antipaucity

I have been working in the realm of “automation” – specifically data center automation – for several years.

Merriam-Webster defines “automating” thusly:

1. to operate by automation
2. to convert to largely automatic operation <automate a process>

Notice the subtle difference with M-W’s definition of “automation“:

1. the technique of making an apparatus, a process, or a system operate automatically
2. the state of being operated automatically
3. automatically controlled operation of an apparatus, process, or system by mechanical or electronic devices that take the place of human labor

These words tend to be used interchangeably – but they are different. Most of the customers I have worked with think they are “doing automation”, when in actuality they are only barely starting to “automate”.

What do I mean by this?

Most customers that bring automation tools in-house (whether simple cron jobs or complex tools like HPSA) take their current, manual processes and merely write wrappers around them to make them “automatic”. That is the first step of automation – but it’s only the first step.

Too many people try to take new tools and make them fit their current processes, procedures, and policies – rather than seeing what policies, procedures, and processes are either made redundant by the new tools, or can be improved, shortened, or – wait for it - automated!

Think of a physical example – you’re a Shaker Cabinetmaker in the late 1800s. You’re making end tables. Cutting dovetails with a dovetail saw. Sanding with a block and sandpaper. Cutting pieces to size by hand. Drilling mortises and cutting tenons with a manual auger and small saw. Lathing on a treadle-powered lathe.

Jump forward 100 years. You’re WGBH in Boston wanting to come up with a how-to program to air weekly. You find a fellow named Norm Abram, and pay him to do the show. You put New Yankee Workshop on TV for years. Norm visits places like Hancock Shaker Village for inspiration. But Norm doesn’t use loads of hand tools – he uses radial arm saws, drill presses, table saws, routers, joiners, etc. Why? Because he wants to make a prototype or three in a few days. And then wants to film a show in two (or occasionally longer for big projects) and be able to give you the confidence, along with a set of measured drawings, that you could, more-or-less, replicate what he did in your own home.

Which approach is better? Neither – they both yield end tables. Which approach is more repeatable – especially by someone with little experience? That’d be Norm’s method: the automated method. But the New Yankee Workshop is only slightly down the road of automating the entire process.

Automation (in the furniture world, at least) is found at Ikea. Thousands of identical Ingos and Karls roll out the door every year. Produced by automated machinery.

The job of the Information Technologist has a great deal of art to it – but it’s also a science: at the core of everything that a computer does is logic (perhaps poor logic, but logic nonetheless). Everyone in information technology (especially, though it’s applicable to myriad other industries) should be striving to make themselves replaceable – because no one is irreplaceable. I’ve seen it come true in scores of settings: the person who makes themselves “irreplaceable” never gets promoted, and is eventually replaced by someone else: either management removes him or finds a way around him, or he leaves the organization.

Therefore, preemptively make yourself replaceable. This was Ken Moellman’s campaign when he ran for State Treasurer in KY: to eliminate the very job he was running for.

There’s a secret to making yourself replaceable – and that is that when you can show that you’re replaceable, especially in the world I work in, you tend to be promoted. You also tend to grow because you’re learning more. Because you learn more and grow, you become more valuable. Because you become more valuable, you can move up the chain as you like.

Do artisan works still have a market? Of course – go look at any “artsy” type store that showcases “local craftsmen” in almost any part of the country: they’re offering their hard work for your consideration … at a hard price.

Is the artisan chair fundamentally any better than the Ikea chair? Maybe, maybe not. It sure looks better. But it’s not as repeatable.

And repeatable tasks get automated because if you have to do it twice, you need to write it down. And if you have to do it more than twice, you need a process anyone can follow. But processes are always open for refinement and replacement. The process to get a piece of lumber from a tree is not completely dissimilar to day from how we did it before the advent of the sawmill – but with laser-guided blades, the sawmill of 2013 can optimize lumber out of a log in a way very very few people ever could .. and can cut the log into its constituent boards faster than any person.

