Why Being Virtually There Is Virtually There

If you work in a factory or somewhere else that requires you to touch things or people, the COVID shutdowns and social distancing have clearly been a difficult situation to overcome.

But it seems that the past few months have also been very trying for many people who worked in office settings before COVID set in.  The Brady Bunch meme captured this well.  However, to me, that’s something which is less a reflection of reality than a lack of imagination and experience.

I’m in the minority of folks who have worked remotely for more than ten years.  By now, I’ve forgotten some of the initial hiccups in doing that.  Also, the software, hardware and bandwidth have gotten so much better that the experience is dramatically better than when I started.

So, I’m a little flummoxed by some of what I hear from remote working newbies.  First off, of course, is the complaint that people can’t touch and hug their co-workers anymore.  Haven’t they been to training about inappropriate touching and how some of these physical interactions can come off as harassment?  Even if these folks were in the office, I doubt they would really be going around making physical contact with co-workers.

Then there is the complaint about the how much can be missed in communication when conversations are limited to text messages and emails.  That complaint is correct.  But why is there an assumption that communication is limited to text.  If you had a meeting in a conference room or went to someone’s office for a talk, why can’t you do the same thing via videoconference?

(My own experience is that remote work requires video to be successful because of the importance of non-text elements of human communication.  That’s why I’m assuming that the virtual communication is often via video.)

In the office you could drop by.  Users of Zoom and similar programs are often expected to schedule meetings, but that’s not a requirement.  You can turn on Zoom and, just like in an office, others could connect to you when you want.  They’ll see if your busy.  And, if you’re a really important person, you can set up a waiting room and let them in when you’re ready.

There is even a 21st century version of the 19th century partner desks, although it’s not new.  An example is the always-on Kubi, pictured to the left, that has been around for a few years.

Perch, another startup, summarized the idea in this video a few years back.  Foursquare started using a video portal connecting their engineering teams on the two coasts eight years ago.  (A few months ago before COVID, a deal was reached to merge Foursquare with Factual.)

By the way, the physical office was no utopia of employee interaction.  A variety of studies, most famously the Allen Curve, a very large reduction in interaction if employees were even relatively short physical distances from each other.  With video, all your co-workers are just a click away.  While your interactions with the colleague at the next desk may be less (if you want), your interactions with lots of other colleagues on other floors can happen a lot more easily.

And then, despite evidence of increased productivity and employee happiness with remote work, there is the statement that it decreases innovation and collaboration.

Influential articles, like Workspaces That Move People in the October 2014 issue of the Harvard Business Review, declared that “chance encounters and interactions between knowledge workers improve performance.”

In the physical world, many companies interpreted this as a mandate for open office plans that removed doors and closed offices.  So how did that work out?

According to a later article – The Truth About Open Offices – in the November–December 2019 issue of the Harvard Business Review reported that, “when the firms switched to open offices, face-to-face interactions fell by 70%”.    (More detail can be found in Royal Society journal article of  July 2018 on “The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration”.

The late Steve Jobs forcefully pushed the idea of serendipity through casual, random encounters of employees.  That idea was one of the design principles of the new Apple headquarters.  Now with COVID-driven remote work, some writers, like Tiernan Ray in ZDNET on June 24, 2020, are asking “Steve Jobs said Silicon Valley needs serendipity, but is it even possible in a Zoom world?”.

There is nothing inherently in video conferencing that diminishes serendipitous meetings.  Indeed, in the non-business world, there are websites that exist solely to connect strangers together completely at random, like Chatroulette and Omegle.

Without going into the problems those sites have had with inappropriate behavior, the same idea could be used in a different way to periodically connect via video conferencing two employees who otherwise haven’t met recently or at all.  Nor does that have to be completely random.  A company doing this could also use some analytics to determine which employees might be interested in talking with other employees that they haven’t connected with recently.  That would ensure serendipity globally, not just limited to the people who work in the same building.

It’s not that video conferencing is perfect, but there is still an underappreciation of how many virtual equivalents there are of typical office activities – and even less appreciation for some of the benefits of virtual connections compared to physical offices.

To me, the issue is one of a lag that I’ve seen before with technology.  I’ve called this horseless carriage thinking.  Sociologists call it a cultural lag.  As Ashley Crossman has written, this is

“what happens in a social system when the ideals that regulate life do not keep pace with other changes which are often — but not always — technological.”

Some people don’t yet realize and aren’t quite comfortable with what they can do.  For most, time and experience will educate them.

© 2020 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

The Bumpy Transition To Video Meetings

As internet bandwidth gets better, we’re seeing more people communicate by videoconference. Facetime and Skype are now quite common ways for family members and friends to see each other when they are physically separated. Video conferencing has been around for a while in big multi-national corporations.

More slowly, we’re also seeing the adoption of videoconferencing for meetings of public bodies.  There are various reasons for the slow adoption.

