Open-plan office and peer-monitoring socialism against creativity

When I started working as a programmer after I graduated from college in 1990s, I was fortunate enough to have a wall-separated booth, thoughwithout a door. This is something which workers have taken for granted atresearch laboratories in the USA or Canada. But things have beendifferent in Japan, where I live and work.

Having a separated space for individuals has been considered a luxury inJapanese companies, where people think space is money. So I should emphasize I was fortunate; because in Japan still corporateoffices are mostly open-planned: everybody seeing each other with nowall, whole bunch of noise, and is forced to listen to each other.

I had to work in 1980s with an open-plan office in Japan as an inturn,and I thought working in the office would surely hurt my body anddegrade the quality of my thinking. If I were just moving around anddoing ordinary tasks, I wouldn't have considered it much. But I had tothink there for writing a technical report. So I thought something hadto be changed.

I do not reject the idea of shared meeting space or the importance offace-to-face meetings. Those are vital factors of successful companies.But without a place for solitude, nobody would be ableto think. Without thinking, no innovation will come, and nonew idea will emerge. How can you think without being alone?

Recently I've found an article on Web which says working in open-planoffice makes you sick and is hazardous to your health.

A recent study of Dr. VineshOommen and his group in Queensland University of Technology showsthe following results:

Results: Research evidence shows that employees face a multitude ofproblems such as the loss of privacy, loss of identity, low workproductivity, various health issues, overstimulation and low jobsatisfaction when working in an open plan work environment.

Well said.

Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister also write in one of theirclassics Peopleware (2nd Edition, 1999, Dorset HousePublishing) as follows (in Chapter 12):

Management, at its best, should make sure there is enough space, enoughquiet, and enough ways to ensure privacy so that people can create theirown sensible workspace.

I've read the 1st edition of Peopleware (published 1987) in 1989, so theworkplace privacy issue is well-known for at least 20 years.

On the other hand, Japanese workplace has little changed for the past 20years. I still see many open-plan offices, especially amongnon-engineering workers.

I suspect Japanese open-plan offices are designed for managers to putthe subordinates under surveillance during the working hours. This isan example of a dark side in Japanese workplace socialism.

In a typical office layout, a manager in a team has the own desk besidesthe cluster of the desks for the team members. A team member can't takea rest or make a physical movement during working hours. I think thissort of desk layout does not respect the health of the team members, letalone the privacy or the productivity.

I've found quite a few articles about this open-plan office sicknessissue on the Web. So I think this is a matter of concern for manypeople. Maybe this is a sort of backlash due to the recent economydepression.

I'd rather work alone if I were put into an open-plan office every day again, solong as my brain and my ideas are the source of my income.

Chain of distrust

Communication is a collection of trust between the involving parties. Unfortunately, the trust is eroding in Internet, or in the society itself; and I see the emerging chains of distrust.

An idea called Chain of trust is a practical implementation of authentication.   Let me put it in this way; when Alice trusts Bob and Bob trusts Carol, then Alice assumes Carol is trustable.  In this way, Alice doesn't have to directly authenticate Carol.  Internet is another good example of chain of trust; each router assumes the peer routers will forward the packets originated from itself. 

But the chain of trust is not what should be taken as it is, in the real world.  In the Alice-Bob-Carol case of the previous paragraph, the peer-to-peer trust relationship between Alice and Carol is not necessarily established; the existence of distrust between Alice and Carol is even possible, and they may don't want to talk to each other.  Communication through a proxy is in fact quite common between the distrusting two parties. Should I call this a chain of trust?  I should rather call this a chain of distrust.

The current Internet is full of chains of distrust. Maybe I should rephrase it for accuracy; the chains of limited trust. For example, your employer will not unconditionally trust you to protect the employer's privacy, so you have to communicate outside the employer's network through a firewall, usually made of packet filters and proxy servers.  Your employer gives you a limited trust for the external communication.  This sort of limitation may cause your distrust to your employer, but the employer usually considers this is a security feature to protect the relationship with you.  The difference of interpretation to the situation of limited trust can be a source of distrust.

In a set of trusted parties with a limited size, each party does not have to spend time on authenticating each other for every packet they communicate with each other. The trust is proven through the physical connection and perimeters.  Internet's packet forwarding system extends this idea of physical connection to the chains of trust by reliable communication with discrete packet deliveries, and the idea has worked well in a limited community where the people are trustable with each other. The end-to-end principle [1] has worked so effectively that the engineers of Internet firmly believe in it.

The reality we are facing, however, is that the people are no longer trustable with each other and rather distrusting one another. People are seeking for a safe haven by creating a chain of distrust, which is apparently a false sense of security, considering that the chain of distrust is easily broken if the proxy between the distrusting two has a malicious intent.

We are heading into the very difficult times, where the security engineers ought to secure the chains of distrust as well as the chains of trust.

Reference:
[1] Blumenthal, M. S. and Clark, D. D. 2001. Rethinking the design of the Internet: the end-to-end arguments vs. the brave new world. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. 1, 1 (Aug. 2001), 70-109. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/383034.383037

Teleworking technology: we already have it

I've been thinking about months for what technology can help people to discover and get the most out of teleworking. I'm getting closer and closer to the following conclusion:

We've already built teleworking infrastructures, at least in my home country Japan, and many other nations and regions which have already deployed the Internet. Period. We need to focus on how to break the barriers and remove the impediments to people to embrace teleworking technologies as their own tools.

