The Drupal project is run by a distributed community, and more and more business are looking to that model as the workplace and work processes evolve. Lullabot has been a fully distributed company (no central office) since its beginning, over eight years ago. In this session I'm going to talk about why businesses should embrace the distribution model, and how that actually works. I'll provide real-world experiences, both good and bad, from the Lullabot experience.

We'll start by defining what a distributed/remote/virtual company is, and then dive into what problems this solves. Why should we shake up the classic onsite co-located model? Why is this a real advantage to not just service and product providers, but also clients and customers?

With the context set, I'll get into how we have things set up at Lullabot to be successful, share the lessons learned, and talk about the current challenges we face, and our thoughts and plans to address them. We'll take a look at topics like timezones, communication, and culture, as we work our way through the reality of the businesses of the future.

BoF: A follow up discussion to this, and another related session on the Business Track, has been scheduled - https://amsterdam2014.drupal.org/bof/business-track-bof-new-ways-working