%0 Journal Article %J IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications %D 2007 %T The role of face-to-face meetings in technology-supported self-organizing distributed teams %A Kevin Crowston %A James Howison %A Masango, Chengetai %A Eseryel, U. Yeliz %K FLOSS %X We examine the role of face-to-face meetings in the context of technology-supported self-organizing distributed or virtual teams, specifically Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development teams. Based on a qualitative inductive analysis of data from interviews and observations at FLOSS conferences, we identify a variety of settings in which developers meet face-to-face, activities performed in these settings and benefits obtained. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, FLOSS developers generally do not meet face-to-face until the project is well under way. An additional benefit of face-to-face meetings is time away from a regular job and speed of interaction for certain kinds of tasks. %B IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications %V 50 %P 185–203 %G eng %R 10.1109/TPC.2007.902654 %> https://crowston.syr.edu/sites/crowston.syr.edu/files/070122.pdf