Yesterday I was part of of a Skype conference call between our development team, one of whom was at home sick and a developer in the states. We met up in campfire first, and then got the skype call going. During the call we discussed a powerpoint slide show that was posted into the campfire chat and then a few web links also shared through the chat.

Even though we sit next to each other in the office, our development team has been communicating mostly through campfire lately because we can just cut and paste code and links to each other and still be working on our code in another window and even listening to music. We don't need to interupt each other when we are trying to concentrate on solving a problem - we can zone in and out of the group chatroom easily.

We have also had a couple of lurkers from other development groups who collaborate with us a bit on the Fez code. It has been good to have the occasional outside comments on what we're doing and I think it has been helpful for them to know what kinds of bleeding edge development we're doing.

Fairly early on, we told our manager about the chatroom and invited him in too. I was not sure whether allowing our mangers into the chatroom would be a vibe killer but it has worked out quite well. Obviously this depends greatly on the kind of management you have but in our case I think it has served in two ways - our manager can get that warm fuzzy feeling of seeing the team actually getting things done (tm). For some of the other staff here who are supporting our actual users, it has meant that at least one of us is paying attention to answer questions (usually) while the others of us might be in full-code-imersion mode. So there is the counterintuitive result of less interruptions.