<aside> 🔭 Swingby's mission is to create space for informal conversations and spontaneous collaboration between remote teams, as if they were working in the same room.

</aside>

Swingby was created from simple frustration: the lack of spontaneous conversation when working remotely.

The current situation forces many of us to work remotely – and maintaining a good team spirit and cohesion can be difficult, especially for teams that are not used to work this way.

We tried a lot of things to stay close and agreed that video conferencing was a good way to recreate what we had when working in the same office – so we've started by using Zoom to create a recurring "morning coffee" meeting. Not mandatory meeting, but always here for anyone to drop by and say hi.

This was great, but it was only a one-time-in-day gathering and then it was radio silence...

That's when we started thinking about a way for those gathering to be more present in our day to day and spontaneous – we were picturing people just moving around in the office and starting talking to each other... but not in real life.

Three confined weekends later – Swingby was live.

It's fairly easy to use – you can create or join a channel, and start spontaneous discussions with the people in it.

And if you don't feel like talking – silence is good as well.

What's important is to be always connected so that the effort to speak your mind is minimal. You can just hang in a channel with your team and only activate the microphone and camera when you want to share a thought – this helped us feel closer as if we were working on the same table.

To face the current COVID-19 crisis and the lockdown of so many cities now, we have released a public space for Swingby – free for everyone and forever. No credit card nor email required.

We currently only support desktop applications for Mac – but we are working hard to bring Swingby to other platforms.