Coffee Time
I love lean coffee — don’t get me wrong. It’s a fantastic way for people to learn from each other and generate new insights in a psychologically safe environment. In fact, just today I added the ability to run a traditional lean coffee conversation. more…
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I just added a small new feature – now you can see how long you’ve been talking about a particular agenda item. That’s been annoying me for a while! While I was there I fixed a small bug about the countdown meter – now when you add a minute, a minute more…
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I don’t know why it took me this long to build. Crazy!
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I have finally removed the last feature that requires you to know somebody’s email address. Now you can invite a contact (someone you met in a previous event that has accepted your request) to an event directly. Also, if you happen to be a member of more…
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The flurry of activity appears to have slowed down. Conversation frequency is reducing, which means opportunities for feedback about Coffee Time are more rare. This doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about this stuff! The need for good human conver more…
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I have been getting nervous that I don’t know when wiki pages are updated in my communities. So I’ve added the ability to subscribe to wiki page changes! The app automatically subscribes you if you edit the page, but if you unsubscribe right after th more…
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I noticed during a conversation today that it was a bit surprising that you can’t “show all votes” if you haven’t cast all your votes. Since some people run lean coffee by not allowing folks to vote after the conversation starts, that felt a bit clun more…
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How does this affect Coffee Time? Welllll… currently it runs on a tiny $5/mo virtual machine somewhere in the cloud. I don’t know where they get their electricity from. I know for a fact that the vast majority of my electricity will soon be coming di more…
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I have just released wiki page history functionality. It is a bit clunky, and I intend to do a bit more with it. However, I’d love feedback before I do anything else! Let me know?
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So I’ve just released the source code of this app to the world, warts and all. You can see a link at the bottom of every page. Yay! For folks who’d like a summary – it’s all licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, which means you are mo more…
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Today’s change is completely cosmetic. However, I feel like it more clearly captures what we are all about. Creating connections between people with common cause. It’s much more than simply accomplishing goals. It’s allowing ourselves to be vulnerabl more…
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In the before times, if there was less than a minute left in a conversation round, you could press “extend” and add a minute. Then the link would disappear. This is not a fun experience. Now, you will see three links: “+1 minute”, “+3 minutes”, “+5 m more…
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I’m not the best designer, but while using Coffee Time with my phone I noticed a bunch of clunkiness. So I spent some time improving the experience. This is super useful for folks who have in-person conversations and don’t want to lug around a laptop more…
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The overwhelming feedback about voting is that it’s cumbersome. So in the hopes of making that a bit easier, I’ve made it so all the votes you put on topics will carry forward into the next round. Except, of course, the votes you put on the topic tha more…
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All teams can now have their own wiki. As you use this functionality, I’d love to hear what improvements you’d like to see! send me a note!
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Now you can send messages to your contacts! Just go to the contacts list and click “email” next to the contact you want to send a message to.
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Today I launched some preliminary contact functionality. When you meet someone at an event, you can request that they become a contact. Then, once they accept your invitation you can add that person to a team you own. Eventually I will add more funct more…
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Sometimes you want to communicate with folks who participated in an event after it’s over. Maybe with followup content or just to confirm a question. You can now do that! And people can also send the event host an email after it’s over, too!
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During today’s conversation we had enough people present that we were able to uncover a couple of defects that I have since fixed! When a host starts a round, and someone else sends a chat message, the announcement of whose turn it is to talk was era more…
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I’ve deployed the new wiki functionality behind a feature flag. It currently only works for the Coffee Time team. We will be testing it there! Currently team members can edit wiki pages and also get a list of pages that refer to a specific page. I pr more…
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A conversation app is only as good as the conversations being hosted on it! Are you someone who is interested in hosting an online dialog with some tools to help you? Hit me up! I’m happy to help you through the process of scheduling and hosting your more…
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I’ve started a branch of work on organization wikis. My reasoning: this is a kind of big deal. You can see the code change here I’m trying my best to adhere to at least the first 2 sections of WikiPrinciples but there may be some divergence.
