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Ask Slashdot: Whiteboard Substitutes For Distributed Teams?
DoofusOfDeath writes I work on a fully distributed software development team with 5-10 people. Normally it's great, but when we're doing heavy design work, we really need to all be standing in front of a whiteboard together. This is expensive and time consuming, because it involves airplanes and hotels. Conference calls, editing shared Google docs, etc. just don't seem to be the same. Have people found any good tools or practices to replace standing in front of a real whiteboard?
sorry, but we are physical beings.
Really, asking Slashdot? All you're going to get is a bunch of snarky comments and a holy war or two.
I recently did some research into (but not actual production use of) SpecLog. It's part of a TDD suite built as a Cucumber implementation for .NET. However, SpecLog is the one product that steps out of the IDE and allows devs, managers and clients to all be on the same footing. It's basically a digital whiteboard made specifically for specifications and requirements gathering. It uses a repository backend which allows for remote input and synchronization, and a graphical interface that lays out and connects features, user stories, actors and business goals all together.
Ever tried OpenMeetings (http://openmeetings.apache.org)? It has a whiteboard in it and I have been in group discussions using it, voice and video. Not as good as a face to face but better than having to travel especially when weather makes it difficult. I think Google Hangouts does something like that too but have not tried it.
http://www.rocketboard.it/
Unless your team is grossly international, per diem and whiteboards are a lot cheaper than wasting time trying to do face to face tasks online. You communicate a lot better, bring the team together for the rest of the project, and work much, much more efficiently.
No, seriously.
I know I've seen systems that use sensors you mount around the edge of a whiteboard and special markers to track where you are drawing and reproduce it electronically on remote monitors -- it's on a cheap system, but it's cheaper than flying people in airplanes all over the place.
You could also just have the whiteboard person use a graphics tablet, and skip the big arm movements.
Buy tablets and have someone host a shared VNC session of mspaint.
In eons past, I used Coccinella against my own jabber server. Free software, but a bit stale now.
Whiteboarding is a symptom of a greater problem: the inability to properly break down concepts into simpler concepts.
Some may say that whiteboards are a tool to enable this, but that's never the case. Whiteboarding does the opposite. It allows the most vocal participants to add complexity to a situation.
If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly. Drawing pictures on a whiteboard won't help with this.
In fact, it makes the situation even worse. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. More words are exactly what we're trying to avoid. We need fewer pictures, and hence fewer words to describe the concepts at hand.
Anyone who has worked with UML and any real programming language will know that this is true. One UML diagram can result in hundreds of thousands of lines of unnecessary Java code. Often that same Java code could, if written sensibly, take up less than a few hundred lines.
matter .. you piece of shit .. grey matter ...
Try Mural.ly
I have used pretty much every tool out there skype, goto meeting hangouts to name the more popular ones. But when I did some work with E-bay a while back I got a chance to work with their lifesize system. The camera the screen the high definition and the lack of lag come together to make something far better then anything else I used. I suspect they charge an arm and a leg for such a setup but it works. (I have no financial intrest in lifesize )
1) You can use Join.me or Gotomeeting and everyone can share the same picture. Fire up a paint program, and voila whiteboard. I find coding with multiple people actually is cool when everyone can see the screen instead of being uncomfortably bunched together.
2) For a bulletin board todo list, use www.Trello.com
I love telecommuting work, it feels more efficient than in person office work.
God spoke to me
We use the combination of Microsoft Lync, where you can start a common whiteboard, and a Wacom Tablet, so you can do some freehand drawing.
It is not free. But the cost is offset after one meeting with members from all over the world...
Okay, so the submitter asked for "good" solutions, and this may not qualify, but it's what I do: A whiteboard at each location, with a camera pointed at it. I can't draw on your drawing, but I can see what you draw, and you can see what I draw. I've experimented with various web-based shared whiteboards, but they all require drawing on the computer. Even with a tablet (either Wacom-style attached to a laptop/PC or a mobile device) and a pen, a real whiteboard is better.
In my case, generally there are at most three locations in the meeting, and usually only two: My home office and a group of people in a conference room. Having more may make the "real whiteboards" solution less effective.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
There are several companies that make electronic white boards. I have seen them in use a couple times and they are used in distance education. An example:
http://smarttech.com/Home+Page/Solutions/Business+Solutions?WT.ac=homepage_bus
probably will be expensive but does exactly what you are asking for
We use projectors/Large TV and One Note + Skype with web cam. With a good internet connection is really fast.
I ahv e been in a team of 10 people and 2-3 persons per location.
Make sure that everybody is prepeared for the meeting. You much be more prepared than an in-person-meeting.
