One way to get started, try a lunch-and-learn virtually. One person talks/teaches, the others eat. Later, that person may eat and someone else talks. Round robi

One way to get started, try a lunch-and-learn virtually. One person talks/teaches, the others eat. Later, that person may eat and someone else talks. Round robin. Simple, frictionless. The closest analogue to coworking online that I can think of is building your own community. At the most extreme end, Problogger, Zen Habits, or the Art of Noncomformity. At the lower end, smaller niche communities (e.g. knitting, parents who travel with their school-age kids to foreign countries). As a purely anecdotal counterpoint, if you have a distributed team focused on solving one of the hardest problems in technology, state-of-the-art video conferencing technology can erase distance and barriers. > EACH MORNING, WHEN Andrew Fikes sat down at his desk inside Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, he turned on the “VC” link to New York. VC is Google shorthand for video conference. Looking up at the screen on his desk, Fikes could see Wilson Hsieh sitting inside a Google office in Manhattan, and Hsieh could see him. They also ran VC links to a Google office in Kirkland, Washington, near Seattle. Their engineering team spanned three offices in three different parts of the country, but everyone could still chat and brainstorm and troubleshoot without a moment’s delay, and this is how Google built Spanner. “You walk into our cubes, and we’ve got VC on — all the time,” says Fikes, who joined Google in 2001 and now ranks among the company’s distinguished software engineers. “We’ve been doing this for years. It lowers all the barriers to communication that you typically have.” http://www.wired.com/2012/11/google-spanner-time/ http://www.wired.com/2012/11/google-spanner-time/