Yes, that may require some shuffling of meetings, or more written documentation versus verbal real-time discussion.
—Matt Mullenweg, in ‘My TED Video on the Future of Work’
I am not sure why Matt appears defensive in this sentence.
In my eyes, enforcing written documentation is a strong positive feature of remote work. It ensures that organisational knowledge (not just developer documentation) is documented, and widely available.
It means that anyone can access that knowledge without requiring access and attention of other people. It means that the knowledge generated in one part of the organisation (say a project management tip) is easily replicable, and improvable across the organisation – without a formal directive to do so.
My wife worked for Automattic, and I want to work with them some day. One of my favourite things about her experience there was their open P2s – organisational knowledge well documented, searchable, and near-universally available.
It’s something I can’t stop recommending to everyone. It also made me sad that even within a8c, communication was slowly drifting away from P2s to Slack (a digital embodiment of ‘verbal real-time discussion’).
Use my marker 