We study the synthesis problem in an asynchronous distributed setting: a finite set of processes interact locally with an uncontrollable environment and communicate with each other by sending signals--actions that are immediately received by the target process. The synthesis problem is to come up with a local strategy for each process such that the resulting behaviours of the system meet a given specification. We consider external specifications over partial orders. External means that specifications only relate input and output actions from and to the environment and not signals exchanged by processes. We also ask for some closure properties of the specification. We present this new setting for studying the distributed synthesis problem, and give decidability results: the non-distributed case, and the subclass of networks where communication happens through a strongly connected graph. We believe that this framework for distributed synthesis yields decidability results for many more architectures.