Transparency, openness and privacy among software professionals: discourses and practices surrounding use of the digital calendar

Abstract Research on the groupware calendar system (GCS) has sought to understand its situated use in workplace contexts, revealing insights around design, culture, and self-understanding. A critical look at how knowledge workers use the GCS, and conceptualize of this use, reveals often overlooked sociotechnical values that figure prominently in workers’ lives. At a time when the public–private entanglement has become top-of-mind, this article adds to research on the GCS and professional subjectivity. It shows how organizational values circulate through use of the GCS and explores how hierarchy is negotiated on it, in part through design. It finds that senior-level workers are afforded opportunities to make their calendars private, while nonsenior workers are met with frustration when doing so. The article draws from a multi-sited ethnography, focusing on interviews with software workers in Canada. Findings suggest that the logistical functions of the GCS shape the affective dimensions related to its use. Lay Summary Within software workplaces in Canada, it is rare to meet a knowledge worker who does not regularly use a professional digital calendar. A common practice in software workplaces is for employees’ calendars to be set to “open,” so that the contents of workers’ schedules are visible to one another. This article asks workers how they think about and use their calendars and examines how they manage them. It finds that, in software organizations, to exercise privacy in the form of a “closed” calendar is a choice shaped by positionality and organizational hierarchy. Interviewees commonly point to “transparency” as a reason for leaving their calendars open and report that calendar privacy was largely deserved by people with organizational seniority. Workers also convey various emotions about calendar practices and some express negative feelings toward nonsenior workers who use private calendars. Additionally, workers populate their calendars with personal events. Some find creative ways to hide what they are actually doing, and others want to display desirable social lives. Similar to some social media, the calendar can be a tool to perform the self. Calendar use in workplaces can also inadvertently entrench hierarchy and create exclusions.