Presence vs omni-presence and the green button of OSS design

In OSS there are some tasks that require availability (the green button on communicator). The Network Operations Centre (NOC) is one. But does it require on-site presence in the NOC?

An earlier post showed how wrong I was about collaboration rooms. It seems that ticket flicking (and perhaps communication tools like slack) is the preferred model. If this is the preferred model, then perhaps there is no need for a NOC… perhaps only a DR NOC (Disaster Recover NOC).

Truth is, there are hardly any good reasons to know if someone’s available or away at any given moment. If you truly need something from someone, ask them. If they respond, then you have what you needed. If they don’t, it’s not because they’re ignoring you – it’s because they’re busy. Respect that! Assume people are focused on their own work.
Are there exceptions? Of course. It might be good to know who’s around in a true emergency, but 1% occasions like that shouldn’t drive policy 99% of the time. 
Jason Fried on Signal v Noise

Customer service needs availability. But with a multitude of channels (for customers) and collaboration tools (for staff*), it decreasingly needs presence (except in retail outlets perhaps). You could easily argue that contact centres, online chat operators, etc don’t require presence, just availability.

The one area where I’m considering the paradox of presence is in OSS design / architecture. There are often many facets of a design that require multiple SMEs – OSS application, security, database, workflow, user-experience design, operations, IT, cloud etc.

When we get many clever SMEs in the one room, they often have so many ideas and so much expertise that the design process resembles an endless loop. Presence seems to inspire omnipresence (the need to show expertise across all facets of the design). Sometimes we achieve a lot in these design workshops. Sometimes we go around in circles almost entirely because of the cleverness of our experts. They come up with so many good ideas we end up in paralysis by analysis.

The idea I’m toying with is how to use the divide and conquer theory – being able to carve up areas of responsibility and demarcation points to ensure each expert focuses on their area of responsibility. Having one expert come up with their best model within their black box of responsibility and connecting their black box with adjacent demarcation points. The benefits are also the detriments. The true double-edged sword. The benefits are having one true expert work through the options within the black box. The detriments are having only one expert work through the options within the black box.

There are some past projects that I wished I’d tried to inspire the divide and conquer approach in hindsight. In others, the collaboration model has worked extremely well.

But to get back to presence, I wonder whether thrashing up front to define black boxes and demarcation points then allows the experts to do their thing remotely and become less inclined to analyse and opine on everyone else’s areas of expertise.

* I use the term staff to represent anyone representing the organisation (staff, contractor, consultant, freelancer, etc)

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