Jon Udell has a write up on some interesting tools being developed to enhance distributed teams - here he's talking about a webcam based system:

Peter's talk focused mainly on Hexagon , a project in ambient video awareness. The idea is that a distributed team of webcam-equipped collaborators monitor one anothers' work environments at home, in the office, on the road using hexagonal windows that tile nicely on a computer display. It's a room-based system, Peter says. Surveillance occurs only team members enter a virtual room, thereby announcing their willingness to see and be seen.

The difficulty, of course, is in getting people to use the system:

Hexagon has been made available to a number of groups. Some used it enthusiastically for a while. But only one group so far has made it a permanent habit: Peter's own research group. As a result, he considers it a failed experiment.

Jon thinks that take up will get easier as time goes by; he may be right. The current lack of usage doesn't surprise me - on our team, we have people who consider IRC (on a private channel) intrusive - and IRC windows are easy enough to iconify or ignore. This is social technology; the social use factors are going to be harder to deal with than the technical ones.

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