Contrary to appearances and what some would have you believe, we live in a rather conservative world.Since the industrial revolution, the how of the working life of most of us hasn't really changed. We get up, we travel to work at the company's site or occasionally at some other site, we work usually in a more-or-less communal setting all day, we travel home, we take what entertainment and news we're offered through a controlled and limited system, we go to sleep, rinse and repeat tomorrow.It's tempting to liken the rattle of keys as we type to the rattle of the spindles through the looms in those "dark, Satanic mills" and whilst that's stretching things a bit too far, it's not entirely unfair either.Now, granted, the nature of the work we do has changed: most of us type now, or scan barcodes or similar, whilst 100 years ago the vast majority did manual work. We notionally have equal rites regardless of gender, ethnicity etc. and whilst I don't think anyone actually believes we're there yet, we're a lot closer than we were 100 years, or even 40 years ago. Some countries have universal health care, most countries have some form of legislation to protect the work-force so children sweeping chimneys and dying at 25 of skin cancer is a distant memory in the first world at least.The question is really why do we still work, and get entertained, that way?I work, as I blog, happily with a variety of people from around the world. I've never met Doug from Ohio, nor Beth from Connecticut, not even Graham from Liverpool who lives close enough for me to have conveniently met him, but I have worked successfully and happily with all three. I've done support work with a student currently living in South Wales for 2.5 years and never met her - in that time I've also done support work face-to-face, and some contracting work face-to-face as well. That doesn't mostly get blogged about because it usually doesn't tie in to what I largely blog about here. I've knowingly met two Second Life friends in the flesh, and although we've occasionally helped each other out with problems, we've never really worked together.Now, you might claim my situation is unusual, very unusual even. But just stop and ask yourself how much of what you do couldn't be done from home over a good internet connection? I rather suspect the answer is quite a lot of it. Play with data - filling in electronic forms, filing etc? You can do that from home. Spend a lot of time in meetings and travelling between them? Second Life, Skype etc. could fill a big chunk of your needs. Are you a coder? Do you really need to travel into the office to do that every day? The list of jobs that you could do from home is quite long, if you were allowed.This won't suit everyone, not even everyone for all situations: whilst we will insist on going out to shop, we need people to actually load the shelves, deliver the goods and the like. Even if we shop over the internet (you mean you've never bought from Amazon?!) you still need someone to pick your books off the shelf, put them in a box and into the post, and you need the delivery people to do the deliveries. There are, even in my jaundiced view of meetings and their utility, meetings that are successful and part of that success is based on the personal interactions, the "chemistry" of face-to-face. If you're going to demonstrate the latest immersive experience (unless it's an immersive virtual environment such as good ones in Second Life) then I probably need to be there to be immersed: I remember a movie that had smell cards for example. I want to watch that in the cinema, with the card and to see how well (or badly given it only happened once) it works. However, there are, in my opinion, far more meetings that aren't useful or productive. But if you save yourself the time, costs and energy of travelling to those bad meetings can you feel better about the time you do waste in them? If you don't do meetings regularly but can (if allowed) work from home, what do you, and the others gain?Let's say half the workforce (and I think the proportion would be much higher) stays at home on any given day. Traffic congestion falls, with a bit of juggling office buildings get smaller and use less power, water etc. How long each day you spend travelling to and from work? You reclaim all that time to do other things, and you reclaim the frustrations of all that travel too. Because the roads are less congested you also help those who must travel too.The bosses tend to throw up their hands and say "OMG, the workforce will never work like that! How do we supervise them?" Actually, I want to know, how do you judge if your workforce is working well anyway? Most bosses don't expect their staff to work in absolute silence and isolation. They may have some idea of how much people are goofing off because they can see them, but they largely use other metrics - number of tasks successfully completed in a day for example - to determine whether you're working suitably hard or not. If your office-based work means you complete 50 tasks per day, and you work from home and achieve those 50 tasks per day, does it matter if that takes you 1 hour or 10? Not, in most circumstances, to your boss I bet. If it's critical that everything is done by 3pm for some reason, then they essentially trust you in the office to do that, why can't they trust you at home? They can fairly quickly see that you're not making it on a regular basis and take steps to address that after all. There is a movement around for a "progress log" that is filled in daily - it's not only Linden Lab that uses this, although they famously do too. Can't you fill in your log and email it to your boss? Or even make a private blog that you boss reads via RSS?Surely both sides win with this? Some will protest that piecework isn't a great way to work, and that's often true - but the majority of good tools (those with