I must be one those guys who hate meetings even more than you do. :-) One thing which I found very useful to keep a team of remote people (let say 10 members) in sync without regular meetings: create a dedicated channel on something like www.jaiku.com per team or per big chunk of work and ask each member of the team to post once/twice a day what #1) they were/are/will be working on and #2) how well/bad it is going and #3) how they feel about it. And forbid posts of anything not related to these "status updates". I was really surprised how easy it was to adopt and how practical it is. For multiple teams I guess you do need some weekly reports which are not that fine grained.