One of the twelve principles behind the Agile Manfiesto states:

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Over the last 12+ months, practically the entire software developing world has done an experiment in non-face-to-face communication. And by many accounts, the result of this experiment has been a demonstration that remote works just fine.

Does this mean the authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development were wrong?

Maybe.

One day I hope to ask some of the authors to clarify that principle, but I expect they were largely rejecting an alternative mode of communication: Conveying information by relay. That is, one group of people creating some list of reqiuremens, then handing them off to some sort of Project Manager, who then takes them to the developers.

In 2001 when the Agile manifesto was written, the tools for realistic remote and async communication were in their infancy. Many people were still using Dial-Up Internet access, and even those with broadband didn’t have quality tools for voide or video calling online, so online communication was mostly via text-based mediums such as email and IRC. Even Wikipedia was brand new then, so the idea of collaborating via wiki was pretty new.