Author: Frederick Pilot

Telecom critical infrastructure for 21st century as knowledge work is decentralized

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But the goal of the “Tri-Gig High Speed” initiative is to offer a broadband infrastructure that is as affordable as possible and will meet the technological needs of businesses, public and educational institutions, and local residents, said Jane Nickles, chief information officer for the city of Greensboro. The Triad is one of several regions across the country striving to offer high-speed gigabit Internet access as a way to attract and retain businesses.“This is really an economic development initiative,” Nickles said. “Businesses are going to want to locate where they can get the high-speed broadband access and where their employees can get it because it opens up those possibilities of things that can be done outside of the office and done from home.”

Source: Triad cities, universities seek contractors to provide high-speed Internet access – Greensboro – Triad Business Journal

Nickles’ comments illustrate the very important role of telecommunications infrastructure in the 21st century. It’s as critical to the 21st century economy as transportation infrastructure was to the previous one. Particularly as performing knowledge work — centralized in metro centers in the 20th century — becomes decentralized and often performed outside the centralized commuter office and at home as Nickles notes. An added benefit is reduced transportation demand at the same time much of the transportation infrastructure is aging and in need of major overhaul.

SF Bay Area population health suffers amid economic stress, long commutes

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Health Department officials began analyzing the link between housing insecurity and health after watching hundreds of their clients get displaced from Oakland and surrounding cities. To understand the depth and magnitude of the housing crisis, officials conducted interviews with 188 Health Department workers and 167 Behavioral Services staff and contractors. Ninety-four percent of respondents said the stress of inadequate or unstable housing was affecting their clients’ health, in many cases nullifying the services that county health programs provide for needy communities.More than 10 staff members who filled out the survey said that they, too, had been priced out of the metropolitan areas of Alameda County, where rents are steadily escalating — the median rent for a two-bedroom is now $2,850 a month, according to the real estate site Trulia. Many of them now have long commutes from places like Tracy, Modesto or Antioch, which cause them to lose sleep and have led to car accidents, the study said.

Source: Public health problems in Oakland linked to housing crisis – SFGate

These results are not surprising and would likely be found in other high cost metro areas. In short, the center no longer holds as a diversified, sustainable socio-economy. Something has to give and that something is population health status.

California state agency improperly reimbursed super commuter’s costs as travel expense, audit finds

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California Department of Public Health wasted state funds when it failed to enforce proper policies or procedures to ensure that it made travel reimbursements in accordance with the applicable state laws. Specifically, from July 2012 through March 2016, Public Health inappropriately reimbursed the commuting expenses of an official from the official’s home in Sonoma County to the official’s headquarters in Sacramento. In total, Public Health reimbursed the official $74,200 in state funds for lodging, meals, incidentals, mileage, and parking during this period. As of June 2016, Public Health continued to improperly reimburse the official for commuting to Sacramento.

Source: California State Auditor – Report I2016-2 Summary – August 2016

So found the California State Auditor’s Office in a report issued this week. It concluded the department cannot ease the personal economic and time burden of a super commuter’s long journey from home to work by treating the employee’s commute as reimbursable business travel and paying for lodging during the work week. (IRS rules do regard long commutes to a distant job as business travel in cases where the job is expected to last less than one year.)

This is an example of how mindless adherence to an outmoded concept of knowledge work (defined solely by daily presence in a centralized, commute-in office) can cause unnecessary problems. The official involved here could likely perform the vast majority of his/her job functions in their home community using the department’s Intranet and a phone. It’s time to embrace the 21st century, people.

Words of IT Wisdom From Silicon Valley to Governments

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[I]t’s no longer practical to have a centralized IT operation, where city governments design and build large-scale computer programs that can take years to implement, are rarely delivered on time and are often over budget. Instead, Keene wants cities to break up big technology projects into more manageable pieces that can be built more quickly, an idea called “agile development” that is already a growing trend in public sector IT. Keene also wants cities to rely less on expensive hardware and take advantage of cloud computing. “We’re moving everything we can into the cloud,” he says. “It’s absurd to keep maintaining all those server farms.”

Source: Words of IT Wisdom From Silicon Valley to Governments

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That same decentralization principle also applies to the knowledge workplace. It no longer makes sense to have knowledge workers assemble daily in a centralized, commute-in office. Just as information and communications technology has outmoded the proprietary, on premise server, it has also obsoleted the office building as knowledge work becomes an activity that can be performed anywhere with a decent Internet connection to the server cloud.

Rural tech startups see success across the US | TechCrunch

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While tech startups have become synonymous with urban areas that offer improved access to talent, resources and infrastructure, the reality is that rural areas are also home to startups. This may come as a surprise to those who have moved away from rural areas specifically to find a job in the tech industry, which accounts for more than 6.7 million jobs in the United States alone.

