It looks like the time has come to again raise the anti-​​blocking flag into the sight of those who advo­cate block­ing rather than deal­ing prop­erly with the issue. stop​block​ing​.org is a clear­ing­house for issues and infor­ma­tion about remov­ing the walls and describes itself as:

… ded­i­cated to pro­vid­ing resources for those who choose to resist the irra­tional block­ing employ­ees from wide swaths of online con­tent. It is a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort to doc­u­ment the ben­e­fits of pro­vid­ing access and answers to the con­cerns raised by fear­mon­gers (not to men­tion the legit­i­mate issues that com­pa­nies can address with tak­ing the dra­con­ian step of access restriction).

Started by com­mu­ni­ca­tor, Shel Holtz, stop​block​ing​.org is def­i­nitely the place to go to get the lat­est infor­ma­tion in the effort to enable you, your col­leagues and co-​​workers open, appro­pri­ate and use­ful access to the online tools you need.

Work­ing in a gov­ern­ment town, the con­cept (and real­ity) of cor­po­rate fire­wall block­ing access to all sorts of things is inti­mately famil­iar to me as I move from client site to client site. There are very few places I go that don’t imple­ment block­ing to some extent. It’s a con­stant source of annoy­ance and frus­tra­tion to me, as I am pre­vented once again from access­ing all the online tools I con­sider crit­i­cal to my work.

The rea­son­ing pro­vided for the block­ing, if you can find some­one to take own­er­ship of the pol­icy, is often couched in terms of net­work secu­rity or nanny state-​​ing (“We’re pro­tect­ing our work­ers” or “We can’t trust our peo­ple to not use these things in an inap­pro­pri­ate way”) or data secu­rity. To my mind, these are all spu­ri­ous and rep­re­sent an atti­tude that fails to treat peo­ple as adults while also fail­ing to imple­ment appro­pri­ate use poli­cies that deal with these issues. They end up in the too hard bas­ket and block­ing is eas­ier than deal­ing prop­erly with the prob­lems and issues.

The ben­e­fits of appro­pri­ately man­aged open access to all the resources your work­ers need are man­i­fold — there are effects on morale, on abil­ity and cul­ture around knowl­edge shar­ing, on break­ing down of silos and on devel­op­ment of learn­ing cul­tures. Open cor­po­rate cul­tures where com­mu­ni­ca­tion is both encour­aged and facil­i­tated are bet­ter equipped to cope with mar­ket change and are fre­quently more nim­ble in deal­ing with poten­tially show­stop­per issues.

Hat tip to Luis and Andy for bring­ing this to my attention.