Talli,
while mentioning Groove I majorly thought of the "empowerment" and the feeling that you get while working in such a virtual space.
With empowerment I mean that every member of a virtual space group has a bunch of tools that he can use to communicate. They even have a drawing tool for example. Simple, but could be useful sometimes. And I think it wouldn't be too bad to have some tool for integrated instant communitcation (like Jabber), although most of the time work would be done asynchronously.
Sometimes the feeling to be empowered to many different kinds of integrated communication tools fosters communication.
Virtual open-source communities might not need the small-group-synchronous-communication, but geographically spread people that work together full time on a project could need it. I think it would be nice to slowly and parallely step into this direction, because work will switch a little bit towards remote working in the future.
Does anyone have a working ACES site running that I could check out? As Michael mentioned, we might lean towards the ACES infrastructure and see if there is some clever people on the specification side at MIT Sloan that we could integrate in the thought process 😉
