The role of face-to-face meetings in technology-supported self-organizing distributed teams

We examine the role of face-to-face meetings in the context of technology-supported self-organizing distributed (or virtual teams), specifically Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development teams. Based on a qualitative inductive analysis of data from interviews and observations at FLOSS conferences, we identify a variety of settings in which developers meet face-to-face, and we point out the activities performed in these settings and the benefits obtained. Contrary to conventional wisdom about distributed teams, FLOSS developers generally do not meet face-to-face until the project is well under way. An additional benefit offace-to-face meetings is time away from a regular job and speed of interaction for certain kinds of tasks.