One of authors here. As a kid, some of my most meaningful relationships and experiences were forged through online gaming (UO anyone?). A big part of this wasn’t necessarily the game itself, but was instead the sense of place and community afforded through the shared environment.
As an adult, many of my most meaningful relationships have come from my work environment. When working remotely or in a distributed setting, however, I find this not to be the case. Existing tools such as Slack and Zoom simply don’t cut it. Individual productivity may benefit, but the culture is fundamentally lacking.
As a leader and someone who has founded and built a large company, I have experienced first-hand how critical it is to have a highly engaged team. This affects everything from communication to culture and company values. Moreover, there is a lack of innovation that spontaneous whiteboard sessions and more fluid communication styles afford.
Spot is the culmination of a year of research and development to recreate a highly engaged workplace with smooth and natural interactions. (Not to mention, it is also a lot of fun!). Would appreciate some feedback from the HN community.
OP here: we originally posted Spot on HN around a year ago with a product that really focused on a virtual workplace for companies. This was driven by our personal experiences and having had very real connections with other people via online gaming (UO anyone?). We wanted to bring this sense of connection and community to remote work and the enterprise.
Since then, we’ve found that our most successful customers are the ones who use Spot as a full-fledged Slack alternative (in addition to a virtual office). We’ve doubled-down on this and are building a powerful team chat implementation directly inside the product. Unlike a lot of other “spatial chat” solutions out there, you will find that we have the most robust and familiar chat implementation. Things like channels, reactions, threading, search, etc. are table stakes, but we also have named topics and are planning on a message-retention policy that is more friendly to the free tier.
Please try it out and would love some feedback from the HN community on both our product and team chat in general!
Disclaimer: I've joined Spot as a strategic/product advisor and consultant, and I'm very excited about the space, product and roadmap.
Working from home since late 2008 myself, I've felt the drawbacks extensively. So when I discovered Spot for the first time, I felt that this truly addressed many of the challenges of working from home. Some of these are the dilution of corporate culture, the loss of rituals and ceremonies, and the loss of chance encounters and spontaneous conversations with coworkers. People working from home over long periods of time tend to feel increasingly more disconnected and unseen.
Location and presence can be powerful enablers and are great ways to communicate what's happening in a team, resulting in richer social interaction. I can imagine how nice it is for a team to see who's in the meeting room right now, or who is hanging out in the lounge area and likely up for some small talk. I can see how that would make me feel more connected than just staring at a bunch of channels or joining video calls.
I'm especially excited about the greater long-range potential of a powerful spatial interface to communication and collaboration. There are many things and nuances we are paying very close attention to in order to bridge the gaps and make it feel as natural as possible.
Another aspect I like a lot here is that the design of the space to which you invite people conveys something about who you are as a company and team. I remember getting invited to Dropbox HQ a few times and the space itself had a personality to it that I liked a lot. I can imagine inviting clients and letting them arrive in a virtual lobby with photos on the walls highlighting some really cool things about our product or so, and then picking them up to walk through our virtual space to the meeting room while telling them about the features our engineers are currently working on as we pass their desks.
> Spot is the first collaborative platform to support walking meetings. It’s mobile-first, and we’ve engineered the entire experience for meetings on the go. We’ve spent the last few months listening to what people need and designed features and capabilities to enhance the meeting experience. Agenda sharing, hands-free note taking, and note storage and accessibility are all possible with Spot.
I just looked up TeamSpace, this is actually a super solid concept. This kind of tool actually makes me think the casual-conversation problem of remote work could actually be solved.
This looks really neat and I'd love to connect and talk about partnering somehow.
I'm working on a related project[1] aimed at the same problem but with a slightly different take. We don't do game hosting and our software is more of a "build your own zoom games" platform with a slideshow/presentation UI. But I think a lot of companies probably want a dedicated host and would be happy to pay for it (I'd be interested to know what that breakdown looks like).
In terms of what games you're working on, I think you're on the right track with games that help create real connections and deeper relationships. It looks like remote work will be permanently elevated (not to current numbers, but estimates look like >300% above pre-pandemic levels[2]). Bottom line is I think the team bonding and remote closeness problem is here to stay.
Thanks for the feedback. One of our team's best productivity hacks is using PingPong for standups and sharing our screen to show whatever it is we've been working on. It's incredible for team understanding and engagement. It's like a mini-async sprint demo every day.
I've found this to be the case. But I don't think it has to be face-to-face. Booking a meeting/lunch on zoom where people have fun by playing an online game (https://www.drawasaurus.org/ was my favourite), can do wonderful things for team cohesion in my experience.
