Supporting communication within our Tech Community

David Joaquim
Swissquote Tech Blog
7 min readFeb 26, 2021

My name is David Joaquim, I’ve been working at Swissquote as an Architect for several years now. Today you will have the opportunity to have an overview of the work performed and the lessons learned by my team while supporting communication within our Tech Community.

Awesome Tech Community session in our cosy room

Why does supporting communication matter?

Communication is a fundamental social human behavior.

Unfortunately, in a working environment composed by diverse people from very different horizons, part of the communication stops happening naturally.

I’m pretty sure there was at least one time in your life where you kept your thoughts to yourself fearing how stupid it would sound to your colleagues or boss, right? I’m not even mentioning the even scarier idea of presenting your work in front of a larger audience.

This is a very common and natural phenomenon.

Communication stops happening naturally at a certain point

This article presents efforts we set up and are supporting in order to compensate the bias towards communication loss.

I will cover how we foster experience sharing while maintaining bonds within our Tech Community, how we are continuously building a common understanding and a shared vision among technical topics. Finally I will explain how we ensure that communication can also take place out of the supported channels.

The regular checkpoint: Tech Fridays

The following efforts did not necessarily happen in that particular order, nor were initially in this exact state, but are the result of years of trial and errors.

One major challenge we had to tackle was to build a process that allows the number of participants to remain high. This is important for adding credibility to these sessions, and gain traction.

One major challenge is to build a process that gains traction

What finally worked for us is to have a weekly checkpoint dedicated to our Tech Community. Every Friday from 11 to 12 we organize a Tech Friday session.

These sessions cover various content, I will come to that a bit later. The key point I want to emphasize is that we needed to have a regular and predictable time slot. The reasons are pretty simple: People need to know when it happens and have to be available in order to attend, no matter how attractive the topic is. These qualities helped people to make some room in their calendar in advance and avoid scheduling conflicting Tetris game tournaments.

They key is to block a regular and predictable time slot.

Design team offered us an awesome blueprint look for the sessions presentations

Following attendance feedback, we also started to record part of the sessions so that people can watch them later if needed. Recording the sessions has interesting side effects such as creating a knowledge archive, and surprisingly it can be used as a support for the presenter to improve her presentation skills.

Recording is not free though, it requires to acquire proper gear, demands some organization and consumes some editing time. Overexposed movies with people sneezing in the background belong to the movie pirating golden age.

Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock

An unexpected positive side effect of the pandemic was to observe a radical increase in attendance. Being all remote forced us to use Zoom for our sessions and opened access for our remote teams. We had around 30 people attending weekly and now there are about 60 to 70 people.

Content, purpose and challenges

Our Tech Fridays are open to any kind of content. Here are the common topics.

Newsletters

A monthly newsletter about major technical changes, migration progression and state of the Tech Community. Our team organises these sessions to keep the community up to date with the latest news and offers a small Q&A space around these topics.

The main challenge for us is to poke teams in order to have enough relevant content every month. Postmortems, major internal tooling and library changes, survey results or status tracking are good newsletter content candidates.

Share your experience

A team presents a selected topic about a lesson learned, an experiment they are trying or a feature they just released. These are the most popular sessions, as at least 30 min is reserved for Q&A.

Our main challenge here is to keep these happening. Teams tends to be subject to the impostor syndrome regarding their work and are reluctant to present results they consider “boring”. A combination of motivational reminders, with a very flexible pre-assigned schedule is currently our best friend. An active involvement from our team is necessary to make sure we have content 3 times per month.

Ask Me Anything (AMA)

AMA gained popularity on Reddit. It creates a space where people can ask any question in a safe environment with people that are prepared to do so.

Our AMA sessions are less frequent than the two previous types, but appeared to be very effective to clarify our technical vision and targets. A wiki is prepared so people can write their questions in advance and therefore we can already prepare answers.

We try to answer as many questions as we can during the session, but there are inevitably some of them that cannot be answered straight away. Trust is a scarce good, therefore it is important to take action in order to keep it at high level.

  • Be honest with your answers, don’t improvise, and be transparent when you don’t have the answer. Providing an answer that ends up to be wrong is damaging for your audience in case they follow your misplaced advice.
  • Take accountability by tracking unanswered questions and taking the time to provide the answers offline.

We did not manage to carve sessions for other purposes yet. I would be interested to get insights on that particular topic if you have time to comment about that!

Beyond Tech Friday: Off track communication

Last but not least, we decided to focus our mission around the communication facilitation aspect. The role is very different from being the drive for communication. We believe that information must flow without us being involved. There are many reasons behind this, the most prominent being scalability and creativity. First, being a central team implies being a bottleneck and second, a third-party supervising all the discussions implies some kind of fear to be judged or censored.

Our team introduced the Rocket.Chat communication platform a few years ago with a set of light governance rules. Our goal was to create messaging channels using topics so that people can ask questions and share their thoughts by area of interest.

Our Rocket.Chat landing page

The tool is massively used. Channel naming conventions helped to organize at very high level the discussions.

Our major successes so far:

  • blackout: Announcements about internal system outages
  • trollbox: Anything you want to talk about, only restriction is to be respectful to others
  • help-* channels: help on specific topics
  • .. and the the addition of custom emojis
Party parrot

Future of communication

Our current efforts focused on peer and team communication achieved a very decent baseline in this area.

Lately, we started an on-going work on Self Contained Systems, presented in detail in a previous post. The topic generated several discussions on architectural changes and produced a set of new important decisions. Today, we are missing a proper way to encode that acquired knowledge that would allow us to share through time, e.g. with future employees or future selves. The idea would be to provide context on past decisions in order to avoid regressions and lose time trying the exact same ideas multiple times.

We need to preserve hardly acquired knowledge for future referral

Our investigation led to Architecture Decision Records change capture method https://adr.github.io/ and iterative decision-taking tools such as P2.

Nothing set yet. Stay tuned!

Conclusion

Communication is fundamental within a group of people. This is especially important during tough times, such as the current pandemic situation.

Many people stopped sharing the same workspace, they likely shuffled their life priorities and definitely stopped sharing a daily coffee and chat at the cafeteria.

Thankfully, communication is an emergent property within a group. This article shed light on four different areas our team chose in order to actively support the Swissquote Tech Community.

I hope that you grabbed the most promising ideas from these insights and that you can adapt and implement them within your work context.

  • Regular and predictable communication slots
  • Diversified content with targeted purpose (news, knowledge sharing, AMAs)
  • Off-track channels

If there one thing to remember from this post, here it is:

Creating and supporting specific communication efforts is not an easy task, but it is a necessary requirement to foster a lively community.

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