Hi Chris,

This sounds like a great idea. Another person I talked to last month at Open Agile Northwest is doing the same thing: Arlo Belshee. It doesn't look like he has a weblog, but here's his linked in page [www.linkedin.com/.../0AB]. Here's his c2.com page: [c2.com/.../wiki]. I would contact him. Sounds like a really cool team to exchange with.

This is a rehash of a post from the last blog but I was reminded of it again after reading about Chris

Many Microsoft employees were at the ALT.NET conf in Seattle -- including many of the ones that have

This is a fantastic idea and one that i have been mulling over for about a year now.

Id be very willing to help out if you decide to get the ball rolling on this.

I run a small agile shop (sentia.com.au) in Sydney with 2 partners and we are very open to something like this.

I'm all for this. Like you said, there's logistics involved but I would love to try this out. I think the biggest challenge though (that I'm not convinced it would work fully) is domain knowledge. Taking someone out of their element (say building a financial app) to another place to build say an invoice management system is a bit of a leap. On any project I've ever run we've needed at least a week or two to get familiar with the domain problem space and working with the customer on their needs. I'm not sure an exchange program would work in this manner. However you do say you would airlift yourself in for a week, then I would do the same for you. So really you're spending a week shadowing me and I'm shadowing you. I'm not sure you could actually get "real" work done on a project, but I'm certain there's optimizations in things like how the teams work, tuning the build process, etc. Things like that would be good for this kind of experience and I would welcome a new set of eyes looking at how we do things.

I think this is a phenomenal idea.  I heard about it at #altdotnet but I never got a chance to talk to you about it.  I just pitched the concept to my boss and he *loved* the idea.  I think it's a winner.

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