Welcome to Fellowstream, Avalon Lab’s online collaboration tool.

Like many projects we hope to help on the site, Fellowstream was born out of a real-world pain point. Up until last November, Jacob and I (founders of Avalon Labs) worked on a website aimed at selling the Torque game engine. The Torque team has a diverse set of personalities: a documentation engineer with a background in game design, a salesman who also works in the accounting department, and a hard-working 2D artist with a passion for GUI design. Some of us worked in Eugene, OR, while others were as far away as England and Australia. And all of us worked together as one cohesive team.

Multi-functional, multi-national teams can be a great asset. Diverse people hold diverse opinions so that the best idea can rise to the top. Best ideas lead to that killer web application, record-breaking charity drive, or most memorable client presentation. However, there are a host of costs to having a diverse team. You need to communicate across different time zones, maybe even oceans. (“Chinese team, prepare for a 3 am meeting again.) Everyone needs to understand each other to motivate and move the project forward. (“All we need are programmers, since they build the product. Why hire marketers”) And, of course, you need to coordinate everyone to a goal so absolutely clear, everyone is aiming at the same target. (“Sorry, I didn’t get that spreadsheet to you, Mr. Critical Resource. I guess that means the project’s delayed another two months.)

Fellowstream is our attempt to alleviate the above problems. We want to empower diverse teams to manage themselves to get work done. We want everyone to understand each other’s contribution to a project, as well as how to smartly manage their own. And we want to give people the tools to track knowledge so it can be easily shared across borders and boundaries.

Will we succeed? Start-ups are risky, but we believe in Fellowstream. If we thought the market had one comprehensive (but not overwhelming) tool to tackle these issues, we would have kept our Torque jobs. We see a need, and so we’re building this thing. What we aren’t doing, though, is building it in a bubble. In the course of alpha and beta work, we hope to hear from you about your experiences working with diverse teams. We hope to use anecdotes you give us to create something you might want us to. We can’t solve problems we don’t know exist. So the hotline is open if you can spare a moment: deborah [AT] fellowstream [DOT] com.

So thanks for coming to the site. We’ll post all sorts of Fellowstream development news here in the blog, as well as tidbits on project management, team building, and entrepreneurship. If you learn a little, great. If we can help you solve a team problem, even better. With conversation and a little elbow grease, we hope to be solving quirky process problems quickly so that you can go back to just “getting stuff done.

And because all work and no play makes for a pretty boring blog, consider this: every good endeavor deserves a theme song. Here’s ours, classic, but also classy and (pun intended) classical:

-Deborah Fike

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