I've recounted a fair number of negative travel experiences in my life so I thought it was time to share a good one.

I flew US Airways to Barcelona via Philadelphia this week and on the way back US Airways got us into Philadelphia a half hour early.  When I checked the departure board I realized that I could either wait around for 3 hours for my scheduled flight to Denver or I could go see if I could talk United into giving me a seat on their next flight in 45 minutes.  The United rep was extremely friendly inspite of dealing with the usual mad preboarding rush. She called over to US Airways for me (to ask them to release my ticket) and not only did they give me a seat on their flight (on an overbooked flight!) but I got the only middle seat on the airplane that only had one seat next to it.  (The emergency row on the Airbus 360 -361?- has only an aisle and a middle seat with no window seat.)

Thanks, United!

MercuryNews has an article about HP cutting back on telecommuting for its IT workers.  When I saw that Slashdot had picked up the conversation, I eagerly read through the whole conversation (which isn't always easy on Slashdot!), hoping there would be a thread talking about how effective the open source community has been at essentially telecommuting.  However I didn't find one, so here I am writing about it.

The virtual meeting versus face-to-face meeting is a topic that is very important to me.  It's a decision I have to face everyday when planning business travel.  I can't tell you the number of times I spent more time on a plane than in a meeting room because it was important to meet face-to-face, and while I've never regretted the face-to-face meetings, I've spent many a night in a hotel room wondering why it was so important to fly half way around the world and could I have been as effective over the phone and/or email?  I ponder this a lot, especially since I work a lot with the open source community.

The open source community is the best example of virtual teams and telecommuting that I know of.  They:

• never talk on the phone
• rarely meet in person
• have all conversations over email and IRC
• record all decisions in a very public way on email mailing lists that are recorded for all posterity

And they are very effective.  They've created hundreds and thousands of very good, high quality products.  So you can understand why someone used to working with the open source community would find it preposterous that they weren't allowed to telecommute. 

So what's so different about work that people need to meet in person?  I think there's a number of different possibilities and I'm sure I'm missing a few, so feel free to comment.

• Motivation.  People join an open source project because they believe the project is important.  While hopefully most of us have a paying job doing something we believe is important, pay is a factor.  It's likely most of us wouldn't work as hard at our jobs if we weren't getting paid for it.  So maybe people are tempted to slack off if they aren't monitored and their job doesn't lend itself to other forms of measurement.  (Personally, I think if you slack off because you are at home, you're in the wrong job or you've set the wrong goals for yourself.  Most of us also have a strong desire to succeed, get recognition, promotions and raises.)
• Common goals.  This goes along with motivation to a certain extent.  I think it's more important for people in a business to have face-to-face time to come up with common goals and values for the company than it is for an open source project.  One of the main reasons for this is that an open source project usually has a much narrower focus and you likely joined the project because you shared that one common goal.  (The GNOME Foundation is having an interesting discussion right now about a common code of conduct that sounds to me like aligning around common values.)
• Understanding management's goals.  In a business setting you don't get to decide your goals by yourself and then join a project that has similar goals.  Even if you decided on your goals and joined a company with similar goals, you most likely have bosses, boards of directors and shareholders who also have goals you need to meet.
• Influencing others.  In an open source project you may or may not be trying to recruit others or encourage people to use your product.  In a company you (or somebody in the company) are definitely trying to convince people to buy, partner, use, try your product or service.  Even if you aren't the one doing the convincing, you may need to help those that are doing the convincing.  Convincing and influencing are best done in person.  Just look at a couple of long email threads for an example of a slow way to change anyone's mind …

And then I think face-to-face meetings are valuable for all teams, open source or not.  I think a lot more communicating gets done in a face-to-face meeting.  How many times have you typed something in an email that got completely misinterpreted?  Or typed five supporting arguments in an email and the other guy ignored three of them altogether?  Or just never responded at all? 

But I still debate with myself how to weigh a face-to-face meeting versus a telephone call and how to weigh working in the office versus telecommuting.  I do think that companies weighing virtual teams and telecommuting for technical folks would do well to study the way the open source community has been effective.