about mesh.
date
Aug 25, 2024
slug
mesh
status
Published
tags
mesh
planning
felix-and-xenia
summary
What is it, why is it important, and few ideas about what’s going to be it’s future.
type
Post
(This post is the first of series “Felix and Xenia”, let me know what do you think about the format. )
X: What have you been doing in the past couple of months?
F: I am building mesh. It is a community of tech builders. We started it as a seminar group about machine learning, and 4 months later we organized a small hackathon. All things went great, we started to grow, and today we have around 15 members who are actively building their own project.
X: It’s great and everything, but what are you doing actually?
F: We have an offline office space where we attend daily to work on our projects. Some of them are self-learning related (e.g. somebody is learning rust by building a game with it rn.) and some of them are funded (both to have some income as a member and as an organization) projects. I am building software, others build self-driving cars, or viral marketing campaigns. Our habits are building, organizing events and competing with each other (e.g. hackathon, fine tuning, solving math problems or Duck Game).
X: What challenges have you faced while scaling up from a seminar group to a more structured community with diverse projects?
F: First of all the coordination. When somebody wanted to go out, or organize a working session I called everyone on the phone, because that was the most effective. I got lost when we grew to 10 members, and I couldn’t remember properly what someone said without taking notes. Also, we used to have day to day or two day checkup about everyone’s project, now it’s weekly. We started to have a kickoff meeting for each week which is great because we can put that in agenda, and all the key players for the organizing and project management part are there.
X: How do you manage the diversity of skills and interests within the group? Does this diversity sometimes lead to conflicts or does it generally foster innovation?
F: What I see is that although people are different in skills, the common thing is their love for building. Diversity leads to not understanding which can lead to conflicts. This is only problem in tasks where the decision is influencing everyone’s activities (event planning, office decor etc.) In these cases all the decision makers needs to be in one place and communicate with each other, then make a decision and commit to it. In the personal projects, the argument about a tech stack won’t influence each other’s life as much, because they can still use whatever they want.
X: What tools or platforms are you using for project management and communication now that you've outgrown phone calls?
F: Discord for communicating and excel for project management. ClickUp, Monday and similar management tools are not necessary and have a bigger overhead than what we need rn.
X: With the weekly check-ins, how do you ensure that every member feels their project is getting the attention it deserves?
F: The attention that a project needs (or the member) is dependent on the complexity of the problem, the seniority of the member, and the ambiguity of the task. If these values are overlooked it can cause a member to quit. In the project kickoff our first task is to determine these, and from that point we can plan how we should help the member.
X: Have you considered or implemented any mentorship programs within Mesh to help newer members or those tackling particularly challenging projects?
F: We have a pool of senior who are committed to help a member if expertise needed. In special cases material costs are also covered by these senior members.
X: How do you decide which projects get funding, and what criteria do you use to evaluate their potential or success?
F: Our success is determined by the velocity and the net gained knowledge throughout that project. We would rather fund a one week project where you build your own website and learn 3+ techs, rather than a 2 year r&d project. Right now our org is not big enough to handle that long projects.
X: What's the most unexpected or innovative project that has come out of Mesh so far?
F: We built a file system to make information sharing easier. We built a self driving car and went to Japan for a competition with it. We are designing home lab equipment for voltage measurements. We built a security system for an RV.
X: How do you balance between fostering competition and maintaining a collaborative environment?
F: Competition is a way to create a goalpost which you can hit. Collaboration is a way to survive in hard times. We think of inner competition as a way to have an urge to work on ourselves, and collaboration as a way to solve hard, and complex problems which we are facing.