[noahtallen]

I work at Automattic, and p2 is (in my mind) _the_ thing that makes our remote-only culture work. We don't really use email that much or other forms of async chat. When synchronous chat (like Slack) gets to be too in-depth, our motto is "p2 or it didn't happen." p2 has the widest visibility in the company -- anyone can search for a p2 post, or cross-post to other teams and divisions. Since many teams are spread across the globe, async conversations are crucial to staying aligned. That's why any kind of in-depth conversation, technical analysis, or decision making happens on p2.

Company culture is also important to making it work, in my mind. p2 is viewed as the source of truth for many conversations (including meeting notes and summaries of slack conversations), which is part of how it works. Additionally, anyone across the company is empowered to post on any p2 to start conversations, ask questions, or kickstart lengthy, technical discussions.

In response to another commenter, Automattic has been using p2 as its main form of async internal communication for years before it even hit 1k employees, so it's not the kind of thing which requires a ton of people to work. Once a few hundred people using it as the main form of async conversation, there is certainly more content than any one person can consume. :)

[vasco]

We use discourse for this. Any type of forum-like product is very effective as a complement to email and instant messages for the reasons you describe. For effective remote I think it's indispensable to have: Instant messaging, email, forum, wiki. Looks like p2 might also serve as a sort of "company directory" thing, which we also use another product for, but I don't get much as value out of that.

[twic]

In 2000 I worked at a company that used an NNTP server for an internal forum. Back then it was common for mail clients to speak NNTP, so you could flip back and forth between correspondence and discussion in the same tool, easily reply to or forward posts by email, etc. That was the smoothest and most productive application of this idea I've seen.

[noahtallen]

I think in my mind, P2 fulfills both email and forum roles internally. But it does have a high level of integration with our other internal tools.

[closeparen]

I’m so jealous.

We have Stack Enterprise, which is permanent and searchable but admits only straightforward Q&A, no discussion.

We have Google Groups, but many employees expect them to be for announcements only, and will reply angrily to threads that are attracting long discussions. They don’t “get” mailing list culture, don’t configure their GMail filters appropriately, and feel that this is the sender’s problem.

Async decision making, such as it is, happens in Google Docs comment threads on proposals. Our auditors actually require us to click the resolve button on those threads once the proposal is accepted, so the discussion is hard to find if you come across the document later.