utilizing products that support the safety of their tenants. We feel comfortable that the office will be well-prepared for when we decide to return.
Our DC office is located in a WeWork, which has shared its COVID-19 protocol with us and all DC-based staff members. As of last week, our DC office moved to a fully remote setup in line with the guidance shared with San Francisco.
As some of our NYC-based colleagues know, we have also been in discussion about leasing a location in Brooklyn. These discussions are continuing but may be delayed.
Tips for remote work
- Some of our colleagues are working remotely for the first time. Our long-time remote colleagues know that it can be an adjustment, and wanted to offer you some advice:
- Limit the length of meetings to at most one or two hour increments. If longer sessions are required, consider how they can be broken up over the course of several days.
- Clearly define the meeting, have an agenda, and send reading materials in advance.
- Make video the default, with tools like Google Docs and Zoom to facilitate live collaboration and connection.
- Have a lead to facilitate every meeting, someone to monitor the chat for questions and track the speaker list, and someone to help take notes (or do collaborative note-taking).
- Send an email to tech support if you need a comfortable headset.
- Use your wellness reimbursement for snacks.
- Join the #remoties channel in Slack to talk with your colleagues about distributed work
The HR Operations team is looking into webinar-based ergonomics guidance to support the increase in distributed work across the Foundation.
Supporting our global communities
This past week we asked all community grant recipients to cancel Wikimedia-funded public events, such as editathons, until the WHO declares the pandemic to be over. We let them know that we understood that our request for cancellations and other restrictions could make it impossible to complete their agreed-upon grant activities and that no one would be penalized for having to delay or modify those goals.
This coming week we will follow up with additional guidance on Wikimania and other regional and thematic community conferences. The general sentiment from around the global community seems to be both sadness at the disruption but relief at the clarity and ability to focus on their own communities, Wikimedia and otherwise. Going forward, the CRT is working to set up a page on Meta-Wiki to provide a space for the community to monitor the impact and follow our communications with them.
