Improve visibility of colleagues among each other in remote work environments

[jancborchardt]

Problem

Working remotely, you are not as connected to your colleagues because you do not meet them as regularly or see them in a physical office on a daily basis.

Current state

There are already a lot of things we do to connect people:

• Avatars is a very basic thing
• Status messages are a nice little indicator
• Availability info is important cause you don’t see them in person
• Similarly, we also now have a more unified way to set your vacation/absence
• People on the same instance are already listed in Contacts so you don’t have to duplicate people (and be possibly left with outdated info)
• We have a super nice org chart for companies and organizations
• There are dashboard widgets for "Recent statuses" and "Recent activity" (and soon also "Teams")
• We have the contacts menu which quickly shows you other people on the instance and their status at a glance – however the sorting is not specifically relevant to you, so that can be improved (see below)

Possible solutions and improvements

We can do a lot more things to connect people further. Overall we have to be sensitive and careful to not add features that feel like spying on users / surveillance.

Big themes that have emerged

Status

• Have a "recent/favorite statuses" list to easily set your user status
• User status integration with other services, for example, "Show in user status" flag in a calendar event
• Refine "Out of office"
  • Use it in mobile clients.
  • Don't require that the user is in DnD.
  • Show upcoming out of office for that user in 1:1. So if you enter on a Friday the conversion and that person is OOO on Monday, show a hint about that.
  • Allow defining/seeing working days (can not abuse OOO, as otherwise it would need to set all the time and such users could not use OOO to promote vacation)
• Visibility for status (visible to everyone vs visible to specific Nextcloud groups vs the organization team based on the assigned manager)
• user_status: recent statuses dashboard widget needs auto-updating, currently a page refresh is necessary
• Setting the status is unintuitive Status dialog improvements #48464

Notifications

• Have more control about notification levels on conversations (@all vs. @me)
• Have an option to ignore/hide the conversation (like archived conversations in telegram), without leaving it (sample sysadmin)`
• Have an option to allow a conversation to ignore DnD on that specific conversation (sample usecase: team lead emergency during vacation)
• Restrict "at all" to only moderators or disallow it at all in big conversations

Time zones

• Better visibility of local time zone of colleagues: Currently, the time zone of the colleague is shown in the avatar menu. Just like showing when a colleague is out of office/on vacation, we can also show a notice when you are sending a message to a person in a timezone outside of their working hours ("It is currently 3:40 AM for Sam Doe. Maybe send a silent message" or something)
• Convert time zones into local time zone: Discord does a cool thing where you can send a time formatted in a specific way to make it show up in your colleague's messages in their timezone. (Eg: I type "Let's meet at /time:11:00CET for the review?" and it shows up as "Let's meet at 15:30 IST for the review?" for my colleague in India)
• Predict based on the availability function when someone will be available again. For example when sending a talk message it can say 'Andrey is likely available again tomorrow at 11 am CEST'
• Allow to post "times" which everyone sees in their own timezone. Smart-picker: add the ability to select a time that automatically gets converted to everyone's (usable in text, talk, collectives, notes, etc)
• * Make user's local time more visible in Talk, e.g. in the top bar in on-to-one

Profile

• When hovering over an avatar, do not only display local time but also calculate the time difference compared to you (similar to how GitHub does this) #48626
• accounts: possibility to create personal (private) notes on a person (in the profile page?)
  • Questions: Where to display this and how?
• accounts: follow people, got notified on bio change e.g. – opt-outable for changes or generally in case sometimes does not feel like being watched
• Make profile more personal (by adding rich text support to the description field) #48627
  • Could be solved in a "simple way" by making the profile description support rich text.
• Personal settings: We can improve the personal settings layout to make it more enticing to fill out so the info is there for your colleagues. Ref Improve personal settings layout #41718
• Post statuses?
  • Idea: Improve Statuses Widget with a "Show more statuses" at the bottom.
  • Idea: Create a new Status Page? Where and what would this page be?
  • Idea: Show the status of the person in the contacts app
  • Idea: Status Widget in Dashboard -> Add a filter to specific people
  • Idea: Contacts Menu on top right: Add criteria to show "most relevant" people on top (by manually setting them as Favorites or by some kind of automatic logic)

