On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 4:10 AM, Kerry Raymond <k.raymond(a)qut.edu.au> wrote:
F2F builds trust in a way that seems harder to achieve
by electronic means. I find if distributed teams initially meet in person (including
eating and drinking together), subsequent electronic communication will work a lot better
than if there wasn't initial F2F. I am not sure I can explain it but it's
definitely been my observation.
+1
I'm sure everyone can talk about conference "success stories" as well
as tales of terrible time-wasters.
One success story for me: I met someone who turned out to be a future
collaborator at Wikimania in Gdansk. My experiences at the co-located
WikiSym did not seem to have the same staying power. The thing is, it
would be rather hard to know this in advance. My "academic"
contribution to WikiSym is what opened the door to me traveling there
in the first place. Also, the only reason he and I ended up
collaborating was because we later met online, again by chance, and
already knew about one another's work and motivations.
The moral, I think, is to look for principles that increase the
chances of serendipity. Things like OpenSpace try to do that, but I
think are less powerful than "the real thing".
It seems to me that the same sort of thoughts (and criteria) should
apply to building (and assessing) research / discourse communities
online. YES there are many times when I've met collaborators first
online. But I nearly always go to visit the strongest collaborators
in person at some point!