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Based on learning over the past week I’ve made it so a few more things are possible even after an event is over: Hosts can start a round to do things like ask how the conversation was for people, Hosts can cancel an event even after it has started, i more…
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Today’s conversation about metrics marks the very first time we had more than 3 people on a conversation since Coffee Time relaunched. Hurray! We had 8 registrations and 5 conversationalists. Made me so happy!
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Today when I was chatting with Lisa about what it would take for her to feel comfortable hosting a community on Coffee Time, I noticed there was some confusion about why the event page looked so messed up. This was because a bunch of stuff was disabl more…
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You can now set up a public profile page, allowing you to say basically whatever you want (within limits). Just visit your profile page (the link at the top-right of the screen to the right of “logout”) and enable your public profile. Then after you more…
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In the before times, when a participant sent an email to the event host, they only recourse the host had was to respond by emailing every participant. Now, there will be a link in the email for the host to reply just to the participant that emailed t more…
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One of the ways I use Coffee Time is having a team for just me. And, every conversation I have with someone that isn’t part of another team is part of this one. That way, I can have a list of all the next steps I’ve decided to take inspired by all th more…
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Today I pushed an update that makes insights fully server-side rendered. Before it was just the text of the insight. Now it’s everything! This required me to add some handling to cause a re-render of the insight list iff it changed because of somethi more…
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So, two things: You can now put markdown in topics. Like, for example, maybe you want everybody to visit a link to a site you want to talk about. Just put the URL in the topic and it will automatically render a link to that URL I have switched insigh more…
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I got annoyed enough today to get rid of the clunky old date/time picker for events. Now we are using the browser native datetime-local picker. I hope it works out for folks!
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During quite a few conversations people have asked me if there is a way to see the topics we already talked about. I finally built the feature to see that list! That is all. 😊
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As a host, the thing I crave most is certainty that people are interested in the topic I’m hosting. So, what helps me the most is when people RSVP as soon as possible. Even if they aren’t 100% sure that they can make it! And now, with the new Observe more…
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When hosting conversations, often people would sign up and then something would happen and they couldn’t attend. However, the only way to make it so I could get an accurate vote count would be to remove them from the participant list. The problem, th more…
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In case anybody was curious, Coffee Time is developed in the open. The source code and backlog are available for anybody to check out: https://fossil.calmabiding.me/coffeetime If you have ideas for improvements, send them along to https://coffeetime. more…
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Today I made some big changes to how feeds get organized. Before, I associated RSS feeds with appropriate web pages. Each team page had a single feed, for example. Now, all the feeds you could possibly get access to are on a single page. You can get more…
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It occurred to me during a conversation that teams want to be able to keep track of more than just a few links and the next steps that people accepted as a result of a conversation. Sure, we want human conversation to be front and center to Coffee Ti more…
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After the last conversation we had, I’ve made a few usability improvements! The event page should be a bit cleaner. AND, you can now change how long a conversation round will last! That is all. 😊 Thanks to Jake for all his feedback!
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Yesterday during a Coffee Time chat we were discussing what it would take to host a conference. My friend Lisa mentioned in the chat that she may not be able to make it. She said she might be out of spoons by the time the conversation rolled around. more…
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You may have noticed there are more conversations showing up on the main page. Also, I’m starting to think about hosting more conversations about eXtreme Programming, a passion of mine. And basically anything else I can get people to join in and talk more…
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On the theme of things I would want to use, there has been some advancement in the world of one on one conversations. I have a coaching client and a friend that I want to meet with periodically. So, I created a private “team” for just the two of us s more…
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So when I resurrected blog posts I immediately had the thought – does it matter if I write anything if nobody logs into the site often enough to notice? Well, then, I decided that at least people who subscribe to the RSS feeds (look for the orange lo more…
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It’s been a while. In the intervening year between when I shut down Coffee Time and started exploring other avenues, I’ve come to the realization that I lost track of my goal. I can’t help create a better world if I keep fooling around! Better to wor more…