When I am working together with people on-line, there is a kind of efficiency we can achieve that is different from in-person efficiency. For example, if we are all working togther on developing a software package, on-line tools let us work in parallel in very nice ways.
In person the process tends to be different. We are (rightly) focusing mainly on each other, rather than on our screens. So we are communicating better as people, but we aren’t quite tracking each others’ work with the same focus.
I wonder whether there might be a way to get the best of both worlds. Perhaps some sort of collaborative software tools that privilege both the power of being together in person and the efficiency of being “plugged in” to our respective views of a shared software project.
This might be one of those situations that would benefit from future higher quality augmented reality.