(1) what would you change in the short survey about the berlin office (see below)?

(2) what are the big things / ideas that are missing in the draft lab-report (also see below)? it's kind of too early to share, but i'm sick of staring at it. you can also send back and say "it's too early to give feedback" and send it right back.

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(1) SURVEY

Green - What did you like best about Berlin?
Orange - What would you improve? 
Red - What should we absolutely do differently next time? How?
If we have another P2PU office in 2013 (slightly different format):
Would you like to come again? (If not, please say why)
Would you recommend it to a friend? 
How do you think we should select people? 



(2) DRAFT LAB REPORT - BERLIN OFFICE

A month at the office - recap

P2PU is an extremely virtual project. It rarely happens that two team members are in the same country. We work across 9 time zones. And many volunteers and some team members even have never met face to face.

While being virtual has many benefits, there is also great value in spending time together as a group. The experience of our workshops has shown that face-to-face interaction is an important community builder. But more than that, the ability for quick review, discussion, and decision-making lets us move much faster. 

Short workshops are great, but you can only achieve so much during a few days together, and often this time is spent doing long-term planning and strategising, becuase the overall feeling is that the short time face-to-face has to be maximised. We wanted to build on the success of our last workshop in Berlin and spend more time doing day-to-day as well as longer-term work together without having to deal with the overheads of a permanent office.

This is the reason why we set out to host a temporary office in Berlin for 1 month. Participants applied with concrete plans and ideas for projects they intend to work on. A review board consisting of two team members and two board members reviewed projects to be realistic (achievable) and impactful.

What happens in Berlin, doesn't stay in Berlin. That was one of the premises of the support we received from the Shuttleworth Foundation for supporting the office. We got a lot done, we had fun, and we also learned a whole lot about bringing together distributed communities and we want to share our learning with you. 


== We got a lot done

School of Open, Mentorship, Mechanical MOOC

-> Don't leave the big discussions for the end


== Balance Structure & Flexibility

Different people like working in different ways. Some of us take calls in our pajamas. Others work all night and sleep most of the day. Some work from home, and others prefer the structure of a co-working environment. Being virtual caters to that flexibility, but it's more difficult when you share a physical office. 

You want to maximize together-time when you have a month in the same location, and if half of the group is most productive during the early mornings, and the other half only really gets going after lunch, you miss out. 

// Stick to daily stand-ups, but keep them useful

To provide a daily touch-stone and make sure everyone has a sense of what the group is working on, we settled on a daily stand-up. Every morning at 10am, we literally stood in a circle (because it's hard to drone on when you are standing) and briefly mentioned what we had worked on the previous day, and what we intended to tackle on the coming day. 

Stand-ups were fun and if someone had a problem they wanted input on, or we all thought about an additional question (e.g. "What is P2PU's spirit animal?" … with answers ranging from ant hill to starfish) but after a while they started feeling a little like "reporting" and felt less useful. Or maybe we were just getting tired? A daily meeting is a great community touch-stone, but mixing up the format will help avoid routine. 

One of my least favorite things about the Berlin office was having to remind some people to be on time for stand-ups. Most of us were there well before ten every day, but a couple of folks consistently ran late. I felt it was disrespectful to everyone else, and I resented having to explain that. I think this is about a larger discussion of accountability

// Fix the schedule, but let the programming evolve

There needs to be a balance between group time, for discussion and feedback, and alone time. Sometimes it's important to have a few hours without interruption to really dig into just one thing. Especially for software developers it may take a while to get into the groove and constant interruptions make it hard to get anything done. At the same time, it doesn't make sense for everyone to work quietly on their own, when the extra benefit of having an office is that it makes it easy to get a few people to give you feedback, or help someone with a problem they are facing. 

We also had lots of great guests. Marien … Sam … xxx … 

They added a lot to the quality of the  meeting, but sometimes the days got a little too full, and the hours felt like they were slipping away trying to balance everything that was going on. 