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And the advantages to having your tech startup based in a rural area? Plenty. Young was full of praise, citing “low cost of living, no traffic, elbow room, and easy access to the outdoors.” In a similar vein, Langer talked about how Red Wing is a great place for those with a love of the outdoors, its close proximity to both Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as only being 45 minutes away from the nearest airport. “Red Wing is the perfect mix of small town and big city,” Langer said. “It’s a wonderful place to raise children. It’s got everything.” An important factor Levy brought up was access to quality education. The Gorge has access to quality schools and “employees for a high-tech company want the best schools for their kids.”

Source: Rural tech startups see success across the US | TechCrunch

In my 2015 eBook Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty-First Century, I discuss these and other advantages less populated regions offer in terms of housing affordability, enhanced quality of life and the end of stressful, time sucking commutes across congested metro areas. The growth of the knowledge and information-based economy makes location far less relevant — unlike during the Industrial Age when work was centralized in downtown metro areas and suburban office parks.

Key to this reverse Industrial Age migration to what author Jack Lessinger termed Penturbia in his 1991 book of the same name is the modernization and expansion of fiber to the premise telecommunications infrastructure to ensure all areas have access to advanced services. It is as critical to the 21st century as roads and highways were to the 20th.

Silicon Valley — of all places — is suffering from future shock

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Alvin Toffler, the recently deceased futurist who authored the bestselling book Future Shock, is credited with coining that term. As Toffler defined it, it’s the psychological reaction to too much change over a short period of time. The mind protects itself by effectively putting on blinders to block out the change it’s not yet ready to accommodate.

Not long after Future Shock was published in 1970, a Los Angeles aerospace engineer had a brainstorm while stuck in that city’s infamous traffic congestion. What if companies could set up satellite offices connected with data lines in communities where workers live so they can avoid getting on the freeway each workday, Jack Nilles thought. With that, Nilles conceived of a novel transportation demand technique — what he was to call “telecommuting” — to take the place of vehicular commuting to jobs that continues to plague L.A. and other large metro areas today. The idea didn’t catch on right away. Nilles attributed it to societal shock to the revolutionary notion that people could avoid commuting daily to an office distant from their home communities. After all, people “go to” work, don’t they? How could that be possible?

Today, nearly a half century later, that future shock not only continues but has intensified with the advances in information and communications technology (ICT). Many of those innovations were hatched in Silicon Valley and make it possible to perform knowledge work in the satellite offices envisioned by Nilles but also in home offices, libraries, coffeehouses and virtually anyplace with good Internet connectivity. Still, Silicon Valley companies like Google, Apple and Facebook continue to insist everyone show up at their corporate mega campuses each workday. The rationale is it’s necessary to have staff co-located in order to collaborate. It stems from Silicon Valley’s founding as a technology manufacturing center where people worked in “plants” operated by Hewlett Packard, Intel and Apple Computer.

That’s less the case now with nearly all manufacturing offshored and the aforementioned advances in ICT that facilitate both real time and non real time collaboration. Ideas can occur and be exchanged with colleagues whenever and wherever they germinate. The “everyone must be on campus in order to collaborate” rationalization is a symptom of future shock. Ironically manifesting in Silicon Valley of all places.

A new formula for exercise? Study suggests 1 hour of activity per 8 hours of sitting – The Washington Post

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If you fear you’re doing irreparable damage to your body because your white-collar job keeps you sitting at your desk from 9 to 5, or you regularly spend entire weekends sprawled out on your couch binge-watching Netflix, there’s some good news just out from sports medicine researchers.

According to a study published in the Lancet, all is not lost. You may be able to make up for your increased risk of death due to a sedentary lifestyle by engaging in enough physical activity.

So just how much is enough? The first thing you need to know is that it’s not a fixed number but based on a ratio that depends on the amount of sitting you do daily. If you sit four hours a day, you need to do at least 30 minutes of exercise. An eight-hour work day of sitting means one hour of exercise.

The numbers come from an analysis based on a very large pool of people, about 1 million adults, 45 and older, from the United States, Western Europe and Australia. The findings show a risk reduction — or even elimination — for your risk of death from heart disease, diabetes and some cancers.

Source: A new formula for exercise? Study suggests 1 hour of activity per 8 hours of sitting – The Washington Post

A big part of the problem is the outmoded pattern of knowledge workers commuting from their home communities to an office located in another distant community. Doing that every weekday adds to the time spent sitting given most commute by vehicle rather than cycling or walking.

