You might do well to find someone who is active in OSS communities, ideally, someone who has contributed code. This allows you to see the quality of their work

You might do well to find someone who is active in OSS communities, ideally, someone who has contributed code. This allows you to see the quality of their work and communication skills, and (in my opinion) it gives some indication of their willingness to work remotely and still "get things done". I work for Mozilla, and I am a full time remote employee. When I was hired, I came in to the office to work for two weeks, and now, I typically visit the office at least once a quarter for at least a week. For a startup on a tight budget, that much travel might be difficult to handle. I would also encourage you to find a place to live in IRC (either host your own private server or set up a channel on freenode or something). IRC brings a sense of closeness to local and remote resources. If people stay in the channel and use it, there is also a good opportunity for "water cooler chat". When I work in an office, I listen to people casually talking around me. If they are talking about something interesting or something I might have some useful comments about, I speak up. If people in your team live in IRC, then they will use that medium as a place to ask those little one off questions that normally happen either in the hallway, snack-room, or via IM. If it happens in IRC, you can easily capture that knowledge for future use, and other people can see the conversation and might have something useful to say about it. I also encourage the use of an IRC "backchannel" if you have meetings that include remote resources. If you want to see an example of a meeting like that, tune in to http://air.mozilla.com http://air.mozilla.com and irc://irc.mozilla.org #staffmeeting on Mondays at 1PM PST.