There is no substitute for meeting in person. We've evolved over millions of years to meet with each other in person. Every distributed meeting I've ever attended has had yelling, mumbling, and misheard things caused by technological failures.
If you're sketching out your next year's worth of work, spend the money and get together for it.
If you're just talking about a couple of minor issues, then by all means use a distributed whiteboard.
Take a page from the marketing/sales executive's book: you all meet in Hawaii for your design team meetings.
Geeze!
Oh! And don't forget the booze and hookers!
I worked on a product that tried to solve this problem... It's but super expensive and not very well executed: Bluescape.com. There are youtube videos showing it in action.
The best thing out there I've seen is mural.ly
The problem you're having isn't a whiteboard issue. It's not technology. It's that you're only getting half the message.
You may not be aware of it, but person-to-person communication is extremely high bandwidth. It's so high that we rarely even recognize the component parts of it, and only come up with little more than a mux generalization, like "they're angry" or "they're unsure". Our minds look at someone's stance and posture, at the speed they're blinking, where their eyes are looking, whether or not there's a nearly imperceptible pause when they're about to say certain words, subconscious muscle tics, and so on, and it passes through this great big neural net and some sort of amazing transformation happens and we get discrete knowledge out the other end. What's more, what they're doing is always going to partially be a response to what we're doing; we're providing real time feedback and both of us are adjusting ourselves accordingly. We're so good at it, that about 5 words into an introduction, we can usually tell if someone likes us or not.
On the other hand, a digital whiteboard, even with audio and video, we can't attempt to get this nuance or the feedback response that a person-to-person meeting allows. There's no way to send that much information successfully.
That's why no digital whiteboard will ever beat the real thing. Because these solutions do not allow you to see each varied nuance and react to them, and allow the other parties to do the same in turn. That's why a person-to-person meeting takes 5 minutes to cover what would go 30 minutes in a phone call. Or why video calls always seem to take far more time than you've allocated. That's why all those business types are always doing face to face meetings and ignoring 90% of our technical advances down here in the trenches of engineering, where we're trying not only to solve a problem with technology poorly, but we're not even aware of what the problem actually is.
Let me sum it up for you; there is no technological replacement that comes close to the clarity and efficiency possible - and likely - in a face to face.
This is from a few years ago. Carnegie Mellon developed a low-cost multi-touch whiteboard using the Wiimote. It's low cost and would require only a little more pretty straightforward work to share over an internet connection. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Whiteboard Substitutes For Distributed Teams?
Videconferencing + whiteboard. It's a very common combination (as it is no longer uncommon to work with remote teams.)
Our startup in Boston ( http://www.rocketboard.it/ ) is actually working exactly on the product you describe, in our previous jobs we've encountered exactly the same problem running scrums, which gave us this idea. We're currently going through a private beta but plan to open it up to the general public in the next few months. The app runs on your phone and detects + processes any board it's pointed at. By processing I mean fixing aspect ratio, removing shadows, glare, presenter, and enhancing the colors. The app streams the content in real time to anyone with a browser (and access to the url). After the presentation, the app creates a slide deck that you can share with those who weren't present at the meeting. You can also view a demo on the Rocketboard website.
Checkout Epsons new web connected projectors. Functions like a Smartboard but can be attached to a network for remote and multiuser
https://sprout.hp.com/us/en/ This is what you need: a touch/draw surface for you to draw on, but overlaid with a video projection of what everyone else is drawing.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I'm still sad they abandoned/scuttled that project.
My team is spread all over the world. We've managed to do quite well using a combination of Google+ Hangouts (with their various interaction plugins) and Trello.
We use G+ for those real-time drawing and thinking sessions, and then once we get all of our thoughts organized and shared with one another, we push it out to Trello for long term storage and project management tracking.
These guys made their own, with a projector, a screen, an infrared pen, a Wiimote, and the Wiimote Whiteboard program. Pretty cool results. Seems like a great market opportunity for someone to package it up in a self-contained plug-and-play unit (although you have the "big videoconference touchscreens" as an upper limit on your price point): http://www.instructables.com/i... http://www.instructables.com/i...
I'm doing something very similar right now with two teams, a team of 4 and a team of 5.
I looked at a couple online whiteboarding tools, and gave realtimeboard.com a try.