a decent measure of outcomes rather than an impression) you use to judge if people are working well can be adapted to work for people you can't see just as well.Entertainment is just as bad. Living in the UK I get the range of UK-made TV. Some are as excellent. Some strike me as terrible. Some are in the middle. I also get a selection of TV from other countries: mostly the US, but also Australia and occasionally India, New Zealand etc. Other people choose for me, if I'm good and limit myself to what's on offer on the TV. They both limit and control what I can see.Of course some people, with a fine disregard for copyright law, record their TV and put it up as bit-torrents and the like so I can, in theory, download it and watch it at my convenience. In practise I have only done this once - I like TV on a bigger screen than my monitor and sitting further away from it is the main reason though, rather than any automatic respect for the law. The only time I did this was when a TV station decided I didn't really want to see Season 5 of a show that I loved. It wasn't a great show, it probably deserved to be axed from the schedules, but regardless of its merits or otherwise, I enjoyed it. They wouldn't let me watch it, so I downloaded and watched it anyway. I don't know how much the TV companies take per person per show, from those companies that do make a profit, but I'd be surprised if it was as much as US$1. I'd be surprised if it was much less than US$0.01 per person though. Obviously, on commercial TV, those takings are advertising revenue. Profits will be lower, because you have to pay all those pesky actors, crew etc. too naturally. But, let's say they take $1/person. If they let me choose to access, quite legally, their material for $1.10 (to cover the costs of the storage space, access charges, bandwidth etc.) or even the $1.99 that the Apple Store charges why not? I have channels on my cable TV that I never watch. I have a couple that I watch for one or two shows and that's it. And then I have some favourites that I watch often. If they give me proper control and choice, I will have (thank you very much) a small number of channels I will happily pay a monthly fee to (as I already do with my cable subscription), on the basis that I watch quite a lot of their shows. I will have an "Eloise's On Demand" channel if you like - where I essentially buy the shows piecemeal from my supplier, so I can watch CSI the day after its US broadcast, or even simultaneously with its US broadcast assuming I make the decision that paying $24.20 (that's 22 X $1.10 if you're not keeping up) for rapid CSI Season 9 is worth it. (I might not mind: in the UK I can see CSI week-by-week continuously without the annoying breaks in the schedule that the US market has to suffer.) Although I rather plucked the $1 value from thin air, with some idea of the $1.99 at the Apple Store, Off the Shelf News costs making ER and estimates around $0.80 per viewer as the revenue from advertising.I can keep going: although the slogan "Information wants to be free" is nonsense at one level - information has no wants after all - whatever your stance on "hippy techie wiki economics" (to quote one of the more vocal detractors that I know), information is becoming free. Google as a search engine (rather than via knol) and wikipedia are gradually filling up the free information market. Google makes its money via advertising, wikipedia via donations, but they are both essentially free at the point of demand. Last week I was invigilating an exam and reading a book whilst the students sweated away (at least mentally). The book I was reading had a number of unusual words I wanted to look up, so out with the iPhone and off to Google. A click later and I was at Merriam-Webster's online dictionary which has an iPhone style sheet to make it easy to use. Wonderful! Three words later it's saying I've used my commitment-free allocation, and do I want to sign up for the trial of their paying service? No! Back to google, and off to dictionary.com - where the information is available and free thank you. It's not as convenient - I have to scroll past the sponsor's message, then zoom the screen in, but for the odd word every now and again, free and taking a couple of extra seconds to find the answer is just fine thanks. Open Notebook Science is starting to chip away at the monopoly of the paid, peer-reviewed journal. It's not there yet, but the information is starting to be free that way. (Actually, I think both system have merits, and what we need is people using both, and the journals changing so they will take material a paper for peer-review that has been included in the open notebook format. There is merit to both reading the entire lab-book if you are interested, certainly to find "failing" routes, as well as reading a well-written paper or review.) What is quite scary is how quickly material from a peer-reviewed journal appears on wikipedia. A few months ago I was reading a paper in Nature, which had been on the shelves for a few hours at the time. There was some background that they referred to in the paper where I was a little hazy, so off to wikipedia... Imagine my surprise when I not only found the information I was after (not that surprising) but found that the page on wikipedia had been updated on the basis of the paper that I was currently reading!And I'm deliberately avoiding discussing the revolutions in education - that could form a 10,000 word rant all on it's own, and at 2,000 words this is quite long enough!The precursors for the information revolution are there. The questions remain though: How long will it take before the revolution really hits? How rough will it be when it does come (remember the Luddites? The industrial revolution certainly hurt some)? Does burying our head in the sand about this as about so many uncomfortable issues make any kind of sense?
