I’d be happy to pre-commit to spending 1-2 hours/day for 4 days out of the week for any week between the coming one and 3 weeks from now. However, I’m not sure how to get notifications for followup posts on LessWrong; in a perfect world, a brick would drop on to my desk when the tech side of things/scheduling thingy has been set up and I’d come and look at the followup post(s).
Idea: Tsakinis already created a chat room, you could look up stats for what the most popular Less Wrong viewing times are and announce as soon as you can that you will be there at those times, starting Sunday for the coming week. Then adjust the experiment by week for the following two weeks to see if you’re able to get any traction.
Its the do it now heuristic—the sooner things start happening and experiments start getting done, the more likely it is that something will come of this.
It might also help if you notify the other people who have pre-committed and see if they would like to come at the same time as you or if you’d rather all spread out and try to cover the clock. My intuition is to prioritize getting enough people on at one time to have it feel like community over covering the clock, but an argument can be made either way.
This is a general suggestion, and Ive been online for very little time. But it seems to me that having the camera pointing to a side angle is way less anxiety causing than if the persons face is facing the camera.
I currently see 2 images, one doesn`t make me confortable, and it is clear that it is because it looks like the person is looking at me.
So unless anyone else objects, please point cameras to ears for the socially sensitive ones like me :)
I’m using my built in camera on my mac, so can’t turn it. Do you have the option to turn my video off and on? I figure its probably better to have on for the sense of socialness, but I certainly don’t need to have it on.
Also, not really sure what to do about chatting on there or not. I got the sense that some people might get annoyed when there is a lot of chat, but others want to connect. I’m not sure what is optimal. I think one nice thing would be if we could have a set of guidelines/expectations.
It would be nice to have linked rooms, like a study room and a more chatty room that people can pop back and forth on.
Another potential useful feature would be if everyone was on the same pomodoro timer, so that the room is consistently quiet 25 mins then chat 5.
Personally I have the sound and notifications off and don’t mind the chatting at all, but that also means I ignore the chat while working. I think chatting for introduction and about goals, expectations is crucial and should be limited only if it becomes about non-productive-related stuff.
Perhaps a second room with more or less chat (or other guidelines) will be good if more people join in, but now I think focus should be more on coming up with correct guidelines.
I valued the bit of chatting we did a lot. It creates a community feeling , and helps with actually getting me to work :)
But indeed, some people are distracted by the chatting. Having a “lobby” would work. Then the study room could be quiet most of the time, except when the joint hour-synced Pomodoro finishes. If you want to hang out but aren’t working, you remove yourself from the study room. These would be simple but effective guidelines, I think.
If people can turn off sounds and notifications, we probably don’t have to worry about bothering others by chatting outside of a break. So we could just have a recommendation that you are allowed to chat anytime, but chatting at times HH:25 -- HH:29 and HH:55 -- HH:59 is a Shelling point.
We can encourage this norm by saying “break” and “break over” at the specified time.
If people can turn off sounds and notifications, we probably don’t have to worry about bothering others by chatting outside of a break.
I would think so too, but at least 1 person has requested chats that chats be at a minimum, even if he turned off the sound and notifications.
Besides that, a lobby has the advantage that you can hang out without working. Here’s the failure mode I’m anticipating and trying to avoid: Let’s say this becomes big, and there’s plenty of people in the study room. Some will just hang out, and not specifically be working at that time. This creates an environment in which it feels “okay” to just hang out and not work when you’re there.
The problem with no notifications is that because you’re still in a room where interesting stuff is going on, of course you’ll check the chat history and/or join the people already chatting. (Unless you use up willpower not to, but the whole point is using less of that.)
Having a 25 min work + 5 min chat cycle seems to be a good thing though; start working because everyone else went silent is so much easier as going back to the “library” while everyone else is still talking in the lobby. If you’re working, don’t go there, that’s it.
Actually, how about “24 Hour International Study Hall?” Its way less prestigious sounding, but a better descriptor and more likely to catch people’s attention.
I like simplicity and would prefer something shorter (it does sound representitive though), but wouldn’t really care about the name as long as the system is working and has (my preference) people from less wrong working there.
Dreeves and other beeminder people used to do pomodoro sessions virtually together starting on the hour, I found value in that. (this is where I got the scheduled pomodoro sessions idea from) that I had suggested to you!
I had forgotten about your suggestion, yes, it is a great idea for coordinated co-working. When I came into the room, other people were already doing pomodoros, so I just opened up my program and started doing them personally as well.
I don’t tend to do them on my own, but in the chat setting I felt like they were working well for me, at least with this first attempt.
I was in for a bit last night and enjoyed it. On the one hand, I think it did help me keep working where I otherwise would’ve quit or wasted more time on Internet distractions. That said, the chat, while interesting, was distracting from the primary purpose of the chat room.