The process for manually provisioning a RHEL server is pretty simple – but shortly after introducing Anaconda, Red Hat introduced the kickstart (modeled after jumpstart). Microsoft, likewise, has unattend.txt and unattend.xml (for either the DOS or WinPE methods of installing). And SuSE, HPUX, and AIX have their systems (AutoYaST, Ignite, and NIM).

Why do these tools exist? It’s so administrators can rapidly deploy machines without having to do a lot of extra setup work by hand. The same can be asked for why do chainsaws, table saws, and circular saws exist? It’s so you can cut wood more rapidly and more repeatably than by hand. You can fell a tree with an axe. You can fell a tree with a saw. But for a single person, felling a tree with a chainsaw is best. Or you can use a Tiger Cat.

The first step of automating needs to be building wrappers to reliably repeat manual processes.

The second, and far more important, step in the paradigm shift from manual methods to automation, is to systematically go through all of your processes, procedures, and policies and see what can be refined, what can be replaced, and, most importantly, what can be removed.

What legacy activities are you doing that should be eliminated, updated, or cleaned-up?

Paul Graham is one of my favorite essayists. The following are some excerpts from his excellent 2004 essay, “The Age of the Essay“.

The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.

With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens? Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay about color or baseball.

…

in the late 19th century the teaching of writing was inherited by English professors. This had two drawbacks: (a) an expert on literature need not himself be a good writer, any more than an art historian has to be a good painter, and (b) the subject of writing now tends to be literature, since that’s what the professor is interested in.

…

The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn’t take a position and then defend it.

…

Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it’s not the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to admit. It’s not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can’t change the question.

And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the things they teach you to write in high school. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the conclusion– uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell.

…

To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called “essais.” He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.

Figure out what? You don’t know yet.

…

If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne’s great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them.

…

Questions aren’t enough. An essay has to come up with answers. They don’t always, of course. Sometimes you start with a promising question and get nowhere…An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn’t already know.

…

An essay is supposed to be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn’t meander.

The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn’t do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea.

The river’s algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting.

…

So what’s interesting? For me, interesting means surprise. Interfaces, as Geoffrey James has said, should follow the principle of least astonishment. A button that looks like it will make a machine stop should make it stop, not speed up. Essays should do the opposite. Essays should aim for maximum surprise.

…

I found the best way to get information … was to ask what surprised them. How was the place different from what they expected? This is an extremely useful question. You can ask it of the most unobservant people, and it will extract information they didn’t even know they were recording.

…

[T]he ability to ferret out the unexpected must not merely be an inborn one. It must be something you can learn. How do you learn it?

To some extent it’s like learning history. When you first read history, it’s just a whirl of names and dates. Nothing seems to stick. But the more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto– which means you accumulate knowledge at what’s colloquially called an exponential rate. Once you remember that Normans conquered England in 1066, it will catch your attention when you hear that other Normans conquered southern Italy at about the same time. Which will make you wonder about Normandy, and take note when a third book mentions that Normans were not, like most of what is now called France, tribes that flowed in as the Roman empire collapsed, but Vikings (norman = north man) who arrived four centuries later in 911. Which makes it easier to remember that Dublin was also established by Vikings in the 840s. Etc, etc squared.

…

There are an infinite number of questions. How do you find the fruitful ones?

…

I write down things that surprise me in notebooks. I never actually get around to reading them and using what I’ve written, but I do tend to reproduce the same thoughts later. So the main value of notebooks may be what writing things down leaves in your head.

…

Whatever you study, include history– but social and economic history, not political history. History seems to me so important that it’s misleading to treat it as a mere field of study. Another way to describe it is all the data we have so far.

…

Gradualness is very powerful. And that power can be used for constructive purposes too: just as you can trick yourself into looking like a freak, you can trick yourself into creating something so grand that you would never have dared to plan such a thing. Indeed, this is just how most good software gets created.

…

If there’s one piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it would be: don’t do as you’re told. Don’t believe what you’re supposed to. Don’t write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don’t write the way they taught you to in school.

…

Popular magazines made the period between the spread of literacy and the arrival of TV the golden age of the short story. The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay. And that’s certainly not something I realized when I started writing this.