dimanche 3 mai 2009
the information revolution
Contrary to appearances and what some would have you believe, we live in a rather conservative world.Since the industrial revolution, the how of the working life of most of us hasn't really changed. We get up, we travel to work at the company's site or occasionally at some other site, we work usually in a more-or-less communal setting all day, we travel home, we take what entertainment and news we're offered through a controlled and limited system, we go to sleep, rinse and repeat tomorrow.It's tempting to liken the rattle of keys as we type to the rattle of the spindles through the looms in those "dark, Satanic mills" and whilst that's stretching things a bit too far, it's not entirely unfair either.Now, granted, the nature of the work we do has changed: most of us type now, or scan barcodes or similar, whilst 100 years ago the vast majority did manual work. We notionally have equal rites regardless of gender, ethnicity etc. and whilst I don't think anyone actually believes we're there yet, we're a lot closer than we were 100 years, or even 40 years ago. Some countries have universal health care, most countries have some form of legislation to protect the work-force so children sweeping chimneys and dying at 25 of skin cancer is a distant memory in the first world at least.The question is really why do we still work, and get entertained, that way?I work, as I blog, happily with a variety of people from around the world. I've never met Doug from Ohio, nor Beth from Connecticut, not even Graham from Liverpool who lives close enough for me to have conveniently met him, but I have worked successfully and happily with all three. I've done support work with a student currently living in South Wales for 2.5 years and never met her - in that time I've also done support work face-to-face, and some contracting work face-to-face as well. That doesn't mostly get blogged about because it usually doesn't tie in to what I largely blog about here. I've knowingly met two Second Life friends in the flesh, and although we've occasionally helped each other out with problems, we've never really worked together.Now, you might claim my situation is unusual, very unusual even. But just stop and ask yourself how much of what you do couldn't be done from home over a good internet connection? I rather suspect the answer is quite a lot of it. Play with data - filling in electronic forms, filing etc? You can do that from home. Spend a lot of time in meetings and travelling between them? Second Life, Skype etc. could fill a big chunk of your needs. Are you a coder? Do you really need to travel into the office to do that every day? The list of jobs that you could do from home is quite long, if you were allowed.This won't suit everyone, not even everyone for all situations: whilst we will insist on going out to shop, we need people to actually load the shelves, deliver the goods and the like. Even if we shop over the internet (you mean you've never bought from Amazon?!) you still need someone to pick your books off the shelf, put them in a box and into the post, and you need the delivery people to do the deliveries. There are, even in my jaundiced view of meetings and their utility, meetings that are successful and part of that success is based on the personal interactions, the "chemistry" of face-to-face. If you're going to demonstrate the latest immersive experience (unless it's an immersive virtual environment such as good ones in Second Life) then I probably need to be there to be immersed: I remember a movie that had smell cards for example. I want to watch that in the cinema, with the card and to see how well (or badly given it only happened once) it works. However, there are, in my opinion, far more meetings that aren't useful or productive. But if you save yourself the time, costs and energy of travelling to those bad meetings can you feel better about the time you do waste in them? If you don't do meetings regularly but can (if allowed) work from home, what do you, and the others gain?Let's say half the workforce (and I think the proportion would be much higher) stays at home on any given day. Traffic congestion falls, with a bit of juggling office buildings get smaller and use less power, water etc. How long each day you spend travelling to and from work? You reclaim all that time to do other things, and you reclaim the frustrations of all that travel too. Because the roads are less congested you also help those who must travel too.The bosses tend to throw up their hands and say "OMG, the workforce will never work like that! How do we supervise them?" Actually, I want to know, how do you judge if your workforce is working well anyway? Most bosses don't expect their staff to work in absolute silence and isolation. They may have some idea of how much people are goofing off because they can see them, but they largely use other metrics - number of tasks successfully completed in a day for example - to determine whether you're working suitably hard or not. If your office-based work means you complete 50 tasks per day, and you work from home and achieve those 50 tasks per day, does it matter if that takes you 1 hour or 10? Not, in most circumstances, to your boss I bet. If it's critical that everything is done by 3pm for some reason, then they essentially trust you in the office to do that, why can't they trust you at home? They can fairly quickly see that you're not making it on a regular basis and take steps to address that after all. There is a movement around for a "progress log" that is filled in daily - it's not only Linden Lab that uses this, although they famously do too. Can't you fill in your log and email it to your boss? Or even make a private blog that you boss reads via RSS?Surely both sides win with this? Some will protest that piecework isn't a great way to work, and that's often true - but the majority of good tools (those with a