes' in Kanboard), Projects and Users are exactly the same in both Kanboad as well as on our Floor layouts.

And there is more ... you can even have rooms that have no equivalence on the Kanboard. For example; you could have a room titled "JC Bose Room" (thats just a name. In many Indian offices, meeting rooms are named after famous persons) -- now you dont have anything equivalent in the Kanboard section. Such rooms are purely meeting rooms, where people can come into, conduct a meeting and disperse

You mentioned four parts: Kanboard, Floor layout, message history and a Stream. What is a "Stream"?
A stream is the stream of chatting we do. We picked that term for the stream of conversations we all have when we work. Each of us carry just one stream of consciousness in each of our mind. When we are in an office, we fluidly move from one context to another -- Say we move talking about "Marketing" in the marketing room and then move onto "Europa" to discuss that project. Yet, each of us are internally continuing our same stream of consciousness in each of our minds, as we continue to work and chat

We do not split our brain into compartments. We flow from one topic to another!

In TT, there are no multiple chat areas -- You would see that there is one for each "channel" in software like Slack, etc. But not in TT. We have simplified the interface so much that you are given ONLY one stream where all your conversations happen. Quite a lot like how it happens in the real world.

But having separate conversations for each channel are useful!
Yes, in some cases they are useful. Though you are chatting always in one area in TT -- remember that the system is gently showing you the context you are in. So you are never lost. The floor layouts tell you where you and your colleagues are present.

Then, just like in Slack, etc. even in TT you can later on pick out only the conversations that you had in "Marketing" or for "Europa" etc. That is what the third part; Message history does.

Whenever you ask the system to aggregate the chat data for you and display it in the message history; it follows a simple rule- for projects and departments (swimlanes) you would be able to read the chat conversations; even for those rooms where you were not present. However, for the meeting room chats; you would be shown only those chat conversations you were part of.

So it is a combination of Kanban boards like Trello, a team discussion system like Slack and a multi-player game environment?
Yes. Brilliantly put. It is as combination of of all three. For the Kanban boards; we have integrated the excellent open source Kanboard system into this service. It not only has Kanban boards, but also calendars and gantt charts ... and more! We are very grateful for the team at Kanboard. It made TeamTwine possible