Sabbaticals At Ai

We're trying something new (for us) here at Ai - sabbaticals.

For approximately three weeks at a time, we're sending smart people out of the office to do something fantastic of their own volition.  They call the shots on the project scope, the approach, the technology and the working methodology.  We make an enormous effort not to bug them during that time.  When they come back they've built something cool.

We decided to do sabbaticals for the following reasons:

1. We wanted a mechanism to allow self-directed projects.  Normally this is very hard in an agency environment, so we needed to create a mechanism that isolated the people from the mainstream agency.
2. We wanted to create assets that would either be the basis for possible future projects, re-usable components, or open source projects that we could sponsor.
3. We wanted to reward proven performers with an opportunity to work on something especially fun.

We thought carefully about how we could do this.  What we came up with was a program where people could write proposals for their sabbaticals and then work from out of the office in order to fulfill them.  The sabbaticals are about 3 weeks long, and can take almost any form.

The people on sabbatical are mostly offline to the mainstream of Ai.  They check their email only once per day, aren't on IM and only respond to emergency phone calls.  We leave them alone to work.

Our first sabbatical is being taken by two of our senior developers - they are blogging their progress so we can see what's happening in their world every day.  Its also a pretty interesting blog, IMHO.