Back in 2009, Joel Spolsky wrote an article called The Duct Tape Programmer. Of everything he has written, I think this is the very pinnacle, and it is summed in one simple sentence in the middle: “Shipping is a feature.”

I’ve referenced this article twice before (in Feb and Sep of ’11).

Why is this so important in my mind?

I went back to school in 2003 to complete my bachelor’s degree in CIS. I had graduated in 2001 with an AAS in CIS from HVCC, and after finding nothing in 2 years of searching better than the job I had at Hertz, I decided a 4 year degree might help. I graduated from Elon University in Dec 2006 with my newly-minted BA in CIS. During my tenure at school I discovered that I didn’t really like the development end of Computer Science, and I instead preferred the analytical and integrational aspects of systems work – tying disparate tools together, improving internal workflow, etc – to help make individuals’ lives better and easier. In other words, I enjoyed finding ways to automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks to allow myself (and others) to focus on more interesting work – like figuring out how to automate more tasks to move up the chain.

I worked for a few places while I was at school (two different departments at the school itself, a pair of non-profits, and some freelance side work doing web site development). When I graduated, therefore, it was only natural that I ended-up with a pair of offers to work with automation tools – one from a company called Opsware, and one from a place called Network General. For a variety of reasons, I chose Opsware.

It wasn’t long after I started in Support for Opsware’s Server Automation [System] product that I became more and more sold on the product, and grew bored doing support – troubleshooting is fun, but with the paucity of good support tickets^*, large similarity of cases coming from customers, etc .. it just wasn’t “me”. Shortly after HP purchased Opsware I put in to move from Support to Professional Services – to, hopefully, get a chance to work with harder integrational problems than I would ever see helping people over the phone and via email.

Beginning March of 2008^{^} I moved from Support to ProServe, and did start to get a taste for the bigger systemic problems that could be solved with the Opsware HP BTO suite. While with HP, I had the opportunity to do the global delivery of HPSA 7.5 for HSBC – performing both installation and onsite mentoring/training in Chicago, NYC, London, and Hong Kong. I also did the replacement install of HPSA 7.0 (a non-upgrade-to release) for Home Depot in Atlanta to manage their 2200 stores. There were some other customers I worked with, too – but those were the two biggest.

One of the issues that has arisen with [nearly] every customer I have ever worked with it that they want what they’ve agreed to pay for in the Statement of Work (SOW) signed, sealed, and delivered by the end of the project – and if it’s not, they want good reasons to sign a CO (change order) to modify the SOW.

And it’s no surprise. When you cost someone nearly 7 cents per second to work for them, they want to see results!

One of the constraints, therefore, that needs to be constantly watched is scope creep – the insidious tendency for all projects to go beyond their intended purpose (violating law 47 of the 48 laws), exceed budget, and never deliver what is really needed.

My primary goal when I work with a customer is not, perhaps paradoxically, to “make them happy”. One thing I learned when working in support is that the customer is never right^!. You may have to pretend that they’re kinda right – but they’re always wrong. They do not know what they want. They do not know what they need. And they certainly do not know what is wrong if you ask them.

My primary goal when I work with a customer is to deliver what they have paid for. When possible, I will change course slightly (following proper CO processes) – but I want them to get what they have agreed to pay for. Ideally, especially now that I am in the architecture end of the world much more than ‘just’ delivery, I can work with them in the pre-sales process to get the SOW to something that approximates what they need. But I always aim to give them what they have paid for. Everything else is window dressing.

At the end of a project – whether as outside consultants, students, internal employees, at home, for work, etc – what needs to be seen is what was paid for.

Ship. Deliver.

Without those two, nothing gets done.

^{* _{I have grown so frustrated with support processes that I spent time a couple years ago writing a small eBook that includes a section on how to make good tickets. I’ve also written on ways to improve your support organization before.}
^ _{Just realized that means I’ve been doing ProServe or PS-like work for 5 years running, and have been with the automation suite for more than 6 now.}
! _{Before you become too concerned – I do realize there are a few good customers out there. But they are just that – few, and VERY far between.}}

Recently came across a seriously funky issue with one of HP’s products (don’t laugh – I know there’s loads of funkiness in HP tools).