Let me simply put in this way: teleworking is no longer something special. For example, writing this blog itself is a very good example of teleworking technologies. All I need is a decent Web browser capable to run JavaScript for Blogger's writing environment; and I can publish and show you what I write, like what you read now.

Collaboration is getting more and more easier also. LUNARR allows you to flip back an electronic document and let you and other people write something on the back. This is a rather intuitive way to co-author a document, which I had never thought about until I saw it. Geeks will do the whole things in more geeky ways using SSH, rsync, CVS, subversion, or whatever else for software development, but it's not only for geeks anymore. Anyone who has to write a document can do it on a teleworking environment.

So let's stop saying "I'm not allowed to work from (wherever you want other than your office) because blah blah blah..." and talk how you can leverage your productivity from introducing teleworking into your lifestyle. If you and your employer think teleworking is something restricted for special people, that mindset is archaic, and no longer applicable to the 21st-century version of modern lifestyle. And let's not take commuting as a duty; it should be a choice and it has to be, to reduce the gross amount of time and energy wasted by being forced to commute.

But beware that teleworking is not necessarily a duty either; don't do it like this as in an xkcd article. Don't leave your partner alone just because "something is wrong on/with the Internet" (grin).

Accountability of an SNS user

In a major Japanese SNS mixi, I feel I have been always exposed to a strong peer pressure, which I find common in Japanese society, that you should not argue with others unless you really want to break up with those people. This sort of fuzzy feelings covers over the whole society of Japan, including that on the Internet.

I really don't like the fuzzy Japanese social atmosphere, though I don't favor the hostile and negative environment which I always find in anonymous and open bulletin boards and blogs in Japan nowadays either. I always want to have a creative discussion with a constructive criticism. People tend to go the opposite way, however, in most of the times. This is what I've learned both from the real and Internet communications.

One of my friends claimed to me that the warm fuzziness surrounded him in 1980s in the Japanese online community of bulletin boards was something completely different from that after the popularization of Internet in Japan. He told me the fuzziness which I don't like actually helped the self-governance of the users. I asked him why.

He told me that the bulletin board operators could individually locate and even persecute each account holder, by exchanging the written agreement in paper, and charging access fee individually from each user's bank account, automatically drawn each month. He said he had many anonymous or pseudonymous friends there, because he could trust those people even without knowing the real names, by the guarantee of financial and social accountabilities for each users that the BBS operator provided. In other words, the participants were supposed to behave nicely online, and the participants could prevent each other from the extreme cases of disputes.

The friend and I agreed, however, that you could no longer expect such a high degree of individual responsibility on the current SNSes and other Internet communities. Many people belong to many different systems, and those systems are usually supposed to keep the personal information undisclosed except for a legal request for the authorities. This means all disputes between Internet participants have to become legal issues, or lawsuits.

And even if you win a legal battle, you can't really collect the compensation justified by the law, unless the law enforcement officers really pursue the defendant to do so. The legally-responsible individual of one of the largest anonymous BBSes in Japan keeps refusing paying the money he has been requested from the court, though he loses on multiple lawsuits, and he is actually winning the battle by not adhering to the legal requests, because those lawsuits are all civil law issues and not the criminal ones. This is a good example of the limitation of depending resolution of individual disputes over Internet on the legal procedures. Forcing people to use "real" names will not solve this problem at all.

How can an SNS user be held accountable, for his/her legal and social activities? This is not a direct technology issue, but technology can and must help the issue to be resolved. And I think tagging individuals and restricting online identifiers do not necessarily effectively work on this issue.

Data erasing woes

Clearing up the used disk has been a real burden for sysadmins, as exploitation of carelessly-discarded information becomes popular. In Japan, people are extremely sensitive against how their personal data records are kept secret and controlled. The reality is, however, that data disclosure incidents keep happening, no matter the government enforces the law, and companies make frequent apologies for those incidents. Once the data get out, you won't be able to take them back.

I think a part of the reason of continuing data disclosure incidents is that erasing data is simply a difficult task. For example, even if you store only 10G bytes into a 160G-byte disk, you need to thoroughly sweep the whole 160G bytes, to guarantee all data are cleared. Also, you've got to be careful to deal with the hidden data, which is not accessible by the data erasing software. If you really want to make the data not recoverable at all, you need to erase the trace of electromagnetic residue on the hard disk platters, which is hard to perform in a usual business or office environment. Destroying a usable device is not an environmentally-friendly practice either.

Another problem is that the sweeping process is slow. The physical writing speed governs the whole performance. For example, one of my old portable 40G-byte hard disk can be written in only 20M bytes per second. So it will take at least 2000 seconds or about 34 minutes to sweep out the whole disk once. You need to do this multiple times to ensure the residue of data is not easily detectable, so the whole process may take 2 or 3 hours. 3 hours for just 40G bytes. 12 hours for 160G bytes. (sigh)

The data storage which an individual has to manage is getting bigger and bigger every year. I wonder how people can cope with this. Do you sweep and erase the used disk data before you resell or give it away to somebody?