KEEPING IT REAL

Dick Pountain/18 January 2002/12:05/Idealog 90

Issue 90, it appears, is the 80th mensaversary* of my service with PC Pro's Real World section, for it was just prior to issue 10 (way back in 1995) that Derek Cohen offered me the job of what was, in effect, editor of a virtual magazine. As well as paying my bills this has turned out to be one of the most interesting social experiments I've ever been involved in, and has vindicated some - though by no means all - of the hype that surrounds 'telecommuting'. Isn't it odd how antique that word already sounds, when only a few years ago it was plastered all over adverts from BT and other telcos, and the subject of earnest analyses in all the business pages. Well we Real Worlders are living (allegedly in some cases) proof that the concept can be made to work.  

For the benefit of anyone who is new to reading PC Pro, I should briefly explain that the Real World Computing (RWC) section is the stuff at the back on the pale yellow pages - it consists of 13 columns, written by 15 different contributing editors who are first and foremost practitioners of some form of IT rather than career journalists. They write about the problems they encounter in their 'real' jobs, hence the name. We have programmers, network consultants, graphic designers, web hosters, a lawyer and more. My prime job is to gather all their copy, do a technical edit on it and then pass it over to PC Pro's production department for final layout. What's special about RWC is that none of us, myself included, is based at PC Pro's office, and indeed only a minority live in London or anywhere near it. At the last count the RWC authors were scattered between England, Wales, Scotland, North Yorkshire, and deepest darkest Suffolk, and the total number of miles separating them probably exceeds 2,000. What's more, many of them travel extensively for their 'real' jobs so that at any one time several are out of the UK (myself again included). Thanks to modern comms this fact is for the most part totally transparent to us all: we have become location-independent.

Many magazines nowadays rely heavily on freelance contributors who work from home, but RWC is much more than that: it's a largely self-organized magazine-within-a-magazine in which everyone including the editor works at a distance from the host body, and whose members rarely meet in person (perhaps once or twice a year) but converse daily or weekly online. One of the problems that those earnest analyses of 'telecommuting' always uncover is that staff who are unceremoniously packed off home to work via a PC link often report feelings of loneliness and isolation, and miss the social contact of office work. That has never been a problem on RWC because we all appear to possess lives, and 'working from home' permits us to get on with them as we wish. For the first few issues of RWC I did in fact have a desk and a PC in the Pro office, but I found that my productivity dropped to around a quarter of what it is at home due to the distraction of other people's phones ringing and office chatter - proof-reading that I can do in an afternoon at home took most of a week, and I found myself still having to write at home in the evenings to escape the distraction.    

Aside from the question of personnel management in such a distributed community - which I've no intention of going into here, thank you very much - perhaps the most interesting aspect has been the set of technologies we've found to be most effective for the job, which are at first glance rather far from state-of-the-art, indeed positively primitive. The whole thing  is still run around the Cix (now Nextra) online conferencing system, which we use both for multicast group discussions (via private conferences) and as a central depository for copy. This latter point is very significant. Rather than email copy directly to me, the RWCers upload it to a private conference from which I download it, which brings two big benefits: firstly, should I get gored to death by a water buffalo, other PC Pro staff who are moderators of that conference can still access the copy; and secondly, wherever we are in the world, we all know without thinking exactly where to log onto. Since I started working solely on the laptop I travel with, my only communication decision is which Ameol connection to launch - direct dial when in London, or telnet via an Internet link when outside - and my mail and copy database remains consistent at all times.

As for the data, forget about all these new-fangled compound document formats: we send Zip files containing the copy as an RTF (so either PC or Mac can handle it) and the pictures as JPGs, PNGs, TIFs or zipped BMPs. Version control is achieved by a three-line Word macro that automatically inserts 'Edited by Dick Pountain on <today's date>'. Whizzy stuff indeed. A Web-based solution could in theory replace Cix but there's not much advantage and the Cix/Ameol combination is refreshingly impervious to the viruses and hackers that beset Microsoft-based solutions. We did once briefly discuss using Netmeeting to communicate face-to-face, but hell, you've seen those mugshots...

* The monthly equivalent of an anniversary, and no, don't bother to reach for your dictionary because I just made it up. And talking of dictionaries [cheap plug alert], perhaps I could just mention that my New Penguin Dictionary of Computing is now available at your nearest bookstore :))