Rebekah Wilson: Making Business in Distributed Settings

Source Elements is company based in the USA, which is collaborating with a company elsewhere and clients all over the globe. Therefore they mostly work online. Rebekah Wilson is co-founder and Director of Technology of Source-elements.

When starting a company it is important to establish each other’s risk profiles. In Wilson’s case all participants had the same risk profile, both were new to start-up culture, which gives a recognizable dynamic. You grow together. When starting one has to know one’s partners for which reason the founders have to meet in real life to assess each other’s integrity and benevolence.

With the programmers it is important to check their capability. Because the company writes and sells computer software, it is ok to communicate on the computer. If it were making something else, Wilson would feel the need to be there more hands on. Trust with programmers is already inherent in the medium; one does not have to be in the same place.

Being the Director of Technology the role of Wilson in the collaboration is to bridge between different discourses and interests. Therefore they developed formats of communication that have a steady rhythm in real time. It organizes response time and feedback between partners, with the programmers and with the clients as well.

Wilson finds that the orchestration of communication with different colleagues and business partners is different in many aspects: in tone of voice, in response time, in how to take minutes, in how to behave when in trouble and it is different in deciding when to meet in real life. All these things have to be appropriate to the relation and this effort is easily under estimated.

With her co-founders and business partners she makes sure to meet in real life to sustain the relationship with them. Every 2 year she tries to spend a few months in the head office. At that time the big decisions about people and future projects and plans are made. She feels one has to be in one room at such moments. When big trouble happens, all stakeholders have to meet in real life as well.

With the programmers Wilson insists on being decent in online communication, polite and personal, yet distant, use diplomacy and sometimes hang out and make jokes on chat or video conf or phone. They use chat and phone to discuss issues, while they use email to arrest minutes of other online sessions. In this collaboration, in which Rebekah is in charge, hard specifications are crucial. Partners may want something done in 3 months, the programmers think they will need 9 months, and it gets done in 6 months. While doing the work it is crucial how fast you get back to people.

Wilson has a distinct behavior of timing in her collaboration with the programmers: confirm when you receive a batch of code, immediately download it and start testing immediately.

All the time Wilson stays in touch, test the whole day and at the end of the day she files the bug reports. They will respond the next day whether they can fix it, what they do not understand and they keep doing that cycle till we have fixed the bugs.

Clients need feedback within the same day. There is an email system to confirm the receiving of emails, and reminds the company to answer. A support system is in place over three continents to know what is happening and alarm if necessary. For clients the people of the company are part of the system.

With Wilson’s business partners, they more or less know what they are about to do. Because they know each other for a long time, not many things are time critical. They understand each other and pick up the slack as soon as it is possible. It is important though to not forget to share the moments of success, booth with business partners as well as with the programmers.

Understanding of the open source ethic that most programmers want to uphold is crucial as technical director. Programmers will make use of the community of programming and use appropriate licenses.

“It is ownership of work, but not of ethic; to me, we own the code, but not the intellectual concepts.” In the collaboration with the programmers working with the open source community, Wilson grants a shared ethic with the programmers through which a long-time sustainable relationship can evolve.

Wilson consciously creates her identity online. It is important that clients feel they can trust her professionally and the feedback is that the support they offer is highly appreciated. They may talk regularly on the phone, but they are not sharing personal information.

“One can use the fact that we are not in the same place to manifest an identity as someone who is not real. For example, I never allow video camera. When working remotely participants may project qualities on the other. I have had one man say, and this is where it goes to far, “you have a beautiful voice, you must be very beautiful”. I take effort not to engage in these conversations but to maintain a professional stance. It is not going on to the point where I take advantage of this by using maybe stereotypical female things; I keep my professional voice etc. The not being witnessed visually is a strategy, to keep it more clinical”.

To Wilson her life online, including her professional life, is like another world in which she lives as well. It is distinct from her life offline though.

“I do not like to talk about my work in social situations for example, because it is part of another reality, I do not know where to start, really not know where to start because there is no ground point, it is such a distributed thing. I could explain it to another engineer but than I could just talk technically, but I cannot talk about it in other terms. (…) It is very hard to share except with the people who are also in that imaginary world like other engineers; then it becomes real. (…) I have not created this; this is who I am. I have been like that as a child when I was playing the piano, my mother can tell you. It is not something I have become; I have made my work of something I like to have, to be able to disappear from where I am. Of course there is conflict, when I have to be available, that can be hard and the imaginary world can become too real. Than I take a walk, call a friend, watch a movie, and usually leave the office.”

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