What is Osmotic Communication?
Osmotic communication (Alistair Cockburn, Crystal) is the useful information team members absorb from background conversations in a shared space — overhearing without participating, then chiming in exactly when their knowledge matters. It's a major hidden benefit of colocation and small teams.
Remote teams lose it entirely, which is why they compensate deliberately: open team channels over private DMs, so the "overhearable" layer exists in text.
Worked example
Two developers debate an API timeout at their desks. The tester two seats away, half-listening, turns around: "that endpoint throttles after 100 calls — hit that last month." Fifteen seconds of osmosis saves two days of debugging. On the same team's remote days, that conversation happens in a public channel for exactly this reason.