Want to know how to climb out of the cramped airline seats and stay home? Below is a guest article by Lloyd Alter of Treehugger, but by way of introduction, here’s a little excerpt from a New York Times piece by Joe Sharkey about his friend, Mr. Allen:
I spoke with [Mr. Allen] a few days ago by cellphone. He was with his two children, ages 5 and 10, at a playground. It was a Friday, which in the old days was when he would be stuck in some dreary airport, hoping to make a connection home for some time with the family before dragging himself back to the airport on Sunday afternoon.
Mr. Allen is not retiring from his consulting job. He is merely retiring from the business travel grind…
Last year, Mr. Allen and a small group of other road-weary consultants he knows from all over the country formed an informal network linked mostly by videoconferencing technology. They were enabled by the proliferation of cheap (and sometimes even free) social networking tools — wikis, podcasts, and computer video and teleconferencing systems like Skype and ooV00.
But how does it all work? Here, by Lloyd Alter, is a a little about the practicalities of how online networking tools can be used to make a virtual water cooler:
In October, 2007, three of us from Brooklyn, Seattle and Toronto were working full time out of our home offices on content for Planet Green, then a new website. We had never actually met, so I thought we should have a better way of communicating among ourselves and started what I called a “water cooler” on Skype–a chat that was always open, where we could share ideas, whines and complaints. I didn’t even tell our editor in Quebec–this was like a real water cooler, a no-holds-barred place to share gripes and ideas.
About a year ago we got a new editor for TreeHugger and Planet Green; I thought it might get her up to speed more quickly if we included her in the water cooler. Suddenly it was public; the President wanted in, the founder, the ad guy out west. Names that I never heard of appeared on the members list. I thought well, it was nice while it lasted, but the water cooler is over.
I could not have been more wrong. It is no longer a water cooler where we hang around and gripe; it has become an essential part of the operation. It isn’t really a conference room either, but is more like a virtual cube farm, with us as virtual prairie dogs poking our heads up above the partitions when there is something to discuss. It isn’t as freewheeling as it used to be; Essentially, we are at the office and have to act like people do at offices, constrained in our discussions by the fact that there is a record of what we are saying and a lot of eyes listening.
And we have been doing it continuously for over a year.
A virtual cube farm, like a real one, has its problems. With Skype you can leave the beepers on and not miss a message but go nuts from the distraction; you can turn them off and miss important messages and threads. Skype also has its own issues; there is what I call the Roach Motel or Hotel California problem- you can come in any time you like, but you can never leave. If we invite someone in and they do not voluntarily leave the chat, we cannot cut them off and have to start all over. Consequently we are really on water cooler 3.01 and are very circumspect about who we let into the virtual room.
But when it works, what a revolution. Here is a three minute sequence discussing a line in a post that we are trying to divine the provenance of a phrase:
chris tackett
9:54 AM
this turn of phrase, is odd- “Something fishy and confusing, this way comes.”yoda-speak?
Lloyd Alter
9:54 AM
it is from a famous phrase
chris tackett
9:54 AM
ah or is that a line from an obscure movie i should ya, i was just going to ask that/
Lloyd Alter
9:54 AM
something wicked this way comes
chris tackett
9:54 AM
ya, that’s right
Lloyd Alter
9:55 AM
Something Wicked This Way Comes is a 1962 novel by Ray Bradbury
Ben Boyd
9:55 AM
Macbeth is the original source, I believe
Lloyd Alter
9:55 AM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
chris tackett
9:55 AM
ya, macbeth sounds right
Lloyd Alter
9:56 AM
The phrase “something wicked this way comes” originates in Act IV scene 1 of William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. The speaker is the second witch, whose full line is, “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.” The wicked thing is Macbeth himself, by this point in the play a traitor and murderer.
chris tackett
9:56 AM
i love it when my blogs quote shakespeare in their bolded subheads.
Lloyd Alter
9:56 AM
shit, that would have taken how long before wikipedia and google? and water coolers?
chris tackett
9:57 AM
a while
Lloyd Alter
9:57 AM
three minutes of people working together–that goes in my no impact man post this weekend
It wasn’t a big issue and didn’t amount to much, but in just three minutes, four people in San Francisco, Alabama, Brooklyn and Toronto use Wikipedia, Google and Skype to discuss an issue and come to a conclusion.
In fact, I find more communication and interaction via the water cooler than I ever did in conventional offices. In one minute recently three of us announced variously that we were going to get lunch, go to the doctor and to get our hair cut; none of us had to, but it just has become a habit to let each other know.
Editor Meg says “I don’t think I could do my job without it at this point. It’s become an essential tool in my work-from-home kit, to the point where I tell people in ‘real life’ stories about things we talk about in the water cooler as if it were a real meeting place. My husband frequently interjects to explain that I’m talking about a virtual place, but to me it’s as concrete as anywhere i go, except i only have walk up the stairs of my house to get there.”
I have never actually met many of the people I work with, but I know about their dogs and their surgery. Meg is right; when you have this level of communication it quickly becomes as real and concrete as any place you have ever worked. We are not web workers or home workers or telecommuters; when the water cooler is on, I am at the office.