As a follow up to my previous blog entry on Live Search and Mashups, It looks like they've uploaded snippets of the January Mashup Day to on10. You can also find snippets of the first Search Mashup Day here. So the other day I was thinking it would be great to get your own dev team involved in this. There are companies that have their teams go on retreats (i.e. Marketing/Sales) or participate in other activities (sports) for team building experiences, etc. But for developers, this would be a great opportunity and technical setting to bring out both the creativity and passion in your teammates. It would offer something that is removed from your daily tasks. I suppose Google may have something in allocating 20% time for side projects (although, I'm not sure if they enforce group/teamwork for these projects); but their intent is also different. Their hope is that one of these projects will lay the groundwork for the next killer app, whereas this exercise would be primarily aimed at learning and seeing your teammates from a different light. I digress...
Anyway, in the video, Jon Pincus briefly mentions his BillG Review Experience in passing. There are quite a lot of documented stories on BillG Reviews (i.e. Joel On Software describes his experiences in the early 90s). Jon is the brainchild behind these Mashup Days along with volunteers. You can also find his blog on Live Spaces at: http://adastra-experience.spaces.live.com/. And if you wanted to get a bit more insight into his BillG Review Experience, he posted an entry back in December regarding this.