I thought agile was supposed to be a preference for useful flexibility, rather than a fixed set of practices? The canonical remote collaboration tools are IRC

I thought agile was supposed to be a preference for useful flexibility, rather than a fixed set of practices? The canonical remote collaboration tools are IRC and mailing lists. There are various sites that allow some sort of remote pair programming, I'm not sure if it's just screen sharing plus audio chat or if there's more structure to it. At work we have conference calls, often with presenter-to-group screen sharing. (We use cisco webex, does anyone know an open alternative?) For larger meetings we've been experimenting with videoconferencing between meeting rooms in different cities. Since being on video is annoying, maybe this would be an alternative to stand-up meetings? (I'm pretty sure whatever we use for this is proprietary as well, what's a good open alternative?) The point of many Agile practices is to increase communication. How can you best capture the ease of walking 2 cubes over to have a chat with your coworker? If everyone's remote you don't have as good a natural indication of how busy or available everyone is. If you build something to provide that indication, the boss can monitor it and it will stop working right. If people are talking in the next cube over, I can ignore it or jump in if I hear something interesting or that I can help with. But in some cases the discussions are things that wouldn't be discussed where certain other people might be able to overhear. How do you capture when communications should be available to some part of the group without interrupting them (so no acknowledgement needed from the recipient), but hidden from some other part of the group? And without requiring the people initiating the communications to explicitly bother to set this up? This is naturally baked in to physical-world interactions, is it useful enough to try to duplicate? I've heard suggestions of a "virtual office" for voice chat, where you have a grid layout with cubes or conference rooms or whatnot and people have locations on that grid and can hear eachother (or not) based on how close they are. Is there anything that actually does this? Is it useful (or if it doesn't exist, would it be useful to have or is it just gimmicky)? From what I understand, electronic text-based communications tend to be archived for a long time for legal reasons. How far does this apply to voice communications, and does VoIP vs telephones make a difference? How far does this affect what is or isn't said? I know at work, some conversations only happen in person or over the phone rather than IM or email. How important is this effect, and how does it impact getting work done?