đź“— Distributed Collaboration Manual

This manual documents the knowledge about distributed collaboration (also called “remote work”, “telework”) employed by ClimateGains. It has been a distributed organization since its founding and relies on practices pioneered by Edgeryders. You can access this manual in two forms

Motivation. Distributed collaboration can avoid a drastic amount of greenhouse gas emissions from business travel (esp. air travel), from daily commuting to work, from the energy consumption in commercial buildings, and from the embodied emissions of constructing new office buildings. But distributed collaboration is not easy, often frustrating, and therefore not nearly as widely adopted as it should be. We believe that, as an organization with 7+ years of experience in this area, we have an obligation to share our expertise freely and widely – it is our best possible contribution to help fighting the climate crisis.

Structure. All chapters past the introduction present their knowledge as a collection of recipes / best practices / patterns . They try to be specific enough to be easily understandable and quickly applicable, but general enough to be relevant for most organizations that have to deal with information management.

Content licence. The manual is an open source document under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported licence (CC-BY 4.0), or at your option any later version.

Acknowledgements. The manual as an open collaboration project received precious contributions from people in EIT Climate-KIC, the Edgeryders company and community, and from the Internet at large.

The manual is a living document. The distributed collaboration manual is itself created by distributed collaborators, and you’re welcome to contribute to this open source project. Being a wiki also means that the content is never truly finished: we keep adding to it and extending it also after the end of the initial funding that made us start this manual. For that reason, you will always find some draft sections and TODO markers throughout the document – and you’re welcome to help the authors out:

How to contribute. However you obtained the manual, the most recent version is always this wiki on edgeryders.eu. As a member of ClimateGails, you can join the discussion thread below that wiki, adding your feedback, reports of problems with the document, or proposed additions. If you feel confident about your contribution, you can also directly contribute it by editing the wiki. The wiki uses Discourse flavoured Markdown for formatting, all of which is documented in our Discourse User Manual .

How to work with the authors of the manual. If your organization faces challenges around distributed collaboration that are not addressed in this manual, and you want their help to solve them, you are welcome to get in touch with @nadia who is one of the co-founders. Edgeryders OÜ is available for consulting in this area as long as we can also include the resulting knowledge into this manual – under an open content licence, and of course in a general, anonymized form. You can talk to @nadia about this: either send a direct message here on the platform, or an e-mail to nadia@edgeryders.eu.