Anne Truitt Zelenka

Part of the promise of Work 2.0 is living anywhere you want yet still working with whom you want to work on the projects you want to work on at the times that you can work. We wish keenly for that aspect of Work 2.0 in Colorado, a place you choose for lifestyle not because it offers a wealth of career opportunities. People choose to live in Colorado for the mountains, for the blue skies, for lakes, for family, but not usually for career. People choose to live in Denver or Boulder or Durango and then figure out a way to economically survive.

Can we divorce the physical from the abstract, the geography from the work, the workers from the employer’s headquarters and branch offices? Can you really live anywhere you want and have the career you want too?

One of my clients is struggling with how to develop team spirit and team-scale productivity given a geographically distributed team. They have physical offices in their population centers of Texas, Colorado, and D.C. but the workers rebel. You might show up on a Wednesday morning in the D.C. office and find no one there. I wonder if anyone ever goes to the Texas office or if it just represents management’s hope against worker’s reality. I personally have never met a single team member in the flesh. Management can declare certain hours where people must attend, but isn’t management by fiat mostly dead?

The thought that we can somehow separate our knowledge work–our brain work–from our bodies brings back the idea of ghosts in the machine. We are not ghosts in machines; we are not separable from our physical experience of the world; we don’t do brain work unless it makes us physically feel good. That’s why people fly to San Francisco for yet another 2.0 conference. That’s why managers spend money on office leases instead of just letting their employees work from home. That’s why it’s harder to build a technology career in Denver rather than San Jose or San Francisco.

There aren’t easy answers for the tensions that pull on us. We want to live near our family in the climate that suits us near the mountains or ocean or lakes or plains that call to us. We want to work with the people we think are smart and insightful doing work that brings flow and a sturdy paycheck too.

So what do we do? There’s coworking and using video or audio technology to make things more personal. There’s flying around the world to meet the people we want to meet–something I’ll be doing next week in Las Vegas at the Adobe Max user’s conference. In Colorado, we are fortunate to have a critical mass of technology workers though we might not be as loud or as numerous as our SF bay area brethren and sistren. We haven’t had a Denver Tech Meetup for a while. Let’s do it. I propose early November so as to get it in before the holidays descend madly upon us.

UPDATE 10/22/06 10:30 am: Check out this morning’s NY Times article on the importance of physical proximity in the success of tech startups and the techmeme conversation it spawned.