  • Public agencies are unfortunately often populated by the less technically savvy part of the overall population or whose members are just more comfortable with physical than virtual face-to-face communication.
  • Or their members may have had a bad experience with video conferencing a few years ago, when neither the software nor the bandwidth was sufficient to become invisible and not interfere with free-flowing conversation. (Of course, there are still examples of bad videoconferences even now. I mention video products I’ve used successfully below.)
  • Public bodies are also subject to various open meeting laws and rules, which haven’t always caught up with changes in technology.

But things are changing, so I went on a search of the video conferencing practices of government bodies. Here’s some of what I found.

Since the latter part of last year, the City Council of Austin, Texas, has allowed the public to speak at their meetings via video so that citizens aren’t forced to come downtown for this opportunity.

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A bigger step is virtual attendance at meetings of the members themselves.

This is important especially when distances are large or obtaining a quorum is hard to achieve. It may be unusual for a city council or a state legislature to fail to have a quorum, but there are tens of thousands of other public bodies who can’t get their business done because not enough members can show up. This affects school boards and libraries and water districts and state advisory boards, etc. (By the way, the problem isn’t new – the first session of the US Congress was delayed for some time while members arrived very slowly.)

Video conferencing that would enable members to participate remotely would seem to be a natural solution. But as in all other aspects of the public sector, things aren’t so simple and policies seem to be the first obstacle to overcome.

Over the last few years, the Wyoming’s State Legislature has developed its video policy, which still seems be somewhere in the middle between those without full confidence and those who want to use it. Approvals are needed for committee use of video, as the policy states: “With prior consent of the committee chair, a video conference may be held for legislators unable to attend a meeting at the official meeting location.”  More generally, “An entire committee can meet via video conference at the direction of the chairman.”

Since 2013, the State of Missouri has allowed those elected to public bodies (mostly local) to vote and participate by video. But the Missouri Municipal League felt it necessary to a model policy for videoconferencing. It particularly emphasizes such guidance as: “a member’s use of video conference attendance should occur only sparingly.”

Following a change in the Illinois Open Meetings laws, the Schaumburg Library in 2009 adopted an official policy on this subject. They require a quorum of members at the physical meeting, not counting members participating via electronic means. Once that quorum is established, the remote participants have full rights although their votes are recorded as being remote. The policy also lists the acceptable reasons for wanting to participate remotely – employment, board business, illness, or family emergency.

In Texas, school boards also can use videoconferencing, but with somewhat similar requirements for a quorum. Whereas, public bodies in Pennsylvania can count remote participants as part of the quorum.

The State of Florida has empowered condo boards, which are a major form of local governance there, to use video. The State allows board members to be counted as present and vote remotely via video conferencing.

In New York State, which has some of the strictest open meeting laws, the State has allowed members to participate in meetings by video, but not phone conference calls. The idea is that, as in a traditional physical meeting, everyone has to be able to see all members’ reactions at all times.

In addition, New York State looks on video participation as a remote extension of the physical meeting, so public bodies using video must list all locations in its public notices – both the main physical meeting as well as any location where a member is using video. Presumably, someone in a hotel in, say, Florida or France, would have to allow any interested citizens to come into their room and also see what’s going on.

I’m on a number of public boards and they have different policies. Some boards are reluctant to use video at all. Another board has just had a completely virtual meeting that worked very well using Fuze and will be repeating this at least twice a year. I’ve also used Zoom successfully for meetings with large numbers of people.

Like most adoption of technology, transitions are not smooth and the old and the new exist together. In the streets of cities a hundred years ago, there were accidents between automobiles (then still relatively new) and horses pulling carriages.

Why should we expect video conferencing to be different?

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© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/158159631752/the-bumpy-transition-to-video-meetings]

The Internet Of A Hundred Years Ago

In many of my presentations, I have pointed out that the Internet is still very much in its early stages. There are tremendous gaps in the availability of high speed, low latency Internet everywhere. It will only be at some point in the future that we could truly expect to have a visual conversation with almost anyone, almost anywhere on the globe.

Beyond expanding connectivity, there are other factors standing in the way of ubiquitous high quality visual communications.

First, the software – the interface that users have to deal with – is quite awkward. There are still too many instances where software, like Skype, just doesn’t work well or freezes or otherwise discourages people from everyday use.

Second, more important, the mindset or culture of users seems not to have changed yet to readily accommodate visual conversations over the Internet everywhere. You surely know someone who just doesn’t want to communicate this way. There used to be many people who thought the telephone shouldn’t replace face-to-face meetings and trying to do so was rude and/or too expensive.

Indeed, I use a rough parallel that we are today with the Internet about where we were with the telephone at the end of the 1920s. That was more than fifty years after the telephone had been invented. Of course, we’re not even fifty years into the life of the Internet.

Although the parallel between phone network and Internet is fairly obvious, it is enlightening or amusing to see history repeat itself. Here is a 1916 advertisement that hails how the telephone is “annihilating both time and space” – what we’ve also heard in more recent years about the Internet.

