At the Fall 2008 Tertulia (September 25), Glenn Dirks and Edel Keville reviewed lessons learned about distributed work as a result of Sun's merger with MySQL. MySQL has been featured in Fortune magazine as a virtual organization success story- with 400 employees, in 30 countries, 70% of whom work from home.

NewWOW's Spring '08 Tertulia featured a presentation by Michael Joroff, MIT, Mattias Bergman, Infrastructure Solutions Group, and Anthony Townsend, Institute For The Future. They discussed strategies for Capturing Business in Integrated Workplace and Real Estate Project Markets. We have uploaded their presentation slides and notes of the discussion at: http://www.newwow.net/members/node/809

The January 10th Tertulia was held in Haworth's showroom in San Francisco. Eric Richert presented the conclusions from his recent study on Distributed Work Group Practices. After his presentation, the audience provided a high-level critique of Eric's research. Virtual connections via remote video conference nodes were set up in Helsinki, Calgary, and Holland (MI).

Nineteen members of the New Ways of Working Network “met” with six members of HP’s Halo Research Group for the largest and certainly most distributed Tertulia ever. Thanks to the efforts of Brad Allen of the Halo Group, the Tertulia convened using the HP Halo Collaboration Studio with groups in Palo Alto, Chicago, Corvallis, and Bristol, UK.

The March 2007 San Francisco Bay Tertulia welcomed Eilif Trondsen, Ph.D. from SRI Consulting Business Intelligence. It was our first virtual and collocated Tertulia. The meeting was shared using Bridgit conferencing software provided by SMART Technologies. Eilif Trondsen is program director of two research programs at SRI Consulting (SRIC), a subsidiary of SRI International in Menlo Park, where Eilif has spent the last 20 years working on a variety of projects in international economics and trade, e-commerce and technology-enabled learning.

The December 2006 San Francisco Bay Tertulia welcomed Dr. Terri Griffith, Professor of Management at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University. Her talk was titled Knowledge Transfer and Virtual Work: A Brief History of this Universe. Dr. Griffith reviewed previous studies on presence effects, team structure, the issue of team size, the role of monitoring, and group processes and discussed her recent research on team performance.

When you think of Gallup, you think of surveys. What many do not know is that Gallup makes most of its revenues through consulting—-primarily in human resources. At our September 21 Tertulia, Dean Jones, Associate Partner, reviewed Gallup’s recent results on exploring the relationship between employee engagement and remote work. These results are based on surveys of remote work and build upon its huge database of employee engagement using its well-known Q12 questionnaire, which has a database of over seven million employees.