[ScottBurson]

Yeah, it surprises me, whenever I stop to think about it, that this isn't more common by now.

In the group I work in we make heavy use of email, of course, and we do have a few remote people who call in via VOIP to meetings, and sometimes we do screen sharing with them, but that's about as far as it goes. We rarely do video, though all our laptops have webcams. We do have a room with a fancy videoconferencing setup with cameras that focus on the person currently speaking -- it's very nice, but it can only connect to another setup of its kind, and the remote people on my team aren't in the one other location I know of that has such a setup; so it's not nearly as valuable as one would like.

The upshot is, I'm left agreeing with those who say that the most effective collaboration still requires being in the same place. Our remote people are certainly productive and part of the team, but we just don't have the same kind of impromptu conversations that I have with my podmates.

And I wonder what the solution might be. Double Robotics [0] certainly has an interesting take on that question; I don't know anyone who has tried it, though.

[0] http://www.doublerobotics.com/

[rwmj]

I actually work in a completely remote team, in the sense that everyone works remotely (about 50 people). So there is no hierarchy of remote people being second-class team members, as you seem to be describing.

For minute-by-minute chats we use IRC, and that works well. For longer conversations, mailing lists. And we have twice weekly video conferences, and twice yearly physical meet ups.

This works well. I suspect it wouldn't work well if half the people were sitting in a room together and had conversations that were not accessible to the remote workers.

[fsavard2]

Do you think/feel this affects how close-knit a team can be in your company?

From what you say you don't seem to use video much (for one-on-one), so a lot of visual/non-verbal is lost (also there are no non-work regular meetups, e.g. lunches, which I think helps with nurturing a bit of informality).

Also when someone is sitting next to me the threshold for asking a question is rather low, and when working remote I tend to waste more time looking for answers on my own. So my guess is that would affect productivity also.

But still I wonder if there are many of these completely remote largish (> 15, say) companies. It's a very interesting model.

[rwmj]

We're pinging each other on IRC all day, and yes it interrupts your flow just as much as asking someone next to you.

Most open source software development happens this way - IRC, email, git, patch review ... It's a very well-proven model.