The view from here

I’ve been working remotely since 2015. First I was on sabbatical. Then I worked for a fully remote startup. Then the founder fired me and I worked for myself for a while. Then I worked for a volunteer project during Covid. Then I was a contractor for the state of California. Then the governor appointed me to a remote job.

They were just starting to make us go into the office two days a week in Oakland (a 90-minute commute for me both ways) when I took my dream job at 18F, a fully remote organization. I spent a few weeks last month worrying about adjusting to going into the San Francisco office five days a week (also a 90-minute plus commute on public transit) when they solved that problem for me by laying off our whole team.

But this is the weekend and I am not here to re-litigate the recent past. Instead I was thinking about how whenever I work remotely with a team of people, I end up suggesting we create a slack channel called something like #the-view-from-here and then I suggest people post the view out their window, or at their desk, or in their kitchen, or out in the backyard, or on a walk in the neighborhood, or a hike, or on a cruise, or of the sky, etc.

I feel this helps create a sense of “placeness” in a shared information environment that may create a sense of space but notably lacks the feeling of a place. Usually folks like this idea and take to it. At one place they did mention that it didn’t seem “work related.”

When I got to 18F there was no need to make this suggestion because there were already numerous channels for sharing aspects of one’s lived experience. My two favorites were the one for gardeners (I am not one, but I stole a lot of Briggs’ valor by posting photos of her incredible works of living sculpture) and another called #here-kitty-kitty.

As the internet intermediates itself among us all and tries to reduce us all to data and bits to be recombined and milked for cash, let’s all keep sharing what we actually see with our eyes on the surface of this planet and keep the human connection alive?

Today, we visited a friend in Berkeley and got to share her amazing panoramic view. Laid out before us were the cities and the bay and the peninsula where I’ve spent the lion’s share of my adult life. Off in the silhouetted distance I could clearly see two bridges.