Some nice things:
free to start - 3 free boards basic sharing tools are free. Skype can do the voice in lieu of the upgrade
infinite space - just keep scrolling and writing
export to pdf/google/etc
basic editing tools (squares, lines, arrows, embed images, etc)
text blocks (don't have to scribble text with a mouse - and I know I can type faster than I can write with a marker)
multiple people can edit at the same time (though not the same object), so it has been very convenient, in an irc like manner, to have multiple conversations occuring in the 'channel' while we are brainstorming. anyone can chime in on any thread, and using the infinite board, you can see the conversations as they move in different directions, and pull them back together if needed. Being able to throw up a quick chart or scribble is great for clarifying where the simple chat channel wouldn't work out. And with more preparation time (or faster artists), you can do more extensive graphical presentations of ideas.
not affiliated, just a happy trial user.
In person meetings are still preferred for initial kickoff sessions and idea forming (read: beer sessions), but I think this format is actually much more productive for our team than in-person designing has been.
Also, 10 people in a design meeting is asking for trouble. Watch for symptoms of design-by-committee and lowest common acceptable. If you want the whole team in there, make it more of a presentation (which realtimeboard does have some features that say something about that, just haven't used yet), than a contribution session.
Look at two products which were originally designed for classrooms, to allow students and teachers to interact. They might be easily adapted to your situation.
Blackboard
Lanshool
I work in a place with a clean desk policy, nothing allowed on the walls and a fricken room for innovation! No wonder we never ship anything on time...
It's people like you that cause global warming and will make all the northern forests to die off. People have such a warped sense of entitlement. Just because you can hire someone in another country doesn't mean you should. Just because you can easily drive from downtown to your house in the suburbs doesn't mean you should. There is absolutely no reason you can't get good people that live near you. You have no sense of community or socialization. If something is too far to bike to, something in your society is off. This doesn't just apply to work. When family moves away it breaks all the ties that matter. "But it's only a 3 hour plane flight" is silly. I know this is kind of radical, but unpack it for a moment. All those nutty holiday flights. No sense of shared responsibility because most of the people you know will get a new job and move in 5 years. The other half live 30 minutes away by car and you see them once a week. You don't have a community, you have buddies. No phone calls and skype don't count. That only makes you care about the person, not the city taxes they are under, or who they should vote for, or their schools. It just makes you narrow and selfish. Phone cares to people far away also just take away from people you could be with near you, or the chance to meet people near you.
I'd think using pen/stylus tablets to scribble diagrams and then emailing or messaging those amongst the team members would be about as good as you can get, unless you can find a software package that would let the people share a drawing space using individual tablets. I've long wanted to get one of the Samsung tablets just for that purpose.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I reviewed 30 offerings for my office. None pleased everyone or most. If you have just a few office locations, Smart makes great connected whiteboards. It's hard to find better. If you have work-from-home or people want to use iPads and whiteboards at the same time, or you've got paper-only constituents, it's a complete mess. Might look at Groupboard or Board thing.
I've used Google's PowerPoint replacement (Slides) for this before. It is kinda perfect. It stores all revisions. Any number of people can simultaneously edit. Has good enough drawing and typing functions. Can work on multiple boards (slides) at the same time, etc...
Oh, and it is free.
Never used it but the concept looks interesting.
If only people were really that perceptive.
Get a few Ultra-Short Throw Interactive Projectors. Nothing else required in some cases (ie, no PC). These were designed specifically for your multi-location whiteboard application.
See an example here: http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/Video-Library/video/Featured/BrightLink-Ultra-Short-Throw-Interactive-Projector-Product-Overview/1727559829001?BV_UseBVCookie=yes
A lot of companies are making them now.
Are you trying to imply that they way people communicate is forever fixed in stone and cannot be changed or improved upon? Don't you think that's a little shortsighted?
Who said anything about a mouse? People write with a whiteboard marker, or in its digital form, a stylus.
A number of years ago I worked for an organisation where people took notes in meetings using a Panasonic Toughbook. The software for the forthcoming Windows 10 is, hopefully, a lot more sophisticated than XP tablet edition as MS tune their software for touch/scribble.
Have you thought about Microsoft OneNote? It is free now. All you do is everyone opens the same file over a network share. If you have touch screens or graphics tablets, you can all draw at the same time. It only takes a second or two to catch up.
This was an application of the "Coven" research done between 1995-1999 among several European school partners. Was shockingly successful, back in 2003. Don't know if it even still exists... had whiteboards, an auditorium, a poster gallery (with video walls and Powerpoint scrollers), you name it.
Citations: Steed, Tromp &al.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I'm waiting for whiteboard sized touch screens to make their appearance. I know Microsoft was working on this a couple of years back.
This would not only be useful for long-distance collaboration, but for team collaboration as well. Image working on a conference table-sized monitor, with a common workspace among 7-8 people. I think a team like that could potentially be more productive than the same number working independently. May require a different sort of programmer.