HP Cloud Service Automation allows you to schedule requests in the future. It also allows you schedule end dates for subscriptions.

That’s neat.

Here’s the problem: if you delete a Service Offering (which allows something to be requested in the CSA catalog) while an active subscription is using it – any active subscriptions get delinked, and become unmanageable with the tool.

Now the dopey scheduler comes into play.

CSA’s scheduler works by putting all future items into a FIFO queue. What this ends up meaning is that if you have an item that fails (because, for example, you’re now past a scheduled end date, but the subscription is unlinked from an offering, so it can’t unprovision it), all other pending items fail, too. Even ones that should happen “immediately” – because “immediately” is still added to the scheduling queue… behind the erroring item(s). And since those items have errored, nothing can move forward.

This is stupid. (And yes – RFEs have already been filed over these problems in the product.)

Instead, have the scheduler put all items into a table – at the appointed time, iterate through the table and run everything you can – if it won’t run, flag it as an error, and move on.

This is how cron works. Why would you not use a commonly-accepted, reliable way of doing things? Oh yeah – you’re HP.

If you’re planning to write something for your product/software/tool – see if anyone else has done it before, and then try to mimic methods that work… please!

I learned recently that my wonderful wife was never taught how to use a dictionary, thesaurus, almanac, or encyclopedia as a child in school.

Not all of that can be because she went to public school whereas I was homeschooled. Nor can it merely be that she grew up in KY and I in NY.

I’ve seen myriad others younger than her that can’t use those resources, either

Most people have the basics of how to search online down – but barely the basics^*. In many ways, I think online tools are killing our ability to think critically in some areas – learning to ask questions well is one of those areas..

Why are these tools still important in a digital age? Well, what do you do when you need to find something and you don’t have your iPhone, Android, tablet, laptop, etc handy? Do you wait until you have internet access again?

What about when you are looking for something at a library or book store – do you exclusively rely on the staff’s knowledge to help you find what you want, or can you start to locate it yourself?

Part of the problem is that schools, because of the misguided legislation that is NCLB, all teach to the test. Tests can be wonderful tools – but they have no bearing at all on the “real world“. Your ability to score a perfect ACT, ASVAB, GRE, SAT, etc means precisely bupkis.

Being able to find what you need when you need it once you’re out of school, however, will be your daily lifeline to keep from drowning at work and in life.

I remember many times having to learn how to use new reference materials – and how to use ones I already had been introduced to in better, more efficient ways (I still look for better ways to find what I need with tools I have). I remember an entire class day devoted to learning what an almanac is (the Information Please, to be specific), and then doing “information scavenger hunts” through it (for prizes, mind you – yes, my team won first place).

I remember learning how to use the Funk & Wagnalls and Britannica Encyclopædias (my aunt owned the Britannica, my parents the F&W). I remember learning how to use World Book at the library.

I also remember my first semester at HVCC in 1999 where we went to the school library to learn how to search for materials online for our English class – and no one knowing what search engines were … nor even how to use the catalog the school had!

I think that was my first worry about the state of education and how ill-prepared most people are out of high school to be ready to function in further schooling. And I have only seen it get worse.

There is a fundmental breakdown in the education system in the United States. Is a solution redecentralizing? Homeschooling? Montessori? Private/parochial schools? Eliminating teacher unions^{^}? Performance pay for teachers?

I think all of those will play important roles in improving the future of the country.

Something needs to be done – because the state of education today is very bad.

For the record: my wife does know how to reference materials at least at a cursory level – but those skills weren’t learned until she had to have them in college.

^{* _{search is broken, but that’s another problem}
^ _{specifically, abuse of power, lobbying, etc}}

Albert-László Barabási’s book “Bursts: The Hidden Patterns Behind Everything We Do, from Your E-mail to Bloody Crusades” is fascinating. In the same overall genre as Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (review) – pop psychology and pop science – Bursts is a great read: bringing highly technical and dense topics to the masses in a manner that [apparently] doesn’t dumb it down, and never condescends to the reader.