There should definitely be two separate rooms—one for general chat and one for paired working. But the shared Pomodoro timing is also a good idea and should be tried, in my opinion.
Also, we should find a different chat client than Tinychat. It’s log in process and text limitations are very annoying.
A few of us have been experimenting with other clients and have not found anything better. Logging into Google Hangout is more of a pain than tinychat, among other downsides. We’re thinking that having a bot to announce pomodoros on tinychat might be the best solution we have so far, given the current options.
If you know anyone who might be up for coding one or if you have better ideas, I’d love to hear!
I actually started thinking about how to create something that would work for this as soon as I started reading the comments about the Pomodoro feature. I’m not sure if I’d be the best person to actually make something like this, but I’ll share the design requirements that I’ve come up with so far.
The framework that I’m basing this off of is something like TeamSpeak or Mumble, where there are a hierarchical tree of rooms with people in them. There should probably be an accessible tree view that shows all rooms along with all current occupants.
Inside of each room, each person should be able to choose whether to broadcast video or not. There will probably be a ~10 person cap on how many can broadcast inside of a single room, but there should be a much higher cap on how many can watch. There should also be text and possibly voice only chat features.
Each room should have an optionally enabled feature set, currently only including the ability to set up synced pomodoros. This feature should probably change the look of the room while it is in the 25 minutes, and then change it to “break room” look while in the 5 minutes. There could be a toggle to optionally mute everyone during the working time.
Rooms should preferably be dynamically allocate-able. At the very least, it should not be nightmarish to add new rooms.
The login/user management should not be nightmarish. Possibly password protected access, and disseminate the password as widely as possible here on LW?
The whole thing should be web based, with no client side software.
Does anyone else have any design requirements that they would like to add?
edit: further googling has uncovered OpenMeetings, which might be just the things needed to build this out.
Right now I’m trying to get a sense of what is needed technically for the features that the people most dedicated to this are most interested in, and then I’m going to write up a post to Discussion about it.
Use “straight” apostrophes rather than backticks (or if you must, escape the latter with backslashes), as pairs of backticks are taken to delimit computer code to be displayed in monospaced type.
I’d be happy to pre-commit to spending 1-2 hours/day for 4 days out of the week for any week between the coming one and 3 weeks from now. However, I’m not sure how to get notifications for followup posts on LessWrong; in a perfect world, a brick would drop on to my desk when the tech side of things/scheduling thingy has been set up and I’d come and look at the followup post(s).
Idea: Tsakinis already created a chat room, you could look up stats for what the most popular Less Wrong viewing times are and announce as soon as you can that you will be there at those times, starting Sunday for the coming week. Then adjust the experiment by week for the following two weeks to see if you’re able to get any traction.
Its the do it now heuristic—the sooner things start happening and experiments start getting done, the more likely it is that something will come of this.
It might also help if you notify the other people who have pre-committed and see if they would like to come at the same time as you or if you’d rather all spread out and try to cover the clock. My intuition is to prioritize getting enough people on at one time to have it feel like community over covering the clock, but an argument can be made either way.
There are currently six of us in the chat room.
This is a general suggestion, and I
ve been online for very little time. But it seems to me that having the camera pointing to a side angle is way less anxiety causing than if the persons face is facing the camera. I currently see 2 images, one doesn`t make me confortable, and it is clear that it is because it looks like the person is looking at me.So unless anyone else objects, please point cameras to ears for the socially sensitive ones like me :)
I’m using my built in camera on my mac, so can’t turn it. Do you have the option to turn my video off and on? I figure its probably better to have on for the sense of socialness, but I certainly don’t need to have it on.
Also, not really sure what to do about chatting on there or not. I got the sense that some people might get annoyed when there is a lot of chat, but others want to connect. I’m not sure what is optimal. I think one nice thing would be if we could have a set of guidelines/expectations.
It would be nice to have linked rooms, like a study room and a more chatty room that people can pop back and forth on.
Another potential useful feature would be if everyone was on the same pomodoro timer, so that the room is consistently quiet 25 mins then chat 5.
Personally I have the sound and notifications off and don’t mind the chatting at all, but that also means I ignore the chat while working. I think chatting for introduction and about goals, expectations is crucial and should be limited only if it becomes about non-productive-related stuff.
Perhaps a second room with more or less chat (or other guidelines) will be good if more people join in, but now I think focus should be more on coming up with correct guidelines.
I valued the bit of chatting we did a lot. It creates a community feeling , and helps with actually getting me to work :)
But indeed, some people are distracted by the chatting. Having a “lobby” would work. Then the study room could be quiet most of the time, except when the joint hour-synced Pomodoro finishes. If you want to hang out but aren’t working, you remove yourself from the study room.
These would be simple but effective guidelines, I think.
