Prairie Dogging

Prairie Dogging is when people in a cubicle environment pop up their heads over the walls of their cubicles to talk to other people or just to see who's around.

Prairie dogs are a rodent (biologically unrelated to dogs) which are indigenous to the central US and Canada; they live in large communities. At any given moment, you will see one or two of them standing semi-upright, heads above his neighbors.

I was told a notable example by a friend at Intel. One of their sites has a huge open floor of cubes for the engineers, with the IT offices along one wall. The IT group has an LED reader board above their office windows so that it is visible to any engineer standing up in their cube. The IT folks use the reader board to broadcast network status and prognosis. When a network outage happens, you get a whole roomful of PrairieDogging as the engineers constantly check the readerboard to see whether they can work again.

Prairie Dogging also refers to the biological function of urgently needing to defecate. See the movie, The Rat Race for an example.

Meerkats do it, too.