Last night I had dinner with Matt Mullenweg, Alex Kirk, Dean Royal, Trevor Montgomery, and Sarah Semark. Matt at some point asked if any of us had met each other previously. While a few had met earlier in the Grand Meetup, none of us had met each other before this week.
“Good! The script is working,” he said.
We have an internal profile system where everyone shares the little details about themselves. One tool within that is called “Meetamattician” where you can check off which fellow Automatticians you’ve actually met in person. Not every company would need a page like this, but with us it’s kind of fun because remote work means you only meet your colleagues face-to-face on rare occasions.
Apparently, at some point before the Grand Meetup the data from Meetamattician was used to created the dinner seatings so that people could meet others whom they’d not met. It’s no mistake that Matt got seated along with a table of folks attending their first Grand Meetup. It’s really these little bits of data that remind me how well Automattic is setup to make the use of the data we have. If we know folks want to meet each other and we have the data to help us nudge that along why wouldn’t we make the seating charts based off who hasn’t met whom?
Haha awesome!