There’s a better model that promotes wellness by freeing up as much as an hour or two every day for more exercise: migrating out of centralized commuter offices and having knowledge workers work in the communities where they live in home offices or satellite co-working centers. It is there rather than the office where that hour or two of daily exercise to offset sitting is more accessible and more easily adopted as a lifestyle change.

Facebook is considering opening a San Francisco office – Business Insider

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Facebook is thinking about opening up an office in San Francisco, which would be a huge boon for employees who have been dreaming of an easier commute, the San Francisco Business Times reports, based on conversations with three real-estate sources.Most of the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Google, Apple, and Yahoo, have a smaller office in San Francisco, but Facebook has always decided to keep its Bay Area employees together at its huge Menlo Park headquarters.This decision has brought grief for city-based employees because the commute can take up to two hours with traffic, which can feel like “a soul-crushing waste of time” despite the Wi-Fi-enabled free shuttles.

Source: Facebook is considering opening a San Francisco office – Business Insider

As I’ve written, the San Francisco Bay Area suffers from enormous tension, caught between advances in information and communications technology — much of it innovated there — and its habit of clinging to the outdated, 20th century Industrial Age model of daily commuting to a centralized, commuter office. The tension is particularly acute in the Bay Area given it has some of America’s worst traffic congestion, generating a huge time suck on the personal lives of those who commute there.

Per this development, it appears the tension is beginning to ease as a large Silicon Valley tech company is reportedly looking to establish a satellite office in San Francisco in order to bring work closer to its staff rather than busing them daily like high school students. Facebook doesn’t even need to spend much on costly San Francisco office space since most of its staff can work from home offices and collaborate with colleagues and customers virtually. With the occasional in-person meeting at the old centralized commuter office to reinforce team bonds. Ideas can be shared 24/7 from anywhere. And in person collaboration isn’t necessary unless Vulcan-style mind melds are needed to better protect proprietary company information.

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New economic strategy for Maine: Lure workers, business will follow — Business — Bangor Daily News — BDN Maine

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PORTLAND, Maine — A new nonprofit has an idea for getting more companies, large and small, to locate in Maine: Don’t try for the whole company.On Monday, the group Work in Place will officially launch in Portland, during the third annual Maine Startup and Create Week, with plans to host a national conference in Maine’s largest city next spring to bring location-independent workers together.As they learn more about people who have a boss but not necessarily a fixed office, they want to provide a professional network and support, too.“We’re not evangelizing remote work, and we don’t need to at this point in time — it’s already happening,” said Misty McLaughlin, who co-founded the group with her husband, Michael Erard.The group aims to host events centered on that growing segment of the workforce, in part to help policymakers and economic development officials consider new approaches in a far-flung place such as Maine, which Erard wrote should be “low-hanging fruit.”

Source: New economic strategy for Maine: Lure workers, business will follow — Business — Bangor Daily News — BDN Maine

More evidence the decentralization of knowledge work and its dispersal across the United States is starting to gain momentum.

It’s no wonder knowledge workers are seeking alternatives to costly, congested metro areas. There’s really no need to work in them now that information and communications technology has matured to the point that knowledge work can be performed independent of location.

To facilitate this megashift in where people work and live, there is an essential infrastructure component that’s needed, especially in poorly connected states like Maine: Universal, affordable fiber to the premise (FTTP) telecommunications infrastructure.

Technology will change where we live | TechCrunch

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Finally, we have virtual reality coming in to totally upend things, perhaps rendering the commute obsolete altogether. There’s a reason Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion. Facebook sees the future of social interaction as happening through VR. Microsoft has already shown demos of people in completely different places physically, interacting seamlessly almost hologram-like in a way that’s both creepy and awesome (they appropriately call it Holoportation).Perhaps there are some lingering expectations of people being in the office part-time to build camaraderie (drinking virtual beer together isn’t as fun after all), but the five-day-a-week commute will be undesirable to employees — and to employers who want a recruiting advantage and prefer more workable hours for their employees and can offer it by eliminating their commute.

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Instead of having a few densely populated pockets like we do today, people are going to disperse because technology will make it easier to do so and it’ll be much cheaper to live. Real estate prices will shift — not just in San Francisco, but in every major city. And places that hold universal appeal (e.g. beachfront/close to mountains) will draw more people as a result.

Source: Technology will change where we live | TechCrunch

Dan Laufer reiterates the thesis of my recent eBook Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty First Century. The maturation and continued evolution of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) such as VR conferencing will render the daily Monday through Friday commute obsolete by removing the last perceived barrier to avoiding working daily in a centralized office setting: the need to meet face to face.

As I write in Last Rush Hour, ICT will prove as a profound and disruptive force of change for residential settlement patterns as the automobile was at the height of the Industrial Age by dispersing people out of inner cities to the suburbs.