This is not particularly original but I built a little social game for work teams a while ago (before the pandemic): https://live.jubiwee.com/ - We enjoy using it with my team from time to time. The goal is to bring back social interaction even if we all work from home (for what it worth).
What our office spaces recreate are all the interactions you would get throughout the day, that are not just scheduled meetings. Our team uses it to work alongside each other, and you can easily drop by someone's desk to ask a quick question or talk as you're walking out of a meeting. After work, you might notice a group playing games in our arcade and join them.
The problem that we've heard a bunch is that people feel disconnected from their coworkers, because you don't really get to interact with them socially anymore. Would love to get your thoughts--do you not feel like you have this problem, or do you think gather.town doesn't solve this?
Problem
There are too many complicated platforms and systems that are needed for every member to use in an organization. Not only is it frustrating to have to navigate between 5+ different systems for communication, training, reporting, event management, task management, contact management, etc.... it's also challenging to every member to organize and use those systems effectively because they are disconnected and not integrated. Plus, any intranet system that may solve this problem is too expensive or restricted in solutions for everyone in a large organization to use.
My friend and I wanted to solve this problem and I would love your feedback!
We created an integrated digital ecosystem called Engage Spaces. Our goal was to solve the problem I described above; we wanted a single platform where everyone could be engaged and collaborating together.
I would love for you to check out what we've created and to provide feedback!
By far the closest online equivalent to pop-ins I've had has been... inside video games. The first 10 hours of playing DayZ, a survival FPS with in-game spatial audio, was a revelation to me. Mostly relating to how, why and when people to talk to each other. I'm convinced you can't separate the work (talking or doing) from the workspace (real or virtual).
I've been building a 3D visual collaboration platform that has some fairly obvious value in how you externalise/connect/recollect thoughts, but I'm really keen to explore if it can become a workplace where pop-ins and serendipitous social collisions come easily. For that to happen it needs to become something you can spend large chunk of your workday inside of, which is no easy task.
> “What’s been challenging in adapting to the new environment is trying to replicate some of the informal communication that happened around the office. It’s an area I’m particularly interested in right now.”
We've been using Discord to simulate an office environment, both from the perspectives of talking to people without scheduling a meeting, and from gathering as a group for discussions as needed. Hanging out in Discord is entirely optional. We use Slack to notify people if we need to talk to them, kind of like a shoulder tap in real life if you need to ask somebody a question at their desk.
This has been working pretty well for us. I especially like Discord's Push to Talk feature using a keyboard shortcut.
Recess is a Slack integration that makes it really easy and fun to connect with your co-workers and cultivate a feeling of camaraderie, by just spending a few minutes everyday.
This is beautiful. I thrive on impromptu social interactions during the work day, and would love to have a system that facilitates and encourages it with teammates that are open to it.
I love the secondary, single-purpose device approach. It relieves the mental strain of figuring out this set up... happy to pay a premium to be connected with my team on one tap.
I was building a social gaming destination which tanked.
The idea was to have a bunch of games (casual + social/party) and a bunch of friends in one single place. And also have all the banter that happens around these games, especially the social/party games, in the same place. So even if you are not in the mood to actively play, you can just participate in the banter which is also great fun. Better than commenting on photos, at least.
While the gaming destination as a whole did not work out, people enjoyed playing the social/party games we built and they led to a lot of banter.
So when we were trying to figure what next, we thought why not bring that banter to the workplace? While remote work is great, a lot of the team bonding/camaraderie that happens through random chitchat is really missing. And we thought social games are a great way for teams to socialize and build camaraderie.
So here we are. Bored brings social games to right where you work - Slack.
I'm not a huge fan of remote teams for a number of reasons, but I've had some success with https://precursorapp.com/ as a quick collaborative whiteboard. I'd like to be able to use it inside Google Hangouts and have the whole session/artifacts recorded, which would cover a lot of the knowledge-spreading I miss.
It doesn't do anything for the camaraderie/happiness/emotional aspects mentioned in the article though.
Now that everyone is working remotely, it's much harder to get to know your teammates. I built https://gettoknowapp.com as a Slack bot extension that sends you 1 question every M/W/F and posts it to a dedicated #answers channel. The whole app is contained within Slack - you can view people's past answers, upvote/like them, and the real fun is just seeing what your friends/coworkers had to say that you didn't expect about their answers.