Others general

• Expose users live activity more widely across teams or Nextcloud
  • While working in collectives make it visible that others from the same team are working on a deck board right now
  • Show who is working on what in the teams overview or dashboard (like files being edited right now)
  • Expose files currently collaborated on in talk conversation
    • e.g. Whiteboard file was shared with a talk room, one user joins and starts editing, show a notification or pinned message "User is editing plan.whiteboard [Click to join]"
  • Indicate active collaboration in the files list (for text/collabora/whiteboard)
    • Partly already there with files_lock app but not real time
  • Keep privacy in mind via invisible status or setting like for the typing indicator in talk
• Create more visibility who is currently looking at a talk room or any other location in Nextcloud like a document, deck board, etc.
• Expose user role, teams, groups more widely (e.g. when receiving a talk message, see which team somebody is in and which role from the profile they have)
• "Active now" section in the right sidebar where you see what friends are doing.
  We could do this to show calls that colleagues are in where you either are already in the conversation or if it is an open conversation. This would for example be nice like our public design review call, the various coffee calls, etc.
  Of course this should not go into the surveillance direction like e.g. how Discord has "rich presence" where you can even show what you are listening to in Spotify or which file you are working on, that’s a bit over the top.
  Not my screenshot, but as an example on the right:
  

Files

• Contacts menu: Our contacts menu has been improved a bit recently by showing the status as per Show status instead of email in contacts/people menu #40559 but we could do more. For example:
  • Showing the new "Teams" in there, and prioritizing up top the people in your main teams
  • Sorting people up top who you interact with a lot,
  • Show the most recent chat message in the subline, in addition to where the status is. Ref People menu improvements #22329
  • Profile hovercard: Currently when you click someone’s picture, you just get a menu, whereas other apps usually show a nice hovercard. This can also be connected to the Nextcloud Profile.
• Work reports: These make it more transparent what everyone is working on and also give personal motivation and reflection. We already do this internally via mail but could weave it into Nextcloud.
  • Basecamp for example nudges people every end of the week via notification or email to write down what they did and every beginning of the week to write down what they plan.
  • [ ]Some of this can be prefilled based on calls you attended, events that were in your calendar, so it is nicer for people to fill out.
  • There could also be a better way of showing/viewing these reports, e.g. specifically within a team.
  • Availability view of other people #44776
  • Limit dashboard recent statuses (common Nextcloud groups or the organization team based on the assigned manager) because the larger the instance/organization, the less significant status updates I will see on the dashboard. I want to see the status of the people I work with closely.

Talk

• Channels (one-to-many talk conversations) spreed#13508
• Contact info in Talk 1on1 conversations: Similarly it could be done in Talk, with further info of the person in the sidebar of 1on1 calls.
• Friendlier screen when you start a conversation: When you first create a conversation with someone, what shows up right now is a blank screen with a "You created this conversation" message and a timestamp. It could show more about the person itself, even if it's just the avatar and role or a short text that encourages conversation (ref Slack's 1on1s). related to When starting new conversation, show some info of other person spreed#6293 then, but basically instead of doing it only on "Start" we do it all the time and in the right sidebar?
• Notification badges when someone calls, sends email, message, and so forth. Regardless of where I am in nc

• when being in a call and trying to schedule a follow up, it would be nice to have a way to create a new event where you also immediately see the availability of everyone in the call Ability to quickly schedule a meeting spreed#6292
• Voice channels. A room concept sort of like Discord has with their voice channels, where if you are in a room it is in a perpetual state of call, or it is a subchannel for a conversation which is its voice channel. And it’s not a barrier to "start a call" in a general chat.
  That you could use nicely for e.g. coworking in remote work environments, more spontaneous and with less scheduling.
  Of course right now you can already create this by just putting in rooms you call "Hangout" but it’s a bit different, more manual.
• Interactive checklist in messages spreed#11402
• Edit user status in the Talk sidebar
• Scheduled messages
  • Schedule a message when the person is starting to work, or if the person moves to online, so if the person is not using DnD, you can still send messages, which are not silent, at a specific time. Or even after an Out of Office event (with a bit of delay).
• Have an option to ignore/hide the conversation (like archived conversations in telegram), without leaving it (sample sysadmin) (only becomes visible when mentioned or searching or "viewing archive")
• Conversations list: Visible users groups or filtering by groups. For example, in the left sidebar to see if a person is from Engineering or Sales, or filter to Engineers only
• Room-like view of group calls video
• take calls over page reload - maybe not possible – is music not doing something similar? perhaps buffered though
• Any type of feature that would cater more to a good experience in hybrid meetings (when some people are online and some people have a meeting in a meeting room). Hybrid meetings are always a bad experience: poor sound (even with special meeting microphones), poor webcam, hard to feel engaged to the conversation
• Summary of talk conversations and calls in a talk sidebar after returning from a holiday
  • At the moment we have a 'summary bot' that can summarize talk messages and post it as a participant of the room into the room. This could also be generally more elegant per chat, e.g. have a button in talk "summarize unread messages" and display it in a separate modal instead of pasting it into the chat where everyone reads it
• Suggesting to automatically record + summarize a call when one participant is not there or on vacation
• When multiple people are lounging around in a talk room a coffee call could be suggested
• Add little multi-player games for talk like a drawing game
• Feature to have a coffee call room that makes people meet in small groups you usually don't talk to in an organisation
• Ability to personalize your own messages that get sent in talk like font, background, etc
• Ability to personalize the design of a meeting room

