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Contents:
An Obsession with Transportation
Virtual Office Blocks
Putting it All Together
Monitoring Employees
Manufacture and Distribution
Making it Happen with Open Source
©
Trevor Turton 2001.
Permission is hereby granted to reproduce this
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http://www.turton.co.za/pubs/freesociety.html is included, and that any
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Open Source Could Build
a Safer, Freer Society
Trevor Turton, 2001-09-22
On September 11th 2001 the wild storm of
international terrorism that has wreaked such havoc in so many
lands finally hit the Eastern seaboard of the USA, causing
unprecedented levels of death and destruction in New York City and
Washington D.C. The heads of the US and other democratically
elected governments have vowed to search out and hold accountable
those responsible for these tragedies, and also those who give them
aid and succor. No doubt we shall see much of this in the months
to come. But for many this will come too late. The damage has
already been done. Our high-tech society has been shown to be
woefully vulnerable to attack from unscrupulous men. The
world has never lacked such people in the past, nor shall it in
the future. No matter how determinedly we pursue them, how grimly
we punish them, there will always be more. It is surely time to
take stock of the kind of society we have built with our new-found
technologies, to assess its weaknesses and the high costs that it
demands from all of us, and to see how we can change it for the
better. I believe that this is entirely possible – that we
can start right now to build a safer, freer society, and that Open
Source will play a vital part in this transformation.
An Obsession with Transportation
125 years ago the automobile was invented; 90 years ago the
airplane. Our society has seized upon these two transportation
technologies with a vengeance, totally reshaping itself in the
process. Much of the world's business is conducted in high-rise
buildings located in megacities. Employees typically spend hours
each workday commuting to and from the buildings where they work
cooped up in steel and glass cages like battery chickens. Megatons
of fuel are used on daily round trips that leave people back where
they started from. Megatons of pollution results. Companies send
armies of salesmen to win contracts to service and supply other
companies in distant states or countries, and increasing numbers
of employees commute weekly by plane to fulfill these contracts.
On a typical day more than 4,000 aircraft crowd the US sky,
carrying about a million tons of aviation fuel which in the
best-case scenario burns in the stratosphere to create more
pollution. We have seen all too vividly what happens in the
worst-case scenario.
Demand for transportation keeps growing, and huge investments
of money, land and peoples' time are being made to meet it.
Millions of acres of farmland and woodland have been converted
into roads and runways, and the rate of conversion keeps
accelerating. Even so, the airways are crowded. Larger planes are
being designed to ferry more people. The World Trade Center towers
were designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707, the largest
plane in use when they were built. They were no match for newer,
bigger planes. What building or community will be able to
withstand an impact from the next generation plane? We are using
our transportation technologies to generate tremendous wealth, but
at great cost to our environment and our quality of life.
Virtual Office Blocks
Imagine a different world. Suppose we could take the World
Trade Center buildings and locate each of their 220 floors as
separate one-story buildings in small communities scattered
throughout New York State and New Jersey. Suppose we did the same
thing with the other high-rise office blocks that jostle for space
on Manhattan Island. Suppose that the people who worked in these
relocated buildings lived in homes nearby, and that these
communities also contained convenience stores and services that
met most of the community's day-to-day needs. The workday commute
would become a ten minute walk or bike ride through leafy lanes.
Imagine a world were you only need to use a car for recreation,
and you only take a plane ride when you're visiting family or taking
a vacation.
Putting it All Together
Sounds good for the employees, but how could businesses
function if the floors of their buildings were spread over two
states? Well, we could knit the scattered floors together into
virtual office blocks using telephones, faxes, teleconferencing,
email, browsers and other electronic collaboration aids.
The engines that would do this are optical fibers, switches,
microprocessors, RAM and disk drives. They are commodities,
available off the shelf. These technologies are becoming smaller,
faster and cheaper at a dizzying rate. Their deployment requires
no forests to be felled, no meadows to be bulldozed.
