another way the distributed office can work:

This group i'm in, my wife calls it my "garage band",(it's not really a music group. More like a startup.) We meet once a week and show the work we've been doing over the previous week. We have multiple projects going at any one time, and different people working on those but usually a main project that gets all the time. We'll have something to eat together, sometimes game together, all in all a nice little meeting. That gets work done. Here's the thing, the meeting place can be everywhere and has been anywhere. It's not based in any one place like a regular office. Some places we meet do have desktop computers, but that's because it's usually someone's house. Really, We're all over the place. As a result there are no cubicles. no cubicles. i remember one time we had a meeting in a stairwell at the San Jose Convention center in the middle of FanimeCon. With the low-flying jets booming by directly above us, in a pit in the ground where no one could see. it was cool. it felt like we were on the cusp of something next. Even though we were just standing around talking.

how does the distributed office work?

Well, at the QA job i don't have anymore, We were able to do all our work (as a QA Lead), wirelessly, anywhere. As long as we had two things: our work laptop, and a mobile device of some kind to load versions onto. We'd monitor and "participate" in office life by at least 3 methods: Skype chatrooms, email, and a business-oriented form of Facebook whose name slips my mind at the moment, and some might say also Facebook. all of these just need a wireless connection, that could be anywhere. our QA work itself consisted of: writing emails, reading emails, leading a group of off-site testers over Skype, finding and writing up bugs in the game. Our bosses tried to keep us in the office through carrot and stick. There were delicious lunches every day. There were also weekly "all hands meetings" where an increasing number of us crowded into the main office. But i think the office wanted to be distributed. I'd argue that the place i worked was a distributed office even as it tried to be a regular office. A transitional form.

qualified?

Why am i qualified to write about the distributed office? Well, right now i'm in a group that's one for sure. And my own office job that i don't have anymore really tried to be one. It's like the technology wanted us to be distributed, but we needed to be together for... what? Old time's sake? Food and meetings mostly. All of our actual work was able to be done at home, or anywhere really. Anywhere with a decent wireless connection. I hope to make this sound like the science fiction it is.