I just arrived in Istanbul to for a meeting with the Assembla.com brain trust – Vitalie, our systems leader, and Sergio, our product leader.  This is notable because we have been working together on this thing for more than two years, and we have never taken the time to travel for a face to face meeting.

A friend from Hawaii IM'd me the other day.... “I spend all day on IM, but for design and architecture, it's not as productive as a war room where everyone sits together.”  He also complained about multiple time zones.  That was ironic because this guy lives on a remote Hawaiian island, in possibly the worst time zone in the world.

He's right though. It is harder to get consensus on big issues of design and architecture without a meeting and a whiteboard.  After two years of basically incremental of the server cluster, the code, and the product strategy, I'd like to make some bigger changes.  So, we will meet.

I'd like to be able to bring in project team members from anywhere in the world, on short notice,

I ran into an interesting challenge finding a location.  An American or EU resident can travel almost anywhere on short notice and get visas.  But what about the folks from Moldova, Ukraine, Pakistan, Vietnam, Argentina?  A small country like Moldova does not have visa arrangements with many countries.  In the worst case, a Moldova resident would have to travel 500 miles to Kiev, in a different country, to pick up a visa, and suffer long delays.  In the George Bush paranoid version of America, it takes two months to get a visa for these guys to visit my home office in Boston.  If I want to systematically arrange these meetings on short notice, we need a better option.

I identified one country, one country in the entire world, that will grant a visa to a presentable person from any country, at the airport.  That country is the tiny Caribbean island of Saint Vincent.  God bless their laid back ways.  I am going to go there soon, check out the Internet access, and look for a resort with a conference room.  I hear there are some nice beaches there, and they have a fiber optic cable.  I think Saint Vincent has a bright future hosting the top brains of the world software business.  If you are from Saint Vincent, please contact me.

But, it's hard to get to Saint Vincent. They don't have an airport for big jets.  You have to go to Barbados or Trinidad and then get another plane ticket on a small airplane.  You can't go through Miami because the Bush administration (did I mention how irritating those guys are) won't give you a transit visa.  Blah blah blah.  We are going to have to get more expertise with the local travel arrangements if we want to go to Saint Vincent.

Our next choice was Istanbul, Turkey.  We have a guy from Moldova, and a guy from Argentina, and a guy from the US, and we can all get visas at the airport for Turkey.  It seems that Turkey likes to welcome visitors from nearby Moldova.  I've never been to Istanbul before, but I can verify that the crossroads of the ancient world has great modern airline service.  You can get there on a variety of airlines, from any other major city with no more than one stop.  It's the off-season there, so we had our choice of hotels.  I'm looking forward to it.

If you are interested in arranging war-room meetings for your globally distributed team, get in touch with me.  We can probably systematize the locations and streamline the travel arrangements.  We can identify friendly locations – Turkey, Saint Vincent, and an Asian location, perhaps Singapore.  We might even think about having a gathering that also includes an un-conference for all of the teams together.