Some of us in the Agile community are not fortunate enough as to work within collocated teams all the time (is it most of us already?). Some of us may spend a significant part, or even all, of our effort as part of geographically distributed or dispersed teams. Just one of the myriad difficulties when working in such teams is to replicate the high-touch techniques to increase participation and collaboration in team events, such as planning and retrospectives. Recently plenty of online tools have reached maturity, allowing teams to collaborate in real-time, in simple and effective new ways, that is, closer to the same room experience.
This post describes in detail a real-life example of using Trello to run a retrospective. Please note no technique or tool is universally applicable and these ones are no exception. You will need to check the circumstances and forces influencing your own problem before applying any specific tool to solve it. Expect some story telling ahead.
javierart 