simple things like updating the board are done at best inconsistently And here you have your real problem. You're applying an office-tool (the board) to a tea

simple things like updating the board are done at best inconsistently And here you have your real problem. You're applying an office-tool (the board) to a team that is not sharing an office. What works much better for distributed teams is to treat them like OSS projects. Do you know any OSS project that uses a "board", or stand up meetings? They use the issue-tracker, pull-requests and chat instead.