[Foundation-l] Wikimedia main office

Sun May 28 23:08:13 UTC 2006

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>   
>> --- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>>     
>>> It's more the opposite: I consider in-person meetings of such low value 
>>> that they are not worth going out of my way to attend or send someone to 
>>> attend.  This is not 1930; internet projects for decades now have been 
>>> coordinated solely by means of the internet.
>>>       
>> In person meetings may be of low value to you, but I've found them to be extremely productive
>> compared to email/IRC or even phone. For example, we accomplished more in a single weekend during
>> the January face-to-face meeting of all the board members and most of the officers than we did in
>> the six months prior to that. 
>>     
>
> That is absolutely right.  A LOT can be done face to face which is
> difficult or impossible online.
>   

I think it would be more accurate to say that you (and some others) find 
that to be the case; it's not a universal truth of some sort.

Since the main bulk of my job (academic research) involves collaborating 
with people, I have a pretty decent sample size.  I find that some of my 
collaborations require seeing the other person face-to-face regularly, 
but that with others it makes little to no difference.  The main 
predictor seems to be whether the other person grew up using online 
tools as a normal part of their life, or whether it's a more recent 
retrofit for them.

-Mark