I really liked your succinct definition of what a side project is. What are your thoughts/experiences/opinions on team side projects?
Looking back, that served two purposes - one, nothing beats face to face debugging and arguing over the merits of various UX approaches and two, having that weekly meeting was a hard deadline - that pushed each of us to get their stuff done and committed to the repository before the meeting (even if it was 5 min. prior to the meeting).