I had used apps like Donut before and they felt oddly pushy and impersonal; you join a room and Donut will randomly select people to chat. Have you ever been in one of those arrangements? Extremely awkward openers. I wanted the questions to serve as a fun icebreaker to help people naturally discover interests together.
Oh and of course the tech. It's all built on Elixir. I run one web server and one database server and that's it. I already have about 100 communities spanning about 4000 people so in terms of message/event processing it is completely seamless...one of my favorite things about Elixir. Most interactions are processed in measure of microseconds rather than milliseconds. This makes for a real-time experience in Slack and is such a joy to work with. I also contribute to the Elixir-Slack open source project which has been fun working with as well.
I hope to incorporate more user feedback as it grows but so far it's been a great tool for teams in lockdown as they ramp up new people and want to quickly build them into their teams' culture.
Gather town is pretty awesome. My team held a 300 person internal event on that platform. People seemed to really enjoy it. They got a hang of it pretty fast without prior experiences playing games.
I do like the idea of an online proximity focused office space but I couldn't get my team to buy into the idea of it. Async messaging on slack is preferred.
We developed Club at my company to fulfil the need for a video conferencing software with fun features that can be used for team bonding activities. Think remote game nights, quizzes, escape rooms, just chilling with your colleagues, etc.
All current software is made with business meetings in mind and lacks any specific features to elevate a fun team activity and make it more engaging for the users. In addition to the engagement features, Club is also a high quality video conferencing platform, on par with today’s video conferencing tools. This means you will have access to all the features you expect.
You can invite others just by sharing the url after you joined the room.
Or you can join my HN room where I will be available to answer any questions and give a short demo (in the coming 1-2 hours):
https://withlocals.club/showhn
Some of the features:.
Fun & engagement:
- Chat, including private
- Likes, with flying hearts
- Raise hand
- Applause (with sound effect and confetti)
- Crickets, to use to relieve an awkward silence in the room (together with an animation)
- Drawing together on a whiteboard while being able to see each other
- Writing notes together, while being able to see each other and see what everyone is typing
- Polls
- Quizzes with highscores
- Fireside chat panel view, where selected members are shown bigger to simulate a panel discussion
- Countdown timer
- Custom backgrounds for the room, e.g. add a fireplace to the fireside chat
- Group selfies so that everyone can remember that team bonding experience
Social:
- Breakout rooms
- Share a website to e.g. play a multi-player game or show a Youtube video directly for best quality
- Control someone else's Google Slides presentation (one person showing a presentation, another advancing slides)
- Random person selector
Technology:
- 100% web based on both desktop and mobile with mobile being a first class citizen and having access to all features
- Mobile friendly, with easy camera switching (front and back) for outdoor activities
- Camera zooming if supported by hardware
- Screenshare with audio and high framerate (to show videos or animations)
- Very high sound quality for music performances
- Blurring of own webcam background or replacing it with an image
- Avatars for people who prefer not to show their video
- Locking a room
- Spotlighting one or more people
- Big groups capable (50+ attendees)
In addition to that, Club also has some unique moderation features (not enabled in the above demo rooms):
- Mute all
- Stop all video
- Kick people from the meeting
- Remote camera, microphone and speaker control by moderator (enabling/disabling and switching).
- Slack integration that will post to a channel if someone joins the room to e.g. meet for a coffee break
- Send one or more persons from the meeting to a specific URL
- Create view/single links for integration with OBS or other live streaming software. This will separate video and audio of one person to be able to embed it in an OBS scene.
- Webinar mode. One or more persons present, all others are watching, with the ability to Chat and raise hands with the presenters able to give rights to speak.
Internally at our company we really like using Club for all our activities and we are planning to launch it commercially. But before we do, I wanted to gather some feedback. So any comments about Club will be greatly appreciated. I will be available to answer any questions in the comments. What I’m looking to answer for myself with this post are questions like these:
In what situation would you consider using Club?
Will it solve a problem for you?
What could make the experience even better?
As an adult, many of my most meaningful relationships have come from my work environment. When working remotely or in a distributed setting, however, I find this not to be the case. Existing tools such as Slack and Zoom simply don’t cut it. Individual productivity may benefit, but the culture is fundamentally lacking.
As a leader and someone who has founded and built a large company, I have experienced first-hand how critical it is to have a highly engaged team. This affects everything from communication to culture and company values. Moreover, there is a lack of innovation that spontaneous whiteboard sessions and more fluid communication styles afford.
Spot is the culmination of a year of research and development to recreate a highly engaged workplace with smooth and natural interactions. (Not to mention, it is also a lot of fun!). Would appreciate some feedback from the HN community.
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