If people can turn off sounds and notifications, we probably don’t have to worry about bothering others by chatting outside of a break. So we could just have a recommendation that you are allowed to chat anytime, but chatting at times HH:25 -- HH:29 and HH:55 -- HH:59 is a Shelling point.
We can encourage this norm by saying “break” and “break over” at the specified time.
I would think so too, but at least 1 person has requested chats that chats be at a minimum, even if he turned off the sound and notifications.
Besides that, a lobby has the advantage that you can hang out without working. Here’s the failure mode I’m anticipating and trying to avoid: Let’s say this becomes big, and there’s plenty of people in the study room. Some will just hang out, and not specifically be working at that time. This creates an environment in which it feels “okay” to just hang out and not work when you’re there.
The problem with no notifications is that because you’re still in a room where interesting stuff is going on, of course you’ll check the chat history and/or join the people already chatting. (Unless you use up willpower not to, but the whole point is using less of that.)
Having a 25 min work + 5 min chat cycle seems to be a good thing though; start working because everyone else went silent is so much easier as going back to the “library” while everyone else is still talking in the lobby. If you’re working, don’t go there, that’s it.
What do you think of “International Study Hall” as a name for this?
Having spent the day on there, I think that is a decent descriptor for setting expectations and I like the ring :)
Not “Common Room”? Ravenclaw or otherwise?
Too obvious? :)
Ooh, I do like that too :)
Actually, how about “24 Hour International Study Hall?” Its way less prestigious sounding, but a better descriptor and more likely to catch people’s attention.
I like simplicity and would prefer something shorter (it does sound representitive though), but wouldn’t really care about the name as long as the system is working and has (my preference) people from less wrong working there.
Dreeves and other beeminder people used to do pomodoro sessions virtually together starting on the hour, I found value in that. (this is where I got the scheduled pomodoro sessions idea from) that I had suggested to you!
I had forgotten about your suggestion, yes, it is a great idea for coordinated co-working. When I came into the room, other people were already doing pomodoros, so I just opened up my program and started doing them personally as well.
I don’t tend to do them on my own, but in the chat setting I felt like they were working well for me, at least with this first attempt.
I was in for a bit last night and enjoyed it. On the one hand, I think it did help me keep working where I otherwise would’ve quit or wasted more time on Internet distractions. That said, the chat, while interesting, was distracting from the primary purpose of the chat room.
There should definitely be two separate rooms—one for general chat and one for paired working. But the shared Pomodoro timing is also a good idea and should be tried, in my opinion.
Also, we should find a different chat client than Tinychat. It’s log in process and text limitations are very annoying.
A few of us have been experimenting with other clients and have not found anything better. Logging into Google Hangout is more of a pain than tinychat, among other downsides. We’re thinking that having a bot to announce pomodoros on tinychat might be the best solution we have so far, given the current options.
If you know anyone who might be up for coding one or if you have better ideas, I’d love to hear!
I actually started thinking about how to create something that would work for this as soon as I started reading the comments about the Pomodoro feature. I’m not sure if I’d be the best person to actually make something like this, but I’ll share the design requirements that I’ve come up with so far.
The framework that I’m basing this off of is something like TeamSpeak or Mumble, where there are a hierarchical tree of rooms with people in them. There should probably be an accessible tree view that shows all rooms along with all current occupants.
Inside of each room, each person should be able to choose whether to broadcast video or not. There will probably be a ~10 person cap on how many can broadcast inside of a single room, but there should be a much higher cap on how many can watch. There should also be text and possibly voice only chat features.
Each room should have an optionally enabled feature set, currently only including the ability to set up synced pomodoros. This feature should probably change the look of the room while it is in the 25 minutes, and then change it to “break room” look while in the 5 minutes. There could be a toggle to optionally mute everyone during the working time.
Rooms should preferably be dynamically allocate-able. At the very least, it should not be nightmarish to add new rooms.
The login/user management should not be nightmarish. Possibly password protected access, and disseminate the password as widely as possible here on LW?
The whole thing should be web based, with no client side software.
Does anyone else have any design requirements that they would like to add?
edit: further googling has uncovered OpenMeetings, which might be just the things needed to build this out.
Yes, you are thinking along the same lines a bunch of others of us are. Message me your email and I’ll add you to the discussion.
Right now I’m trying to get a sense of what is needed technically for the features that the people most dedicated to this are most interested in, and then I’m going to write up a post to Discussion about it.
Yes, we’re working on it.
Use “straight” apostrophes rather than backticks (or if you must, escape the latter with backslashes), as pairs of backticks are taken to delimit computer code to be displayed in monospaced type.
testing’testing’ testing
BTW, if you don’t like straight apostrophes, the ‘proper’ Unicode right single quotation mark (U+2019) should also work fine.