I work from home as much as I can, but nothing trumps seeing your colleagues face to face. Text can also cause misunderstandings, and apparently no one likes video, at least in my company. I don't like video much either, though.
Searchable conversation history is certainly extremely useful. But today, that's at the cost of needing to regularly go back and redo text discussions from 5 or 15 minutes ago because it becomes clear that we initially hadn't understood each other at all.
So I dream of a Black Mirror style future with an indexed video archive of what my eyes had seen.
In theory. But when you are dealing with a lot of "anti-social" people who have a hard time communicating verbally, or integrating socially, it usually has the opposite affect, ime.
It also means you have to stop what you're doing, sit down and talk to your screen. I like being able to stand up, or go grab something more than a meter away, take a walk or make coffee while I talk to someone. If I vanish from sight, the other parties on the video call don't know if I'm still listening. Heck, even if you can see the person, you don't know if their sound is still working properly, so there's more "can you still hear me?" and "sorry, you cut out for a moment there, can you repeat yourself" sorts of interactions as well.
Video's a pretty bad substitute for real world face-to-face.
That's a deeply abnormal situation. It's like talking to someone while sitting in front of a fun house mirror. Who would subject themselves to such a metaphysical nightmare?
And that's just one of the little uncanny distortions that video conferencing brings.
You might enjoy this excerpt from a novel, which predicts a bad future for video chat:
http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527
Sample:
> It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they’d been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They’d never noticed it before, the delusion — it’s like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her.
And:
> This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn’t just ‘Anchorman’s Bloat,’ that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. In an early and ominous InterLace/G.T.E. focus-group survey that was all but ignored in a storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm, almost 60% of respondents who received visual access to their own faces during videophonic calls specifically used the terms untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like in describing their own visage’s appearance, with a phenomenally ominous 71 % of senior-citizen respondents specifically comparing their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon during the Nixon-Kennedy debates of B.S. 1960.
Search for: "collaborating writing tool", "virtual whiteboard" etc.
The latter are usually part of teleconference tools. Here's from an open source one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MNqiMEblgo
They let you write stuff (even with a pen, on a touch capable display) and have others see what you write (and even write/erase themselves).
What else is missing?
Standing in person before an actual whiteboard? Smelling the marker's ink? Maybe with the advent of cheap VR and smell-o-vision we'll get that too.
VR would a giant help as body language, gesturing and physical size all become much easier to see. Of course, that would require quite a leap forward in VR to accomplish that level of avatar.
You can draw things in different sizes through remote whiteboard, you can add helpful icons and your voice can get louder or quieter for effect.
And you can't effectively draw some things on a tiny monitor screen.
We had one guy who had a nice house with a big dining room, and once a month we'd work from there in one room. Less work got done, but some things that otherwise might never have been done/resolved got handled. Plus it was "kind of" fun.
So unless you're geographically too far from colleagues, there's no reason why you can't have meetups (and I would advocate for them... occasionally).
This is a fallacy. If something really needs resolving, the setting is not relevant.
Sometimes on person describes an annoyance they have, and one of the other people in the room feels motivated to resolve that issue. Or a couple of people start talking about something, and a third person has a new idea that improves thing. There are endless scenarios that can result in something happening that otherwise might never have happened without the meeting.
Granted, I'm pretty bad at self-discipline