I participated in a fascinating discussion forum this morning - Laura Hill and Bernard Horan (both of Sun) organized a "fishbowl" on the topic of distributed workplaces. That works like this - there were 7 chairs arranged in a circle in the center of the room, with a large ring of chairs around them. There were 6 of us in that center ring, and discussion kicked off with our opening statements on distributed working (which we had submitted previously). From there, it was an open discussion under the following ground rules:

• Only people in the bowl could talk (fish)
• People on the outside could get up and enter the bowl at any time
• There always had to be at least one open chair in the center

What that means is that people are entering and leaving the bowl regularly. We got participation from nearly the entire audience, and the conversation ranged over a lot of stuff: whether remote working is desirable, whether it works for anyone, how you can manage agile development, how you do communication.

The talking really focused on communication - both on tools (IM, NetMeeting, IRC, phone), and on the practice - how often, ad-hoc or planned, how often you need face to face meetings, that sort of thing. It was a good time, and a good discussion. In know that Laura and Bernard were taking notes and recording the session, so if any of that comes online, I'll link to it.