Stephen Wolfram Q&A

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Some collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram

Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.

March 16, 2020

From: Reddit AMA

Our company just started remote work today. We have our daily stand-up in the morning as well as a casual catch-up in the evening just before we finish. Is this a good way to go about it?

Do it by audio. You don’t need to physically have everyone there. Just make sure they all have good audio connections (no weird “people sounding like they’re in caves” etc.). Personally I’ve never found video useful. (The closest I get is that if I think people are not paying attention, I’ll sometimes threaten that we should switch video on … but in all these years I’ve never needed to do it 🙂 )

In meetings I have, I always like to have an agenda that we can screenshare … even if that’s just a list of people and projects to get reports on.

Another point is that I very often am visibly taking notes on a version of the agenda while we’re doing the meeting. I find that helpful. Another thing is that quite often we record the meetings so people can go back later and figure out the details of what was said about something. (Something we just started doing is using our new Wolfram Language video and speech-to-text capabilities to make video and word-cloud summaries of meetings; this seems quite useful for going back to old meetings and finding details beyond the notes that were taken.)

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