How to use colleagues systems as servers to run Storm

At times when coectivity to the inteet is not very good or unavailable, my colleagues and I are considering using each other's laptops as servers (Storm supervisor nodes), to run our Apache Storm prototype applications.

As of now, we aren't able to ping each other's IP's and I couldn't find a way to make my Mac OS firewall to allow specific IP's. Our IP's begin with 192.168.x.x. The WiFi router's IP is also shown to be 192.168.x.x.

We are a startup, and there's no separate IT team.

Questions:
1. Is this a worthwhile, sensible idea?
2. How do we configure our systems to be able to communicate with each other?