Groupware

• Contact info next to mail composer: When you write a mail to someone or reply, we could show their contact info next to the composer. Maybe you have some notes in their contact which are relevant for that, or their company name and position. I remember some mail app did this but can not recall which. cc @nimishavijay maybe it came up during research for gap analysis. Recipient info next to mail composer mail#9622
• Show upcoming events for the current conversation inside Talk calendar#5909
• Support rich text event descriptions calendar#3234
• Text prompts for Calendar bookings
  • "Lunch with Anna" -> suggest attendee
  • "Piano lesson 4pm" -> prefill start time Show dropdown to suggest time based on title calendar#17
• Use Calendar name, description and possible tags to guess the calendar for new events. E.g. Sales meeting would pick/suggest the Sales calendar over personal
• Track where people work from (office, home, other) and let this information flow into meeting scheduling
• When moving a meeting in Calendar via drag and drop, show drop zones for availability and free/busy. Show a hint/warning in the simple/advanced editor. #48517

Clients

• Avatars in more places: Like in desktop and Android, see Show avatars in notifications and activity (like in server) #16207

Office

• Comments in Text: There are comments and chat options in the sidebar, but the collaboration technique that came up the most often in the internal design calls is highlighting a sentence and leaving a comment for your colleague. This is currently possible in office, but not so in Text. Inline comments text#185
  Collectives
  -[ ] Indicate that other users are currently editing in the page list
  Text
• Version comparison
  • First step comparison/diff
  • Second step notify about changes
• Comments in text
• Show user status when mentioning a user so you know if someone is out of office
• Indicate user status for mentions
  • Might be tricky with the small side, but maybe just add a profile hover card
    Tables:
• Live updates for web interface (like in deck)
  • Could be part of the general live activity feature
• Tables dashboard widget
  • Recently changed tables, added rows
• Comments in tables

[nickvergessen]

• Somewhat related to When starting new conversation, show some info of other person spreed#6293 then, but basically instead of doing it only on "Start" we do it all the time and in the right sidebar?

[juliusknorr]

Another idea:

• when being in a call and trying to schedule a follow up, it would be nice to have a way to create a new event where you also immediately see the availability of everyone in the call

[jancborchardt]

when being in a call and trying to schedule a follow up, it would be nice to have a way to create a new event where you also immediately see the availability of everyone in the call

@juliushaertl this is probably related? nextcloud/spreed#6292

[marcoambrosini]

• Notification badges when someone calls, sends email, message, and so forth. Regardless of where I am in nc

[karlitschek]

I like all the ideas :-) Very cool!

[jancborchardt]

A cool thing that Discord does is they have an "Active now" section in the right sidebar where you see what friends are doing.
We could do this to show calls that colleagues are in where you either are already in the conversation or if it is an open conversation. This would for example be nice like our public design review call, the various coffee calls, etc.
Of course this should not go into the surveillance direction like e.g. how Discord has "rich presence" where you can even show what you are listening to in Spotify or which file you are working on, that’s a bit over the top.

Not my screenshot, but as an example on the right:

[jancborchardt]

Another thing that I think we discussed in the past for Talk if I remember correctly @nickvergessen @karlitschek:
A room concept sort of like Discord has with their voice channels, where if you are in a room it is in a perpetual state of call, or it is a subchannel for a conversation which is its voice channel. And it’s not a barrier to "start a call" in a general chat.

That you could use nicely for e.g. coworking in remote work environments, more spontaneous and with less scheduling.
Of course right now you can already create this by just putting in rooms you call "Hangout" but it’s a bit different, more manual.

[ChristophWurst]

Brainstorming results of the Groupware team

• Availability view of other people #44776
• Show upcoming events for the current conversation inside Talk calendar#5909
• Interactive checklist in messages spreed#11402
• Support rich text event descriptions calendar#3234
• Edit user status in the Talk sidebar
• Visibility for status (visible to everyone vs visible to specific Nextcloud groups vs the organization team based on the assigned manager)
• Limit dashboard recent statuses (common Nextcloud groups or the organization team based on the assigned manager) because the larger the instance/organization, the less significant status updates I will see on the dashboard. I want to see the status of the people I work with closely.
• Text prompts for Calendar bookings
  • "Lunch with Anna" -> suggest attendee
  • "Piano lesson 4pm" -> prefill start time Show dropdown to suggest time based on title calendar#17
• Use Calendar name, description and possible tags to guess the calendar for new events. E.g. Sales meeting would pick/suggest the Sales calendar over personal
• Track where people work from (office, home, other) and let this information flow into meeting scheduling
• When moving a meeting in Calendar via drag and drop, show drop zones for availability and free/busy. Show a hint/warning in the simple/advanced editor.