These distributed office floors will be networked together to
form virtual office blocks. The workers within them will work for
many different companies. They would use rather familiar-looking
office equipment to carry out their daily tasks – telephones
with video added, faxes, and desktop PCs. These would be networked
to operate as if they were connected to their company's PBX and
LAN. Dispersed employees could think and act together using common
office tools as they do today. The only casualty would be
face-to-face meetings, which are becoming steadily less necessary
as other communications media such as phones, email, and workflow
systems supplant them. Video phone calls could take the place of
most face-to-face meetings. Virtual office blocks would also
contain video conferencing facilities that office workers could
use when more extensive communication is needed.
Workers who must service contracts with other companies would
have their office equipment networked into both their employer's
virtual office and that of the other companies that they service.
Their single video phone and fax would appear as an extension on
all relevant PBXs, able to respond to a call from any. Their
computer equipment would have access to all relevant LANs as if it
were present on each one, without however compromising the
security of any of these virtual LANs by allowing cross-talk
between them.
Monitoring Employees
Good management practice measures employee effectiveness by the
outputs produced. Bad management practice does it by observing
employee activities – how often does the employee goof off,
make long private phone calls, play computer games, visit
undesirable web sites and so forth. Real-world managers use both
techniques in differing proportions. The virtual office technology
will only be accepted if it supports both of these management
styles. Sadly, it will have to provide management surveillance
facilities so that managers can monitor their employees' phone
calls to numbers outside their virtual PBX, the emails that they send
and receive through the company's mail server, and the URLs of the
web sites that they visit. The workstation could
allow management to "see" what the screen is displaying.
Employees could be required to clock-in on their workstations when
they arrive at work, and clock-out when they leave. The
workstation could record extended periods of inactivity. All of
this should be made known to employees as part of their terms of
employment. If they don't like it, they can always commute to an
employer who still uses physical office blocks.
Manufacture, Distribution and Services
People who are directly engaged in manufacture and distribution
will still have to go to factories and depots in order to get the
job done. People who deliver services will have to go to where their
customers are. These industries are far more dispersed than
"knowledge workers" who constitute a large and growing
fraction of the workforce, and who today cluster in vulnerable high-density
buildings. These are the folk who could potentially make use of
virtual office block technology to avoid commuting to skyscrapers
in cities. Traders who have traditionally crowded onto trading
floors are increasingly switching to electronic trading workstations,
and could also disperse in the future.
Making it Happen with Open Source
The computer and communications hardware required to build this
dream of the future are already available to us, but the other
component vital to the realization of this dream is software that
would swiftly and reliably knit the scattered pieces together in a
kaleidoscope of constantly changing patterns to meet the needs of
the business projects that the employees undertake. This software
isn't yet in place, and the normal commercial software development
model does not give us much reason to hope that a suitable
solution will emerge anytime soon. Commercial software often seems
designed more to take hostages than to empower users, and would
likely give rise to a rash of incomplete, incompatible solutions
better suited to the Tower of Babel communications model than the
needs of modern businesses which must interoperate or die.
We've probably all heard the proud boast of computer
manufacturers that if aircraft hardware had improved as rapidly as
computer hardware, we would be able to fly anywhere in the world
in ten minute for ten cents. Some aircraft engineers have come
back with the riposte that if aircraft hardware had improved at
the same rate as computer software, the aircraft crew would have
to assemble their plane from parts on the runway prior to each
flight, the plane would be fueled by the finest whiskey, and it
would be used to haul garbage.
Happily, the Open Source movement provides a robust and
reliable alternative to commercial software development. Early
Open Source projects developed the key protocols and software
components that underpin the Internet, the closest approach that
we have today of the universal communications bus that will enable
future business built from dispersed employees, customers and
suppliers to operate effectively.
One of the benefits that we will realize from this new mode of
operation will be a huge reduction in business travel, and the
time that this takes out of our lives. Another will be a
diminishing need for skyscrapers. Apart from the great personal
inconvenience that their occupants must suffer in order to cram
into them each day, these will always serve as tempting targets
for ruthless men who seek to gain through violence what they
cannot gain through reason.
Comments and corrections will be gladly received, and acknowleded
if incorporated into this document.
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