Our company is fully remote. We have an always-on Google Hangout that everyone is on all day.<p>The key for this to work is that everyone has their mic + camera turned off except when we have a scheduled meeting (ie. standups, team meetings).<p>Throughout the day, people often pop in the hangout by unmuting themselves to ask the team a quick question, which also works great. In practice, this doesn't cause very many interruptions because people know to ping someone 1-1 if they have a question meant for a specific person rather than the whole team.<p>Even on days when everyone's mic + camera is muted all day except for standup, it's still effective at creating the feeling that you aren't sitting there working alone (I guess it acts as a reminder that you really do have teammates working alongside you, albeit virtually).
Author here. The original inspiration for this came from working remotely for 7 years and feeling occasionally lonely and isolated.
I wanted to create a frictionless, always-on video room for your team to hang out in while you work. But I've found that so far most teams use it for stand-ups.<p>Feedback is much appreciated!
I like this idea. Discord has it for audio. Our fully-remote company pretty much uses zoom in a somewhat similar way. "Always-on" doesn't have to mean everyone is always in the room, it's simply an analogue of a physical meeting room or even an IRC channel directory. You can see who is currently in it and what the topic is (if there is one), and choose to hop in. That said, I would probably disable audio and video if I'm idling in a room I'm interested in until someone joins and starts talking.<p>It's a video meeting channel directory. I think a lot of comments are focused exclusively on the "always-on" wording, which I feel misses the point.
Pretty cool, but terrifying. I would be in constant stress and probably resign the day after if I was required to join an alway-on call.<p>I work remotely.
We tried various iterations of this when I was a PM a Blue Jeans (enterprise video conferencing company). We always called it the virtual water cooler - a place where people on distributed teams could just pop in and ask questions/chat as people in the office do at the water cooler.<p>Lots of customers showed interest, but nobody ended up actually using it. Video conferences always ended up being scheduled ahead of time (i.e. meetings) or escalated (more like this use case - starting a Slack chat and turning into a call because that was easier for the topic at hand), and this occupied a sort of weird middle ground between the two.<p>I still love the idea, and I hope you can make it work, but I suspect that it's really only ever going to be practical for a small subset of distributed teams that have just the right culture for it (and I don't know exactly what that culture is).
I have zero desire to shove my face into other people's existence remotely. If I want to see people or be seen I work at the office. I turn off video in our conferencing software and I absolutely despise people who blast their face into a 27in display sized window, and then decide to eat snacks the whole time.
Not to take away from the efforts of the developer but this basically turns Slack into Discord. Which I think would be interesting. I think always open audio channels are useful because anybody can just join and you can code and talk whilst doing so.