How We Work
This is a document of standard working practices around Neuromatch.
As we evolve, so will these practices. Our hope is that everybody from Neuromatch will contribute to how we can improve these over time.
Trust and Decision Making
We have high trust in our teammates and believe that people should have ownership and agency over the areas that they work. While these owners should be thorough in gathering input and identifying affected parties that need to be part of the decision, they should also feel empowered as decision makers so that we can move quickly. Read more about 🌳Making Decisions .
Governance
Our goal is to make our organization systems, team structure, and voting dynamics as clear as possible, and this is always improving. You can see more about our organization structure and how we are governed on our 📃Governance and Organization page.
Documenting Things
Basically every decision or action should result in documentation or code. This is how we communicate our choices to others, help others continue our work, and maintain a culture of transparency.
It is hard to be inclusive when your team is all around the world. The best way to be inclusive is to document things thoroughly. Doing things without a record makes is very hard for people in different timezones to work together. Often times, when you have a meeting, it won't work for some timezone, so document notes and decisions clearly so that people 'off time' can easily benefit from the meeting use the results to guide their work. Making readable content lets somebody process it in their own language and at a time that works best for them.
Open Communication and Slack
To support transparency, we keep many conversations in Slack and we try to keep them in public channels when possible. Email is rarely used except for big announcements or for external parties. If someone directly messages you, but the conversation could be public, try to encourage them to make it public.
Tools and Services
We use lots of different software tools and services. Keeping track of all of them, why we use them, and who owns them can be quite difficult. This list of 
Tools and Services should help.
Tools and Services should help.Marketing and Branding
We have many people working on many different projects. It is important these projects feel like they are part of the same effort and organization. To do this, see our 📙Marketing & Brand Guidelines .
Work Processes for Staff
Calendar is Truth
It is very inefficient to schedule meetings in a global team environment if your calendar is not up to date. Use the working hours feature of Google and set events to block off time you are unavailable (such as a meeting, or needing a period of focus). All other times are considered open for meetings that your colleagues can schedule with you without asking. You are responsible for making sure your calendar is up to date.
Deep Work Wednesdays
It's hard to be on and available all the time. While we strive for a constant balance between communication and time to focus, we want to make sure to at least set some dedicated time where the whole organization can get into deep work without guilt of missing a meeting or being unavailable. We call these 'Deep Work Wednesdays'.
How to do a Deep Work Wednesday?
- Mute Slack (do not disturb) and close it
- Block it on the calendar to block all internal meetings
Exceptions are made for extreme cases such as major customer facing bugs that require live collaboration or external meetings with important partners with limited schedules (feel free to tell external partners about deep work Wednesdays when trying to find a time to meet, though).