EtherPad

With EtherPad, anyone in a meeting can contribute to the notes, or watch them as they're typed. This means more efficient meetings, more useful notes, and fewer misunderstandings.

EtherPad literally keeps everyone on the same page.

Here at the office, we have a planning meeting every Monday to determine goals and priorities for the week. Sitting in front of our computers, we use EtherPad to collect and organize the tasks under discussion, resulting in a document we can refer to for the rest of the week.

We start by opening an EtherPad pad and brainstorming tasks for the week: features, important bug fixes, performance improvements, and any company business.

Next, we take our pad of ideas and start prioritizing. As we discuss the importance of different tasks, we collaboratively move them around the document until we all agree.

Finally, we discuss who will be assigned each task, and fill in a name next to each one.

We previously used a whiteboard for this process, and we find EtherPad to be a vast improvement. Not only can we all participate comfortably without passing markers around, but at the end of the meeting we immediately have a clean, legible document that we can access from anywhere.

Using EtherPad in place of a whiteboard is a great way to coordinate local and remote participants in a meeting. In a very real way, it makes communication more efficient and effective by allowing people to use their hands and eyes as well as their mouth and ears.

For phone calls in general, EtherPad serves as both a communication channel and a shared record, keeping everyone in sync.

Effective writing often means sweating the small stuff. For marketing copy, prose that goes on your company's home page, press releases, or emails sent to the board of directors, drafts are edited and finalized with the help of many people on the team.

EtherPad streamlines the wordsmithing process like never before. Previously, reaching agreement meant sending multiple copies of documents by email. With EtherPad, text can quickly be finalized by having all the stakeholders come to the same pad, make their edits, and collectively sign off on the resulting document.

For example, EtherPad was used to edit the final draft of this very web page.

Two eyes looking at code simultaneously means catching more bugs and generating more new ideas. EtherPad lets programmers collaborate on code in realtime for authoring, refactoring, or debugging.

There is an entire practice called Pair Programming which advocates this. Traditionally paired programming required 1 person to be the "driver" and another to be the "reviewer", and for both to be seated at the same physical keyboard. With EtherPad, pairs (or teams of more) can program regardless of their geographic location, and they can take turns "driving".

Phone screening is a more cost-effective way to weed through engineering applicants than bringing them on-site for job interviews, but the main disadvantage is that it's hard to assess a candidate's coding ability without actually seeing them write code.

EtherPad lets you watch a candidate write code during a phone screen for the first time.