Why a remote team drifts apart
In an office nobody reports how they are. You notice it. Someone arrives late and quiet, someone else is laughing at the coffee machine, and by ten o'clock you have a rough sense of the day without a single question being asked. None of that crosses a network. What crosses is what people choose to send, and the person having the worst week usually sends the least.
The tools meant to fill the gap each fail in their own way. A chat status is set once and forgotten, so a green dot and "focusing" can sit there for a month. A camera-on check-in turns how you are into something you perform in front of colleagues, so everyone is fine. An icebreaker adds a meeting to a team that already has too many. And a virtual office with avatars asks people to spend the day inside another app, which is the opposite of the ambient awareness an office gave for free.
What was lost was never conversation. It was a background sense of the room, available at a glance, costing nobody anything.
What weathr does
The team is a channel. Somebody creates it and lets the team in. Each person holds one mood, the same in every group they belong to, so there is nothing separate to maintain for work.
Saying how you are is one tap. One of five symbols (sun, sun and cloud, cloud, rain, storm) at one of four levels. It is an async check-in: no camera, no sentence, no meeting, and nobody has to be online at the same time. Casts are blind by default, which hides who and never the mood.
A mood stands until it changes. There is no daily form to fill in. What you said on Monday still counts on Thursday, and as it ages the sky draws the team's signal weaker, so a team that has gone quiet reads as quiet rather than as happy. This is where it parts from a stale status: the staleness is shown.
The team becomes weather. Every half hour weathr takes the proportion of everyone's moods and draws it as a sky with a temperature and a trend. Five people are a real reading. Nobody's mood weighs more than anybody else's, including whoever owns the channel.
It keeps a timeline. Hours, days and weeks are sealed and never rewritten, so "it has been raining since the release" is something the team can see rather than argue about.
It stops moving when you stop saying. A cast keeps the sky live for between an hour and a day. Then it freezes and asks how you are. There is no seat that only watches, a manager's included, which keeps weathr from turning into a monitoring screen. Why a glance beats an open feed is argued in better than a black screen.
What it doesn't do
weathr is not a virtual office, with or without video, and it is not a Gather alternative in that sense. There are no avatars, no rooms to walk into, no video and no voice. It tells you that the team is stormy, not why, and the answer to a storm is still a conversation. It has no Slack or Microsoft Teams app, no admin console and no single sign-on, and a team is one channel today, with no structure of departments above it. It produces no reports, exports or per-person history, by design. And in a team of three, a blind cast hides very little.
Compared with what teams usually try
| Chat status | Camera-on check-in | Virtual office | weathr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Effort for each person | Remember to update it | A meeting | Stay logged in all day | One tap |
| Shows when it is out of date | No | Not applicable | No | Yes, as a weaker signal |
| Answer given in front of colleagues | Yes | Yes | Yes | Blind by default |
| Reading the whole team | Scan every name | Sit through it | Walk around | A glance |
| Needs a camera or an avatar | No | A camera | An avatar | No |
| Lives inside Slack or Teams | Yes | Usually | No | No |
Questions
How do you keep a remote team connected without more meetings?
Give the team something it can read without gathering. In weathr each person taps one of five weather symbols for how they are, and the team channel draws everyone together as a sky that updates every half hour. Nobody has to turn a camera on or join a call to see it.
Is weathr a virtual office like Gather?
No. There are no avatars, rooms, video or voice. weathr shows how the team is, not where people are sitting, and it is meant to be glanced at rather than inhabited.
Can a manager see each person's mood?
Only what everyone else can see. A public cast shows a name with its mood; a blind cast shows the mood without the name. There is no manager's dashboard, report or per-person history. In a team of three or four, blind hides less, and that is worth saying out loud.
Does weathr integrate with Slack or Microsoft Teams?
Not today. weathr runs on its own in any browser, and an Android app with a home-screen widget is being built. There is no Slack or Teams app and no admin console yet.