Re: A simple request to Sun's employees
Well, this is interesting to me. I work for Sun Microsystems as I explained earlier, and Sun is doing this interesting experiment in transparency. We have open blog capabilities for any employee to use to write to the public, and there are blogging opportunities through java.net and other places Sun owns.
As I've been writing on this blog, there's a tension in being an employee who is also communicating with the public using company owned infrastructure. What do you say? What can you say? How do you say it? How do you say it without offending your boss?
A Simple Request to Sun's Employees
That's a blog posting by Jonathan Schwartz, our fearless leader who is a prolific blogger himself. He's written this as an open letter to all Sun employees, placed in public for some reason. He's asking us to not "leak" and to remember the importance of Sun's confidential information.
Okay, this could be predicted from the thought experiments I've been playing in this blog. As I said, there's the tradition that employees don't say anything, and now we're toying with transparency.
There's no indication from his blog that the leak he's concerned about happened through a blog entry made by an employee. It could have been done any number of ways. All the employees have email, for example, or could simply have talked in a place or way they shouldn't have.
Come to think of it, blogs don't open up any more holes than already exist. Confidential information is trivial to "leak" through any number of ways.
But in his blog you can see some of the thinking that goes into the tradition of secrecy. He claims leaked information harms the ability to get high end press coverage, etc, and ends with the thought of "Let's introduce ourselves to the world on our terms, not someone elses".
In other words, he sees the secrecy tradition as a way to control the presentation. Instead of being transparent, I think he's arguing for a controlled release of information. The blog then becomes just a communication channel, and not the informal and open and transparent medium the inventors of blogging intended.
Maybe that's inevitable. There's lots of things where the inventor had one idea, and it became used an entirely different way when the product came onto the market.
For example, would the inventors of blogs have forseen spam blogs? These are blogs where the owner publishes manipulated text that's meant to draw traffic for specific keywords that then draw visitors from the search engines who will hopefully click on adsense advertising. The actual content of the blogs is useless, except in that it draws visitors to the site through search engine searches, and then they get an opportunity to click on advertising.
In any case, I thought Jonathan's blog entry is an interesting live example of the tension between confidential information and the desire for transparency.
I'll say this in closing. Recently a company wide requirement went out to take an online training concerning Sun's Intellectual Property policies. It was a decent training, giving a good overview of why confidential information needs to be kept secret. It gave us a good grounding on how to mark the information we deal with as confidential etc, as well as some guidelines in figuring out what should or should not be kept secret.
But in practice, I'm rather stumped still. I've found the guideline too vague, but maybe that's stemming from the size of Sun and the huge variety of what we all deal with in our jobs.
As I've been writing on this blog, there's a tension in being an employee who is also communicating with the public using company owned infrastructure. What do you say? What can you say? How do you say it? How do you say it without offending your boss?
A Simple Request to Sun's Employees
That's a blog posting by Jonathan Schwartz, our fearless leader who is a prolific blogger himself. He's written this as an open letter to all Sun employees, placed in public for some reason. He's asking us to not "leak" and to remember the importance of Sun's confidential information.
Okay, this could be predicted from the thought experiments I've been playing in this blog. As I said, there's the tradition that employees don't say anything, and now we're toying with transparency.
There's no indication from his blog that the leak he's concerned about happened through a blog entry made by an employee. It could have been done any number of ways. All the employees have email, for example, or could simply have talked in a place or way they shouldn't have.
Come to think of it, blogs don't open up any more holes than already exist. Confidential information is trivial to "leak" through any number of ways.
But in his blog you can see some of the thinking that goes into the tradition of secrecy. He claims leaked information harms the ability to get high end press coverage, etc, and ends with the thought of "Let's introduce ourselves to the world on our terms, not someone elses".
In other words, he sees the secrecy tradition as a way to control the presentation. Instead of being transparent, I think he's arguing for a controlled release of information. The blog then becomes just a communication channel, and not the informal and open and transparent medium the inventors of blogging intended.
Maybe that's inevitable. There's lots of things where the inventor had one idea, and it became used an entirely different way when the product came onto the market.
For example, would the inventors of blogs have forseen spam blogs? These are blogs where the owner publishes manipulated text that's meant to draw traffic for specific keywords that then draw visitors from the search engines who will hopefully click on adsense advertising. The actual content of the blogs is useless, except in that it draws visitors to the site through search engine searches, and then they get an opportunity to click on advertising.
In any case, I thought Jonathan's blog entry is an interesting live example of the tension between confidential information and the desire for transparency.
I'll say this in closing. Recently a company wide requirement went out to take an online training concerning Sun's Intellectual Property policies. It was a decent training, giving a good overview of why confidential information needs to be kept secret. It gave us a good grounding on how to mark the information we deal with as confidential etc, as well as some guidelines in figuring out what should or should not be kept secret.
But in practice, I'm rather stumped still. I've found the guideline too vague, but maybe that's stemming from the size of Sun and the huge variety of what we all deal with in our jobs.
posted by David at 9:30 PM
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