Back in 1994 when I was recruiting a design director for Star Tribune Online, I got a blizzard of applications from artgeeks from as far away as Australia arguing that if I really believed in the new virtual interactive universe I'd hire them and let them work from home.
Well, I didn't believe that much. When I eventually hired Jamie Hutt from the Halifax Daily News, I forced him to confront the hell that is the U.S. immigration system, haul his family halfway across Canada and south to Minnesota, and set down new roots in Minneapolis, where he continues to crank out great designs today.
In 1994 it seemed obvious that we were far from prepared to have a fully virtual organization.
But 14 years later? We've made some progress. Twitter, Skype, Pownce, Facebook, Ning ... these tools all collapse space. This morning I know that Naka Nathaniel took the buyout from the NYT and that Kevin Anderson in the UK just installed Hardy Heron and that Matthew Buckland is "sniffing paint" in South Africa. And that Ernesto Burden is attending a NewspaperNext workshop while Ken Riddick is not going to be freezing in Minnesota any more.
But despite all this electronic connectivity, when it comes to getting high-quality work done quickly, face to face still wins.
I just stepped out of a darkened meeting room. Half a dozen coders are gathered in a sitebuilding sprint, working on a big Drupal project for one of Morris' non-newspaper businesses.
These guys ordinarily work in cubicles on one of two floors in the Wachovia building in Augusta. It's not as if they're ordinarily separated by six or eight time zones, like the code sprinters who gather at your typical Drupalcon. And it's not as if they're actually talking -- in fact, when I walked in they all had headphones or earbuds.
Yet that proximity that makes for casual, high-bandwidth, intense exchanges seems to really make a difference when it's time to roll.
That and a large continuous supply of drinks and munchables.