A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.

The Great VC Coin Rush: At the Bitcoin Convention
There has been lots of coverage, from us and others, about the potential importance of bitcoins. Even so I enjoyed how this piece got into the culture of bitcoin.
—Brian Bergstein, deputy editor

We’ve all been taught that it’s important to have daily standup meetings. These are meant to encourage information flow between teams, but the problem is that they’re actually structured to restrict information flow. We’ve come up with a better way at Treehouse and I wanted to share it with you.

Traditional Standup Meetings

The traditional daily standup meeting goes like this:

• The standup meeting is conducted face-to-face (in person or over video chat) and is limited to 15 minutes.
• Each person has 1-2 minutes to express what they did yesterday, what they’re working on today and what’s blocking them from completing important tasks.
• Someone holds a timer and keeps the meeting on schedule. If a discussion breaks out, the person running the meeting asks people to discuss it after the meeting.

As Tommy Morgan explained in his post Daily Meetings are Great but You Should Never Have Them, the whole point of a standup meeting is to exchange information, but asking questions to clarify issues and receive insight are banned. These face-to-face meetings are also very disruptive because you have to stop what you’re doing to attend, whether you’re in the zone or not. Tommy’s proposal is to do daily standup meetings over email instead. I liked his idea but I wanted to take it even further.

A New Way to do Daily Standup Meetings

Email is sub-optimal for this kind of daily standup meeting because of the following reasons:

1. No threaded comments. Long email threads quickly breakdown into reply-hell where it’s difficult to tell who said what and to whom they’re talking.
2. Not searchable or transparent to other teams who might want/need to know what your team is doing. If you weren’t on the email thread, you don’t have access to the data.

I was discussing the idea of email daily standups with Grant Roholt and he had a killer idea: Why not use Convoy, the Treehouse internal Reddit clone, to post daily standup updates?

So here’s how it works:

1. I create a post in Convoy that is titled “YYYY-MM-DD Daily Standup” and email the link to the people in the standup meeting.
2. When they have time, they check their email, click the link and post a comment to the thread with their daily update.
3. Throughout the day the other folks circle back to the thread and ask specific questions to get further insight into what was posted. Threaded comments are natively built into Convoy (Reddit) so it’s super easy to read back through the thread and understand what’s happening.
4. The thread is public to the whole company so anyone can drop in and see what my team is up to, and ask questions if necessary. This matches the “Open Doors” Treehouse Value.
5. All the daily standups go into a category (for example Designer Team Daily Standups) so that anyone can easily go back in time and see what was said/done in previous meetings – an automatic record of what everyone said they’d do so they can be held accountable.

We’re going to build in @replies so that when you mention someone in a comment, they’ll get an email and be reminded to come back to the thread and reply.

How do you do it?

How do you conduct daily standup meetings? What works well and what’s a pain in the ass for you? Looking forward to chatting in the comments!

The post A Better Way to Do Daily Standup Meetings appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

While most artists seek to have their work immortalized, 51-year-old Jim Denevan plans for his art to be temporary. His enormous land creations use natural materials like sand, earth and ice, effectually making the landscape itself become the means of his masterpieces. Due to their colossal scope, aerial photography is often employed to appreciate the full piece, while at the same time preserving the art before the tide or other natural elements wipes away his work.

Using rakes, sticks and other instruments, the California-based artist traces intricate, geometric patterns. Sometimes he works alone, and other times has made use of a large crew. When The Anthropologist commissioned a project on Lake Baikal in Siberia using ice and snow, the team successfully produced the largest work of art in the world.

Although Denevan considers the erasure of his work by weather and waves to be simply part of the process, its beauty is preserved on film for us to appreciate. Here’s a closer look at his awe-inspiring epic art.

What aspect of Denevan’s creations do you find most impressive? Should Denevan’s creations be preserved or allowed to disappear? Let us know your opinion in the comments.

Thirsty Rough Font Family – only $9!

While most artists seek to have their work immortalized, 51-year-old Jim Denevan plans for his art to be temporary. His enormous land creations use natural materials like sand, earth and ice, effectually making the landscape itself become the means of his masterpieces. Due to their colossal scope, aerial photography is often employed to appreciate the full piece, while at the same time preserving the art before the tide or other natural elements wipes away his work.

Using rakes, sticks and other instruments, the California-based artist traces intricate, geometric patterns. Sometimes he works alone, and other times has made use of a large crew. When The Anthropologist commissioned a project on Lake Baikal in Siberia using ice and snow, the team successfully produced the largest work of art in the world.

Although Denevan considers the erasure of his work by weather and waves to be simply part of the process, its beauty is preserved on film for us to appreciate. Here’s a closer look at his awe-inspiring epic art.

What aspect of Denevan’s creations do you find most impressive? Should Denevan’s creations be preserved or allowed to disappear? Let us know your opinion in the comments.

Convert Photoshop Layers into CSS – only $19!

We’d just like to give a shout out and a warm THANK YOU to our amazing student callers. They’re revving up for end of fiscal year, so if your phone rings, be sure to give them a moment of your time and help them reach their goals. They’re so excited to talk with you about their beloved UMBC.

Give our student callers a shout out of your own on the UMBC Phonathon Facebook page!