In the influential "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister state that an organisation that builds a satisfying community will tend to keep it's people. We have about 40 programmers at work. How do we go about creating a "community" out of them?
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Create a common cause. Let people contribute to it. It will unite them. As a very basic idea, create some sort of an online documentation system or a knowledge base (wiki, blogs) and encourage people to contribute there, collaborate and comment each other's contributions. It will spin up. A while back ago I did my master thesis on creating communities and promoting socialization inside large international corporations. We had plenty of ideas. The core of it:
Of course people need to like more or less their job in the first place (work, respect, salary, attitude). Without that nothing will work. It's a challenging task to form communities in a working environment but a worthy one. |
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Find a group of people willing to work with you on the goal and start a grassroots movement. One thing I did was start up a twice weekly brown bag program. In order to kick start it, I made sure that we had enough brown bags scheduled for 6 weeks out. We got a lot of interest in the program and by the time I left, there were enough submitted topics to last 3 months out. The internal brown bag became a great training ground to get members of the company involved in the greater local tech community. They started submitting talks to the local user groups based on the confidence they received from talking to a more private audience. In addition, the knowledge sharing turned into an internal training program. We also started recording the sessions and hosting them for our staff to view at any time. |
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The IT department in our company is working on this task right now. We have about 40-50 developers scattered in about 10 different countries all over Europe. Until last Autumn we partically didn't know anything about each other, although often people in different countries were working on similar problems. They started by pulling together as many people from as many different countries as possible, for a two-day workshop last autumn. The agenda was to introduce ourselves, tell about our current project(s) and get familiar with each other. This simple programme already provided us with lots of funny moments, e.g. when two teams from different countries realized they have been implementing almost exactly the same project twice without knowing about each other... and then a third team from a third country chipped in "no, that project was actually done three times, not twice" :-) One of the action points was to create an internal forum and Wiki for developers to share questions, discuss ideas and solutions to common problems. This has been implemented by the end of last year, and it started to work quite well. People can create their own profile page including their skill set, so it is possible to look for experts on a specific language or topic now. In March we are looking forward to have our first Java developer workshop (there are two Java teams in the organization, most of the rest are on .NET). |
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Curiously, my answer to this question is relevant here, too! In particular, I think you would benefit from a calendar of internal/external technical events, so that employees can attend together (and discover shared interests), and a central hosting solution for anything developers think is relevant. +several to the preceding suggestion of starting a brown bag program. |
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