☕️ (R)emote Expresso #76

☕️ (R)emote Expresso is global. Remote. Slightly feral. Weekly.

Somewhere on your hard drive is a workshop that has never been taught.

It has a title. Possibly a color scheme. An outline you've reordered four times. It's been almost ready for... a while. The only thing it's still missing is other people.

You haven't run it because it isn't ready. And it isn't ready because every time you open it, you find one more thing to fix. The intro's clunky. The middle sags. The slides could be better. So it sits there, getting polished in a room with no door, for an audience of one.

I did the newsletter version of that for years before I ever started one.

This week I published issue 50 of a newsletter I write. Fifty of them. The early ones were rough in ways I can still feel. Issue 1 had a layout I'd describe, generously, as a ransom note. No niche, no schedule I trusted, no real idea what I was doing. I published it anyway, mostly because telling people it was coming had become more embarrassing than telling them it was bad.

And then people came in. Not for the layout. They came in for the part that was unmistakably a person thinking out loud, and then they came back, and now there's a roomful of them who open the thing every week. I never finished that newsletter. I just kept leaving the lights on.

That's the whole trick. It's a stupid trick. It works.

The reason it works got more obvious this year, not less. Polished is cheap now. Ask any chatbot for a flawless, professional, perfectly structured anything and you'll have it before your coffee's cool. The market rate for "looks finished" just dropped to zero. Which means the polished version of your thing is the one nobody needs. The one worth something is the one with your specific, uneven, slightly-too-honest fingerprints on it. The messy middle is the load-bearing wall. Hiding it is how the room falls down.

We've spent a month in here on how we find each other. Side channels. The things you learn about a colleague by accident. The work nobody saw. The last piece is the inconvenient one. You cannot be found in a room you haven't built yet. Somebody has to start the thing. Open the doc. Send the invite. Be findable.

The room is never going to be finished. I've published fifty issues and mine still isn't. Finished was never the goal. Finished rooms are just rooms everyone's already left.

Build yours with the paint still wet. Let people watch you figure it out. Turns out that was never the embarrassing version. The embarrassing version is the one still sitting on your hard drive, perfect, lights off.

I read every survey reply we got back. All of them. Didn't take long... I could count the replies without taking my shoes off, and I've decided that's charming, not alarming.

We never asked if you wanted to host anything. Build a room, run an event, gather people - none of that was a question on either survey. You answered it anyway. In the margins. While we were asking about something else entirely.

— One of you got asked what comes so easily that people keep coming back for it. The answer: gather people. Build the way a group works together. Run a brainstorm that ends with an actual idea and not a vibe.

— Another did the math on a single free hour a month and decided they'd spend it running a learning event. That same person, a few questions later, said they want to feel steadier leading a group. Not ready, and signing up anyway.

— A third never mentioned hosting once. They were too busy describing what it takes to survive out here - a network, a couple of people who have your back, a team that exists even when no employer is paying for one. They also wished, out loud, for the time to make events instead of only attending them.

So no, I don't have to talk anyone into this. The want is right there in your own handwriting. You're not waiting for permission to want it. You're waiting for a door.

I can't make this next part cute. I'm not going to try.

Not everyone who wants to build a room can get into the ones we already have. Some of you told us so, in your own words. Our events are hard to find. Showing up can mean showing up in a language that isn't yours. At an hour that belongs to someone else's morning. In a format that assumes you already know how all of this works.

And the people telling us this? Not beginners. Not even slightly. Some of them build and hold communities offline - the kind that are harder to keep together than anything we've ever run in here. They know how to make a room. They're good at it. They just can't reliably find ours.

"Build your own room" is good advice. It's also advice that quietly assumes you could already get into the building.

For some of you, the room you build won't be a nice extra. It'll be the first one with a door you can actually open.

The want is here. So is the locked door. We're not tidying the second one away to make the first one feel better.

Two rooms are open this week. Both built by people who didn't wait until they felt finished.

Remember what you told us in the survey - that you wanted someone to teach you the setup, the planning, the template for running an online session? Carolina Poll heard the same thing, and she built the answer.

From messy prep to clear briefs with the Workshop Kickoff Canvas. A repeatable three-phase template for prepping a workshop with actual clarity instead of a knot in your stomach. Beginners welcome. People new to remote collaboration, especially welcome. This is the on-ramp, not the deep end.

Thursday, May 28
10 AM CDT | 11 AM EDT | 4 PM BST | 5 PM CEST

Not ready to lead anything? Fair. Steve Lastavich hosts the Remote Co-Working Café - cameras on, work in progress, nobody performing. You don't prep. You don't present. You show up with whatever you're doing and do it near other people. The lowest-stakes way to practice being in a room before you build one.

Friday, May 29
9 AM CDT | 10 AM EDT | 3 PM BST | 4 PM CEST

This whole issue came out of survey answers. Six-ish people typing into a box did that. So here's the box, still open.

Two ways in, depending on how much road you've got left today:

Three Questions. Genuinely three. The fast one - answer it at a stoplight, answer it while your coffee reheats. This is where a lot of this issue came from.
[link]

The longer one. The April member survey, for when you've got more to say and the room to say it. This is the one that tells us what to build next.
[link]

No wrong door. Pick the one that fits the energy you have right now, not the energy you think you should have.

Enough theory. There's a wall, and it's already a little messy - the way a room should be.

Two slides, link below. Slide one asks the question this whole issue has been circling: what would you build, host, or run if you knew people would show up? Add a sticky note. Drag it anywhere. There are a few up there already, including one that's barely a thought yet - that's the bar, and the bar is low on purpose.

Slide two has no question at all. It's an open floor. Sticky note, photo, doodle, a hello, whatever you want the room to have.

No login. No name required. You're an anonymous animal of some kind the second you arrive. Works best on a laptop.

You don't have to build the whole thing today. You just have to put one wet-paint thing somewhere a person could see it.

The first room I ever built was a Gilbert and Sullivan show in Minneapolis. Community theater. I was not good. I want to be clear about that - I was genuinely, verifiably not good, and there is a recording somewhere that would hold up in court.

But I remember the church basement we rehearsed in. The radiator that came on whenever it wanted. The man who played the Major-General and forgot the patter song every single night until, one night, he didn't, and the whole room made a noise I've never forgotten. None of us were ready. The show was held together with safety pins and nerve. People came anyway. People always come anyway.

Then I moved for work and didn't sing for years. The folder, but make it a whole part of yourself - closed, almost ready, lights off. I only opened it again recently. It was exactly where I left it. They always are. That's the cruel, generous thing about the rooms you don't build: they wait.

So this is the end of the arc. Four issues asking how we find each other, and here's where I've landed - we don't, not really, until somebody builds somewhere to be found. The room doesn't have to be good. Mine had a temperamental radiator and a Major-General running on borrowed luck.

Build it anyway. I'll be in the basement.

— The (R) Generation Team 💻 🧡 🫶

PS: The cartoon for this issue isn't perfect. You may have noticed. I noticed around 11pm and had a brief, dignified internal debate about fixing it. Then I sent it. An issue about not waiting for things to be ready does not get to wait until it's ready. That would be embarrassing for everyone.

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☕️ (R)emote Expresso is published weekly for R Generation - a global community of remote professionals, designers, product people, facilitators, consultants, and freelancers who believe remote work should fit the human, not the other way around.