(I'm planning on migrating a lot of the content I/we generate for our team newsletter to the blog, so for the CivicActions team, you'll be getting more information about what we're up to on the blog than in our internal newsletter.  For the rest of the world, it'll mean a more transparent view into what we're doing at CivicActions and how we do it.  We were founded on, and value, the principles of openness and we intend to dive even deeper into expressing the values of transparency, collaboration and participation.)

Since our inception, our business model relies on the coordination and management of a geographically distributed team of people whose time, attention and applied talent have empowered non-profits and triple-bottom line businesses to do their work more effectively and efficiently. 

For people working with CivicActions, this means an opportunity to do good work from anywhere. To the world, this means fewer people driving their cars to sit in a supersealed building or a cubicle somewhere.  While it does carry some risk of creating occasional feelings of isolation, the environmental benefits are commensurate with the human benefit of actually being free to do what we want to do. Our frequent phone conversations, instant messaging and in person gatherings make huge strides in overcoming that sense of isolation (not to mention that work is not the ONLY place one has connection with others). The net benefit is overwhelmingly positive, at least IMHO.

Over the last year, we've undergone a pretty significant transformation in the way we're organized internally at CivicActions. We have grown organically - creating, adding to and modifying our systems, processes and documentation as we've gone along. Last year, we took time to step back, analyze and outline an operational organization that has made CivicActions tremendously more efficient than we were, say, two years ago. And today we have the benefit of being poised to scale more effectively than any time in our history, which we think is good timing, considering the scale of the needs for our kind of work.

Today, we kicked off a similar "take a step back and analyze" project to map out a new technical infrastructure to support our new organization.  While our current systems are obviously effective in organizing distributed teams, we have a vision that it could be so much better.  We see an opportunity to take what we've learned about working with a distributed network of people and creating a technical infrastructure to make the human experience of working in that way more real, more immediate and even more satisfying to our needs and desire to have a more significant impact in our work and in the world.  

Our approach to creating (anything) at CivicActions is to start with defining a vision of what we're doing. Then we brainstorm, analyze and choose among strategies to achieve that vision, then we organize to implement. We then integrate, leverage and iterate. It's an exceptionally efficient and powerful approach (and one we're grateful to Shirlaws Business Coaching for helping us distinguish) we call "Layers" or "Layering."

This is the process that we began today in looking at creating a scalable technical infrastructure for remote/distributed/virtual teams, and one which we intend to share with the world (both insights into the process itself and the results).  I've asked Owen Barton (our resident technology visionary and the leader/coordinator of this project) to share his thoughts and learnings about the process of undertaking this project in the weeks and months ahead, and I'll ask any member of the CivicActions team to chime in with anything they want to share as well, as we merrily (and digitally) roll along.

The massive reduction of carbon emissions and the fragile state of our ecosystem alone are reasons enough to radically advance the effectiveness of remote working.  The world needs better tools and methods for working together, especially now. The resources (technical and human) have never been more accessible. The opportunity for any organization (non-profit and for-profit alike) to reduce the environmental and financial costs of centralized work is immense, and one we've learned quite a bit about, so we're looking forward to sharing that with you.