If you post it, they will read.
http://ftp.fi.netbsd.org/pub/csc/graphics/NCSA/collage/
Have been using this with distributed teams for years. I saved a 4 guy trip the first week I had it. Looks expensive, but ROI should be pretty quick.
http://www.smarttech.com/Home+Page/Solutions/Business+Solutions
Those bits of communication that only come through face to face can be substituted by more technology. Someone in a teleconference doesn't need to read my facial expression when drawing if I then say "Wow, holdup, I don't understand." There's a whole different method of communication when it comes to having an effective meeting that isn't face to face. Things like going around the table person to person and addressing each person individually, asking for confirmation of something being understood, not assuming that someone knows something etc. There's nothing magical about a face-to-face meeting that can't be communicated via a telephone using a different method. You said it yourself, it takes longer, but as soon as you include travel it is actually far more efficient.
Spend $5k on sending each person to a business communications class, and an how to run an effective meeting class. Then save yourself $50k / year on flights.
This may be true for a meeting with all or mostly technical types, but throw in a pointy haired manager or two and the information exchange bandwidth goes asymptotically towards zero.
What is this "looking at people" thing? Do us autistic technical types do it?
I laugh at the idea that lack of physical shared spaces makes for too-long meetings. Been in too many too-long meetings that WERE in physical shared space.
Then again, I've been in meetings where half the people in the room were spending more time communicating with people who weren't in the room than with the ones who were. A bunch of Crackberry addicts.
These short throw projectors have a smart whiteboard capabilities and can be connected to other epson 1420 projectors so that all can see and add annotations.
How are you going to see if the person is losing interest, or if they have a puzzled look on their face?
Communication is not fixed, but nobody argues that every form of communication is equally good at communicating every idea. Letter writing is an awesome form of communication, but for everything it gets right, a picture still can be worth "a thousand words".
He's focusing on the drawing combined with the speech as the communication medium. When I took classes on communication at University (yes people really do study it, I advise you try to too!) there was only one focus which would have a maximum impact; the audience.
Forget the whiteboard, what does your audience need to know? What, you didn't ask them? No wonder your whiteboard diagrams aren't getting the job done.
http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-surface-hub/en-us
Like that ?
That's why no digital whiteboard will ever beat the real thing
I don't see any reasonable person claiming this. But if your team could use a quick session with another team that's 1000+ miles away, having a functional shared whiteboard is better than 1) taking three days for one team to fly back and forth, or, 2) not meeting at all because there's no point unless they can see the other team's facial tics.
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
I am a near full-time instructor who regularly teaches in multiple countries at once thanks to this rig.
For multiple people sharing the same whiteboard, I recommend using WebEx which has a mediocre whiteboard, but it works better than the other's I've tried.
Is what I have used. I have found it quite adequate. Hooked up a graphics tablet to my machine and I could draw like a 3year old. With practice I might get better.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
It's heavily used internally and, in my experience, works fine. Seen it used on Windows and OS X.
You can share desktops, have chat rooms for breakout sessions and do presentations.
Keep using the whiteboard and put a cheap camera in front of it.
Just wait a bit. The Hololens will change the world.
I know, I sound like a shill. I'm sorry. But this is the very first time in my life Microsoft has ever made me happy.
I'm currently implementing it as part of our digital learning platform.
Not sure if it covers all the things you need, but it's a start.
#SickNotWeak
Are you trying to imply that they way people communicate is forever fixed in stone and cannot be changed or improved upon? Don't you think that's a little shortsighted?
Sorry, could you rephrase your questions? I didn't understand what you were asking, as I was unable to see your facial expression as you were typing them.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
If you want to try out some things inexpensively you might try the wimote whiteboard IR pen tracking as others have mentioned.
There are various whiteboard applications that could be used, I have not seen this one mentioned in this thread:
http://open-sankore.org/
Works on Mac, Windows, and Linux, they caim to have support for various input devices such as wacom.
We've had some success with using a tablet and online whiteboard service such as https://awwapp.com/draw.html.
Hi, Maybe http://wyxs.net/web/wiiscan/in... could be a startint point. I't our own developed digital interactive whiteboard.
I've used whiteboardfox.com many times. Its a simple tool site, where you create a unique whiteboard and share the link. Everyone who connects sees and can interact with the whiteboard.
I don't really know a better substitute but you can learn chinese in skype at http://preply.com/en/chinese-by-skype.
There is one to try which proved efficient: Ziteboard. Although it is simple as a stick maybe that's what is the best in it. Only-facebook login however is a downside to it but I'm sure email login will come soon. I'm using the chrome extension so I don't forget the domain name. Anyway, it works on my phone, tablet and the company laptop. I guess that's a huge Pro for web-apps.