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While there were many articles written at the time about the impact of telephones on society, the economy and life, even in the 1920s (or 30s or 40s or 50s …), telephone usage was not taken for granted. Among other things, long distance calling was not widely considered something most people would do.

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Mobile telephony was discussed but not really in existence yet.

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There was even a product that anticipated today’s Twitter and similar feeds – or maybe it was just a concept for a product, since vaporware was around even a hundred years ago.

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The chart below shows the pattern of historical adoption of telephones in the US from 1876 until 1981.

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From the perspective of 1981, never mind 2016, the first fifty years of telephony were the early age.

And since 1981? We’ve seen mobile phones overtake land lines in worldwide usage and become much more than devices for just talking to people.

So imagine what the next 100 years of Internet development will bring.

© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/150726984612/the-internet-of-a-hundred-years-ago]

[note this is an updated version of an earlier post in the beginning of 2014]

Getting Us Closer?

When we look at the adoption of new technologies, there often seem to
be two simultaneous divergent trends. The innovators and early adopters
push the technology forward, making significant progress every year.
The laggards still find many reasons not to use the technology.

The current state of videoconferencing provides a very strong example of this divergence.

While
videoconferencing has been steadily increasing in the corporate world,
it hasn’t really taken off. Each year, we see new predictions that this
next year videoconferencing will be unavoidable.

The obstacles to widespread adoption of videoconferencing in the past included:

  • Cost – which has decreased dramatically over the last few years
  • Quality
    — the need for high broadband, low latency on both sides of the
    conversation, which gets better as bandwidth has generally increased
  • Sunk
    costs that make people wary of investing more money — one estimate is
    that more than half of businesses have outdated hardware
  • And, as always, human resistance or impediments to change of any kind.

In
recent years, consumers have tended to adopt new technologies faster
than big corporations do. But reliable data about usage of consumer
video, like Skype Video or Apple FaceTime, is not readily available.

Nevertheless, the technology is moving forward with some interesting results.

Two weeks ago, Skype celebrated ten years of video calls by offering group mobile video conferencing.

Using through-the-screen-camera and a holographic illusion, DVETelepresence
has worked to make videoconferences appear more natural to
participants. This picture is one of my favorites. You’ll notice that to
enhance the illusion they even embed the office plant on both sides of
the screen, as if it really is to the side of the people who are remote.

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Last week, 4Dpresence, a spinoff of DVETelepresence, announced
the availability of their “holographic town hall” for political
candidates and issues. Taking a page from India’s Prime Minister, who
used videoconferences to appear all over that country during their last
election, this company is offering to host candidates who can appear as
if they are live holograms and interact with audiences. The company
claims:

“In live venues, the patented holographic augmented
reality podium is so bright the candidates appear more compelling than
actually being there in person. The candidates and citizens engage each
other naturally as if they are together in person.”

You can see a video on their website.

Personify
offers what they call “Video Conversation, With a Hint of
Teleportation”. The idea is to eliminate the background that an Intel
RealSense 3D camera or a Primesense Carmine 3D cameravideo camera is
picking up so that you and the people you’re talking to all seem to
share the same virtual space.

Another version of teleportation for videoconferencing was featured a few months ago in a Wall St. Journal article titled “The Future of Remote Work Feels Like Teleportation: Virtual-reality headsets, 3-D cameras help make videoconferencing immersive”. As its author wrote:

“I
have experienced the future of remote work, and it feels a lot like
teleportation. Whether I was in a conference room studded with monitors,
on a video-chat system that leverages 3-D cameras, or strapped into a
virtual-reality headset inhabiting the body of a robot, I kept having
the same feeling over and over again: I was there — where collaboration
needed to happen.”  

The article focused especially on the use of virtual reality gear to achieve this effect. There is DORA from the University of Pennsylvania, in which a person uses the VR headset to see through the eyes of a mobile robot.

This month’s MIT Technology Review also highlighted the use of Microsoft’s Room Alive in an article
titled “Can Augmented Reality Make Remote Communication Feel More
Intimate? A Microsoft Research study uses augmented reality to project a
life-size person into a room with you, perching them in an empty seat.”

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Eventually, as the technology gets ever more interesting and
intimate, some fraction of the laggards may finally adopt the new
technology. Although as Max Planck noted about scientific progress, the
adoption pattern may just be generational: “A new scientific truth does
not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,
but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation
grows up that is familiar with it.”

So it’s interesting that “47% of US teens use video chat including Skype, Oovoo, Facetime and Omegle.”

In
the meantime, the early adopters are getting all the economic and
intellectual benefits that can only occur with the full communication
that videoconferencing provides and texting/emails don’t. These people
are literally seeing the real potential of global Internet
communications and will likely reap the economic gains from realizing
that potential.

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© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/138040698302/getting-us-closer]