The Importance of Group Communication

Last week I said I formed a group of people to commit to contributing to Apache Cassandra. After forming the group everyone was excited to begin. Our first task was to read and understand the architecture of the system. We then didn’t speak for two weeks.

After those two week’s everyone felt confident in their knowledge of the system. Having said that, everyone was much less enthused due to the frustration implicit in lacking communication. Myself included.

This week we spoke on a video conference about how to move forward as a team. We acknowledged that it is hard to meet in person and accepted it. We decided that instead, we will video chat on an at least weekly basis. We also made a two-week plan. We also decided who was good at what and how we wanted to work together moving forward based on our own unique particular interests and skills. Fortunately, after communicating over a conference call, all the frustrations were voiced and we became more confident, productive, and happy.

In our two week plan, we decided that we would all feel completely comfortable with Cassandra as a user and as a system. We also decided that we will be in communication and assigned to the issue of writing documentation within the community. Lastly, we decided to pair up people who feel comfortable with the system to those who don’t.

Keeping up with communication is very important. Once people fall out of the loop, it becomes very hard to stay enthusiastic about working together. So the video calls purpose serves to hold each other accountable, to stay enthusiastic, to voice concerns as they come up, and to make slow but incremental progress. All of this together should keep our team happy and productive.