The New York Times Companies Move Away From Centralized Offices [requires 'free' registration]

""Corporate America is developing a different strategy of place," said Charles Grantham, chief scientist of the Institute for the Study of Distributed Work. "The bottom line is a hard-core business logic — you're better positioned for business continuity if you're distributed. But Sept. 11 also crystallized for a lot of people that they want a better balance between their personal and professional life, and managers are going to have to confront that in the coming year."

Such revolutionary zeal may be premature. After all, the longstanding conviction that a centralized workplace is essential to enforcing corporate culture, loyalty and hard work has been behind big real estate investments in corporate campuses and towering headquarters buildings. Those expenditures can make it prohibitively expensive to switch to a distributed workplace."

redux [09.26.01]
OpenP2P In Defense of Cities

"Dan Gillmor, in his San Jose Mercury News column of last Saturday, makes the case that in light of the attack on New York City, "...the logic of decentralization has never been more clear." He notes that the Internet's decentralized architecture performed well during and after the attack. He goes on to call for a similar Internet-style decentralization of populations away from cities, predicting that the attacks should or will precipitate a migration away from cities into more decentralized patterns of living.

He is right about data infrastructure, but he is wrong about cities, because cities are not cause but effect. (Full disclosure: I am a long-time resident of New York, and have spent the better part of two careers working in cities of various flavors.)

Cities are not isolated things so much as the large-scale intersection of countless small forces, forces which in aggregate give cities the kind of homeostasis and adaptability that have made them such surprisingly long-lived features of human life."

redux [02.28.01]
Context Magazine Location, Location, Location

"The Digital Age, though, has weakened the urban magnet. People no longer have to live amid service providers to have access to their services; many services can be effectively summoned electronically. Telecommunications, moreover, is bringing work back into the home. People now may work in a wired spare bedroom or in a home office in an executive ghetto such as Aspen, Colo.

Does this mean the diaspora of urban professionals now will push beyond suburbs and exurbs to remote hideaways, mountaintops, or places such as Venice, selected merely for their beauty? "

"For planners and politicians, the dawning Digital Age creates an urgent need to find policies that will create an acceptable level of social equity. For architects and urban designers, the complementary task is to develop an urban fabric that provides opportunities for social groups to intersect and overlap?perhaps using a laptop at the piazza café instead of a personal computer inside the gated condo."

redux [09.20.01]
LATimes Firms Turn to Meetings Without the Traveling

"The economy and corporate budgets are in sharp decline, new safety checks have made moving through airports slower than ever, and there's a general reluctance to travel in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks.

If corporate America is to attempt some semblance of normality, there must be meetings with customers, suppliers, far-flung co-workers, bankers, lawyers and distributors.

To keep things going, many companies are turning to videoconferencing, the technology touted years ago as the movement that would end corporate travel. It never did and it never will. But videoconferencing is on the rise, and experts said last week's events will further accelerate its use."

redux [07.11.01]
MIT Technology Review Work the Problem, People

"While researchers tap Internet2 to extend collaboration between universities and push the limits of new Internet technologies, another group of social scientists is looking at how Internet2 is affecting those who use it - in effect, researching the researchers."

"Still, human beings clearly prefer working face to face. Teasley says that although scientists at each CFAR site can meet and examine data from their own PCs, they still tend to cluster around a single computer. "Their biggest complaint was that it was too hard to see that small screen," says Teasley. "I told them they should buy a projector. That was my high-level PhD advice.""

Alertbox Beyond Being There

"Beyond Being There was a research project at Bell Communications Research in 1991 and 1992. Its key insight was that computer and communications technology cannot in the foreseeable future achieve the same quality of human interaction as that afforded by PPR (physically proximate reality - our somewhat obscure term for meeting in person). Thus, while most other projects aimed at every-higher communication bandwidths and higher-fidelity video, we aimed at making computers help people communicate in ways that cannot be done in PPR (for example, anonymous interactions). In other words, we wanted to be better than reality and move beyond being there!"

Scott Klemmer scott's thoughts on: Beyond Being There

"Hollan and Stornetta effectively argue that the pursuit of face-to-face is a) often inappropriate, and b) destined to fail. The premise behind this assumption is that a media attempting to imitate face-to-face fails when communities only use that media when f-to-f is not available. When this happens, electronic communication is at a disadvantage relative to f-to-f. They argue that "In telecommunications research perhaps we have been building crutches rather than shoes;" we only use the crutch when our fully functional leg is not available. The authors suggest that researchers should instead begin building shoes, which augment our legs, and we use them even when they are fully functional. They astutely argue that there are potential advantages to electronic communication that are not present in f-to-f. "For example, three significant features of the new medium are its ability to support asynchronous communication, anonymous communication, and to automatically archive communication.""