"I remember working on a number of student groups at Stanford where we might have had meetings once a week for an hour or two where we’d talk about what needed

"I remember working on a number of student groups at Stanford where we might have had meetings once a week for an hour or two where we’d talk about what needed to get done, and then actually did the work on our own..." It sounds like the weekly meetings were in person, which makes sense. When you figure out what to do, and maybe how to do it, face-to-face is very valuable. In software development, there is a lot of this kind of decision-making. Actually implementing what you have decided doesn't require collaboration as much, so then remote is fine.