...Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.
-Robert Frost, Mending Wall, 1915
DRIVE up the road leading to Facebook's spanking-new data centre in central Oregon, and you may be shocked to see no sign of a fence, or even a gate. Lack of the latter is partly down to a miscalculation. The first of the planned buildings on the centre's campus is accessible from a public road that was intended to be private, but a property goof left it in the city's hands and, as such, not eligible for a bar across the way. Not to worry. Facebook is paying for a ring road to skirt the site, and be given to the town?which agreed to christen it Social Loop?in exchange for taking the access road properly private. A simple gate will one day be erected. For now, Babbage pulls off the road to a security shack in a parking lot, and engages in friendly banter obtaining a slip of paper authorising his car to park a short distance away at the campus's first fully functional building.
The fencelessness, by contrast, is entirely intentional. The centre's boss Ken Patchett explains that fences in the middle of a rural area do not provide any enhanced security. A fence is a gauntlet thrown to anyone eager to pick it up. Ditch the wall altogether, and you remove the temptation to scale it. Moreover, Mr Patchett dislikes the message a fence sends. He reckons that a wall creates both a literal and figurative divide between the company and the community. He and his employer are doing their level best to blend in, by hiring locals, offering a no-strings-attached cash grant to the town, and bringing in power and broadband that should enhance the town's appeal to other internet firms.
Little wonder, then, than rather than erect a barrier Facebook drew inspiration from Robert Frost (see poem above) and plumped instead for a shallow ditch, a gentle berm and lines of sight out in all directions. All this makes the property appear fully open. For all that, the owner's ability to control who and what goes in and out remains intact. And the strategy seems to be working. (For instance, the image above depicts a gift from quilters in the community: a physical manifestation of a social web with Prineville at its heart.)
Facebook must juggle openness with privacy and security elsewhere, too. On its website, the company constantly has to choose between granting users the right to include and exclude people from their social circles as they see fit, on the one hand, and fostering new relationships which, by dint of the network effect, let it net ever more users, on the other. Increased use and more users produce more cash. And Facebook would surely love to drill peepholes in privacy barriers to give advertisers and partner firms a glimpse of data that would help them target clients more efficiently. Privacy groups, governments and users keep postering over those holes or demanding new, taller, solid fences.
Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/08/open-computing?fsrc=rss
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