[makeitdouble]

I think the biggest change with online communication is moving these random encounters into peering into what other teams are doing, or what they're discussing.

For instance we had someone from a completely unrelated team bump into a project thread discussion our firewall rules, and coming up with the proposed changes he was working on and wanting to brainstorm something that could work beyond his team.

You'd need an incredible level of luck to bump into that precise discussion at a water cooler, and it would require a super broad call to get people to gather on that subject the "normal" way. But having most communication in Slack, indexed and accessible cross-team gives incredible opportunities for these kind of interactions that would be just impossible on the previous office culture.