Recently I spent time with our very own Lars Wirzenius, in Helsinki. While there, I had the distinct pleasure of standing in front of a whiteboard with Lars and hashing out aspects of two different Free Software projects which we are both involved with. We have talked about irc in the past and we've talked about being gracious when dealing with your community. In general we've only really spoken online interactions with your project (excepting when we spoke of conferences) but today I'd like to introduce you to the inestimable value of whiteboarding with your collaborators.
While the value of having written discussion is very high, a log of what was said by whom and in response to what is very helpful, and nicely written design documentation can be critical to a project's success; the incredible bandwidth of face-to-face discussions is hard to beat. Conferences are, as previously discussed, one of the ways to achieve this. But for the raw base design work for a project, whiteboarding on your feet (or your rear-end I suppose) is one of the best ways I find to get the ideas flowing.
Whiteboarding is best done in a small group. Ideally two to four people. You need to have a room to yourselves because you will be making a lot of noise; talking over each other as the ideas pop up; and generally making a lot of mess on the whiteboard. If you can have multiple whiteboards in one room then larger projects can be easier to deal with. I have successfully whiteboarded with a fold-up whiteboard on a café table, though that was a lot of work.
The second thing that you really must have for whiteboarding is a camera. You might get lucky and have a "smart" whiteboard which you can extract an image from, though I generally find those to be less effective than a quick snap from a camera phone before wiping the whiteboard down.
Don't be afraid to write stuff up on the board which you're going to immediately say is wrong, because seeing it written up can spark ideas in others. Whiteboards give you the ability to sketch out diagrams as well as APIs with equal ease - I find that sometimes the best way to work out how a state machine works is to draw it up, despite the fact that I am almost entirely incapable of thinking in images at all.
Once you've done your design work and come to agreements, ensure that photographs of your whiteboards are circulated among the attendees. At this point the most important step of all happens -- you all should write up what was discussed and the decisions which were arrived at. Then you can all review each others' memories of what happened and come to a consensus as to the final decisions as a group. Interpreting the whiteboards after the fact gives the attendees further chance to jog an idea which may have been fermenting in their minds since the session.
I hope that you'll take this on board and try out whiteboarding with one of your projects just as soon as you can. However, since it can be hard to just magic up a whiteboard, I won't set you homework this week. Enjoy your respite.