The author is a professional researcher with deep experience in the fields he writes about – a huge plus. If you can wade through all the Hungarian names in a couple of the stories (it’s not that hard), you’ll find this a fantastic, enlightening read.

Reading this makes me want to go buy his other book, Linked.

One of the biggest issues facing Western societies is that they are all consumption-oriented.

Not enough time is spent creating – all [most] people want to do is consume: entertainment, food, money, fun…

We all want shortcuts. We all want to be at the level where we don’t have to think to accomplish work. We all want to have fun instead of working. Some of us have fun while working, but most people just want the day off.

One of the biggest drawbacks to a consumption-based economy (like most western economies – and certainly how the United States’ economy is currently structured), is that consumers feel compelled to consume ever more. We have to have the next best thing out there. Keeping up with the Joneses.

I think far too few people create in our society, because it is so much easier to consume.

I know I don’t create nearly as much as I consume – I wish I did, but I don’t … yet. One of my personal goals is to move that balance in my life more towards the creating end from the consuming one – little things along the way certainly help: mentoring, teaching, volunteering, growing a garden, etc.

What ways do you see that folks can create more and consume either less in gestalt, or at least less from others because they’re contributing themselves?

I learned about the call command in Windows recently.

Some context – was trying to run a command via HPSA at a customer, but kept getting an error that the program was not a recognized internal or external command.

Very frustrating.

Then one of the guys I worked with suggested adding a “call” to the front of my script. That worked like a champ. Here’s why.

When the HPSA Agent on a Managed Server receives a script to run from the Core, it runs it in a headless terminal session. This means that while environment variables (eg %ProgramFiles%) expand properly, if the first part of the command is NOT a built-in from cmd.exe, it won’t execute. Unlike *nix which is designed to run most things headless, Windows never was (and isn’t still as of Win2k8R2).

The built-in command ‘call‘ forks the next command to a full session (albeit still headless), and enables cmd.exe to run it properly.

Now you know.

Knowledge capture, retention, and dissemination has been an interest of mine for a long time. I have written about various aspects of it before.

The most vital commodity any organization has is the knowledge of its members – it does not matter if it is a historical society, company, church, or school: the organizational knowledge base is vital to ongoing health of the organization.

I love the picture of the “Tree of Wisdom“: at the ground there is a meadow of data, from this data information roots are gathered, the roots grow into knowledge branches, and at the end is the application of that knowledge in wisdom leaves.

Data is easy to come by.

Information similarly so.

Knowledge, taking information and transforming it into a more-usable form, is important.

When to apply that knowledge – aka using wisdom – is the topic for another post.

Capturing Knowledge

There are a host of available tools for capturing knowledge – text files, brown bags, PowerPoint, SharePoint, blogs, Plone, wikis, etc. The “best” on to use is the one you use.

Culture

Getting team members to contribute to organizational knowledge pools can be difficult – unless it is an organizational priority .. a part of the organization’s culture.

Incorporating this culture switch (if it’s not already innate to the organization) needs to be done not merely as a top-down directive, but encouraged via bottom-up interest.

Retaining (Managing) Knowledge

Now that you’ve captured (or started capturing) the organization’s data, managing it becomes the next task of import.

For example, should the KB article written 5 years be updated, replaced, or left alone?

Who is responsible for managing all of the information that has been collected? Will it be self-managed and -directed, will there be a curation team, will it be a combination?

Who determines the process for taking “internal” knowledge and “promoting” it to “outside” knowledge?

How are these roles going to be managed as the team changes memberships through people leaving, entering, and shifting in the organization?

For extremely small organizations, formal curation may be unnecessary. Perhaps since everyone knows everyone else, or the knowledge domain is so small, everyone’s individual contributions will remain fairly static and the “promotion” path will merely be proofreading (eg a historical society’s archives – the archives may be extensive, but the material doesn’t ‘change’ all that much (excepting being added-to, of course)).

