This grand experiment in corporate blogging at Sun has been going for three years now. Looking back it seems I got on this bandwagon early, in June 2004 with a pathetic first post. I know there are a lot of blogs who contain only that kind of posting as their first and only entry, fortunately I kept up at it. It helps that I publish several web sites of my own, and one of them has a 12+ year history. But looking back what helped the most to feel comfortable with blogging is having been a Usenet denizon during the 1980's. Around 1986 I was a system administrator and student at the University of Kentucky, holding a student job working for the Mathematical Sciences department working on system admin to a network of Vax's running 4.2BSD. It's wasn't quite a typical student job in that we supported those systems from the bare metal on up, because DEC didn't quite like people running anything other than VMS on their hardware. Yeah, the technical support guy from the local office would come out and swap boards etc, but he wouldn't do any of the operating system maintenance, which left that to us. One thing I managed was to learn about Usenet .. one of our gang had graduated and gone to work for Bell Labs, and sent back a tape full of postings from the Unix-Wizards mailing list as well as several others. From those I gathered that this thing called Usenet existed, figured out what UUCP path addressing was, and around that time I had the job to set up a UUCP link between our system and a system at the ANL-CMS lab in Chicago. Using those pieces I found my way through Usenet to land an email to Mark Horton and managed to get our systems connected to Usenet. And then proceeded to totally enjoy life chatting with people all over the world ... until our university was connected to the Internet at which time the enjoyment skyrocketed.
In a large way the blogosphere is very much like Usenet but with even more autonomy. What I mean is the very personal style of writing, because clearly a blog owner generally is writing in their very own and usually highly controlled space. I very much think of my Usenet experience as giving me experience with and exposure to writing that would be astonishing considering my history of English/Writing classes during school.
My most interesting moment blogging for Sun was when Tim Bray called me at 11 AM on a Sunday morning. There had been a slashdot article about Kodak's lawsuit against Sun, where they claimed we violated some patents. The suit was still in the process of being settled, but I had a bee up my butt about software patents and posted some opinions which were probably pretty good .. but .. as Tim pointed out when he called me, it's in violation of my employment contract to talk about ongoing court cases. And so, I pulled the posting grumbling about corporate interference with freedom of speech.
What to make of that ... well, there's several angles to this. First, is some aspects to freedom of speech by an employee. Employees have traditionally been told not to talk to press at all, to not talk in the open at all, and to leave that for the professional PR and Marketing people who have the specific training to know the right things to say. That leaves most employees of a company mute and unable to speak. But what about an employee who is witnessing some illegal or immoral act. Their employment contract probably forbids them from speaking about company proprietary stuff. Further the employer is the one giving them money, so the employee has an incentive to keep quiet, or their flow of income will stop, as will the food, shelter and other primary needs provided by that money. ..etc.. so all those things and more go together to to maintain an air of employees not speaking out. But if a company really is doing something illegal, shouldn't an employee have the freedom to speak out about whatever their employer is doing? Isn't this harming society by keeping employees beholden to and muted by their employers?
Another is the sensitivity of negotiations that happen between corporations, especially when there are court cases involved. The stakes can be quite high, in that case with Kodak it was many many millions of dollars. So there is a real need for many types of information known by an employee to remain quiet.
Another is the sort of gamble our company management has taken to allow everybody in the company to do this blogging thing. It represents a sea change in the mindset of the typical role of employees. That stereotype of employees unable to say anything is gone, replaced with a "use your best judgement" guideline. Corporate transparency is a good thing, I believe.
Thank you to the blogs.sun.com team, and to the management at Sun for having the bravery to do this.
(2007-04-27 14:25:19.0) Permalink
