I have been a fan off the IETF Draft and RFC process for a long time, and recently started looking at the tools they use for that process. It’s mostly async, naturally. BUT, they do have in-person (virtual this time around) big gatherings every quarter or so. I have no idea what fraction of contributors go to these meetings, but it seems like it would only have to be some small critical mass for the ideas and discussions at those in-person meetings to spread to the broader community.
It’s a model I’m thinking about quite a bit lately given how distracting I’ve been finding a lot of IM/chat apps lately. I’m with you, both forms in moderation, and ideally with the sync stuff concentrated into reasonably-sized reasonably-spaced chunks.
“We need to be async only yada yada. It’s how the Linux kernel is developed”
We do that until our projects are late or we have an outage, then it’s just endless synchronous calls until we get our smug on again.
Just have both in moderation.