[edlug] teleworking

["Nick" <nickwoolley@xxx.xxx.xxx>]

Hi,

I'm curious to know: how many teleworkers are there on this list?

I am, for one.  I'm a newcomer to Edinburgh and to EDLUG.  I used to live
and work in London but have moved here with my girlfirend, who has a new job
at the university.  I work for a small company who agreed to let me telework
from Edinburgh, since replacing me would be rather more exensive and
inconvenient.  It's an experiment, which seems to be going okay so far,
after a few weeks.  The plan is to return to London every month or so for a
week of face-to-face work, but the rest of the time my office is the sofa in
a small flat in Newington.

I expect one of the biggest challenges will be to avoid getting cabin-fever,
but another problem is general communications with the other people I'm
working with.  So far we've been getting by okay with MS messenger, CVS and
TightVNC over an ssh tunnel, a wiki, email and the phone.  Net/Gnomemeeting
doesn't (quite) work both ways, as we have a NAT firewall at both ends and
no VPN set up yet... but then, video seems more of a distraction than an
aid.  Voice over IP would probably be more useful, if it was simple to use.

Any solution will need to be a bit platform-agnostic, since my work requires
developing in .Net, which I am becoming fairly comfortable with, but I'm
traditionally much happier using Unix, specifically Linux, and I don't see
myself ever switching to MS entirely.  This is not usually true of the
people I work with / for, however.

It's not just a technological problem either.  It's a social and management
issue, too, and we'll need to change the way we work.  There are some
interesting suggestions on http://www.fastnloose.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/dad,
which I've not had time to read thoroughly yet.

So, do any of you telework, or know of any teleworking interest groups,
especially any in the Edinburgh area?

Regards,

Nick

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