hey, challenge will be that these teams are breathing. sometimes they diminish for years and then at some point join again because time, business, trust and money make them working together again.

the biggest challenge will be to make their outstanding advantages visible. As a dev team builder, I was always struggling to make my dev teams performance visible. especially to benchmark it against industry levels.

means: probably if you can solve, making IT performance of individuals/teams transparent and industry wide comparable (and hence connected to reasonable prices to charge), you might have solved your intention already.

Hey, I fuly agree with what yor saying, having let dev teams for agile projects for more then ten years, all remove attemts we tried were not producing results as good as those of the onsite teams. I assume facing the same walls, being integrated with the full team dynamics, feeling all everyday emotions does integrate all team members much better and enables them to contribute much more efficiently...

Hey, I've been working for the Samwers in Berlin, for US based companies and recently in Lisbon. And yes, the vibrations and creativity of the ciy is still unique and not yet overun by hipster crowds. I believe it will stay like that for quite a while because there is no giant rush of international masses to the city to live and work like in berlin. thats good for staying a creative landmark, thats bad for driving business and startups forward. most stuff here is dominated by local people or international enterprises and as long no international strong interest si driving knowledge and skill into the city it won't change.