It's funny how the phrases "paperless office" and "it'll never happen" can occur in close proximity, but just maybe there is a way to work towards this dream. Modern offices are often a colossal mess of paper, high powered printers churn out copies of electronic documents, scraps of paper litter people's desks and people remind themselves of tasks to be completed by sticking little notes to available surfaces. If somebody turns up to speak to you about a topic, they will often print out an email about the subject. Recently, recycling boxes have appeared in offices to give people a way to at least try to alleviate some of the environmental impact of using so much paper, but confidential documents must be shredded using even more energy.
Don't get me wrong I'm not some sort of environmental extremist, I like many people simply try to "do my bit", and rather than try to change the world to use less paper, I'm starting with my own paper using habits, after all I'm guilty too of excessive paper use. It's kind of a diet, but with paper. One aspect of paper use that I thought I could reduce on was meetings. Like most employers most of us at the university have desktop PCs. Any information you want from them is firmly routed to that spot, if you go elsewhere you can't take it with you, so if you go to meetings you had to print information out to refer to it. As a lot of my meetings are about web sites, this increasingly didn't make sense, as web sites are an interactive idea, you just cannot represent them properly on paper. Now you might be thinking at this point, what about laptops, PDAs or having PCs in meeting rooms? Yes I've tried them all, and they all are a bit disappointing.
Firstly, laptops, how many times have you seen people in meetings faffing about with laptops? They always seem to be out of battery power, or taking ages to log in. Before you know it half the meeting desk is consumed by the laptop and its wires. The same with PCs in meeting rooms, which invariably are machines that don't have the software needed, or you are stuck with Internet Explorer 6 to show off a website, but then you can't demonstrate features like RSS, and besides IE often has the same effect on beta web sites as a car hitting a fox. Again somebody will be distracted for a while as the machine boots and it drags a "profile" from a remote server. PDAs are great in their own way, but the browsers tend to be cramped and unrepresentative and also if anybody in the room has less that 20/20 vision you are a bit stuck.
So I've started taking the Asus EEE PC to meetings and so far have found it a positive experience. Using the wireless network we have on campus, resources can be accessed easily. Digital objects can stay digital, there is no need to print them out. The pace of discussion can be increased as you don't have to explain ideas as much, people can see and experience what you mean, it can make a meeting much more interesting to work with interactive objects. The screen is big enough (enough any smaller would probably be too small) for a group of people to see at once. To top it off the fast boot time of the machine does not distract from the substance of the meeting, you only have to wait 15-20 seconds from the machine being turned off to being able to access information. For me it is perfect as my handwriting is absolutely terrible and sometimes I couldn't read the notes I took in meetings anyway.
The only problem so far? Well it is a case of having to unlearn habits gained over my working life, it always feels easier to take a printout, because it is a familiar discussion point in meetings. It still has a lot of novelty value so I think it will take a while for people to get used to seeing me with the machine in every meeting, but it feels like the right thing to do, and it seems to function well as a working practice in meetings. After all, data should be where you need it. It is early days yet, but maybe the "paperless meeting" will be a good starting point to rediscover the "paperless office".