For very big organizations (like the MSDN documentation available on microsoft.com), many layers of curation are likely going to be needed – proofreading, formatting, verifying, etc.

Finding the right balance of self-direction and organizational management can be tricky.

Disseminating Knowledge – Getting The Word Out

All of the captured knowledge in the world is useless if you can’t find it – and knowing where to look is vital. A close second to knowing where to look is how to find it.

Where is it?

There needs to be a solid document, landing page, directory, table of contents, etc so that new members (or folks who forget) can find the tribal knowledge that exists ion the organization.

As a part of the new-hire\introduction\etc process\period, be sure to tell new members where information can be found, and who to talk to about certain major topics.

Finding it once you know where to look

“Search is a hard problem.” Google’s own Udi Manber said that. Anna Paterson at Stanford wrote, “Writing Your Own Search Engine Is Hard”.

Search in general may be hard, but many tools handle at least basic (and some fuzzy) searching well – OSQA, WordPress, Plone, Drupal, and many others. If, in addition to categorization, a tag taxonomy is employed, quickly finding content relevant to the searcher’s wants\needs.

“A tag is a keyword or label that categorizes your question with other, similar questions. Using the right tags makes it easier for others to find and answer your question.” {SO description}

Knowledge contributors should be the primary agents of tagging. However, consumers should be able to suggest additional tags. Administrators\curators should be able (under unusual, but well-defined, circumstances) to remove tags.

The human factor

For any given topic / knowledge region in the organization’s realm, there need to be established “experts” and “mentors” who will help guide new individuals through the fog to locate the buoys to be able to navigate themselves into a clearer understanding of the new world they have been made a part of.

Apprenticing upcoming experts into the organization is the single most vital aspect of the knowledge capture process – if it is not disseminated, it doesn’t matter if it is captured.

I have a very long-term interest in education.

As I look at the current public education “system” in the US, I can see a variety of major problems.

The biggest problem, endemic of any system built around the premise that the only people who should be together all day long should all be “similar”. Somewhere along the way, we decided it would be a Good Idea™ to split children into monocultures of more-or-less indentically-aged groups called “grades”, and then batch them into groups of 20-30 and herd them through a variety of subjects every day.

We have lost the concept of learning as exemplified throughout history in the “apprentice” or “disciple” model.

Before the monoculturification of schooling, whole (but small) groups of children were taught together – it’s how my dad’s uncle was taught. From 1st (or K) through 12th all in one room. At any given moment, all ages were either being reminded of earlier work, or hearing about later work, or doing their own work.

This model is still used by the large segment of the population that homeschools (presuming, of course, they have more than one child).

What if we re-adopted this approach to school in the public system? What if, instead of having schools which housed hundreds of students in just a couple grades, we had schools in every neighborhood that had a few dozen students that represent all the grades of the community?

What if schools became “migratory” – in the sense that as the demographics of the community change, the location of the school ‘building’ can shift. Perhaps, for example, in a suburban community the school could be usage of a development community center – but if and when the community has fewer or no children, the school locale could be removed or shifted to a new young demographic area.

Some of the myriad benefits I can envision in such a scenario:

• reduced overhead for any given school in terms of hiring, maintenance, etc
• reduced school board / district overhead – elimination of now-unneeded positions
• increased teacher-to-student engagement
• lower student-to-teacher ratios
• increased student retention as they are continually being reminded of old concepts
• teachers becoming more generalized, rather than [potentially] myopic in their teaching
• team teaching – cutting across disciplines and seeing an integrated view of the world
• improved teaching flexibility
• reduced union strength
• improved connections between teachers and the community they serve
• more well-rounded graduates
• reduced / eliminated busing
• decreased prevalence of bullying
• increased likelihood of teachers living near/in the communities they serve

Some of the antibenefits I could envision:

• loss of school sporting teams
• forced generalization of teachers
• more complex IT support infrastructure (if managed by a central authority such as the board or district)

I eagerly anticipate your feedback – what do you think?