Global Virtual Collaboration

I have a feeling that the current age could be described as the dawn of the open-source model. It’s not just software that can benefit from a workflow that is distributed, versioned and collaborative. And it’s not only “open” products that benefit from these tools. Here’s a great example of this at work in the latest Mars rover:

Why Designing a Mars Rover Like Curiosity Just Got a Lot Easier

“Global virtual collaboration” really stuck out for me. It’s rather obvious how this enables far more productive engineering teams when put this way. What’s not always obvious is how and where this workflow really should be introduced in other fields.