It must be clear now that working remotely is going to be essential with the Virus situation. This is not going to ease up for many months or year and even then we may have relapses.
There is many enterprises and jobs that shall be not affected.
So it is fortunate that we can still continue to function on at least some work due to the nature of our business.
We are fortunate that a few of you could try to make this work with short notice. There are others who can pick up with greater effort. And we shall need to transition others out who are not able to adapt.
PAST ONLINE COLLABORATION AT FECT
Because we had some history in working remotely, and the use of web-based tools such as DL, trying to address tasks with others in other parts of the world, we have a bunch of different efforts.
ESTABLISHED CLOUD BASED WORK
--Trello Boards - SaaS
- Blogs - Blogger - Freemium, Wordpress - OS
- Mail-chimp - Freemium
- Canva - Freemium
- gDrive - Freemium
- Dropbox (early staff) - Freemium
- WhatsApp, Skype - Freemium
- Wordpress - web hosting - OS
- R Statistical Software - OS
- Thunderbird - mail client - OS
TRIED
- video conferencing - Zoom
- some secure systems of online communication - Signal - OS
- Encrypted Email - Protonmail - OS
- Collaboration Board - Freedcamp for the Tea Project - Freemium SaaS
- GIMP - Photoediting - OS
- Torproject - OS
- qGIS - OS
EXPERIMENTED WITH
- secure systems for communication - Telegram - Freemium
- TAILS Secure OS on an USB - OS
- LibreOffice - Office package - OS
TO BE DEVELOPED
- Freedcamp or OS alternative - Collaboration Software
- Wave - Financial Software - Freemium
-
REPORTING BY MAIL
All along, we also required some Daily or Weekly Reporting by email.
Lately, we have sadly let things go - Trello Boards, Blogs, Dropbox, OSF.
Which is a shame.
ADDRESSING SHORTCOMINGS FIRST
So there is work needed to make it possible for you to work effectively from home.
We can try our best to overcome the obvious problems
We have used our email system as an UNSORTED PILE to find things - which is not efficient. We identified a lack of
secure file storage as a key shortcoming.
We have used the gdrive mostly to share documents - but we need
- OSF or Freedcamp or some other system for collaboration
- and a better Filing System - digitally - which remains a problem when we hunt for documents.
We have a good filing system which is paper based - but its not updated or used.
UPDATING PAST SYSTEMS AND ONBOARDING STAFF WITH THEM
In this regard, you shall see
- Trello Boards are being updated - TASKS, DCSL, STEM, KMV,
- Blogs are being updated - fectorg.blogspot.com
- OSF projects are being recovered - starting with DL, KMV, Maldives Dengue
- soon you shall have an interface to access these at a Trello Board, Internal Page or in the Blogs
We have been working on
- guidelines on IT, Work From Home, IT Security, Common Tools
- A string of emails bulding up to these guidelines has been sent out by me - this included - and these shall be compiled.
We are also trying out - being careful not to overburden you with the figuring out the role of
- Zoom.us -for video conferencing - effective - need to figure out DATA costs
- Clockify.com for Online Time Keeping - but Clockify.com required attentively that not all of us have. So we rely on self reporting.
- Slack.com - for communication - the jury is out on this - don’t think we are using it well.
- Freedcamp.com or one of the open source Collaboration alternatives in our fectorg blog - - We have used it in the past - and Sanjaya recommends it - we shall try this for Admin and/or IT to begin with.
When we work at home, we may have different software and to the extent possible its good if we can standardize on multi-platform, open source free software or software from Open Source organizations (OSF, Libreoffice, GIMP) at least free versions with stable companies such as Google,Trello (it got bought out, so have to be cautious) Canva and Yumpu.
We also need to try our
- Wave for Financial Management - Initially receipts and accounts for Online Work can be handled through it.
- GIMP - is free open source software for graphics
- OFFICE - LibreOffice - enables you to save documents in .docx - and since we are going to be going between different versions of Office - its good we can standardize on that.
——— YOUR EFFORT AND CHANGE IN DISPOSITION REQUIRED -------------
It requires effort on your part as well to work as close to effectively as you do from the office.
If you are in the office, some of this happens incidentally even if partially as you or your supervisor or collaborators stop for a chat. But now you need to take this a lot more seriously.
As per all the guides on working from home (e.g reference - Indian Express Article (Adapt yourself to the New Normal)
- you do need to separate out an area at home for work and organize yourself
- get others around you to respect you the work time
- get the equipment in order - computer - check camera and mic
- address any software shortcomings
- use open source software (see post in fectorg for guides)
- addressing communication shortcomings is mandatory - have alternative systems and overcome DATA issues
- plan the work for the week, the day, the month
- help with reporting our work in a timely manner
- communicate and monitor the work of the teams that you are working with
- update the work on the appropriate collaboration spaces.
- back up your work
- take time for IT disaster recovery systems - see our IT guidelines.
Improvement your WEEKLY and DAILY reporting.
- Send your weekly TASKs list - as completely as I want and on time - alert others involved as to what you need
- See how to represent this in the Trello Board
- Work on Making TASKS SMART
- Update the Trello Boards as you complete your tasks.
- Check at the end of the week whether you accomplished your tasks.
- It shall help if you send a daily report as well to your team members.
The understanding of how to make a TASK smart is POOR and is undermining our work planning. I have provided some further guidance at
COMMUNICATION
No collaboration online or even remotely is possible succefully without planning and self reporting.
At the least, if you are not paying attention to emails on weekly reporting and other matters, or query when things are not clear, then you are not able to function with the Online Transformation. You shall thrive to the extent that you can excel in this.
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