Perseverance usuall pays off, keep it up.

With all due respect to hosted solutions such as Basecamp, our P2P based rich client is truly team-friendly and as soon as we will make available our hosted solution, users will have the best of both (rich and thin clients) worlds.
Give us a go and be sure to send us your feedback.

That’s funny that there’s a requirement for the telecommuter not to show she enjoys doing it! There’s probably a bunch of posturing required from the telecommuter, none of which actually contributes to high productivity.

@Rick: you bring up a ton of good questions and make great points… we will need to keep talking about this.

And, probably a separate piece, what it means for management to support occasional telecommuting. I’ve recently been getting a funny feeling that there is an unspoken agenda going on in these arrangements. For example, sometimes there’s a requirement for the telecommuter not to show that she enjoys doing it!

no, I haven’t seen that. I’ll grab a copy. Here are a couple of other things I wonder about with virtual teams:

– do they only work with virtual companies? In a traditional company why go virtual and how does the interface to the non-virtual teams work?

– transitioning to virtual. I have a client that is delivering a SaaS web app, is 30ish people, but still sends docs around via email and doesn’t use IM…. I’m not trying to move them virtual since it’s a short term contract for me, but the cultural issues surrounding this intrigue me. Why some companies move this way, what starts them down that path, and the inverse… why some companies don’t do this and why not.

- recruiting. If the team is really virtual, you should evaluate talent regionally, nationally, even globally. Yet most companies still post jobs with a physical location, showing a mindset that is decidedly tipped toward the physical. Can you really do this? Or is it just too hard? Is there really an advantage to opening up the talent pool for any but the scarcest skillset?

– non-core geographies. One thing about WWD and most of the buzz around this is that it seems to come from Silicon Valley. But there’s a concentration of tech people there. What does it really mean to be virtual if your compatriots or clients are all within 40 miles? (I realize you’re not there). Isn’t the advantage of moving virtual really bigger for people in non-core places? I’m not speaking of small towns, but places like Denver, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Santa Fe, Cinncinati, etc, etc. Or, for that matter, why not small towns? As long as I have high speed connectivity, reliable VoIP or mobile phone service… why not? But virtual teams in SV seem like cheating – its too easy and SV is too far to one side of the curve.

Those are excellent questions and ones I hope we’ll be able to tackle as we talk more about the human context of web work. Have you seen the book The Starfish and The Spider? It addresses the question of decentralized, flat organizations. It didn’t get enough into how to make that really work for my tastes, but it did at least lay out the trends and various organizations that are operating that way.

I like tech toys too… don’t get me wrong.

On face to face… I’ve often had business relationships with someone that started virtually, we met in person for some reason, and then we continued virtually for years, never meeting again. The single in person meeting, often just for a few hours, added richness to our interactions.

On offsites.. I HATE offsites. They never end up being valuable and usually are an excuse for management to blah blah a lot about ’strategic initiatives’ and such. I’m thinking more of a peer driven get together that the team uses just as get to know each other situation. Which brings up another point – what does a move toward virtual teams imply for how we organize companies? Can we really maintain an hierarchical organization in a virtual world? Do we have managers or are they more coordinators? If the latter, how do we set and move toward common goals? How does this work in a company of 50? 500? 5000? 50,000?