decent measure of outcomes rather than an impression) you use to judge if people are working well can be adapted to work for people you can't see just as well.Entertainment is just as bad. Living in the UK I get the range of UK-made TV. Some are as excellent. Some strike me as terrible. Some are in the middle. I also get a selection of TV from other countries: mostly the US, but also Australia and occasionally India, New Zealand etc. Other people choose for me, if I'm good and limit myself to what's on offer on the TV. They both limit and control what I can see.Of course some people, with a fine disregard for copyright law, record their TV and put it up as bit-torrents and the like so I can, in theory, download it and watch it at my convenience. In practise I have only done this once - I like TV on a bigger screen than my monitor and sitting further away from it is the main reason though, rather than any automatic respect for the law. The only time I did this was when a TV station decided I didn't really want to see Season 5 of a show that I loved. It wasn't a great show, it probably deserved to be axed from the schedules, but regardless of its merits or otherwise, I enjoyed it. They wouldn't let me watch it, so I downloaded and watched it anyway. I don't know how much the TV companies take per person per show, from those companies that do make a profit, but I'd be surprised if it was as much as US$1. I'd be surprised if it was much less than US$0.01 per person though. Obviously, on commercial TV, those takings are advertising revenue. Profits will be lower, because you have to pay all those pesky actors, crew etc. too naturally. But, let's say they take $1/person. If they let me choose to access, quite legally, their material for $1.10 (to cover the costs of the storage space, access charges, bandwidth etc.) or even the $1.99 that the Apple Store charges why not? I have channels on my cable TV that I never watch. I have a couple that I watch for one or two shows and that's it. And then I have some favourites that I watch often. If they give me proper control and choice, I will have (thank you very much) a small number of channels I will happily pay a monthly fee to (as I already do with my cable subscription), on the basis that I watch quite a lot of their shows. I will have an "Eloise's On Demand" channel if you like - where I essentially buy the shows piecemeal from my supplier, so I can watch CSI the day after its US broadcast, or even simultaneously with its US broadcast assuming I make the decision that paying $24.20 (that's 22 X $1.10 if you're not keeping up) for rapid CSI Season 9 is worth it. (I might not mind: in the UK I can see CSI week-by-week continuously without the annoying breaks in the schedule that the US market has to suffer.) Although I rather plucked the $1 value from thin air, with some idea of the $1.99 at the Apple Store, Off the Shelf News costs making ER and estimates around $0.80 per viewer as the revenue from advertising.I can keep going: although the slogan "Information wants to be free" is nonsense at one level - information has no wants after all - whatever your stance on "hippy techie wiki economics" (to quote one of the more vocal detractors that I know), information is becoming free. Google as a search engine (rather than via knol) and wikipedia are gradually filling up the free information market. Google makes its money via advertising, wikipedia via donations, but they are both essentially free at the point of demand. Last week I was invigilating an exam and reading a book whilst the students sweated away (at least mentally). The book I was reading had a number of unusual words I wanted to look up, so out with the iPhone and off to Google. A click later and I was at Merriam-Webster's online dictionary which has an iPhone style sheet to make it easy to use. Wonderful! Three words later it's saying I've used my commitment-free allocation, and do I want to sign up for the trial of their paying service? No! Back to google, and off to dictionary.com - where the information is available and free thank you. It's not as convenient - I have to scroll past the sponsor's message, then zoom the screen in, but for the odd word every now and again, free and taking a couple of extra seconds to find the answer is just fine thanks. Open Notebook Science is starting to chip away at the monopoly of the paid, peer-reviewed journal. It's not there yet, but the information is starting to be free that way. (Actually, I think both system have merits, and what we need is people using both, and the journals changing so they will take material a paper for peer-review that has been included in the open notebook format. There is merit to both reading the entire lab-book if you are interested, certainly to find "failing" routes, as well as reading a well-written paper or review.) What is quite scary is how quickly material from a peer-reviewed journal appears on wikipedia. A few months ago I was reading a paper in Nature, which had been on the shelves for a few hours at the time. There was some background that they referred to in the paper where I was a little hazy, so off to wikipedia... Imagine my surprise when I not only found the information I was after (not that surprising) but found that the page on wikipedia had been updated on the basis of the paper that I was currently reading!And I'm deliberately avoiding discussing the revolutions in education - that could form a 10,000 word rant all on it's own, and at 2,000 words this is quite long enough!The precursors for the information revolution are there. The questions remain though: How long will it take before the revolution really hits? How rough will it be when it does come (remember the Luddites? The industrial revolution certainly hurt some)? Does burying our head in the sand about this as about so many uncomfortable issues make any kind of sense?
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