My observation is based on Indian perspective but it may apply to other countries as well.
Numerous drupalists from western countries have development partners in India but rarely do they meetup with their outsourcing partners in India. Even when they travel to India for fun, they may not even meetup/connect with their development partner. The outcome is the outsourcing relationship is short-lived.
If you connect to people in other countries irrespective of business relationship, I feel it creates more fun and makes you a more seasoned person later in life. I have been handling hundreds of clients from different countries since 1996 and based on that, I feel a cross border business relationship/friendship fails because of the following reasons:
1) People from different countries evolve in a relationship in different ways and at different speeds.
2) Most small businesses(both buyers and sellers) around the world look for quick/short-term success via online relationship.
I think many people who overcame this were able to scale up from small to big!
Even from open source perspectives, I find some of the best contrib modules are being abandoned every year due to maintainers/developers becoming busy later on life. If better personal connections developed with more travels could bring in more youngsters to open source initiatives, I think we would be able to provide required growth momentum to contrib modules.
-Parameshwar Babu
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