We tried to work with a basic schedule (link) but there were so many great events that it was hard to say "no" and stick to blocking time off as planned. In future I think we want to be a little more vigilant about our time. Having 1 or 2 blocks each week for visitors, and pushing more things into the evenings, will help us stay focused during the days. 


// Manage Expectations

Apart from a few staff calls and some logistice-related emails, we didn't really communicate about expectations to the group before they arrived, which was a mistake. Laying it all out before we began would have probably been a useful way to set some things in stone (show up on time, play nice, we'd like you to be around for 8 hours per day, but your weekends/evenings are your own etc etc). It would also have been good to get a sense of the volunteers expectations of the event (rather than the projects) beforehand. This could also have been documented somewhere, which would have saved the inevitable repetition that occours when people arrive and leave at different times. 



== Light-weight Logistics 

// Living spaces

Organizing good places to stay can be (prohibitively) expensive if you focus on hotels, or a lot of work if you try to arrange shared apartments for everyone. That's why we eventually asked folks to self-organize. We matched participants whose days overlapped, told them what the budget was (USD 40 / person / night) and sent them off to airb'n'b.  We had one late cancellation, which caused a little stress, but we were able to find an amazing (much better in fact) replacement. 

// Workspace

Our hosts at Agora Collective were awesome. Their building offers a good mix of spaces, ranging from a very social (and loud) cafe to the super-quiet monasterial third floor. There was also a great little garden, which we hung out in a lot on the nice days. Depending on our projects, most of us moved around quite a bit - and worked out of different spaces on different days. 

// Make food easy. 

Agora also operate a restaurant in the building, which saves a lot of time trying to find lunch. They weren't quite used to feeding 15 additional people, and sometimes things got a little slow, but the food made up for it. In addition, Niels operated the "Bei Niels" pop-up restaurant 2-3 nights of the week, which served contemporary food ("Salade Nielsoise") in a refined environment. And we had a couple of P2PU dinners, for which we picked up the tab. 


== Accountability

….


== Work, Play, Rest - and know when you are doing what

// One month is too long

Even though not everyone was there for the entire time, we were all pretty tired by the end of it. We worked hard, there was a lot going on, and because everyone is so engaged in the ideas around P2PU, the conversations often carried on over dinner, drinks, and late into the night. 

// Define boundaries

Most of us stayed in shared apartments, which meant it was easy to carry on your work conversation on the way home, over dinner, and long into the night. While that is great, it also meant it was hard to switch off. When were we working and when were we having fun? It was all mixed together. 

// Next time

Next time, we'll aim for 1 week of focused work, followed by 3-4 days of downtime, and a second week of work. 


== Great Value

The whole event cost roughly 25,000 USD (that includes some of the time that went into organizing it). 

We brought together XXX people, for an average stay of YYY days (the minimum was two weeks, but most people stayed longer). 

We couldn't have hired this group of people to work with us for a month for 25,000 USD. Factoring in the cost of flights, accommodation, food and local transport this means that hourly rates for volunteers were in the range of XXX and YYY. Team members got paid their usual rates or salaries in addition of the travel cost, pushing their hourly rates up to between YYY and ZZZ. 

But hourly rates are not even half the story. The additional value of working & living together for a month is hard to quantify, but lies in increased creativity, serendipity and new ideas, and a strong sense of community that carries over well past the time together. Those are all very valuable to a project like P2PU. 


== Let's do this again

We definitely want to do this again. The next P2PU office will be shorter, it will have clear boundaries between work / play / rest, and we'll probably experiment with a slightly different application process, but overall the experience was "superlative". 

Unfortunately it's not easy to get funding for an event like this, because it's not one discrete project and the outcomes are a little fuzzy to describe months in advance (which is typically how long it takes a funder to consider a proposal). That's why in addition to approaching foundations we already know, we are considering a kickstarted campaign and asking the broader community to help support.