Philosophy

In real life, doing and teaching are so intertwined that we don't really think about it. If I do a thing for you, then you automatically see how I do it, and can maybe do it for yourself next time.

In many online spaces like chat, it's a little more tricksy. We lose some of this doing-teaching'ness. When someone makes an ask in chat, the doer will often go off into the real world (or some other digital space) and performs a task. We don't see how it happened. It's out-of-band, as technical folks might say. We just know they went quiet for awhile, and then came back and told us it was done.

This is unfortunate.

The above is a common problem a tech companies, particularly those involving lots of remote work. They've developed some thinking around this dilemma. The term they use is "ChatOps", short for "chat operations".

The general idea of ChatOps is to do the work to bring the "doing" of important tasks into a chatbot command. From then on, the "doing" can also be "teaching", and we can get back a little of what we lose by going digital! This brings the doing from the real world (an black box as far as chatters are concerned) back onto the critical path that is the chat tool.

And that's really what ChatOps is about: Pulling mission critical actions back into the medium of interaction!