Prior to the use of information technology and communications networks, groups that wanted to work together needed to work physically together in the same location. This fact held even when I started my career.

When I worked in the defence industry in the late 80’s all work happened either in-person or over the phone. When we got some PCs, we put them all in a lab, and used them to print status reports that we would pass around. Most of my working day involved hand-written documents and drawings that I would either hand-carry, or intraoffice mail them around in those manilla envelopes with holes in them.

When I went to graduate school, we used e-mail and e-mail lists. I attended research groups in person, and most significant work, such as my thesis, were reviewed and marked-up in paper form. Still, a significant amount of less-formal work happened over e-mail. My research group was spread across the campus, so e-mail was quicker than walking.

At the same time, largely as a diversion, I would spend part of my day on Usenet newsgroups, mainly following my musical interests. Usenet groups were some of the first virtual communities. While much of the interaction was personal leisure time for me, many participants at that time crossed the boundary into professional work, using these groups as resources for collaboration.

By the late 90’s, dynamic web techology allowed virtual communities to move to the web with support for more forms of content. While many of these communities had more of a culture and leisure focus, and were seen as a marketing tool, increasingly these communities became resources for professionals. I worked in and internet start-up that hoped to build support for virtual communities as a marketing/distribution vehicle. We explored self-organizing communities driven by common interest, called mybytes.com similar to Yahoo groups. We aquired a company that had developed a social networking site, called Six Degrees, very similar to Linked-in and Facebook in its their current form,

Use of these resources within the enterprise was less prevelant, largely over proprietary and confidentiality concerns. Enterprise collaboration and workgroup software grew to fill this walled garden within corporations, which increasingly needed support for remote work to support national and global efforts. VPNs extended the garden worldwide while insulating the enterprise from the internet at large.

This tension between the intranet and internet was more than a technical and business problem, it was highlighted cultural issues around proprietary corporate culture. Due to other forces as well as the rise of the internet, workers have become less tied to corporations, and more tied to interest based, or professional communities not limited to corporate or geographical boundaries.

As things now stand, the physical corporate office has little to offer workers who are now closer tied to virtual communities than any particular corporate sponsor. Here in the United States, globalization has put pressure on workers to behave more as free lance professionals, as large and small corporations increasingly outsourced and move work to remote locations.

This has made the management of remote work a primary concern for both corporations and free-lancers.